When it was announced last week that Clay Felker, the Missouri native who rose to prominence as the founder of New York magazine, had passed away, tributes began to mount: Felker was hailed by the New York Times as “a visionary editor who was widely credited with inventing the formula for the modern magazine,” remembered by a roundtable of Talese-caliber writers at the Observer, praised by Kurt Anderson as the rare editor who possessed the Big Idea — but the apex of praise arrived on newsstands this week, with Tom Wolfe‘s cover story in New York, in which Wolfe celebrated Felker as a “Midwesterner who had come to New York to swallow America’s great City of Ambition whole, slick talk and all.” A search on the website of the Village Voice, where Felker was briefly an editor in the Seventies, revealed this voice of dissent, published in 2005: “New York magazine owes its birth to Clay Felker, and — in the mind of many a Voice insider and observer — this paper owes its death to him.” And a search on the site for Esquire, where Felker was also briefly at the helm, revealed nary a mention, freeing up more room for surveys such as “The World’s Worst Eating Contests.”