Good morning. It’s Tuesday. The Knicks lost last night — San Antonio won Game 3 of the N.B.A. finals, 115-111. We’ll meet the next generation of fans at a favorite gathering place, a barbecue joint in Queens. First, though, we’ll find out why the Carnegie Corporation of New York is changing its name.
When Louise Richardson left Oxford University at the end of 2022, she told people, “I’m leaving to run the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which is not a corporation — it’s a foundation.” Now it is changing its name to the Andrew Carnegie Foundation to make clear that it is what it has always been, a nonprofit that was set up with Carnegie’s money. Dropping “New York” also makes it clear that “we fund globally, not just in New York,” she said. It has been doing that since 1911, making good on the promise Carnegie made when he sold his steel company for nearly $500 million a decade earlier: to give his fortune away — all of it — before he died. “He discovered towards the end of his life that, actually, that was going to be very difficult,” Richardson said. Carnegie put $135 million into the foundation when he started it in his mid-70s, declaring that anything that accrued to his estate after his death — he lived another eight years — would also go to the foundation. Today its endowment is worth more than $5 billion. Its grant-making budget for 2026 is $220 million. There is no mission change behind the name change. The foundation says it will continue to focus on issues that Carnegie valued — education, democracy and peace. Nor does dropping New York from its name mean that it is abandoning the city. The foundation says it has invested more than $588 million in organizations in the city, including a $1 million grant in 1921 that helped fund the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, and a $1 million grant in 1968 that helped create the Children’s Television Workshop and, with it, “Sesame Street.” The most recent Carnegie grant for that organization, for another $1 million last year, helped fund Season 56 of “Sesame Street” and plan for Season 57, the foundation says. “Our trustees are constantly saying, as we look at every grant and every commitment we make, ‘What would Andrew do?’ — which I think is a very good mantra for us to remember,” said Janet Robinson, the chair of the foundation’s board of trustees. “Andrew was a large personality and someone who did a lot of good in the world, and continues to do a lot of good in the world because of the decision he made in 1911.” But none of the foundation’s money went to Carnegie Hall or the 66 Carnegie libraries in New York City that are now part of the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Public Library and the Queens Public Library. Carnegie paid for those directly (and more than 1,600 other libraries elsewhere in the U.S.). “There’s Carnegie Hall, there’s the Carnegie Endowment — so many other Carnegies,” Richardson said. The foundation says there are more than 20 institutions in the U.S. and Europe that bear his name, among them Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh — all underwritten before he created the foundation. But what’s in a word — specifically, the word “corporation”? Why did Carnegie call a nonprofit a corporation? “He didn’t use the word or the name ‘corporation’ elsewhere, which I have assumed was the reason he gave it to us,” Richardson said. But people “now think of a corporation as something that is a profit-making entity.” She said the it’s-not-a-corporation problem had continued once she arrived in New York. “I get invited to all kinds of business things because people think I’m a female C.E.O. of a corporation,” she said. “We wanted to clarify that, in fact, we are and always have been what is currently understood as a foundation.” WEATHER Expect a sunny sky with a high near 79 degrees. Tonight will be partly cloudy with a low near 65. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING In effect until June 19 (Juneteenth). QUOTE OF THE DAY “This has been talked about for longer than people’s lifetimes. This is going to be absolutely transformational.” — Gov. Kathy Hochul, who broke ground yesterday on the next phase of the Second Avenue subway, extending the Q train to East 125th Street. The latest Metro news
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Despite the Knicks’ 115-111 loss in Game 3 of the N.B.A. finals last night, there is probably a place in New York that’s not preoccupied with basketball right now. Pig Beach, a barbecue joint in Queens, is not that place. It’s a sea of blue and orange and white. The adults in the crowd are youngish, mostly 30 and under. They believe in the Knicks with a confidence that most New Yorkers over 30 do not. And then there are those at Pig Beach who are too young to have heard about the years of anguish that older fans endured for years. No, decades. Take Philip Germain, who is 10, and his brother Noah, 8. Both of them want to be professional basketball players. Both know that these Knicks are unbelievably good. “The main thing they’re learning is: Don’t take things for granted,” said their father, also Philip Germain, who is 42. While the latest generation of fans pay tribute to their parents for handing down a passion for the Knicks, the young say their social media posts have drawn new supporters. That was apparent at watch parties outside Madison Square Garden. Things got so out of hand on Friday during Game 2 that a party planned for last night was canceled. During the first two games of the finals, the police took more than 30 people into custody throughout the city. At least three major watch parties were held last night: at Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan, Wollman Rink in Central Park and Brooklyn Bowl in Williamsburg. Registration opened at noon for the Bryant Park event, which can host up to 5,000 people. All three parties quickly filled up. Like Philip and Noah, those fans understand that they are seeing the Knicks make history. At Pig Beach last week during Game 1, Jose Lliguichuzhca, 39, a construction worker from Corona, Queens, stood on a bench with his daughter Isabella, 9. Both were too delighted to touch the ground. Lliguichuzhca was Isabella’s age in 1999 when he watched the Knicks’ last trip to the finals. “This is a special moment,” he said. “I never expected it, and I’m living it.” METROPOLITAN DIARY The red balloon
Dear Diary: In slow motion, I saw it: a young boy holding a red balloon at the corner of 59th Street and Columbus on a sunny morning, and a woman beside him, holding the boy’s hand and a phone. People on their way to a nearby grocery store and a drugstore navigated between cars, cyclists and delivery trucks as the boy, squinting at the balloon, focused on it and not on his grip as the round red bubble slipped from his hand and began a lazy climb upward. Walking by him, at the moment of escape, I saw, briefly, his eyes as they melted from awareness to confusion to terror to grief. I saw him pull the woman’s hand, pointing upward, wondering if perhaps it was not too late. There were no cars turning onto 59th. As she ended her call, she shook her head once and guided him across the avenue, undeterred by the gasps, then growing wails, then sobs. It was all expressed in a gentle toddler warble but spoke so powerfully of loss that my heart paused, just for a moment, as I continued on, watching the balloon get lost among apartment buildings, and the boy and woman get lost behind the delivery trucks on that busy morning. — Laurie Ann Gruhn 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. Hannah Fidelman and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. |
