The New Math? Schools Chief Klein and the Missus Add Up 12 Rooms on Park Avenue
MORE Manhattan Transfers
New York is a city of poshly-housed public servants.
The mayor owns two mansions in the East 70’s; the governor goes rent-free in a terraced Fifth Avenue apartment (it’s owned by his dad); development chief Robert Lieber has a new $7.25 million condo at Trump International; and even Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum is in the Beresford.
Now Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has bonus space on Park Avenue. He and his wife Nicole Seligman, a Sony executive vice president (and an ex-lawyer for both Oliver North and Bill Clinton) have paid $1.7 million for their second apartment at 95-year-old 565 Park Avenue.
“When you walk in the lobby,” a longtime resident once told The New York Times, “it smells like old money.” The bouquet won’t be new to Mr. Klein: City records show he bought a seven-room apartment in 2002 one floor up from his new one; that old apartment had been listed for $3.5 million.
If he combines the two co-ops into a duplex, the man who oversees 1.1 million schoolchildren will have himself a nice sprawl. According to listings, the apartments add up to 12 rooms: two fireplaces; two dining rooms, one “formal” and the other “intimate,” with its own archway; a wood-paneled library and a study; one stone kitchen; and one stainless steel kitchen.
The couple’s new master bedroom has unobstructed views over the 104-year-old Colony Club across the street on Park Avenue, a building the AIA Guide to New York City calls a “prissy neo-Georgian town palace.” (Don’t tease Mr. Klein’s wife about the prissy neighborhood: Lt. Col. North once said, “Nobody messes with Nicole Seligman.”)
Her husband grew up in the outer boroughs, but when he took office in 2002, Mr. Klein turned down the keys to a $2.4 million Brooklyn Heights brownstone the city had bought for schools chancellors. Maybe it lacked that moneyed odor?
A spokesperson said Mr. Klein “gracefully declined” to comment, and his wife didn’t return calls to her office.
Re: Our Park Avenue Chancellor
Will coincidences never cease? What a chuckle I derived, if not a certain fleeting sense of bittersweet regret, on reading this article by Max Abelson.
You see, in 1995, I was considering acquiring the penthouse at 565 Park Avenue. That humble duplex pad was comprised of two fabulous flowing levels, and included a rather nice roof area overlooking Park Avenue. Just the spot for that soothing evening cocktail after a long day in the salt mines.
What stopped me from closing on the purchase, was that I would have had a fairly difficult time moving my immense (each painting) art collection up into the penthouse due to the logistics of that century old building's architecture.
See: www.OldMasterPortraits.com
So, in the end, I had to opt for a pad on the 27th floor of 900 Park Avenue on 79th street. (You know, the tall condo condo with a huge bronze Fernando Botero cat sitting in the middle of the taxi driveway- just a stone's throw from Mayor Mike's stately townhouse at 17 East 79).
Why the remark "bittersweet regret" about passing up the roof of 565 Park Avenue, you ask?
There has been a war, of sorts, going on between me and that learned Esquire and former Federal prosecutor, now schools Chancellor, Joel Klein, for the past several years- ever since I became a whistle-blower and landed up in one of the New York City Department of Education's infamous and affectionately called "rubber rooms".
That is where you end up if you make waves anywhere in Mr. Klein's latest fiefdom- the NYC school system.
An investigative reporter, Jim Callaghan, wrote all about this strange story in The New York Teacher, this past March, and on the Website of Randi Weingarten's United Federation of Teachers. The article Mr. Callaghan penned, "Whistle-blower axed--again", explains why Chancellor Klein is probably happy we are not living under the same roof at 565 Park.
See: www.uft.org/news/teacher/top/axed/
You can also go to www.uft.org and just type "Pakter" in the search box.
At the end of Jim Callaghan's article is a link to the letter I sent JK, Esq., on Oct. 2, 2003, that got his feathers up, and to the blistering response I received from his former General Counsel, Chad Vignola, Esq., who, talk about poetic justice, was forced to resign in disgrace shortly thereafter, for the part he played in the Deputy Chancellor Diana Lam cover-up scandal.
And to think- Joel and I could have been neighbors, and chatted in the elevator each morning, as his chauffeur waited downstairs, prepared to whisk the Chancellor off to his palatial headquarters in the former Tweed Courthouse (as in Boss Tweed) located at 52 Chambers Street- and as I was about to head uptown to the small windowless "rubber room", on 125th Street in Harlem, to which I have been banished for trying to tell Mr. Klein about some issues in the NYC school system that required his immediate attention.
In hindsight, I guess I should have purchased both pads. But hindsight, as they say, is always 20/20.
I wish Mr. Klein and his wife well in their new expanded digs.
It is ironic that the same week Klein brought his new luxury condo, he revealed during an interview with Charlie Rose the thing he most remembered about his father. "Work hard and you won't have to stay in public housing," he was told by his Dad. Klein's luxury real estate holdings show that he achieved his goal. Unfortunately, he heads a DOE Kingdom where most of his subjects are low and middle income, and many live in public housing. Perhaps this explains Klein's distain for the parents of public school children. Why should he elicit the opinion or listen to the ideas of these "failures"? If you don't have big money or big houses you have failed and you do not deserve to be heard. How far is this elitist attitude from the original idea of the public schools by great educators like John Dewy and social reformers like Jane Adams! Perhaps this explains the underlying failure of the public schools; how can they succeed when the people running them hold the general public in contempt?
Re:The comment posted by 'Sky' regarding the view from the top
I am sure the attached letter, sent to our Park Avenue Chancellor, when he was still making due with 'only' one floor at 565 Park Avenue, went down his Park Avenue garbage shoot faster than a speeding bullet.
The response the letter received from Mr. Klein's former (disgraced) General Counsel, Chad Vignola, Esq., certainly reached that letter's author with all deliberate speed.
See: www.ParentAdvocates.org/nicemedia/documents/ACF1C0C.pdf
Please see more on David Pakter and Joel Klein and the "Rubber Rooms" when you enter those names as search words in www.parentadvocates.org ---along with "rubber room" and you will discover more about the deceipt, theft, billions of dollars of money-funneling and collusion and corruption in education, controlled by Klein, et al, here in New York City. Also, please look into the illegality of Klein's Panel for Educational Policy in the case Colon v NYC Board of Education. Furthermore, do a google search on the suicide of Vince Foster and how Klein, Hillary and Bill have worked together in the past, and are surely working together in the present!
THE WAR ON PARK AVENUE
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If one stands in the middle of Park Avenue and 57th Street, especially at high noon on a sunny day, one cannot help but experience a rapturous sense of almost heavenly inner peace.
Many New Yorkers who like to shop, consider this spot on God's earth, the geographic center of the world, as you are about midway between Bloomingdale's to the East and Holly-Go- Lightly's favorite shopping spot, Tiffanys to the West.
New leather shoes or sparkling diamonds- take your pick. And while you are deciding, there is that view. And what a view it is. Whether gazing north or south, you can't go wrong.
Lovely green and verdant islands of trees, grass and flowers stretching forever as far as the eye can see. What more could one possibly ask for?
But listen a little more carefully and you can hear the sound of virtual cannon balls whizzing through the upscale Park Avenue air. Because there is a war going on between two people who reside along that great green (in every sense)
urban lane of power.
David Pakter got there long before his counterpart, the illustrious Chancellor of the New York Schools system, Joel Klein, Esq. And they live on opposing sides of the avenue.
Pakter on the west side of Park at 900 and the learned Mr. Klein, Esq. on the east side at 565, the subject of Max Abelson's lively article in THE NEW YORK OBSERVER.
That fact is symbolicly appropriate because the war between Mr. Pakter and Mr. Klein has now been waging for over four years. Though they are both involved in the world of NYC Education, that is about the extent of where the similarities between these two gentlemen lie.
Mr. Pakter is a portrait painter, but he has also taught art in the New York school system for 37 years. He must have done something right because several years ago he was personally decorated as a Teacher of the Year by former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, in a City Hall ceremony, with the Press present, a sumptuous buffet- the whole nine yards as they say.
Mr. Pakter, who has Masters degrees in Renaissance painting techniques, Art History and Amatomy, designed, funded and built, from the ground up, the first Medical Illustration Program in the nation for gifted, inner city, minority students. And by coincidence that all happened on, where else, 57th Street, a stone's throw from stately Sutton Place. At the High School of Art and Design on Second Avenue to be exact, where he taught for 25 years.
At that point Mr. Pakter and Mr. Klein's NYC Dept of Education had a very nasty falling out over the fact that Mr. Pakter documented on film that after the former Principal, Madeleine Appell decided not to allow her mostly minority student population to receive "Music Appreciation", she invited a physically adjoining, predominantly White elementary school, to take over the second floor of Mr. Pakter's school to expand their own stellar music program.
My goodness, thought Mr. Pakter, what ever happened to Brown versus Board of Education, 1954 and of course the highly touted No Child Left Behind initiatives. The gifted minority students in his Medical Illustration Program, as well as all the other minority students at his High School were certainly getting left behind- big time.
Not to mention, the only so-called "foreign language" they were allowed to study was Spanish. The language most of the large Hispanic population at the school, spoke before they learned English, which at least initially for most of them, was a foreign language.
Mr. Pakter wrote a very long and respectful letter about all this to Chancellor Klein. Mr. Klein was not happy. Not about the situation at the school but about Mr. Pakter's letter. In fact Klein had his former General Counsel, Chad Vignola, Esq. fire off a blistering letter to Mr. Pakter that it was wholly inappropriate for him to take ten minutes each day out of his 90 minute Medical Illustration classes, to teach his gifted students French- a language the school had banned along with every other language in the world except Spanish. We can't let kids learn French by God. They might actually learn there is a place called Paris that has an Eiffel Tower.
Well you get the idea, Mr. Pakter is an innovator and highly energized Educator and in Chancellor Joel Klein's school system that can be dangerous to your health. Mr. Pakter was removed from the school on Sept. 26, 2004. After a long stint in several of Mr. Klein's many infamous "Rubber Rooms"
for two years, Mr. Pakter eventually survived a Dept of Education trial for "insubordination" and another saga in which he was Railroaded by Mr. Klein's Medical Office Director, Audrey Jacobson, MD, (whose office suppressed evidence Mr. Pakter was fully fit for duty only to later be
forced to recant in writing that knowingly false claim.
The Dept of Education's own hand picked Final Binding Medical Arbitrator, Chief of Psychiatry at Montefiore Hospital, Dr. Charles Schwartz, wrote a scathing Medical Arbitration report that essentially reflected that Mr. Klein's Medical office doctors had severely violated their collective Hippocratic Oaths- as in "Physician, do no harm".
The Dept of Education had to repay Mr. Pakter a year's worth of back pay with interest and place him in a new school.
But five weeks after Mr. Pakter began teaching at the High School of Fashion Industries he was pulled out again. The Principal and her Assistant Principal, Giovanni Raschilla, had received strict orders from the New York City Dept of Education to "get something on Mr. Pakter".
He was unceremoniously removed in late November, 2006 without explanation and sent to the DOE's most notorious "Rubber Room"
in their entire system of "Rubber Room gulags". The tiny windowless "Rubber Room" on West 125th Street in Harlem.
There, as teacher "miscreants" languish each day, as they stare at the room's four bare walls, and like nomads in the desert wish they at least had access to such a basic amenity as a water cooler, the former educators can reflect on whatever it is that got them assigned to one of Mr. Klein's gulags.
Mr. Pakter after an entire year of waiting, has just received an Express Mail package from the concierge at his Park Avenue building finally informing him of the "heinous" crime he is charged with. It seems Mr. Pakter, besides being an established portrait painter and expert on the techniques of the Renaissance Masters, is also a designer of jewelry and watches for which he has garnered many international patents and copyrights over the years.
Though for over 25 years Mr. Pakter has used fashion accesories he has designed as incentive rewards for students who receive a 90 average and make the Honor Roll in their school, now after a quarter of a century, the NYC Dept of Education, while at the same moment they are discovering the "carrots" approach, and going so far as to let Principals offer students Ipods and ten speed bicycles for high academic achievement, have decided that Mr. Pakter is not permitted to do the same thing.
Or is Chancellor Klein's NYC Dept of Education just looking for one more excuse to Railroad Mr. Pakter out of the system.
Perhaps it may be better to let Mr. Pakter himself explain this latest chapter in the ongoing story, "David Pakter versus Chancellor Joel Klein, Esq. et al." Who could possibly be in a better position to know the facts.
Watch out for those virtual cannon balls whizzing over your head as you stroll down Park Avenue. The Park Avenue War is far from over.
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david_pakter@msn.com and/or http://www.uft.org/news/teacher/top/axed