This week’s biggest Winners & Losers

This attorney is going to be raking in the cash: he’s been newly hired to represent the state’s executive chamber in a probe into nursing home deaths. It’s Abramowitz’s second time on the job, as he previously repped the chamber in a 2014 federal probe. Though Cuomo says Abramowitz isn’t involved with recent sexual harassment claims, it wouldn’t be new territory – the attorney made his name representing Woody Allen. 

You’d be hard pressed to find anyone enjoying Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s recent slate of scandals more than Hizzoner. No longer forced to play the role of New York’s villain the mayor seems to have a little pep in his step! He’s showing up pressers (relatively) on time, his admonishments of Cuomo are being published in every outlet and he’s expected to get the new Johnson & Johnson vaccine any day now. You can’t tell us this man isn’t winning – even if the win is just in his mind. 

After a year in stasis, the performing arts are back in the limelight. Plays, concerts and other performances will be coming back to New York starting in early April, both indoors and outdoors. The limited capacity requirements aren't a boon to all arts venues that need more audience members, like Broadway, which is poised for a later reopening. But it's certainly a big help to some other art institutions, such as Lincoln Center and the Shed – respectively led by Henry Timms and Alex Poots. After all, a global pandemic won't stop New York's artists from declaring that the show must go on. 

Is it too early to crown a loser of the year? A third accuser was in the paper of record this week, more lawmakers are calling for his resignation, his sweeping emergency powers are being curbed, and a cult of Cuomo-truthers are propagating conspiracy theories online that this is all Trump’s doing. A single press conference with a half-assed mea-culpa isn’t going to cut it.

During the negotiations for the latest COVID-19 federal relief package, Rep. Elise Stefanik denounced what she considered unnecessary spending added by Democrats, including $1.5 million for what she called the “Schumer bridge.” In fact, the money for that bridge in her district had actually been requested previously by the Trump administration. The provision to get cash for the North Country bridge was removed reportedly because she didn’t fight for it. Her office later called it a bad deal, but if she was always planning to vote down the bill, wouldn’t some money be better than none?

In a year when so many of us are avoiding haircuts, it didn’t seem quite fair to lop 20 stories off the top of a building. So an appeals court reversed the ruling on 200 Amsterdam and will let the Upper West Side condo stay tall, despite its crazy-but-legal gerrymandered zoning lot. Tough luck for 90-something activist Freud and Municipal Art Society President Goldstein, who sued the city and maybe should consider moving to a different city if they don’t like skyscrapers.