For the first time since 2000, the mayoralty of New York City will be an open seat, and there are a lot of people grabbing for it.

Depending on how you count the candidates—most are still technically undeclared—there are at least a dozen hopefuls vying for the job, and possibly as many as 20. And though quite a few of the would-be mayors will likely not make the ballot, with the passage of a 2010 referendum reducing the number of signatures required to qualify by 50 percent—to 3,500—it is likely that the victor will ultimately have to vanquish a crowded field of challengers in order to prevail.

And who will the big winner be? The answer is anyone’s guess.

Visit cityandstateny.com to read the full article.

Who are the 100 most powerful people in New York City politics? Of course, the answer is both subjective and controversial. Still, in an audacious attempt to arrive at a ranking that reflects who really are the movers and shakers that drive New York City’s agenda, City & State has solicited the off-the-record opinions of many of the five borough’s most savvy political insiders, poured over dozens of reader nominations and incorporated the results of our online polls. It should be emphasized that the scope of this list has been limited strictly to city politics. It does not judge each individual’s place in history or standing on the statewide, national or global stage. If that had been our aim, we would have arrived at a very different list. Also, though our selectees come from different communities, genders, parties, sexual orientations and religious affiliations, we openly acknowledge that the list does not adequately represent the city’s rich diversity. We do believe, however, that it is an accurate portrait of the distribution of power in city politics at this moment in time—and thus an illustration of how far we still need to go for our government to mirror the demographics and dynamics of its people. With no further ado, we boldly present City & State‘s first-ever New York City Power 100 List. We hope it gets you talking.

To read the full list, please visit cityandstateny.com.

The East River Ferry (via nycedc.tumblr.com)

The closure of the flooded subway system frustrated commuters earlier this month but it was a godsend for the East River Ferry.

Over 7,400 commuters crowded into the boats on Nov. 1, a number more than double the average ridership for the season. The weekend saw heavy ridership numbers as well, with 5,000 on Nov. 3, 3,000 on Nov. 4, and more than 7,700 people on Tuesday, Nov. 6, one of the highest totals of the year. When the L train returned on Friday, Nov. 9, some 3,200 people rode the ferry over the East River, an average figure for this time of year.

Ferry officials say that the high figures show the service is a necessary transit alternative for the city. “The return of the East River Ferry service was a significant step in providing a quick and safe transit option for commuters heading back to work in the wake of Hurricane Sandy,” said Paul Goodman, CEO of Billybey Ferry Company.

To read more New York political coverage, visit cityandstateny.com.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is pushing for high-tech investment in New York, has touted the University of Albany’s College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering. (Photos from College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering)

New York City isn’t the only part of the state that has been attracting a growing number of high-tech companies.

In upstate areas struggling to rebound from the recession and recover from the longer-term decline in manufacturing, the state has been recruiting companies like Yahoo! and IBM to add or expand operations, create new jobs and assist in rebuilding the economy.

To read the full article, please visit cityandstateny.com.

The embattled legislator had already lost his coveted housing committee and Brooklyn Democratic Party chairmanships this summer when news broke of allegations that he sexually harassed four female staff members.

To read the full article, please visit cityandstateny.com.

NYC Board of Elections Commissioner “J.C.” Polanco (via Twitter)

With Election Day rapidly approaching, the devastation from Hurricane Sandy could have residual consequences that may alter the outcome of local and federal elections. With many polling sites still without power and thousands of residents displaced due to flooding and damage to their homes, the New York City Board of Elections has been scrambling to come up with solutions that would allow voters to cast their ballot.

To read the complete article please visit www.cityandstateny.com.

A tree blocks two lanes of traffic on Bedford Avenue at Avenue T in Brooklyn.

Their offices were flooded, their phones were down and the power has been out, but that hasn’t stopped lawmakers in Zone A from helping their constituents.

Sen. Dan Squadron

On Monday, New York City Councilman Steve Levin drove around Brooklyn neighborhoods from Manhattan to Atlantic avenues monitoring flooding and gawking at residents who did not evacuate from their Zone A condos.

To read the full story, visit www.cityandstateny.com.

Morgan Pehme: Having studied literature and begun your career as a journalist, I was wondering if you think of yourself as a writer first and a historian second.
Robert Caro: It’s not quite that. It’s that I feel like with writing, the level of the prose is just as important in nonfiction, as fiction … 99 percent of [nonfiction books] or more, you can see that the author doesn’t really think that the writing matters… He got the facts and he’s got to put them down on the page. But my feeling is that if you want a nonfiction book to endure, the same things that we think are important in fiction—like sense of place, narrative drive, rhythms, that reinforce the words, that let the reader see the place where it’s happening—they’re just as important, and that’s not a belief that’s really held, and so I wanted to test it out. When I was first starting The Power Broker, I took the novel that’s most like a great long work of real history, which is War and Peace, and then I took [British historian Edward] Gibbon, and I would read a couple chapters of Gibbon and then a couple chapters of Tolstoy, and the level of writing—you can fool me about almost anything, but you can’t fool me about writing—the writing is just as important. So when I was doing something like Lyndon Johnson, when he gets out of the hospital … and he’s so far behind [during his first race for senator], and he’s desperate to catch up, I remember putting a note, scotch-taping it to that lamp: “Is there desperation on every page?”—not just the facts.

Is there a time in New York City history that is particularly relevant to understanding the New York of today?
The 1920s, when New York was expanding into [a] large metropolis. Now you have this situation where not only is the skyline changing with all of these huge buildings going up, but what that signifies to the neighborhoods that used to be there. I think that it’s important that the city build—it’s important that the city do what’s necessary to come into the modern age—but you have to be very careful that … the values of community, the values of neighborhood, are not being lost in this expansion … If you wanted to sum it up like we were taught in school, that Rome is power and Greece is glory, what is New York? New York is home. New York is the ingatherer, it’s the place that for a century and a half the peoples of the world have come to—in the 1870s and ’80s, the Italians, then the Irish, then the Jews, now all this wonderful influx of the Asian countries—so you say, What did New York do? It took these people in and it made them part of the fabric of the city … I don’t say this is happening, but I worry. … Are those values being destroyed again [like they were by some of Moses’ projects]? … I can’t pay enough attention to what’s happening in the city now, because [writing the Johnson book] is taking all my attention, but you can’t help thinking and wondering about it.

Is there a current figure in New York city or state politics now who would merit a Caro biography?
No. [Robert Moses] changed the world that we live in. Somebody said to me last night at dinner … “I was coming down the West Side Highway, and I was passing Lincoln Center, [and I realized] this is still the city that he built.” And I said, “He built it in many more significant ways. The fact that you had no choice but to come by car, that’s because he stopped the building of subways.” At the time he came to power, New York had this great subway system and it was being expanded, and he stopped that, and he stopped the maintenance on it, so that the MTA could basically never catch up … I don’t see anybody. He wanted to change the world, and he changed it, in some ways for the better, in some ways for the worse.

For the full interview visit CityandStateny.com