Bistate battle over congestion pricing escalates with new lawsuit

Good morning. It’s Thursday. We’ll find out about a second lawsuit from New Jersey challenging New York’s congestion pricing plan. We’ll also look at a wristwatch from Andy Warhol, who said everyone would be famous for 15 minutes.

A new lawsuit from New Jersey heralded an escalation of the cross-border battle over New York’s congestion policy, which would provide funding for public transit with tolls for motorists entering Manhattan below 60th Street.

Suburban residents complain that congestion pricing would create more traffic on their roads and more pollution in their communities. Governor Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey sued the federal government last summer to block the plan, saying it would impose unfair financial and environmental burdens on his state’s residents.

On Wednesday, Mark Sokolich, the mayor of Fort Lee, NJ, announced a new lawsuit challenging congestion pricing as a threat to the environment.

Sokolich, who was joined by other officials from northern New Jersey including Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a fellow Democrat, said more vehicles would pass through Fort Lee on their way to the George Washington Bridge once the congestion charge went into effect. because drivers would avoid Midtown Manhattan. and the new toll rates.

The lawsuit, a potential class action suit that includes Sokolich and a Fort Lee resident who has asthma as plaintiffs, alleges that congestion pricing would increase pollutants such as nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide in Fort Lee.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which oversees New York’s public transportation and counts on congestion pricing for $1 billion a year in new revenue, had hoped to start collecting the money next spring. Janno Lieber, the authority’s chairman and chief executive, said last week that Murphy’s lawsuit to block congestion pricing jeopardized much-needed work.

“We’re done being the nice, quiet neighbor to everyone; we’ve had enough,” Sokolich said. “I’m going to tell you that the extra traffic is secondary at this point. We deal with the pollutants, the soot, the dirt every day. Extra traffic brings extra pollution.”

Gottheimer, whose district includes Fort Lee and who has long opposed congestion pricing, said the toll system would add $5,000 a year to the price commuters pay to drive to work in New York.

“That’s in addition to the $17 a day they already pay to cross the bridge or enter the tunnel,” he said. “That’s in addition to parking. It is on top of the gasoline and the billions of dollars that Jersey residents pay to New York in income taxes every year.”

Eugene Resnick, a spokesman for MTA, said: “Congestion pricing must move forward for less traffic, safer streets, cleaner air and vast improvements to public transportation.” He also said the Traffic Mobility Review Board, a six-member panel that will advise the authority on how much drivers should pay and who should qualify for exemptions, is continuing its work. It has not yet released its recommendations.

Sokolich’s lawsuit, which cited reports that the MTA planned to spend $130 million to address pollution problems in the Bronx, noted that New Jersey would receive no such compensation. The lawsuit seeks a “full and thorough environmental review” and a monitoring program for people with respiratory problems due to extra traffic.

But Sokolich said in an interview that his priority was simply ending congestion pricing. “I’m not suggesting that if a stipend program existed it would be justified,” he said. “We cannot trade our health for a check here.”

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Andy Warhol is famous for saying that everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. He could have timed everyone’s 15 minutes. He owned hundreds of wristwatches. It took the income from who-knows-how-many Marilyns and Campbell’s soup cans to buy them all.

Some watches were found in the fabric of the canopy on top of his four-poster bed after his death. Others, such as one to be auctioned at Christie’s next month, were discovered later, stored in a false-bottomed file drawer.

Surprisingly, considering how Warhol’s work – Pop Art – brought out brighter than bright colors and everyday objects that no one else looked twice at, the watch that comes to market is classic and understated. It is a self-winding perpetual calendar model from the Swiss manufacturer Patek Philippe. It has a dial-within-the-dial that watch specialists call a moon phase register.

Christie’s expects to sell it for $350,000 to $600,000, partly because it is rare. Only 586 were made, and only 449 others have the yellow gold case that Warhol’s has. The cases on the rest are pink gold, platinum or white gold.

Patek Philippe introduced that model in 1962, the year of Warhol’s first exhibition of his Campbell’s soup cans.

“It was quite a feat of watchmaking when it came out,” says Rebecca Ross, Christie’s vice president and head of watch sales. “You really wouldn’t expect him to have anything else.”

He was a collector, and not just of watches. After his death in 1987, approximately 10,000 items were offered at Sotheby’s in 2,526 lots: everything from Art Deco cigarette holders and Bakelite bracelets to paintings by Magritte, Man Ray, Picasso and Norman Rockwell. It was enough to fill three floors when it was put on display before the auction. The New York Times asked, “Where did he put all this stuff?”

That sale included more than 300 watches. Warhol had apparently “absorbed them from markets and dealers, along with cookie jars, Native American art and all manner of ephemera,” as The Robb Report put it in 2020.

They weren’t all Patek Philippes or Rolexes. There were three plastic watches depicting Gumby, Fred Flintstone and Judy Jetson that were originally valued at $60 to $80. They sold for the three for $2,640 (now just under $7,000).

And then, months after that auction, the Andy Warhol Foundation curator found the cache in the false-bottom drawer. There was another auction.

Ross said Warhol’s Patek Philippe was made in 1977 and Warhol bought it the following year. “It doesn’t seem like the case has been polished too much in the past,” she said. “He may have even used the perpetual calendar feature. I can really see him playing with it.”

METROPOLITAN diary

East Ninth Street Bakery

Dear Diary:

I think back with nostalgia to a bakery on East Ninth Street, near First Avenue, that I often visited in the 1970s.

It was run by two brothers who sold bread by the pound in loaves that they kept in large drawers.

“Hello darling,” they always said when I walked in the door. “If you eat this bread, you can live forever! You’ll never have to eat anything else again!”

They cut a slice of bread, put it in my hand and ordered me to taste it on the spot to get their point across. There were lots of rye breads and dark rye breads.

One brother began to lose his memory, and it was touching to see the other care for him as they continued the business.

Eventually the brothers died and I heard on the news that someone had secretly built a small fortune that he passed on to a cousin.