Good morning. It’s Friday. Are you ready for Game 5? What about the World Cup? It’s going to be some weekend.
The Knicks will try to put away their first N.B.A. championship in 53 years. Can’t you still see OG Anunoby’s tip-in?
But the Knicks have done more than play well (though that was hard to believe for a while during Game 4). In electrifying New York, the Knicks have managed — as my colleague David Waldstein pointed out — to bring together a city where loyalties are divided between Giants and Jets, Rangers and Islanders, Yankees and Mets. And the Knicks did it in spite of their obstreperous owner, James Dolan, who feuded with Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the police commissioner, Jessica Tisch. He not only called them inexperienced at coordinating big events, he suggested that they are only fair-weather Knicks fans.
Can World Cup fever be as good as the Knicks’ remarkable run has been?
Or will it bring traffic hassles at Pennsylvania Station, as commuters try to head in the same direction as fans with pricey tickets?
We won’t find out until next week. Our first taste of live, on-the-field World Cup play will come on Saturday, when Brazil and Morocco take the field — sorry, the pitch — at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. It had to be renamed New York New Jersey Stadium for the World Cup because, as my colleague Victor Mather wrote in April, FIFA does not want its own sponsors outshone by the companies the stadiums are named after. Oh, and The Athletic favors Brazil.
Did we say it would be some weekend? Also on Saturday, the Mets will be at Citi Field (but why watch the Mets right now). The Yankees will be away (in Toronto). The Liberty will play the Washington Mystics at Barclays Center on Sunday.
But back to the World Cup. It is changing the cityscape in Manhattan — miles from New York New Jersey Stadium — where 23 soccer ball sculptures have gone up.
“Art and sports don’t intersect all that often,” said Diana Burroughs, the executive director of the artist residency program for ARTS 14C, a nonprofit that runs an arts incubator and exhibition space in Jersey City.
But she realized last year that the World Cup could be a moment when arts and sports could be made to intersect. She then called someone she knew who liked sports and art — the collector Agnes Gund, who had already donated more than 1,500 works to museums. Burroughs suggested a project for artists to celebrate soccer.
“Her first response was, ‘How much money do you want?’ I said, ‘Actually, Aggie, I don’t want any money.” She wanted Gund to make introductions to leaders of museums who could nominate artists for the project, and Gund did so. (Before her death last September she nominated the artist Katherine Bernhardt, who moved her studio from Brooklyn to her native St. Louis a few years ago.)
Burroughs’s plan was for the artists to create larger-than-life soccer ball sculptures that could be auctioned off. Christie’s will do exactly that, selling several of the sculptures on July 18, the night before the World Cup final. The money is to be split between each artist, ARTS 14C and Studio in a School, a nonprofit that Gund set up.
The soccer balls were fabricated at Powerhouse Arts in Brooklyn. Each has 32 aluminum panels — 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons — on a stainless-steel frame. The artists could do what they wanted to the panels. Bernhardt spray-painted hers. Others submitted designs for ultraviolet printing.
Mario Ayala, a Los Angeles-based artist who was nominated by Max Hollein, the director and chief executive of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, designed the soccer ball that ended up being placed across from Grand Central Terminal on East 42nd Street. Ayala has been painting images of vehicles, based on photographs he took, and decided to “manipulate” one into “the soccer ball form.” It’s an image of a pest control company’s van, “reconfigured and now displayed on the streets of New York, because that’s where that image started,” he said.
When he came across the van, on a trip to New York a few years ago, “I thought it was lovely, the geometry of it all,” Ayala said by phone from Los Angeles. He added: “The idea of pests is very fitting for today. Me, myself, thinking about that word politically, I felt like it symbolizes the moment we’re going through, with ICE taking a huge toll here in my own community. That word resonates even further than the literalness of what that van is.”
Weather
Mostly sunny and hot with a chance of thunderstorms after 5 p.m.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until June 19 (Juneteenth).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“I have no idea why I was called to transit.” — Sue Sarah Gilbert, a Rockefeller descendant from Seattle who raised $1 million to place her drawings in subway stations in New York.
Two high-ranking members of the New York City Council are demanding greater oversight of contracts in the city’s school system. The scrutiny comes as the chancellor, Kamar Samuels, is under investigation for a $180,000 no-bid contract from his previous job, when he ran schools on the West Side of Manhattan.
The no-bid deal was for foreign language instructors. The comments by the Council members followed testimony at a City Hall hearing on Wednesday by Sean Kreyling, the chief executive of the Language Learning Network, the company that supplied the instructors.
Kreyling cast Samuels as a key figure in brokering the contract, saying that Samuels was aware that the billing structure in the contract was intended to bypass Department of Education procurement rules, which can be seen as rigorous — or onerous. Kreyling called the episode “significant financial malfeasance.”
Eric Dinowitz, the chair of the Council’s Committee on Education, called Kreyling’s appearance at the hearing “deeply troubling” and said the testimony underscored the need for closer scrutiny of Education Department contracts.
‘A system that has flaws’
“I’m not interested in talking about one individual,” Dinowitz said. “That’s not what this is about. This is about a system that has flaws.”
Julie Menin, the Council speaker, said that she had “great concern” about contracts at the Education Department, which total more than $12 billion annually.
The testimony by Kreyling was hastily arranged by Council members after The New York Times published an article about the investigation. The session stepped up pressure on Samuels, whom Mayor Zohran Mamdani appointed chancellor when he became mayor at the beginning of the year.
Samuels has acknowledged that there was a “lapse in procedure” on the contract. But he said that his motivation was “not for personal gain or to benefit anyone other than our schoolchildren.” Mamdani said on Wednesday that he was taking the investigation seriously but still had confidence in Samuels.
As the superintendent of schools on the West Side, Samuels signed the contract before the 2023-24 school year. His deputy superintendent signed the contract when it was renewed the next year.
In recent days, the Office of the Special Commissioner of Investigation — an independent watchdog that examines wrongdoing and misconduct at the Education Department — has opened an investigation into Samuels and the contract. The special commissioner’s office received a whistle-blower complaint last year that one of the instructors provided by Language Learning Network had been barred from working in city schools.
That teacher had been investigated in 2014 over allegations that he had made inappropriate comments toward students and had touched a student’s stomach. Kreyling said he had not been aware of the allegations and fired the teacher.
Dear Diary:
I stopped at a fruit cart on my way into my Midtown office. The dates were seven for $1. A bargain!
“Seven dates, please,” I said to the vendor.
He broke into a huge smile.
“What time should I pick you up?” he said.
— Catherine Clark
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
