Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll go to lunch with Gustavo Dudamel, the music director designate of the New York Philharmonic. We’ll also find out about plans for two casinos in Manhattan that were rejected.
It took a guy who doesn’t even have a full-time job in New York yet to get me to a place where I’d never had lunch. Or breakfast. Or a late-night snack. And it’s only a block and a half from where I live. Food people have been known to call it iconic. He ordered. We commandeered a table outside. A taxi stopped at the light on the corner. And there he was, staring back at himself from the ad on top of the cab. Lunch with Gustavo Dudamel, the music and artistic director designate of the New York Philharmonic, was like that. Somebody I’ve known for years walked by, and almost before she noticed me, she was telling him how great she thought the orchestra sounded last week. Dudamel was a boy wonder when he went to Los Angeles in his late 20s. He still seems boyish as he looks to New York in middle age. He’s often described as “ebullient” or “enthusiastic,” sometimes “infectiously” so. I wanted to talk about how he is taking a high-visibility job in New York after more than 15 years in a high-visibility job in Los Angeles, as the music and artistic director of the orchestra there. I wanted to talk about how someone becomes a New Yorker — if that is something he aspires to be. He won’t become the music director here until a year from now, but he is conducting the first two weeks of the Philharmonic’s season (and the Philharmonic has put that ad on cabs). Someone told me he already had his haunts in New York. I thought, let’s go to one of them, which is how I finally had a hot dog at Gray’s Papaya, on Broadway at West 72nd Street. I mostly think of hot dogs as calories I don’t need, which is why I’ve walked by who-knows-how-many-times and resisted temptation. But this time I had no such excuse, so I met Dudamel at David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, and headed to Gray’s. We hadn’t gone two blocks when an ambulance passed us, its siren going full blast. Dudamel put his hands over his ears. “New York without this is not New York,” he said. “You know, cacophony is sometimes half beauty, because there’s harmony. Cacophony is also part of harmony.” He said he was deep into the massive biography “Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph,” by Jan Swafford. Beethoven figures in Dudamel’s week at the Philharmonic, with a program that includes Symphony No. 5, a piece the orchestra has performed more than 500 times. But he was talking about the documentary “Song of the Hands.” His wife, the filmmaker María Valverde, filmed it after he conducted Beethoven’s opera “Fidelio” with a theater company of deaf actors and a chorus from Venezuela whose members are deaf or hard of hearing. “Beethoven’s deafness is something that you have to really put on the table to really understand the dimension of the sound that Beethoven was thinking of,” Dudamel said as we walked. Swafford “enlightens a lot,” Dudamel said. “You know, your approach for the music, how Beethoven was behaving, how he was marking the tempo and singing at the same time in a very loud way because he was getting deaf.” Now, about hot dogs. Pink’s, a famous hot-dog stand in Los Angeles, created something called a Dudamel Dog when he arrived at the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2009. A Dudamel Dog comes with a lot besides the hot dog: guacamole, cheese, fajita mix, jalapeño peppers and tortilla chips. At Gray’s Papaya, the eponym of the Dudamel Dog opted for a pair of hot dogs with only ketchup and mustard. “Look, we in Venezuela, we love hot dogs,” he said. “And I remember watching a film” — “Fools Rush In,” with Salma Hayek and Matthew Perry. “She brings hot dogs from New York. He was working, like, in Vegas. And he says, ‘Gray’s Papaya, it’s the best.’” Dudamel said his reaction was: “The best hot dog is in Venezuela.” So he had to check out Gray’s Papaya. Now people sometimes take hot dogs from Gray’s Papaya to him. He mentioned the violinist Gil Shaham. “We went to his house because I was so ‘I want Gray’s Papaya. I want Gray’s Papaya.’ He was like, ‘OK, we will have Gray’s Papaya.’” He said Shaham served 18 hot dogs from Gray’s Papaya. WEATHER Expect a foggy morning! Today will be mostly cloudy before gradually becoming sunny. Temperatures will be in the low 80s. Tonight will be mostly clear, with a low around 67. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING In effect until Tuesday and Wednesday (Rosh Hashana). The latest Metro news
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So now there are six. There had been eight proposals for three new casino licenses in the New York area. But two were voted down on Wednesday by a Community Advisory Committee that took opposition to each proposal into account. One of the two was the $5.4 billion plan for Caesars Palace Times Square, which had backing from the rapper Jay-Z’s sports and entertainment company as well as from one of New York City’s biggest commercial developers. My colleague Matthew Haag writes that the proposal had faced resistance from theater owners and producers, who said that a casino would threaten the entertainment industry and change the character of the neighborhood that is home to their theaters. The committee also voted down a $7 billion proposal called the Avenir on the Far West Side of Manhattan. It was a project of another big commercial developer, Silverstein Properties, and Rush Street Gaming, which operates the Rivers Casinos. Each proposal failed on a vote of 4 to 2, with the only “yes” votes coming from the representatives of Mayor Eric Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul on the panel. They had asked for the vote to be delayed to make time for additional deliberations and had chastised the other committee members for what they said was a hasty vote. The chief executive of SL Green, the developer whose building at 1515 Broadway would have hosted the casino and hotel, confronted members of the advisory committee immediately after the vote. The chief executive, Marc Holliday, could have received a $10 million bonus if the property had become a casino. “The benefits you denied this community and this city and state, you have to live with that history forever,” he said. But Jason Laks, the president of the Broadway League, an industry trade organization, called the decision “a vote to protect the magic of Broadway” for people who work in the theater industry and for their audiences. METROPOLITAN DIARY Quick Toss
Dear Diary: It was May, and I was visiting my aunt in New York City. On a beautiful day, I went exploring. I had a new Minolta camera, and after settling onto the subway, I took it out to check out its features. When I got to my stop, I left the train quickly. Once I was on the platform, I realized I had left the lens cap on the seat. I turned to try to retrieve it, but the car had filled with the people, and the doors were about to close. Just before they did, the lens cap came flying over the heads of the passengers and onto the platform in front of me. — Don Straube Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here. Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here. Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
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