When Trade Shows Were Both Grand and Central

David W. Dunlap/The New York Times Many hotels along Lexington Avenue were built in part because of the presence nearby of the Grand Central Palace exhibition and convention hall.

In the preservation debate over Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's rezoning plan for east Midtown, one of the most conspicuous landmarks is a building that hasn't existed for almost half a century, yet still exerts a strong influence over the neighborhood.

Grand Central Palace, on Lexington Avenue, between 46th and 47th Streets, was New York's principal exhibition hall for 40 years: home of the International Flower Show, the Greater New York Poultry Exposition, the Westminster Kennel Club dog show, the Sportsmen's and Vacation Show, the National Photographic Show, the International Beauty Shop Owners Convention, the Frozen Foods Exposition, the National Plastics Exposition, the International Textile Exposition, the National Modern Homes Exposition, the American Medical Association Exposition, the city's Golden Anniversary Exposition of 1948 and - in the greatest annual generator of nautical daydreams and logistical nightmares - the National Motor Boat Show.

(You think it's tough driving in Midtown? Try it in a 54-foot Wheeler cruiser with a flying bridge.)

In 1963, 52 years after Grand Central Palace opened and a decade after the last show was held there, the 13-story building was demolished. A 44-story office tower, 245 Park Avenue, took its place.

But even today, you can clearly follow the shadow of the Palace by walking up Lexington Avenue from 47th Street. Expositions and conventions brought thousands of travelers to town. Accommodations sprouted shoulder to shoulder along “Hotel Alley“: the Winthrop (now the Roger Smith), the Lexington, the Shelton (now the Marriott East Side), the Montclair (now the W New York) and the Beverly (now the Benjamin). Across Lexington Avenue, and in a different league, were the Barclay (now the InterCo ntinental Barclay) and the Waldorf-Astoria.

All but one of these hotels have been identified by the Municipal Art Society, the New York Landmarks Conservancy and the Historic Districts Council as worthy of consideration for landmark status. (The Waldorf-Astoria is the exception. It already is an official landmark.) Preservationists fear that the increase in permissible building density envisioned in the mayor's rezoning plan would make it economically feasible to demolish structures like these.

Uris Buildings Corporation Grand Central Palace occupied the block of Lexington Avenue between 46th and 47th Streets. The exhibition areas occupied the first four floors. Interior spaces were large enough to accommodate a pool for log-rolling contests at the 1936 Sportsmen's Show (below).

The New York Times

Had there been a strong landmarks law in 1963, there surely would have been a fight over Grand Central Palace. A good case could have been made for its architecture, too.

It was designed by Warren & Wetmore and Reed & Stem, who also worked together on Grand Central Terminal itself. The Lexington Avenue facade of the Palace had a portico of four colossal columns. A two-story arcade - illuminated at night - ringed the top of the building. The main exhibition area was ingeniously carved out of the second and third floors to create an interior volume 48 feet high. The main floor could accommodate 94 booths, typically about 320 square feet each. (I've lived in smaller apartments.)

But let's be honest. Grand Central Palace was not about architecture. It was a setting where adults could play out their fantasies under the pretense of doing business; that is, unless you'd been inducted there into the armed forces during World War II or had a dust-up with the Internal Revenue Service, w hose New York headquarters were there in the 1950s.

Associated Press Following their fitness examinations at Grand Central Palace, which was converted into an induction center during World War II, men picked up their street clothes.

Even the staid New York Times got into the spirit of things. “Grand Central Palace All A-Cackle With 7,200 Poultry Show Entrants,” said a headline on Jan. 4, 1951, under a photograph of a young woman with a long-tailed bird on her s houlder: “Florence Awe using ‘Lady Amhurst,' a pheasant, as a hat.”

The perennial tangle between automotive and nautical traffic before and after the boat show also allowed Times copy editors to let down their hair a bit. “Boats Go Bounding O'er Main Streets,” was the headline on Jan. 8, 1953, heralding the arrival of the show.

Assessing the home furnishings show in The Times of Sept. 18, 1952, Betty Pepis wrote: “All the items that could - and, it seemed to this reporter, many things that shouldn't go into a home - will be displayed by more than 400 exhibitors.” With a nod to the impending presidential election, Elizabeth Draper designed a study for Dwight D. Eisenhower in bold strokes of red, white and blue. Melanie Kahane's study for Adlai E. Stevenson was of muted gray and beige. You know how that turned out.

One of the greatest annual draws w as the flower show, which offered azaleas, camellias, lilies, peonies, petunias, primroses, roses and tulips in early March, when such color and fragrance in Midtown would have been welcome. As a reporter, I imagine it was a pleasant way to spend an afternoon. Yet I don't envy the writer who had to describe it year in and year out.

“‘Spring followed by summer' is the forecast today and all through the week for Grand Central Palace,” was how she opened her account on March 5, 1951. Two years later, on March 9, 1953, her lead paragraph began, “‘Spring leading into summer' is the forecast for one small part of New York this week.” I'm not going to name names. We've all done it.

Talking to Invisible Friends

Dear Diary:

One morning last week, as I stepped into the elevator in my apartment building, I encountered an unfamiliar man carrying a bulky tool bag, who was in mid-conversation with, it seemed, an invisible friend. I didn't spot a cellphone or Bluetooth, and there was no one else in the elevator.

Normally, I would assume this was just another stressed-out New Yorker talking to himself, but - wait - I could also hear the other person's voice! Was I going crazy, too?

Finally I asked, “Who the heck are you talking to?”

The guy laughed and pointed upward.

“I'm the elevator repairman, and my buddy is riding on the top of the car.”

Read all recent entries and our updated submissions guidelines. Reach us via e-mail: diary@nytimes.com or telephone: (212) 556-1333. Follow @NYTMetro on Twitter using the hashtag #MetDiary.

Talking About Gun Restrictions Without Talking About \'Gun Control\'

No matter what you may have seen or read, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is not keen on gun control.

Oh, he remains eager for laws to limit the mayhem from assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips - more so than ever after the nightmare in Newtown, Conn. What he would like, though, is to steer clear of “control,” a word fraught with negative potential.

“I think that's a bad word,” Mr. Bloomberg said Sunday on NBC's “Meet the Press.”

“What about ‘regulations'?” he said. “What about s ensible gun laws that limit what you can do, when you can do it, make it consistent with the Constitution but also don't jeopardize everybody?” On Tuesday, a spokesman said that Mr. Bloomberg was also partial to the phrase “reasonable restrictions.”

Polls show that “gun control” has fallen out of favor, even among those who support policies routinely described with that phrase, the mayoral spokesman, Marc La Vorgna, said. It has been used by the likes of the National Rifle Association, he said, to convince people, unfairly, that “we want to take away everyone's guns.”

Mr. Bloomberg's aversion to “gun control” reinforces the role that language plays in framing discourse on controversial issues. Words matter.

We have seen this time and again, with Americans “finding words to match thei r ideological point of view,” said Ben Zimmer, language columnist for The Boston Globe and executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com. It can result, he said, in a collision of euphemisms and their linguistic opposites, dysphemisms.

“Death tax” is a good example of a dysphemism, favored by lawmakers determined to do away with what is more neutrally known as an “estate tax” (or far from neutrally, by some just as determined to preserve this levy, a “Paris Hilton tax”). For a doozy of a euphemism, try “enhanced interrogation technique” to describe a practice like waterboarding, regarded by much of the world as torture.

Republican strategists have been notably adept at shaping debates with phrases that pack an emotional wallop: “partial-birth abortion” for a form of late-term abortion that is resorted to infrequently; “elites” as virtually a synonym for liberals; “job creators” to ennoble the super-rich.

“When Sarah Palin was talking about ‘death panels' in the health care debate, it certainly created a kind of visceral backlash,” Mr. Zimmer said, “especially at a time when Democrats in Congress were talking about ‘the public option,' which sounded quite bureaucratic and antiseptic.”

Other examples abound, with few more enduring in public policy debates than “pro-life” versus “pro-choice.”

Pro-life is “a brilliant phrase, even though it's meaningless because it implies anti-life on the other side,” said Lucy Ferriss, a writer-in-residence at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. “‘Pro-choice' has never been as strong a phrase as ‘pro-life.'”

On Monday, Ms. Ferriss tackled “gun control” in Lingua Franca< /a>, a blog of The Chronicle of Higher Education. Like Mr. Bloomberg, she felt the phrase didn't sit right.

“We Americans don't like to be controlled,” she wrote. “We don't like anything that controls us.”

“Whatever we come up with,” she said, “should emphasize freedom: the freedom of us law-abiding citizens to go to school, the mall, the movie theater without the fear of psychopaths with assault weapons.” In a phone interview, Ms. Ferriss championed “ordinary freedom” as best suited for changes in gun policies.

“Most of us aren't interested in the freedom to have an arsenal of weapons,” she said. “We're interested in having our ordinary lives be as free as possible,” and that includes freedom from the sorts of security checks that heavily armed killers have forced on ever-more corners of American life.

Not everyone is convinced that language affects political positions.

On gun control, “I understand what Bloo mberg means - I'm also on his side,” said John McWhorter, a linguistics professor at Columbia University. “But let's keep calling it what we call it, because changing the words will only help us along for a short time.”

“The relationship between language and thought is vastly exaggerated,” Professor McWhorter said. “Our thoughts are what we generally need to work on a lot more than what we say.”

All the same, the search for game-changing expressions will undoubtedly continue. In the gun debate that follows the mass death of innocents in Newtown, there is a phrase that the mayor and his allies have not tried. It's one that has held up well. Maybe it's time to breathe new meaning into “pro-life.”

E-mail Clyde Haberman: haberman@nytimes.com

12:22 P.M., Cromwell Avenue, Staten Island

Sarah Maslin Nir/The New York Times

Police Say a Man Attacked His Grandmother, Then an Officer

The police said on Wednesday that an emotionally disturbed man in Hamilton Heights bludgeoned his grandmother and, as officers attempted to arrest him, struck a police officer in the head with a plastic elephant tusk, injuring him.

The officer, a 19-year veteran of the New York Police Department, was taken to St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center, where he was treated and released, the police said. Five other officers were also hospitalized following the morning melee, which occurred in an apartment on St. Nicholas Avenue in Manhattan.

The police said the grandmother, 67, who was not immediately identified, was taken to Harlem Hospital Center and was listed in critical but stable condition.

The cramped and chaotic confrontation began shortly 8 a.m., the police said. The mother of the man, Dominick Anderson, 27, summoned two officers patrolling the street near the apartment, telling them that her son was attacking her mother.

At the apartment, the two officers were soon joined by several others and found that Mr. Anderson's grandmother had been struck in the head and body with a blunt object, the police said.

Mr. Anderson struggled with the police, who used a Taser gun and pepper spray to attempt to restrain him as he swung with the object, which the police described as a plastic elephant tusk.

Mr. Anderson was taken to Harlem Hospital Center for a psychological evaluation. The police said an arrest would most likely follow the exam.

A Very Andrew Cuomo Happy Holidays

Rusty Zimmerman, via New York Governor's Office A new poster from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's office reflects a style of political advertising used in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Click to enlarge.

ALBANY â€" The portrait was of William Jennings Bryan, but it was the octopus that got all the attention, its tentacles wrapped around emblems of American industry while Lady Liberty took aim at the monster with an ax of democracy.

Office of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo A campaign poster from William Jennings Bryan's 1900 presidential bid.

Agency Will Pay $1.7 Million for False Job Placement Claims

A nonprofit agency that once was among Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's favorite contractors has agreed to pay $1.725 million to the federal government for falsely claiming to place 1,400 New Yorkers in jobs.

Most of those New Yorkers in fact found jobs on their own, or remained unemployed.

Federal prosecutors announced the settlement on Wednesday of a civil fraud lawsuit against Seedco. The agency, according to prosecutors with the United States attorney's office for the Southern District of New York, routinely falsified entries in government job placement databases.

“In addition to being illegal, it is insensitive to the people who desperately need employment help to exploit public funding for these programs,” said Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan. “We will not tolerate the abuse of federally funded programs.”

Barbara Gunn, the president of Seedco, has acknowledged for at least a year that ag ency officials made serious ethical errors. “Over a year ago, Seedco terminated a number of employees after an extensive internal investigation following allegations that Seedco employees had falsified data entry,” the agency said Wednesday.

Among those who resigned was Francine Delgado, a former senior vice president for the agency.

The New York Times first revealed the abuses in the summer of 2011, after a former deputy director at Seedco, Bill Harper, approached the newspaper with more than 400 examples of false placements. Later, six other Seedco employees told The New York Times that managers had pressured them to produce thousands of false job placements.

The fraud came as a blow to Mr. Bloomberg, who has long touted his administration's success in finding jobs for unemployed New Yorkers. Seedco, which now holds no city contracts, stood at the heart of many mayoral programs, from job placement and cash grants for welfare clients to loan programs f or small businesses.

But the claims of success in the Seedco program relied on a pressure-cooker atmosphere at the nonprofit, former employees said. They spoke of unrelenting pressure from the Bloomberg administration and the Department of Small Business Services to produce more and more job placements; each year city officials raised the target for placements, even in the teeth of a severe recession.

The Bloomberg administration handed out “performance-based” bonuses to agencies which produced high numbers of jobs. Seedco employees told city Department of Investigation agents that they feared for their jobs if they failed to reach these goals.

Robert W. Walsh, the commissioner of the city's Department of Small Business Services, said early on that he had “no apologies” for setting aggressive targets, and insisted that the city's third party verification contractor â€" which called a small numbers of clients and simply asked if they were employed †" would catch most problems.

His confidence was misplaced. His agency has since strengthened contract terms and officials say they count only placements that can be verified directly with employers. They have similarly tightened data practices and say they have made it more difficult to tamper with customer records.

Mr. Harper, the Seedco whistle-blower, now lives in Seattle. As part of its settlement with federal prosecutors, Seedco also settled with Mr. Harper. Agency officials had attacked him personally in The Times's first article, and Seedco agreed to issue a full retraction of its comments.

Jackson Blames Cast Member for His \'Saturday Night Live\' Expletives

Given the panoply of colorful language that Samuel L. Jackson has used in his film career it would not seem to require much effort to get him to enunciate another expressive word of the 4-, 8- or 12-letter variety. But after two (or possibly one and a half) vulgarities slipped past his lips on “Saturday Night Live” over the weekend, Mr. Jackson suggested in an interview Tuesday night that they were the fault of a n “S.N.L.” cast member who may have missed his cues.

As he was being bid goodnight by Kenan Thompson, who plays the host of the recurring “Saturday Night Live” sketch “What Up With That?”, Mr. Jackson appeared to utter at least part of an obscene word, then spoke another as Mr. Thompson comically chided him. (“Come on, Sam,” Mr. Thompson told him. “That costs money.”)

Discussing his “S.N.L.” appearance with Jimmy Kimmel on Tuesday night, Mr. Jackson said he had spoken only half a swear word in the first instance, adding: “I got the next whole word out.” He also expressed surprise that NBC had censored the words in a West Coast rebroadcast of “Saturday Night Live.” (Video of the original exchange, with those words uncensored, can be found here.)

Mr. Jackson said in the interview that Mr. Thompson “was sup posed to cut me off.”

“So you're saying this was Kenan's fault?” Mr. Kimmel asked.

After a shrug, Mr. Jackson replied: “I'm used to working with professionals that know their lines. Even the ones that are written on cue cards in front of you.”

Press representatives for “Saturday Night Live” did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Musical Moments, Part VII: Brahms

Brahms prefaces his Intermezzo in E-flat (Op. 117, No. 1) with a quote from a short poem, a sad Scottish lullaby, sung by a mother who is comforting a weeping child. And this intermezzo begins like a gentle lullaby. But a reader from Beachwood, Calif., loves the moment in this piece, a short transitional phrase, when the music turns mysterious and troubling. I agree, and I discuss it in this video.

12-12-12 Producers Say Concert Brought In $50 Million

The 12-12-12 benefit concert at Madison Square Garden last week has raised about $50 million for people affected by Hurricane Sandy, the producers announced on Tuesday night. They said that they expected more money to flow in over the coming weeks from the sales of albums, merchandise and more donations, and that the first $50 million in aid would be distributed immediately.

With a lineup featuring stars like Bruce Springsteen, Eric Clapton and Paul McCartney, the event raised more than was collected during the Concert for New York, a similar show staged by the same producers after the Sept. 11 attacks. (That show brought in $35 million - adjusted for inflation, the equivalent of about $45 million today.)

But the benefit's tally fell short of other recent telethon-style fund-raisers, like the Hope for Haiti concert that was broadcast on MTV in January 2010, which raised about $61 million. It also did not exceed the $55 million gathered in 1985 (about $118 million in 2012 dollars) for famine victims at the Live Aid concerts, according to BBC news. Those concerts drew tens of thousands of fans to stadiums in London and Philadelphia.

David Saltzman, the executive director of the Robin Hood Foundation, said the money would be distributed to about 140 groups that are providing aid to people whose homes and businesses were destroyed when Hurricane Sandy swept through the region in late October. Among other things, those groups have been providing hot meals to people in devastated areas, legal and psychological counseling to storm victims, cash grants to college students unable to pay their bills and home furnishings to people whose houses were destroyed.

“Our hope is that Robin Hood will continue to put boots on the ground in the hardest hit communities, to get people what they need now,” Mr. Saltzman said.

The concert was marred by reports that thousands of tickets were resold for a profit on StubHub, the ticket resale site. StubHub donated its fees from these sales - about $1 million - to the Robin Hood Relief Fund, but it appears most of the profits from those secondary sales went into the pockets of professional ticket brokers and individuals, rather than to the charity, said Glenn Lehrman, a StubHub spokesman.

Since Stubhub charges a 25 percent fee, the total cost of the tickets sold on the resale site is estimated to be about $4 million. The tickets were listed for many times their face value, prompting some calls in Albany for a ban on reselling tickets to charitable events.

The large number of tickets that were resold for profit also drew fire from the concert's producers - James Dolan, the executive chairman of the Madison Square Garden Company; John Syk es, the president of Clear Channel Entertainment Enterprises; and the filmmaker Harvey Weinstein.

Mr. Saltzman said about $30 million of the total had come from the initial sale of 13,500 tickets and donations from corporate sponsors, chief among them J.P. Morgan Chase & Company, which also underwrote the production costs.

The rest of the proceeds - some $20 million - flowed in from other sources: donations given over the telephone, online donations to Robin Hood and the sale of merchandise.

The charity is also receiving money from the sale of an album of the concert, which has been distributed by Columbia Records. That recording was listed at No. 3 on the iTunes album chart on Tuesday afternoon.

Funds are also being raised through an auction of memorabilia from the show, mostly instruments and clothing signed by the celebrities who took part. A Fender bass autographed by Mr. McCartney, Mr. Springsteen, Roger Daltrey and several other rock figures was being auctioned for more than $40,000. The drumsticks used by Dave Grohl during his appearance are being sold for more than $6,000.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 19, 2012

A previous version of this post misspelled the name of a StubHub spokesman. It is Glenn Lehrman, not Glen Lehrman.

\'Glengarry\' Revival, With Pacino and Cannavale, Recoups on Broadway

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Al Pacino, left, and Bobby Cannavale in a Broadway revival of David Mamet's “Glengarry Glen Ross,” directed by Daniel Sullivan, at the Schoenfeld Theater.

Send the word to Mitch and Murray and all the guys down at the home office: those broken, backstabbing salesmen of “Glengarry Glen Ross” have turned a profit on the latest Broadway revival of that David Mamet play.

Press representatives for the production, which stars Bobby Cannavale as the office hotshot Ricky Roma and Al Pacino as the past-his-prime chiseler Shelly Levene, said on Wednesday that it has recouped its $3.3 million capitalization. After delaying its original opening date by nearly a month, the play opened on Dec. 8 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater to mixed reviews. (In The New York Times, Ben Brantley lamented its “strange combination of comic shtick and existential weariness.”) This “Glengarry,” which is directed by Daniel Sullivan, has nonetheless been a box-office smash, grossing more than $1.2 million in ticket sales for the week that ended Dec. 16.

“Glenga rry Glen Ross,” which will run through Jan. 20, is the first production of the current Broadway season to recoup its investment, a marked contrast to Mr. Mamet's new play “The Anarchist,” which closed after only 23 previews and 17 performances.

Designers on Their Favorite Book Covers of 2012

Peter Mendelsund

We recently asked people in and around the world of graphic design to name one of their favorite book covers from 2012 and briefly describe its appeal. We didn't allow for repetition of choices, but several of those polled mentioned the cover chosen by the designer Jon Gray, who writes:

The book covers that Peter Mendelsund designs are most often brilliant. He is annoyingly talented and, worse, consistent. My favorite this year is his cover for Ben Marcus's novel “The Flame Alphabet.” A simple idea beautifully executed in rich, warm colors. Like all the best designs, it makes you wish you'd thought of it your self. It serves as a reminder that a book can be so much more than data consumption on an electronic device. You want to hold it, own it and buy it for your friends.

Mr. Gray's selection, and 18 others, can be found here.

Ballet Opening Night at La Scala Is Canceled as Chorus Members Go on Strike

Chorus members at La Scala theater in Milan, protesting having to wear costumes and make gestures without extra pay during a dance performance, have gone on strike. The strike forced the cancellation on Wednesday of opening night of Berlioz's “Roméo et Juliette,” with choreography by Sasha Waltz. The choristers said the extra duties violate their contract, but management argued they were no more than normally called for, according to Italian new reports. James Conlon, the American conductor and the music director of the Los Angeles Opera, was to have led the performance. Strikes or the threat of labor action at La Scala cause frequent disruptions, usually in opera productions.

Surge of Sales for Jenni Rivera; Swift Remains No. 1

Taylor Swift has topped the Billboard album chart once again, with her album “Red” (Big Machine) holding at No. 1 for a fifth week with 208,000 sales, according to Nielsen SoundScan. The new album by Bruno Mars, “Unorthodox Jukebox” (Atlantic), also did well, opening at No. 2 with 192,000.

Reed Saxon/Associated Press Jenni Rivera in March.

But the most remarkable performance on this week's chart is by Jenni Rivera, the Mexican-American singer and television star who died in a plane crash in Mexico on Dec. 9. Her mourning fans - and perhaps some newcomers whose cu riosity was piqued by news coverage of her death - bought 64,000 of her albums in the United States, more than 10 times the 6,000 sold the week before. She also sold 85,000 digital tracks, seven times the 12,000 she sold the week before. A compilation album released just two days after Ms. Rivera died, “La Misma Gran Señora” (Fonovisa), scored highest, reaching No. 38 on Billboard's over all album list, and she takes the top three slots on Billboard's Latin chart.

In the days after her death, Ms. Rivera's songs also became much more popular among radio programmers. According to BDS, another division of Nielsen that tracks radio playlists, American stations played her songs at least 14,700 times last week, almost five times her average over the three previous weeks. Such sales and airplay spikes are common after a big star die s, as with Michael Jackson in 2009 and Whitney Houston earlier this year. But they are all the more notable in the case of Ms. Rivera, who had a big following among Hispanics but was little-known to many Americans.

Also on the chart this week, the British boy band One Direction holds strong at No. 4 with 127,000 sales of “Take Me Home” (Syco/Columbia), bringing its eight-week sales total to slightly more than 1 million; the Game, the Los Angeles gangsta rapper, reached No. 6 with his latest, “Jesus Piece” (DGC/Interscope), which had 86,000 sales. To no one's surprise, a slew of holiday albums by well-known acts also scored well: Michael Bublé (No. 3), Rod Stewart (No. 5), Blake Shelton (No. 7) and Lady Antebellum (No. 10).