Letters to the Editor

The King of Backgammon

Having read with interest last February’s Village View piece by Remington Davenport on a budding backgammon renaissance, I recommend to your readers my article, The King of Backgammon, on the late backgammon god Paul Magriel. First published in 1977 in the SoHo Weekly News, then Gambling Times magazine, the piece was the fruit of following Magriel for about six months. It is a seminal study of the man —a character’s character who hung out at the Washington Square Park chess tables and the Village clubs—and the gamesplayer.

Pleased with my work, Magriel hired me to edit his New York Times backgammon column. We tortured over every sentence – sometimes debating punctuation, grammar, and style for hours! — until we were both satisfied. He was eminently charming, with many tony prep-school traits, but his erratic schedule and propensity for marathon working hours were enough to defeat an Olympian. He later decamped for Las Vegas and poker, eventually unraveling and succumbing, according to reports, to a lifestyle that proved lethal.

The King of Backgammon has been quoted, with and without attribution, by many publications, including Sports Illustrated and Esquire, as well as The New York Times in its 2018 Magriel obituary. I first dubbed his book, Backgammon, the “bible” of the game. The piece also gives the feel of the New York City “backgammon landscape” of the late ‘70s, itself a revival of the game.

Here’s the link: nebackgammon.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/GamblingTimes_1978_Aug.pdf

—Susan M. Silver

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NYU’s John A. Paulson Center – A Mercer Street Monstrosity

Architecture is a matter of taste and opinion. One man’s Guggenheim is another man’s Golden Arches or, more to the point, “JAP” the John A. Paulson Center, NYU’s 735,000-square-foot, block-long, insufferably tall, black glass turd. Considered by a clique of severely taste-challenged sycophants as a “cultural magnet for community members,” and christened in honor of the “super investor who in 2007 made $15 billion betting against subprime mortgage bonds,” this tasteless, totally inappropriate in scale and profoundly missguided black glass erection is a blot on a previously semi-sylvan slice of residential Greenwich Village. It looms now over Bleecker, Mercer and Houston streets as a grotesque monolithic carbuncle. One which makes this longtime Greenwich Village resident wish for a sonic boom capable of shattering its every window. It menaces our trembling neighborhood like a festering sore. It stands as a stench to the eye and a monument to a Wall Street player who profited obscenely from a lucky bet based on the misfortunes of thousands of ill-advised, bankrupt and now virtually destitute families left financially crippled by a corrupt Ponzi scheme-style mortgage bubble.

Fifteen billion dollars! Which generated a $100 million “gift” to NYU from a man whose architectural tastes personify the term “abysmal.” What a colossal disaster. NYU has planted other grotesque edifices in our cruelly abused neighborhood. But the “JAP Center” takes the malodorous cake. Pity the Washington Square Village and Silver Towers residents doomed to mourn the loss of their previous views and gaze at this glass pustule ad-nauseum. This calamitous dystopian nightmare should have been nipped in its unsightly bud. In fact it should never have been approved for construction in the first place. The inside story of how it was approved by whatever graft-friendly NYC board or agency supposedly responsible for monitoring new construction projects in our sleepy little town will someday make either a hilarious Bill Murray farce or a devastating, heartbreaking Ken Burns documentary. Hopefully both. NYU has been doing to Greenwich Village exactly what Donald “f’n” Trump is doing to America!

Your architecture critics / columnists, Brian J. Pape, Jean Tucker and Steve Reynolds have done terrific stories on the Village Alliance “Project Green” and the 43-49 Bleecker Street conversion. I’d like to see what they have to say about NYU’s JAP monstrosity.

When we moved into our loft, the photo on the right was taken from the perspective of the vacant lot which had previously been graced by the Broadway Central Hotel, the infamous St. Adrian’s Bar and on its Mercer Street side “The Mercer Arts Center” (the Studio 54 of The Village, where terrific performances by The New York Dolls, The Modern Lovers and other Village stalwarts performed unforgettably raucous sets deep into the wee small hours of the morning). Somehow NYU “acquired” that vacant lot and dumped upon it an equally monolithic eyesore, the God only knows how many stories tall LAW STUDENTS DORM!!!

—Howard Sherman

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In the Midst of Winter…

I am too much of an admirer of Albert Camus to resist commenting on what you allowed into print by accepting it was written by him.

— Leila Mustachi

Thank you for your letter. The passage in question, though widely circulated online with Camus’s name attached, is in fact not written by Camus. Only the brief line — “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer” — comes from his 1953 essay Return to Tipasa. The longer paragraph we printed originated in a 2013 reflection by American writer Jennifer Pastiloff, who expanded on Camus’s famous phrase. —The Editors