Nelson A. Rockefeller

Tragically, the Rockefellers didn't make it into The Observer's Power Families issue. But don't weep for the Standard Oil spawn: According to city records, Peter C. Rockefeller and his wife Allison Whipple have sold their four-bedroom apartment at 131 East 69th Street for $7,400,000.

(According to their 1987 wedding announcement, he is Nelson Rockefeller's grandson, and she used to be a broker at Douglas Elliman.)

The Brown Harris Stevens listing--which is now offline--clocks the apartment at 11.5 rooms, and brags that the place was renovated by high-brow classicist Peter Pennoyer. So naturally there's a 30-foot-long gallery that leads into a "wood paneled drawing room with a wood burning fireplace." Sounds flammable, no?

Then there's the "huge state of the art kitchen," which comes with an old-school butler's pantry. Most mysterious (and therefore best) of all: "Historically correct mahogany Pella thermo-pane windows have been recently put in place." According to the deed, the proud new thermo-pane owners are "super lawyer" Lori Lesser and Daniel Shuchman.

Click on the floorplan below and the cozy snapshot above for enlargements.

- Max Abelson

Don't expect any last-minute attacks on Hillary Clinton from John Spencer in these waning days of the campaign.

"We're running a campaign on principles," Spencer's spokesman Rob Ryan told me. "We're talking about issues that are core republican issues, and we're talking about Senator Clinton's failure to properly serve the people of New York."

"It's obviously a tough year for Republicans in New York State and for that matter, nationally. So we're going to make the best effort possible. This has been an issue-oriented campaign and it's going to remain one. And we'll see what happens on Election Day."

How bad is it this year?

Ryan said, "This is pretty much what it was like 30 years ago. It was 1976, you were coming out of Watergate, Nelson Rockefeller was out of New York State and no longer governor...this is the state things were in." But, he said it's times like these that "open up the shot at rebuilding."  read more »

-- Azi Paybarah

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The stirrings around the Republican nomination to face, probably, Eliot Spitzer, are growing, and it looks like a three-way contest: Tom Golisano, Bill Weld, and some wild-card tycoon -- in the wildest fantasies of GOP insiders, make it Time Warner CEO Dick Parsons.

First, here's some unexpected news from the AP:

Tom Golisano says he just spoke to John McCain: "He was very personable and said the Republican Party could use people like me, and that he'd love to have me as a candidate [for governor]."

An odd, deliberately-placed story that makes it sound like Golisano is feeling a little heat from Weld's increasingly serious mutterings.  read more »

And the Parsons notion is not as farfetched as it sounds. Running Time Warner isn't as fun as it once was. And Parsons came up in New York State politics, as an aide to the original Rockefeller Republican, Nelson Rockefeller.

As a first-time candidate for public office in 2001, Michael Bloomberg said that the Mayor should ha  read more »

For the first time in more than a century, there are no Republican legislators on the island of Manh  read more »

I've probably spent more timein dancing school than anyone since Arthur Murray-not recently, but whe  read more »

It seemed, at first, to happen as an afterthought.  read more »

One of the last of New York's Rockefeller Republicans directed his driver to pull off the New York T  read more »