Monday Bulletin: Why Gen Z Isn’t Running to Replace Nadler on the UWS; Curating Russia’s Banned Books; Cuban-Chinese is the ‘Mom-and-Pop’ of Fusion Cuisine; Another Multimillion-Dollar UWS Brownstone Up for Sale

Today is Monday, March 2, 2026

Today should be sunny, but far from balmy, with a high of 30. The rest of the week is something of a mixed bag: “snow to rain” on Tuesday, clouds and rain much of the rest of the week. But the good news is that highs next weekend could reach up to 60 — or possibly higher. That may start to burn away the seasonal affective disorder (appropriately acronymed SAD) that Gothamist reports has been particularly acute for New Yorkers this winter.

On this day in 1933, the original King Kong, starring Fay Wray and Robert Armstrong, premiered to rave reviews at Radio City and the RKO Roxy in Rockefeller Center, becoming an instant classic. The movie’s stop-action sequences revolutionized the movie industry, and the success of the film ultimately led to a franchise that includes 13 films (to date), novels, comic books, video games, amusement-park rides, T-shirts, action figures, and other merchandise.

Notices

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News Roundup

Compiled by Ann Cooper       

When 78-year-old Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler announced he would not run for an 18th term in Congress, he said he was leaving to make way for a new generation that “can maybe do better, can maybe help us more.”

Some 20 candidates are now seeking to replace him for the District 12 congressional seat that includes the Upper West Side. The largest cohort are Democrats, though as Columbia Spectator notes, the Democratic roster no longer includes candidates from Generation Z – those born between 1997-2012.

To be eligible for a House seat, you must be at least 25, so those born early in the Gen Z period would meet the age requirement. But they’re not likely to make much headway as candidates, said the Spectator, because Gen Z “has been roadblocked by gatekeepers and institutions that have long fueled New York City’s political machine.”

The Spectator suggests that’s why the two 20-something Gen Z candidates who initially announced they were running – “and “who generated online excitement when they announced their bids” — have both since dropped out.

Liam Elkind, who announced his candidacy even before Nadler said he would step aside, left the race in November, saying “A number of exceptional candidates have gone into the race. Many of them are more qualified than I am to serve in Congress, so I’m suspending my campaign.” Elkind subsequently endorsed Micah Lasher, one of the Democratic frontrunners for Nadler’s seat.

The other Gen Z dropout, Cameron Kasky, is a survivor of the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, and an outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights; he has strong appeal among Gen Z voters, political writer Michael Lange told the Spectator. But his plan, to move from activism to political office, was abandoned after encountering “the sprawling underbelly of New York City politics,” wrote the Spectator, “a world [Kasky] described as populated with gatekeepers, personal grievances, friendships, and allyships.”

“You don’t see people who are ideologically motivated,” Kasky told the Spectator. “You see people who are motivated by the machinations of the system in which they’ve been operating for so long that they’ve forgotten what this is all about.”

Read the full story – HERE.

Last week, the Rag’s Openings & Closings column introduced you to the Tamizdat Book Corner. It is quite literally a corner in the first room of White Rabbit Books at 200 West 86th Street (between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue), where you’ll find books, stacked floor to ceiling, that were curated by the nonprofit Tamizdat Project, whose founder, Hunter College professor Yakov Klots, was profiled recently by The New York Times.

Tamizdat is a Russian word meaning “published abroad,” and it encompasses the many volumes banned by censors throughout the Soviet era. Think Doctor Zhivago, or the poems of Anna Akhmatova, or the works of Russian exiles Joseph Brodsky and Vladimir Nabokov. Some manuscripts, smuggled out of the Soviet Union, were printed at specialty New York publishing houses – funded covertly by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to the Times. Then, the publications were smuggled back into the Soviet Union during the Cold War years, “often in small batches, hidden in deliberately mislabeled containers, packed in food tins or tampon boxes and, in at least one case, tucked into a child’s diaper.”

Yakov Klots, who grew up in the Russian city of Perm, recalled the surreptitious sharing of banned books in the Soviet era. His mother sometimes traveled to Moscow, to the home of a dissident who would give her a forbidden copy of one of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s work. “Then she would stay up late into the night duplicating the borrowed book, page by page,” the Times recounted.

“One of my childhood memories,” Klots told the Times, “is my mother typing something at night and me falling asleep to the sound of the typewriter.”

Klots had just finished a book on the history of Cold War censorship in 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. A long-running Kremlin crackdown on free expression sharply intensified in the wake of the invasion, “at a scale unseen since the Soviet era,” the Times wrote.

The new repressions prompted Klots to found the Tamizdat Project, which has collected and stored at Hunter banned books of both the Cold War and Putin eras (the powerful memoir of Alexei Navalny, who died two years ago in an Arctic prison, is among the censored contemporary works). Klots estimates that as many as 700 contemporary titles produced since 2023 are now banned in Russia.

“I can’t help thinking about what will actually remain from this new time of tamizdat that’s so exponentially growing today,” he told the Times.

Read the full story – HERE.

Was Cuban-Chinese the original fusion cuisine? That’s an argument made in the online magazine Tablet, which singles out the Upper West Side’s La Dinastia and La Caridad 72 (successor to La Caridad 78) as among the few places left dishing up authentic Cuban-Chinese cuisine, in a city that once boasted at least 20 such eateries.

The history of Cuban-Chinese (Tablet calls it Chino-Latino) has been the subject of academic studies in the past; the Rag wrote about it when La Caridad 78, which closed during the pandemic, reopened as La Caridad 72 in 2023.

Some studies have attributed the decline to gentrification, claiming that “restaurants started to fold as the Upper West Side’s noble working-class Chinese-Latino population was driven out by wealthier, whiter, residents.”

But in fact, gentrification actually boosted the Cuban-Chinese restaurant sector, according to Tablet. When Lincoln Center displaced a vibrant UWS Puerto Rican neighborhood, Latino restaurants folded, but “a new population of dancers, singers, and musicians” helped Cuban-Chinese take off as a concept in “the then-staid Manhattan dining scene.” That laid the foundation for the fusion food culture that followed, making Cuban-Chinese “the mom-and-pop of fusion.”

So why are there so few Cuban-Chinese places left in what Tablet calls “the world’s foodiest city?” As new fusion cuisines proliferated, bringing sushi burritos, Korean tacos, and spaghetti with curry meatballs, the original fusion — Chino-Latina — “became a victim of its own savory success.” Yet, said Tablet, “Thankfully, in certain corners of the Upper West Side, Chino-Latino lives on.”

Read the full story — HERE.

Finally, what’s a Monday without news of another multimillion-dollar UWS home on the market? This one, on West 71^st Street between Central Park West and Columbus, is a renovated five-story, 6,000-square-foot Italianate property with five bedrooms, four full and two half-baths, a full-floor primary suite, and a landscaped roof deck (along with three other outdoor areas).

A recent real estate ad put the asking price at $9.6 million. The seller is Stanley Willers, whose late grandfather Stanley Ho was the billionaire owner of more than a dozen gaming facilities on the island of Macau. According to Crains, Willens is CEO of HoGaming, a Malta-based firm that makes software for online poker, slot machine, and sports games.

Crains reported that the Ho family put the house on the market in 2016 for about $15 million, but StreetEasy data showed that despite some discounts, down to $13 million, it did not sell after three years. In 2020, the brownstone was offered for rent at $32,000 a month; now, it’s back on sale, for considerably less than the asking price seven years ago.

Read the full story — HERE.

In Other UWS News

• Hunter College placed professor Allyson Friedman on leave while it investigates a “painful incident” in which Friedman could be heard on a Zoom call with UWS parents and students making comments that city education officials denounced as “inappropriate, harmful, and racially offensive.”
• The polar bears at the top of this column were not the only elaborate snow art sculpted in Central Park after last week’s storm. A dressmaker using two serrated bread knives carved a graceful mannequin that turned heads and made for a viral video.
• And by the end of last week, as the sun came out and temperatures rose enough to start a thaw, an exuberant TV reporter showed smiling faces, melting snow, and concluded: “It felt like we were breaking free.”

ICYMI

Here are a few stories we think are worth a look if you missed them last week — or a second look if you saw them. (Note that our comments stay open for six days after publication, so you may not be able to comment on all of them.)

Meet the UES Candidate Running to Represent Both the UES and UWS in Congress

A WSR Conversation With Candidate Nina Schwalbe in the Race to Represent the UWS in Congress

‘This Is a Traffic Cone’: UWS Couple’s Videos Tell the Stories Behind the Neighborhood’s Mundane Streetscape

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