Bill & Ken, Andrew & Joe



This morning Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo attended a ceremony marking the reopening of NYU Langone Medical Center’s emergency department.  Closed since Hurricane Sandy swept through, the rebuilt emergency department was funded by a $50 million gift from Ronald O. Perelman.

The re-opening ceremony brought together a mix of political allies and rivals, including Governor Andrew Cuomo, Mayor Bill de Blasio, Joe Lhota and Ken Langone.  The governor and mayor’s periodically fraught relationship has been widely chronicled.  Lhota ran against de Blasio in the 2013 mayoral race after having served as the Cuomo-appointed head of the MTA.  He’s currently senior vice president and chief of staff of the NYU Langone Medical Center.  Ken Langone, the extremely wealthy, blunt, opinionated eponym of the Medical Center is a major political donor who heads “Republicans for Cuomo.”  In March he was quoted as making an offensive comparison between Hitler and Nazi Germany and populist political appeals such de Blasio’s “tale of two cities.”

Here’s what happened as de Blasio and Langone greeted each other following the ceremony.