by Drew Nelles

Last Monday morning, outside the Piers 92/94 convention center in Hell’s Kitchen, a giant banner read WESTMINSTER KENNEL CLUB in purple and gold, while a trio of Irish wolfhounds — the largest dog breed in the world, regal, grey, long of limb — stood on a patch of grass and urinated gracefully. Nearby, a Bouvier des Flandres sniffed the ground; beyond the line of cabs at the entrance, a shiba inu and a Cavalier King Charles spaniel waited for an elevator to take them inside, where, in the two cavernous halls of the convention center, there were a whole lot more dogs. It was packed, a crush of fur and sweat. Many of the breeds were familiar — bloodhounds, border collies, Boston terriers — but others had names as exotic and beautiful as the animals themselves: keeshonden, cirnechi dell’Etna, löwchen, schipperkes, pulik, salukis, xoloitzcuintli.

More than three thousand dogs swarmed the hundred-and-fortieth annual Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show last week. The biggest and most important dog show in America, Westminster is what’s called a bench show, which means that, when they’re not competing in the rings, the animals are on display, in rows and rows of purple-and-gold aisles, for attendees to see and touch and marvel at: Bergamascos and their matted dreadlocks; Afghan hounds, with long silky ears held back by funny scrunchie-type things; Yorkshire terriers, tangled up in barrettes and bows; and tiny Pekingeses, lounging expansively, fur flowing in all directions. This is what makes Westminster fun — the sort of place where you can overhear a teenage girl say, “Can you tell I like spitz breeds?” or a grown man say, “Excellent tail posture on that one.”

It is easy to mock the dog fanciers of Westminster, but the truth is that they just represent a certain extreme manifestation of the vast human desire to feel close to something. The handlers, who are always touching the dogs, are also always finding new ways to touch the dogs: They furiously brush the coats of the collies and the Pomeranians as they await examination in the ring; they spray the hair of the Malteses and the shih tzus in the benching aisles, the dogs’ heads resting serenely on pillows or paper-towel rolls; they clip and shave the poodles into obscene topiaries. Especially strange is something called “stacking,” which refers to posing the dog’s legs and body for photography or a judge’s eye, and which the dogs, accustomed to this kind of treatment, suffer without protest, standing stock-still as their handlers rearrange their limbs and peel back their lips. With smaller dogs, the handlers sometimes cradle them by the throat and the bum and lift them horizontally off the ground, rocking the animals back and forth in the air.

Most affecting of all, however, is the bait: small pieces of meat — liver, chicken gizzard — that the handlers use to hold the animals’ attention. The handler might remove a bit from her pocket, feed a morsel to the dog, hold the rest in front of the animal’s face for a moment, then swiftly transfer it to her own mouth, storing it there for safekeeping before removing it again to repeat the process all over. (One handler, during the Chinese crested competition, appeared to produce the bait from her bra.) The movement of the meat from the dog’s jaws to the human’s lips, and back again, feels like a profoundly intimate exchange, a bird regurgitating a worm for its young.

In the mornings and afternoons at Westminster, the dogs face off within their breeds. The Best of Breed dogs then go on to compete, in the evenings, for Best of Group. There are seven of these groups: Sporting, Hound, Working, Terrier, Toy, Non-Sporting, and Herding. Finally, the Best of Group animals vie for Best in Show, the highest honor in American dogland. The business in the ring is a complicated, inscrutable dance, with the handlers either beseeching the dogs to remain perfectly frozen or tugging them along at a brisk trot. On Monday, the humans struck rigid poses, their arms at stiff right angles, holding the leads taut, as they broke into awkward half-jogs. The women all had flat shoes; many favored sequined jackets. The men wore suits, some of them ill-fitted and others crisp and well-cut. There was a clear gender divide: women often handled smaller, effete dogs like Chihuahuas, men preferred larger, more intimidating ones like Beaucerons. Nearly everyone was white. In the obedience category — which is open to any kind of dog, including mutts, and rewards only fealty to a magical series of commands — most of the handlers were women.

The best part of Westminster, though, is not the rings but the benching aisles, where you can wander around and look at dogs and talk to their handlers and owners. Near the back of Pier 92, Chrystal and Paul Clas, handlers from Hanover, Pennsylvania, were grooming a black miniature poodle, Champion Madans Driven By Style, whose call name is Shelby. “When this breed originated, they were not kept like this,” Chrystal said, gesturing at the dog’s baroque contours. “They had very short hair that was matted, and they worked in the field. Then the French got them.” She explained the workings of the cut. “This is the continental trim,” she said. “The little balls on the hips there, those are called hip rosettes; the balls on the legs are called bracelets. Usually, when they were worked in the field, they would take the hair on top of the head and tie it into a knot. So we do a modernized version of that — we band it with elastics, and we call that a topknot.” Shelby began to gnaw on the vetwrap around her ear.

A few rows over, Michelle Soave was prepping a seventeen-month-old Chinese crested hairless. His call name was Koby, but she forgot his show name. “For Your Eyes Only…I can’t remember the other part,” she said. “It’s a client.” Grooming Chinese crested hairless dogs, which look as though they could shatter like glass at any moment, takes a lot of work. “His skin gets shaved, and then you put oil and different things on his skin to keep it in condition. This breed can get pimples,” Soave said. “He has beautiful skin. You work on it every day. And you tan, you make sure he gets a lot of sun.”

A man named Kevin Smith sat in an empty aisle while his Dalmatian, Spotted Bliss Oreo Delight, or O.D. (pronounced “Odie”), whined at the end of his lead. “I think he sees his daddy,” Smith said. He and his husband, Daniel Brumfield, who live in Florida, bred and own O.D., as well as a few of the dog’s siblings. In 2014, O.D. won Best in Breed and took fourth place in the Non-Sporting group, but he had already been eliminated that morning. “Two years ago, when O.D. took Best of Breed and got his group placement, Daniel and I got married while we were here,” Smith said. “On the 11th of February. We got married on the top of Rockefeller Center. It was a very small group — basically an officiant, Daniel and I, and a witness.” The dog was not involved in the ceremony. “It was probably about ten degrees on top of Rockefeller Center,” Smith went on. “We found out later there’s actually a place inside, on the upper floor of Rockefeller Center, that looks out over the city, too. We could have just done it in there.”

At night, the show moves to Madison Square Garden, where, as the press materials tell you, it is the longest-running resident. On Tuesday evening, a small clutch of animal-rights activists protested outside. They carried signs reading “THE AKC KILLS SHELTER DOGS’ CHANCES,” and seemed grateful when passersby stopped for pamphlets. Inside, in the catacombs beneath the arena’s seats, the Best in Breed winners were benched, waiting for their turn in the big ring. Between the cramped quarters and the fluorescent lighting and the subterranean ambiance and the fevered competitive pitch, it felt even more claustrophobic than the convention center. Three middle-aged women walked around in matching Cat in the Hat-style t-shirts: “Bitch 1,” “Bitch 2,” and “Bitch 3.” A security guard who instructed attendees not to photograph the dogs without the owners’ permission was roundly ignored. A young woman asked her friend, “Have you heard of the film Best in Show?”

The arena itself was not quite full. The events proceeded through the Sporting, Working, and Terrier groups; the four other categories had competed the previous night. Westminster’s announcer, David Frei, who is retiring after twenty-six years as lead commentator, offered gentle introductions to each breed: “Despite his name, he has no known connection to Denmark” (the Great Dane); “Sir Walter Scott chanced upon them and made them famous in his novel Guy Mannering in 1815” (the Glen of Imaal terrier). Certain animals, like the Clumber spaniel and the Dogue de Bordeaux, received, for reasons that remain mysterious, huge roars of approval from the crowd. Most attendees seemed to be dedicated dog people, but there were also groups of raucous twentysomethings, who sat in the nosebleeds with plastic beer cups and yelled things like “I like your gait!” and “You’re so attentive!” During lulls in the action, Purina commercials played, as did ads for WEN Pets (“it leaves them soft, it leaves them silky, it leaves them hydrated”), starring the company’s owner, the quasi-celebrity stylist Chaz Dean, who last year was the object of a lawsuit alleging that his products have caused hundreds of women to go bald.

Sometime after eleven o’clock, Madison Square Garden went dark, and the floor was pockmarked with spotlights. “It’s time for the portion of tonight’s program you’ve all been waiting for!” Frei boomed. One by one, the Best in Show finalists entered the ring: a German shepherd, a German shorthaired pointer, a Samoyed, a borzoi, a Skye terrier, a shih tzu, and a bulldog. The dogs walked in circles around the ring as the judge, a white-haired man in a bowtie, looked on. Sometimes he advanced, faux-menacingly, at them, with his hands raised, to see if they would startle, but none of them did. At one point, after being thoroughly groomed, the shih tzu shook himself, throwing his tresses into disarray, and the crowd laughed.

It was difficult to understand, from an outsider’s distant perspective (the Madison Square Garden press box), just how the judge would make his decision — by what arcane parameters he would choose one of these creatures, bred over centuries or millennia into the bizarre forms we find today, instead of another. The dogs were all interesting and, in this context, on the floor of the country’s most famous arena, pretty much pointless. A few minutes later, though, the Best in Show winner was announced: the German shorthaired pointer. Valerie Nunes-Atkinson, the dog’s owner and handler, looked shocked. She dropped to her knees, covered her mouth with her hand, and embraced Grand Champion Vjk-Myst Garbonita’s California Journey, who was utterly oblivious to it all.

by Kathryn Doyle

The male sex anatomy, protruding and unabashed, has been relatively easy for anatomists to describe, dissect, label and move on. But the female anatomy — what the various parts are, where one starts and another stops, and what they do — has been harder to get at. Writers of hugely varying qualifications still proclaim there is a “key to achieving hands-free orgasm” or “proof that the G-spot does not exist” or “proof that the G-spot does exist and anyone who says it does not should be uninvited from your dinner party” in your Glamours and your Cosmopolitans and your Maries Claire.

Scientists are still investigating these questions, and a lot of other aspects of the human sexual experience. I know this because I am a freelance health journalist who covers many of these studies when they are published: I’ve written stories about the best way to measure one’s penis (flaccid and stretched); why it’s a bad idea to use petroleum jelly intravaginally (bacterial infections); and whether or not the HPV vaccine encourages riskier teen sex (nope). There’s no guarantee that every new contribution to sex research will move the field forward, and part of my job is to separate the good papers from the meh ones from the bad ones, most often for an oft-mispronounced wire service founded by a baron in 1851.

Last October, while working at a ranch house on Florida’s east coast, alternately checking emails, sitting by the pool, calling sources, and looking up periodically from the pool to check that the small dog hadn’t been snatched by an alligator from the nearby swamp, I received an extra assignment at the last the minute. I already had a full docket of assignments that week — eight seven-hundred-word news stories — but the assigning editor hoped I could squeeze it in because it needed to be “a bit tongue-in-cheek.”

In October of 2014, a pair of Italian researchers published a paper on the existence of the “female penis” in a special sex edition of the journal Clinical Anatomy. It’s not a top-tier journal, like the New England Journal of Medicine or the Journal of the American Medical Association, but it is peer-reviewed. The two authors had the same last name, which was odd but not unheard of — perhaps a Masters-of-Sex-style husband and wife team of sexologists who worked together investigating intimate matters of the boudoir. But the paper didn’t report the results of a study. No subjects had been recruited, no hypothesis was proffered, no statistical analysis had been performed. Instead, the paper was merely a long essay on how today’s sexologists are using the wrong terminology to talk about lady parts; it suggested, instead, a new terminology that re-centered the terms of the discussion around existing male nomenclature.

The researchers use a great deal of space to argue that most of the female sexual arousal area, instead of being referred to as the internal or external clitoris and attendant glands, as they are currently known, should be called the “female penis,” because the clitoris and the penis develop from the same undifferentiated cells in a blastocyst. The authors claim that what sexologists sometimes refer to as “clitoral bulbs” should in fact be called “vestibular bulbs,” and that the G-spot does not exist. Also, all women can only reach orgasm by clitoral stimulation manually or orally, but not during penis-in-vagina intercourse, and not via a “vaginal orgasm,” which again, definitively does not exist. Since vaginal orgasm does not exist, the duration of penile-vaginal intercourse is not important for a woman’s orgasm. Every woman is able to achieve a clitoral orgasm “if the clitoris is simply stimulated with a finger,” they write. To back their assertions, the authors relied on twelve diagrams, eleven of which came from their own previous publications and appeared to be hand-drawn — the twelfth came from Wikipedia. The diagrams were emphatically labelled with confrontational headings like “The G-Spot does not exist: is it a scientific fraud?” and “Vaginal orgasm does not exist.”

I emailed “Mr. and Mrs. Dr. Italian Name*” to set up an interview. The male doctor, who was the lead and corresponding author, responded that he did not speak enough English to have a phone conversation, but could answer a few questions in written form. I asked, among other questions, why the pair chose to tackle the subject now, if female sexual terminology has been neglected in the literature for a while, and if the G-spot and vaginal orgasm were both myths. But the only question I got a clear answer to was about the nature of the relationship between the pair. The answer was: “She’s my daughter.”

I only need one outside source for each story, since there’s not a lot of room in seven hundred words, but for this one I talked to six, including another sex researcher in Italy, a urologist at Yale, a private-practice urological surgeon in Australia, a surgeon who specializes in repairing female genital mutilation in France, a psychologist at Rutgers and a sexual health expert at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction at Indiana University. They all told me pretty much the same thing.

Calling the “clitoral complex” the “female penis” isn’t technically wrong, but there’s little benefit in replacing one conceptual term with another, especially in order to introduce the word “penis.” The notion of a “vaginal orgasm” is another question entirely: The Italian authors believed this term should be thrown out in favor of “female orgasm,” because, according to their thesis, orgasm is only possible via the clitoris; in their argument, women only think they are having vaginal orgasms because they have been misled by the media. But this isn’t true. The psychology professor at Rutgers explained to me that stimulating the clitoris, vagina or cervix activates different areas of the sensory cortex in the brain. Women whose pudendal nerve — which carries sensation from the clitoris to the brain — has been cut can in some cases still experience orgasm from stimulation of the vagina or cervix, so the claim that women can only orgasm by clitoral stimulation is clearly wrong. (As for the “G-spot,” the experts agreed that we should probably phase that term out. “I don’t think very many scientists or urologists would argue that there is an actual G-spot,” the Yale urologist told me. “I don’t think it does any favors to women to refer to it as one spot, it’s probably a system of vascular structures that are all kind of interplaying.”)

In other words, the paper was bad and weird, and probably shouldn’t have been covered in the press at all, but I had to publish a story. Over a couple of sleepless nights I wrote it and sent it in. It was published on October 16th, and the Italian researcher must have been waiting for it to come out, because he contacted me the same day. He was mad, and he had my personal email so he could tell me about it several times a day. He copy/ pasted the whole story into an email and interpolated his commentary, with lots of ALL-CAPS and “???” and “THE G-SPOT DOES NOT EXIST…” type comments, which he wanted added to the story, post-haste. He said that he was going to sue the publication and me personally, and accused me of being a fake journalist — of being in the pocket of “big vagina” or part of a global conspiracy to silence his “research,” and of not caring about female sexual health. He said the media has been misleading women about how their bodies work and that I was a part of that now. The messages were constant, through weeks of new assignments. After the first three emails, I referred him to our legal department and stopped responding, but the messages — well, some contained no message at all, but the subject line “SHAME” — kept coming in.

His harassing emails continued through November, but by December he stopped bothering with me and focused on higher-ups at the company, so I didn’t see the correspondence any more. He found my Twitter account, but going back now, I can’t find his messages from a year ago, which is probably for the best. Nothing more came of the legal threats,to at least I didn’t hear any more about them. He got entangled in a similar situation with a Guardian journalist, also a woman, several months ago, and I sent her a note of solidarity, which felt kind of like closure.

But fighting with a man I’d never met and couldn’t talk to who was thousands of miles away, about being a woman, no less, played perfectly on my underlying fear that I might be “doing it wrong” in all areas of my life, socially, professionally, and sexually. Publicly defending an idea that turns out to be incorrect is one of my biggest personal fears — like that scene in Jaws 2 where Brody sees a shadow offshore and evacuates the beach, actually taking out a gun and shooting the ocean, but it turns out it was just a school of bluefish. Did I shoot at a shark that turned out to be a badly translated but basically harmless bluefish, even though I felt in my gut it was a shark, and several shark experts came and looked and agreed it was definitely a shark?

In the end, I’m 99.999999 percent sure, like an asymptote where the limit is “a hundred percent” sure, that I was right about this, about the guy, about his theories. But did I win? I know he’ll always be out there, just like “SHAME” is somewhere in my deeply archived emails; every woman has some version of that man and that email, dictating their experience with supreme confidence and even rage, somewhere in their life and in their inbox. As a journalist, I’m supposed to present a view from nowhere, but I can’t help that I am, biologically, in the pocket of “big vagina.” So sue me. Oh, you might? Great.

*I am omitting their names for obvious Google Alert reasons

Photo by Alias 0591

Here are seven minutes that will pass so pleasantly you will only be aware they are over when you start to wonder why everything doesn’t feel as good as it did just moments ago. Would that we could say the same thing about the entire day, but has any Monday in history ever happened that way? It has not. Sorry. But at least there’s this to enjoy.

★★★★ Fluffed-up pigeons bobbed around the forecourt. The cold was not quite freezing but the brightness was absolute. Everything was sharp and three-dimensional. The deep parts of friezes insisted on their depths; modest dentils cast shadows sideways and down. Some plastic sheeting on a window high across the street sent light trembling and wobbling all over the desk. Snaps on a pedestrian’s coat flashed at a distance. A zipper pull. The dull silvery top of a truck was full of the colors of stone and sky. The skull felt buoyant. The last sun found a water tower up the avenue and held it, warming it from gold to orange-red.

A reasonable question: In this, the Year of our Bowl 2016, what truly distinguishes the “power bowl,” an artfully curated and composed selection of vegetables which may be pickled or roasted but are certainly beautiful (especially with the right VSCOCam filter), a protein of some kind, and and probably an acid-spiked dressing that tastes vaguely “global,” all gently lolling on a warm, moist pile of fluffed grains, from the chopped salad — a homogenous, finely diced mulch of fresh vegetables, healthy protein, and a touch of delicious fat that makes the whole thing work?

The chopped salad is the perfect mid-day nutritional replenishment for the mid-level modern knowledge worker in our post-app economy who has neither the time nor the inclination to eat a lunch with any possibility of variation from bite to bite, which would require more attention than the little needed for the automatic elliptical motion of the arm from bowl to face, jaw swinging open and then clamping shut over and over until the fork comes up empty and the vessel can be deposited in the garbage can under the desk. Because the modern knowledge worker cannot afford to let the appearance of being productive ever slip, even during their alotted lunchtime — and eating something less healthy than a salad is tacitly unproductive — whether they are producing a tangible good for the entity who has contracted their labor or they are participating in the startup economy by buying things from Amazon or looking at ads on Instagram as while dutifully taping “like” on each of their friends’ brunch photos because there’s no point in Instagramming a pile of grass clippings.

The power bowl is “almost like a hug” because it is “based on macrobiotics” and “brings everything together” and it is also “very Instagram-friendly.” It is for an extremely busy person who needs a “really satisfying meal” for between $14 and $25 but who also somehow has the luxury of just enough time to appreciate every individual component of the power bowl — the pickled red onions, the Japanese yams roasted just to the point of a light, marshmallow-y char, the undulating poached egg with its neon yolk slowly spilling out from the center, the Pollockesque drizzle of a green, snappy dressing, the deep harmony and soft contrast of the colors and flavors — and to capture it all in a perfectly level and carefully composed overhead shot for their thousands of Instagram followers. And that is all before taking a single bite, each of which must be thoughtfully considered and precisely executed to ensure a harmonious distribution of textures and flavors, crunchy and soft, umami and acid, a process that must be repeated again and again and again, until the bowl is empty.

The chopped salad is consumption that fuels production; the power bowl is consumption transmuted into production through performance, one that fits entirely within the square frame of Instagram and that implies no adherence to any particular diet fad, or even an overly conspicuous life, just vaguely effortless with lots of self-care and good taste, but the sort that carefully signals that it in truth requires a lot of time, or money, or both. Which is all it was trying to say anything about, anyway.

Photo by Dimes

A Few Thoughts On Longform, Inspired By The Current Debate Over Its Significance And Necessity In Our Fast-Changing Media Landscape

Most longform is bad. The problem arises from the “long” part. If you need more than 600 words to say what you need to say you are trying too hard for accolades or you’re getting paid by the word. It is unfortunate that society conflates length with depth and quantity with complexity, but no one who cuts the checks will agree to pay more for less. Any writer who tells you he cannot reduce his prose to a digestible number of sentences is lying because he’s afraid that if he does he’ll blow the whole scam for everyone else. Are there some stories so intricate that they actually demand tens of thousands of words to tell them? Sure. Maybe six or seven a year. Everything else you read is padding or awards-bait. The problem with the Internet is that we feel like something needs bloat (or “heft,” depending what side of the screen you’re on) so that it seems more substantial than a listicle, but when you see what people do with all the extra words they dump in for prestige purposes you start to think that maybe, in spite of how stupid they are making us, listicles aren’t all bad. Everything you’ve just read added up to 200 words, and even then you were probably already in agreement at “Most longform is bad.” I believe that settles the debate. Thank you.

“Nelle Harper Lee, who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961 for her book, ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ has died at the age of 89, multiple sources in her hometown of Monroeville confirmed Friday morning. Lee was born April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, the youngest of four children of lawyer Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Cunningham Finch Lee.”

There is something so disturbing just below the surface of this that I’m not even sure how to properly characterize it. However you hear it, it’s fantastic. (It’s an oddly appropriate companion to St. Vincent’s recent cover of “Emotional Rescue.”) Anyway, enjoy. Oh, and while you’re at it, congratulate yourself for making it to the end of another week. Whatever else you’ve fucked up in the last five days, at least you kept it together enough to get here. Good for you. [Via]

★★ The light faded to an empty gray. It was time to try another coat, the third in three days. The precession of the weather had wobbled to something neutral and devoid of interest. The hydrant where the icefall had been merely dripped. Would it ever freeze again? The chill through the opera house’s glass wall was almost unnoticeable background in the dining space on the Grand Tier. The clouds that had seemed immovable were gone, and Jupiter shone huge and bright in the east.

by Brendan O’Connor

This past weekend, former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, who resigned in 2008 amidst a prostitution scandal, was accused of assaulting a woman he had gone to visit at the Plaza Hotel. Police responded to a 911 call from the woman, Svetlana Travis, on Saturday evening. Spitzer initially turned the officers away at the door to the hotel room. But, after returning and noticing blood and broken glass on the floor, they searched the room and Travis was taken to a nearby hospital, where she told staff that Spitzer had choked her. On Sunday, Travis — who is the author of a widely read essay on Matter about her experience as a sex worker — flew back to her home in Russia. She later apologized in an email for fabricating the accusation, Spitzer’s lawyer said. The NYPD’s investigation is ongoing — it executed search warrants and is combing through phone and computer records, the New York Times reports — but it does not seem likely that there will be formal charges. “We are at a standstill now, absent a complainant,” the NYPD’s deputy commissioner of public information, Stephen Davis, said.

On Wednesday, a spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal that Spitzer “has no intention of ever re-entering public life, and looks forward to continuing to build his family’s real estate business.” The disgraced governor was not always so excited about the prospect of getting into real estate. Six months after he resigned from office, as it became clear that he was becoming more involved in the family business, Spitzer shrugged when asked how he was doing: “Making money is making money.”

In recent years though, Spitzer has embraced luxury development in New York’s prime neighborhoods with the same aplomb as he once pursued settlements against corrupt Wall Streeters — like Henry Blodget — in the early aughts, as attorney general. During a failed bid for city Comptroller in the summer for 2013, it emerged that Spitzer’s father, Bernard, who was suffering from Parkinson’s disease, had transferred control of much of the family’s real estate empire to his son. (His comptroller bid was basically self-financed: according to campaign finance records, Spitzer spent nearly $10.7 million on the campaign, only $45 of which came from anyone who wasn’t Eliot Spitzer. Scott Stringer, on the other hand, raised just over $3 million from thousands of contributors, and received another $1.8 million in matching public funds.)

According to tax returns that he invited journalists to review, between 2006 and 2012, Spitzer’s income as a landlord grew more than eighty percent, from $1.3 million to $2.56 million. Most of the buildings Spitzer has a stake in (with other members of his family) are on Manhattan’s East Side: As disclosed in a report he filed with the Conflicts of Interest Board, Spitzer receives income from partial ownership of 985 5th Avenue (a lovely twenty-five-story luxury tower overlooking the Metropolitan Museum of Art in which Spitzer, his now ex-wife and their daughters lived, rent-free, for years), 800 5th Avenue, 220 East 72nd Avenue, 210 Central Park South, and a residence in Columbia County, up the Hudson River. He is also the majority owner (sixty-three percent) of Spitzer-Madison LLC, which holds the lease to the six extremely lucrative boutique retail spaces on the ground floor of the Cumberland House, at the corner of 62nd and Madison Avenue; Spitzer’s father acquired the master lease for the retail space in 1990, and transferred it to the LLC in 1999.

Spitzer’s first bid for attorney general, in 1994, was a devastating failure — he came in last among the Democrats running for the office. It was also an expensive one: Spitzer took out a $4.3 million bank loan to fund the campaign, using the eight apartments he owned in another of his father’s buildings, 200 Central Park South, as collateral. When Spitzer ran for AG again, in 1998, he won, but not before it was revealed that he’d been paying back the bank loan with a loan from his father, which he in turn paid off by selling the apartments back to his dad for $6.1 million in 1999 — the same year that Bernard transferred control of the Cumberland House retail spaces to his progeny.

Still, even as he benefited from the resources and support that the family business afforded him, for most of Spitzer’s adult life he poured his prodigious energies into public service (or, at least, public life). After graduating from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and Harvard Law, Spitzer clerked for a federal district-court judge, Robert Sweet. Then he became an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, where he helped dissolve the Gambino crime family’s control of trucking in the garment industry — establishing a fake sewing shop in Chinatown as a front and eventually bringing an antitrust suit (rather than extortion charges), which resulted in a successful settlement. In the early aughts, his aggressive investigations into fraudulent investment and advisory practices on Wall Street resulted in a number of significant settlements and precipitated similar investigations around the country. He also developed a reputation as a bully, “which encompasses not just professional aggression but also what many regard as a preening rectitude and a tendency toward intellectual arrogance,” Nick Paumgarten reported in his presciently titled New Yorker profile, “The Humbling of Eliot Spitzer,” published just a few months before the New York Times reported that the governor patronized prostitutes.

Spitzer’s Williamsburg development (via)

Whatever ambivalence Spitzer had expressed about entering the real estate business following his quick resignation from office, the industry was more than happy to have him. In 2013, speaking to Politico New York (then Capital), a prominent real estate investor, Peter Hausburg, who Spitzer had consulted with for advice about potential development locations, dismissed the prostitution scandal entirely. “What our colleagues do makes that stuff look like choir-boy stuff.” Hausburg said. “He comes with a great real estate pedigree and he’s paid attention to the business, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see him emerge among the top tier of real estate names at some point.”

In December 2013, Spitzer Enterprises acquired the block-long development site at 511 West 35th Street, in Hudson Yards, from Alloy Development for $88 million — well over the $75 million the site was expected to go for. The following summer, Spitzer filed an application to purchase nearly a hundred and forty thousand square feet in additional development rights from the city, bringing the total buildable area to more than four hundred thousand square feet and building costs to $125.36 per square foot, or $17.33 million, paid to the Hudson Yards District Development Fund. No building permits appear to have been filed since the acquisition, but, according to Department of Finance records, Spitzer Enterprises took out a $17.5 million mortgage on the property last summer. (It looks like he might want to build a luxury mixed-use hotel.)

Bernard Spitzer died a few months later, in November 2014. In his will, the New York Post reported, he ordered that $250 million of his $500 million estate be left to charity. Subsequently, the Real Deal reported, the former governor transferred shares of 30 co-op units at 200 and 210 Central Park South, as well as a substantial stake in 1050 Fifth Avenue, a rental building, into the Bernard and Anne Spitzer Charitable Trust.

Spitzer has reconfigured the family’s portfolio further: In April, he sold the crown jewel of his father’s empire, the Crown Building — which was once secretly owned by the kleptocratic dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled the Philippines for more than twenty years — for $1.78 billion, apparently the highest price per square foot ever paid for an entire office building. Also last year, Spitzer acquired 420 Kent Avenue, in Williamsburg, for $165 million, just down the street from the $1.5 billion redevelopment of the Domino sugar factory. Spitzer plans to develop his site into a $700 million complex, the Times reported, including three luxury towers that will comprise eight hundred and fifty-six rental units. There will also be two rooftop pools. How the mighty have… risen?

Photo by Timothy Krause