Brad Lander, one way or another

No one wants to be assaulted during their morning commute, but I grew to accept it as one of the many hazards of the New York City subway system, especially during an election. I’d had rigid flyers and sweaty hands thrust at me before, but this one in 2009 felt different. There was something about this middle-age white guy that seemed genuine and likable. He was running for City Council. I had a premonition that he should be mayor.

Brad Lander won the council position with a significant majority of the votes and, over the next few years, I watched him significantly transform the 39th district in Brooklyn. “Watched” because I could literally look across the street from my apartment into his office. Not that I could see what was going on, but the guy I just met on the elevated platform of the 4th Avenue F stop was now coming and going from the nondescript entryway next to Neergard Pharmacy—a microcosm of neighborhood necessities; the same building where I drew blood for my annual physicals; where I soon made midnight runs for diapers and formula and children’s Motrin, or swept through the second-floor toy shop where I bought my daughter’s first Lego kit. Emailed newsletters kept me informed of the councilman’s activities, but I knew things were afoot when his office lights were illuminated late at night, more often than not.

The actual mayor at the time lived a block up the hill. A tall, lanky guy who resisted the allure of Gracie Mansion and, even after he was forced to relocate, and drew flak for regularly returning to the Park Slope YMCA for a daily workout, tax-funded motorcade and all. While it was a novelty regularly passing Bill DeBlasio on the street (his fiercest competition in my mind was another enigmatic celebrity, Sir Patrick Stewart), Brad Lander was in the pedestrian mix, striving to make the city, and perhaps the world, a better place. 

After I moved to the suburbs, I’d occasionally spot Brad on the streets of Midtown, a celebrity in his own right. He was getting things done, whatever those things might be. Revitalizing the bleakly industrial Gowanus Canal. Pushing for paid family sick leave. Introducing “participatory budgeting.” He moved the needle of progress. Competence in a city known for its corruption. Eventually term limits forced him out of the council and into a successful campaign for city comptroller, where he’s given current Mayor Eric Adams some well-deserved friction. 

There was no surprise when he threw his hat in the ring for the next mayoral cycle. I saw this coming all along. Is this the right time? Almost, but I trust my gut feeling from years ago.

Now that he’s made national and international news for being who he’s always been, I can attest that Brad Lander is indeed a decent, hard-working guy who knows how the system works and because of that would be a fantastic mayor for one of the largest and most complicated cities in the world.

A brush with death

What began as a slow crackle accelerated into a total misalignment. The pieces that collectively created a magnificent archway were no longer in harmony. The vaulted roof gave way and collapsed with a deafening roar onto the airport terminal below.

Had our red-eye from New York arrived thirty minutes late, had my companion and I lingered longer in the glorious new structure, admiring its breathtaking beauty in the early morning light, silent like a cathedral, we might have been buried under its rubble. Instead we were already through customs, already at baggage claim, delirious from jet-lag and thinking about the long week ahead. If there was any large sound or rumbling, or panic from the airport staff, it went unnoticed as a town car whisked us off to Paris.

Only after an opulent breakfast at the Four Seasons, once we had settled into our new office down the street, did I discover the news. Several dead, numerous injured at Charles de Gaulle. Terminal 2E had barely been finished a year before it catastrophically failed. We were just there.

My companion shrugged it off. The disaster didn’t affect him, didn’t alter his course—he had a movie to get off the ground.

But I never stopped thinking about it, days and years later—reading about the unlucky victims, the forensic investigation, the charges of involuntary manslaughter, the razing and rebuilding. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that the world quickly forgot. Or didn’t notice at all.

It was twenty years ago today.

Last year my family had an early flight out of Terminal 2E, waiting in the exact place where everything went down. The new structure echoed the magnificence of the original. My kids ran around, watching airplanes on the tarmac. I sat and took it all in, perhaps the only person in the building who could still see the ghosts, still wondering “what if.”

12 Feb 1997

Thousands of short, silent, colorless, 16mm films have been shot in Washington Square Park. The majority are projected a few times before disappearing into a box or a landfill. 

This is mine, which comically pits two NYC archetypes against each other.

Filmed on 12 February 1997, the day might have been forgotten if not for what happened after returning the camera rig. I sprinted over to Astor Place to catch the tail end of a bizarre press conference—my favorite rock band announcing their new tour inside the KMart lingerie department. Only in New York.

The reluctant warrior

In hindsight, his words ring hollow, but to a boy easily seduced by the deceptive excitement of war, it was a thrill to receive a personal reply from the military’s highest ranking officer.

I wrote to Colin Powell (then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) for a middle school journalism assignment. The 1991 US-Iraq war was about to escalate, and I was thrilled to experience it from my protective suburban American bubble. Big stories require big sources, so I aimed high and unexpectedly succeeded.

“I have no good feelings about war,” he wrote. “It’s unpredictable, brutish, deadly, and diverts resources that could be used for other things. But that said, there are some things that can only be resolved by war.”

It’s difficult to imagine him retaining those feelings in 2003, when, as Secretary of State, he presented the case to return to Iraq under flimsy pretenses—a war that ultimately wasted vast amounts of money and lives and created more problems than the fruitless one it intended to resolve.

Despite my disappointment in his leadership, I remain eternally grateful that someone so instrumental in managing global affairs had taken the time to reply to an inquisitive kid. If anything, General Powell taught me to distrust calls for war, even when they come from a seemingly reluctant warrior.

Read the full letter below:

Letter from Colin Powell, 25 Jan 1991.