RIP Mario Cuomo

A truly great loss !! The man who should have been the first Italian American President !!

More importantly did anybody pick him on the dead list..

Not only that but he would've been a GREAT president!

He was one of the best orators I've ever heard.

I agree with that, SC!

His son Andrew seems like a cool guy, too. DeBlasio's even good, many don't like him because his wife was an alleged communist in the past and because he let protestors grieve and express their rights in the streets.

Andrew looks like and sounds like his father. The one thing that bothers me about Andrew is when he starts acting like an MC during a ceremony and he introduces someone to the crowd with, "How about a round of applause for _________ ?"

I liked Mario his son is not even close to his father. But i do dig his girl friend ever seen her she is on the cooking channel

Mario Cuomo was a great orator and ddid lower out taxes a little but still a big liberal. His son Andrew- also said conservatives no longer welcome in NY State so I think he sucks. His girlfriend is Sandra Lee ? who has her own show on food network. SHe's too good for him.

Being a great orator and doing your job effectively as President of the United States is quite different, no? That imbecile in office now is a great orator...but his policies and dictatorship has to stop...2 more years with this prick!

Ditto on Andrew.

I respected his father for his accomplishments as a fellow Italian American, and I agree that he was one of the GREAT orators. But I've read quite a bit about his contempt for his roots, and I must admit that it turned me off a bit.

And as a centrist, he was probably a bit too far to the Left for my taste. But I still voted for him twice (much like I was a HUGE Obama supporter back in 2008, which I believe gives me the right to be so critical of him today).

But this should be a celebration of a man's life, not a political discussion. Rest in peace, Governor.

Obama is overrated as an orator. He's too... stilted. Too... slick.

Cuomo was self-inflated, egotistical leftist who accomplished nothing other than for prison expansion. In a nutshell, he was a weaker, Italian version of Ted Kennedy, and didn't even want to be Italian at that.

I touched on that myself, OldSchool:


If you want to read a bit more about it, you should check out "Were You Always an Italian?" by Maria Laurino (an Italian American author with equal contempt for her heritage, even if she manages to sugarcoat it through her writing). She's been torn to shreds by the Sons of Italy over the years (and Cuomo was never a favorite of theirs, either).

he played pro baseball. Mario did, I forget what team signed him, but, he played pro ball, in the minors of course.

Thanks, PB, I will check that out....and great to have you back.

This was the final Jeopardy question from a few months back
category 1970s films


"In 2013 Mario Cuomo said he finally saw this film, which he had boycotted for personal reasons, & called it “maybe …a masterpiece”.

Rest In Peace to Gov. Cuomo (1)


Without being disrespectful to this thread which is about his life and legacy, I ask what leads people to think that Cuomo had contempt for his heritage?

He was married to an Italian woman(Sicilian), he remained a Roman Catholic, and he never changed his surname.

Conspicuously converting to Protestantism, marrying a wasp or person outside of your ethnic background deliberately, and anglicizing your name are the general things that people who want to distance themselves from their white ethnic roots do.
Not necessarily indications of self hatred/contempt but of wish to assimilate into what they view as "American" culture. Mr Cuomo did neither and I've heard in real life and now on this board that he held his heritage in contempt.

Could it be that he held media stereotypes of Italians in contempt and not his heritage. I read years ago that he refused to see The Godfather and I assumed that it was for this reason.

Mario Cuomo was a trusted negotiator before he became an elected politician. In 1972, Mayor John Lindsay proposed putting a low-income housing project with three 24-story buildings in the middle of Forest Hills, and upper middle class neighborhood in Queens. It ran into violent opposition. Cuomo was called upon to find a settlement. He trod a very narrow, very careful line. His proposal, which was adopted, put three 12-story buildings in the neighborhood, with a significant number of apartments reserved for seniors. And, it was a "Mitchell/Lama Coop"--a type of housing in which the tenant puts down a certain amount of money per room (not a lot), but can only sell it back to the Housing Authority. The project succeeded without harming the neighborhood. It was one of the significant stepping stones to Cuomo's political career.

I remember growing up all the adults were pissed off about the same thing they did in Flatbush, it was called The vanderveer. Built those same projects right around all the new Trump Brick homes and the classic homes lining the avenues.

I love Forest Hills, TB. Beautiful neighborhood. I would have lived on Austin Street in a heartbeat way back when. And I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but there's a HUGE Bukharian Jewish population living there now. And those old Mitchell/Lama Co-Ops are Ground Zero for many of them.

Mitchell-Lama was a great boon to the middle class. My folks lived in a Mitchell-Lama building on 96th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan. Two bedrooms, $500/month rent, until my father died in '97. A close friend lives in a Mitchell-Lama building on the ocean in Arverne (Rockaway Beach), two bedrooms, plays about $500/month.

I did a lot of work out of that area too, TB. Plaza Memorial on 91st and Amsterdam. Nowhere near as busy as Riverside, but it's not as impersonal, either.


Unbelievable. They're really building in that area now. They better never let go of that apartment. They'll be looking for $2,000 with new tenants. Guaranteed.

As far as that area goes, I'm glad that the builders have left Breezy Point alone (as far as gentrification goes). Because the blue collar families that have been in that neighborhood all their lives have been through absolute Hell these past dozen or so years (9/11, the American Airlines crash, Hurricane Sandy, etc.).

THAT SEEMS FAIR ... PUT THE PROJECT'S IN JAMAICA AND FAR ROCK ?

PB, the last time I stayed with him was '09. Yes, they were building luxo private homes almost on the beach. Russians were buying them. I think the houses got wiped out by Sandy. My friend's 16-story building had 6 feet of sand in the lobby. All the cars in the building's parking lot were ruined. He and his wife had the good sense to drive their cars to Howard Beach and park them well away from the bay before the storm.