Envy Apartment

Mark Painter (Photo: (c)Pamela Ebel) Mark Painter served as a judge for 30 years. He is the author of six books and a member of the Enquirer’s Board of Contributors. In 1965, I lived in a basement apartment in Corryville. It was a vibrant neighborhood – a doctor’s office, two delis, an actual mom-and- pop dry cleaner , and perhaps the best bar and restaurant ever – the original Lakewood Tavern at Jefferson and Lakewood. What’s there now? The entire tax-paying environment was destroyed to build the Environment Protection Agency . Not that it couldn’t have been built on empty land nearby – UC and the Feds just wanted it as close to the university as possible. It’s sterile and ugly to boot. The small businesses were gone. The homeowners gone. Tax- paying property replaced by non-taxpaying property. Population lost. When you destroy a neighborhood, you tear the fabric of the community. Connections lost. Roots lost. And so it goes. Buy Photo Several dozen houses in Avondale -- abandoned ...

One day in August, 2016, the financier Carl Icahn made an urgent phone call to the Environmental Protection Agency . Icahn is one of the richest men on Wall Street, and he has thrived, in no small measure, because of a capacity to intimidate. A Texas- based oil refiner in which he had a major stake was losing money because of an obscure environmental rule that Icahn regarded as unduly onerous. Icahn is a voluble critic of any government regulation that constrains his companies. So he wanted to speak with the person in charge of enforcing the policy: a senior official at the E.P.A. named Janet McCabe . Icahn works from a suite of offices, atop the General Motors Building , in midtown, that are decorated in the oak-and-leather fashion of a tycoon’s lair in a nineteen-eighties film. During that decade, Icahn made his reputation as one of the original corporate raiders , pioneering the art of the hostile takeover and establishing himself as a human juggernaut—a pugnacious deal machine ...