“We’ll show you the place. I expect that will put your mind at ease, convince you the mansion has nothing to do with anything so sordid,” Mayor Statler said. “Roland tells me you’re quite the history buff, Detective. And you, Alex, you’ve been spending time in France I understand. You know Zuber?”
Mike’s brow furrowed at the mention of a name he didn’t know. He hated to be left out of the loop.
“Yes, sir. I’ve seen this room before, but never without a crowd in it,” I said.
“Take a good look. It’s remarkable, isn’t it.”
“I’ll bite,” Mike said. “What’s a Zuber?”
“Jean Zuber ran a company in Alsace, Detective, that was set up in the early nineteenth century. The crème de la crème of French artistry.”
Mike was running his hand over the smooth surface of an antique pier table. “What’d he make?”
“Wallpaper.”
“You could get rich from wallpaper?”
“This is the grandest quality in the world, Mike,” I said. “These panoramic scenes were printed on hand-carved pear-wood blocks. Les Jardins Français, isn’t it?
“Yes, Alex. Made in 1830.” The stunning painting of French gardens covered the room, like a colorful montage of trees and flowers and fountains. “That was the height of the craze for French wallpaper of this quality. It was before photography, so people would pay to have these foreign scenes created in their homes.”
“Flocking. My mother was more partial to flocking,” Mike said.
“This would have cost a fortune to re-create today. Beyond our means,” Statler said, ignoring Mike completely. “But the decorators just happened upon it in the attic of a grand Hudson Valley house, unused and in its original wrapping. Did you know Jackie Kennedy found two Zuber panoramas to place in the White House?”
The mayor was finishing his coffee. Mike poured us each a cup and helped himself to the cookies.
“No,” I said, “I didn’t.”
“We got very lucky. We’d never have afforded this one.”
“Ninety percent of police work is getting lucky,” Mike said. “Glad it happens under your roof too.”
“But there was a fortune spent on restoring this house, wasn’t there?” I asked.
“Indeed,” the mayor said to me, then turned to Dan Harkin. “Want to ask someone in the kitchen for hot coffee?”
Statler pushed back from the table and stood up. “Parts of the house were falling down by the time Ed Koch moved in. Almost uninhabitable. By 1983, he’d raised private money-millions-to establish a conservancy for Gracie Mansion, to get down to the foundation and rebuild the entire structure.”
“That must have been quite a process,” I said. Statler clearly wanted to be stroked, to show us he was in charge of the “people’s house,” before he turned it over to us for examination.
“You can’t imagine what they did. Everything from infrared scanning to determine the posts and beams of the original wooden framing, biopsies-really, biopsies-of old paint chips to try to match the original colors.”
“It was renovated again in 2000, wasn’t it?” Mike said.
“It’s very hard to maintain something as old as this building. Despite the earlier work, the deck on the front porch almost collapsed. At the time, there was an anonymous gift to the conservancy here for five million dollars.”
Mike whistled. “That could buy a lot of Zuber.”
“There was a great effort that went into finding some of the original pieces the Gracie family owned, furniture made for the house when the Gracies lived here.”
“Nice job. Bloomberg, huh?”
Statler bristled at the sound of his predecessor’s name. “Anonymous, I said.”
“We all know what that guy did for the city,” Mike said. “Every decent charity and every great cause got an anonymous handful from his deep pocket. The guy is aces.”
Statler clearly didn’t like Mike’s admiration of the popular politician who had preceded him in the post.
“When did Gracie Mansion become the official mayoral residence?” I asked.
“The country’s first official mayoral residence, Alex,” Statler said. “At the insistence of Robert Moses, who was the very powerful parks commissioner, Fiorello LaGuardia reluctantly gave up his own comfortable apartment and moved in here, to the farm, as he liked to call it. Nineteen forty-two was the year.”
Mike was getting antsy. “How come so many of you guys don’t want to live here?”
“Each mayor, each family, has its own reaction to the house. You know we had a district attorney who became mayor, Alex, do you?”
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“Nineteen forty-six, Bill O’Dwyer,” Statler said. “He’d been the Brooklyn DA.”
“Prosecuted the Murder, Inc., guys,” Mike said. The media had given the thriving organized crime group known as Brownsville Boys, who’d been responsible for scores of murders from the 1920s to the 1940s, their more vibrant name.
“Yes, he did. But his wife hated it here. She thought the proximity to the river made it a lonely place-foghorns, the noise of the buoy bells keeping her awake,” Statler said. “Ed Koch used it more than he ever thought he would, though he still escaped downtown most weekends to his own apartment after too much pomp and ceremony.”
“Then Rudy ditched the place when he walked out on his bride,” Mike said.
The moment that Giuliani held a press conference to announce he was leaving his wife-before telling her himself-had deservedly been one of his lowest points of popularity in the months before September 11, 2001.
“And Mayor Bloomberg?” I asked.
“When he was elected in 2002, he made the decision to live in his own home, all the time,” Vin Statler said. “Bloomberg has a magnificent town house. He preferred to use Gracie Mansion for daytime functions and to house the most eminent overnight guests. Quite frankly, I made the same choice. The mansion is a public place, and I’m a rather private man.”
“How public is it?” Mike asked.
“Walk with me, please,” the mayor said. “Once the Wagner Wing opened, they had to construct this little hallway to connect the two pieces of the house. See? Brilliant, isn’t it? We call it ‘the hyphen.’ ”
That’s exactly what it was-a narrow, hyphen-shaped passageway between the original parts of the Gracie home and the rooms that had been added hundreds of years later for much larger, public events.
Statler was walking us through, showing us everything from the enormous ballroom, painted the same mediagenic color as the Blue Room in City Hall, to the dainty parlor, to a smaller dining room, and another reception area with huge glass-fronted bookcases and tall shelves that housed a collection of Chinese export porcelain. In each, the dark mahogany furniture gleamed against the deep true colors that had been reclaimed and restored.