Ana Marie Cox Comes Full Circle at ‘Radar’The founding Wonkette editor signs on to do irreverent political coverage for Maer’s magazine, another Charles Kushner associate goes down, and Andrew Cuomo noses around Dick Grasso’s package, in our daily roundup of news from the worlds of media, real estate, law, and finance.
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Albert Ledner Defends His White ElephantCan St. Vincent’s Medical Center’s O’Toole Building be saved? Moderinist mavens hope so, and many of them, in chunky art-director glasses, gathered in Chelsea last night to hear its architect, Albert Ledner, 83, defend it. Ledner designed two nautical-themed New York buildings for the National Maritime Union in the sixties; one is now the Maritime Hotel, with its slab of porthole windows looking down on meatpacking revelers, while the other, a levitating rectangle that flares at the top with two rows of stylized sea “waves,” has long since become the O’Toole Building. St. Vincent’s wants to build an energy-efficient, seventeen-story hospital on the site, and many Villagers are happy to see Ledner’s boxy, “wave”-bedecked rectangle go. (Its façades are “closed and forbidding,” says local activist Zac Winestine.) Ledner’s fans, however, want to preserve it.
