John McEnroe, Midtown Needs You!

Somehow the “Core Club” succeeds in coming off as even more pretentious sounding than Soho House. And the Times is refreshingly merciless in profiling them:

It’s a funny time to start a club in New York. Socially, the city seems as wide open and meritocratic as ever. The influence of old wood-paneled clubs of the Upper East Side, with their aging memberships and lobster nights, is at an ebb, in part because of their remoteness from the powerful and vigorous global nomads who fuel the city’s energy.

But on East 55th Street, a team of construction workers is laboring furiously to put the finishing touches on an ambitious act of social exclusion called the Core Club, set to open its doors, for a few people anyway, in mid-September.

While traditional clubs serve to promote homogeneity and to preserve the social order by keeping new and different people away, the Core Club’s pitch – and as a for-profit corporation, it has a pitch – is that it will serve as a place for a geographically and socially diverse set of wealthy people to gather and meet others of the same disparate tribe. As a result, its membership list resembles a kind of Noah’s ark manifest of overachievers from various professional species – politics (Vernon Jordan); finance (John Schneider, a managing director of Allen & Company); real estate (Aby Rosen, the developer, and Steven Roth, the chairman and chief executive of Vornado Realty Trust); the arts (Marianne Boesky, the gallery owner, and Richard Meier, the architect); entertainment (Ari Emanuel, a partner in the Endeavor Agency, and Andrew Lack, the chief executive of Sony BMG Music); music (Roger Waters and Patty Smyth); sports (Dan Marino and John McEnroe); and so on.

Exactly what such a socially disconnected group of people will talk about and do when they gather at the club – what the club is in general – remains a kind of mystery, one that Jennie Saunders, the president and chief executive of the Core Group, the club’s parent company, seems content to perpetuate. For Ms. Saunders the thing is so ambitious as to be almost indescribable.

“Try to get off the idea of a reimagined private club concept, because it’s so much more than that,” Ms. Saunders said. “Our vision and our goal as an organization is to provide the conditions for transformation.” The club, Ms. Saunders added, would be “a hyper-edited collection of people, art, books and ideas – a compelling collage.”

A reporter confessed he still didn’t understand: “Is it a club or a hotel or a spa, a cult or what?”

“It’s all of those things,” Ms. Saunders said.

So, you ask, What does the privilege of breaking up a fascinating tete-a-tete between, say, Richard Meier and Dan Marino (or Roger Waters and Vernon Jordan!) cost one? Sadly, being put in one’s place by the semi-famous does not come cheap:

At a minimum, the club may appeal to wealthy people who’ve run out of novel ways to spend their money. The first 100 members, among them Millard S. Drexler, the chairman and chief executive of J. Crew, and Terry Semel, a former chairman of Warner Brothers Studios and now the chief executive of Yahoo, paid $100,000 each to get the club going. (If it works out, they’ll be paid back their investment, with interest, over five years.) Two hundred additional members have joined by paying $55,000 entrance fees, refundable should they decide to cancel their memberships.

The Well-Read Jam Box And Brown-Bagged Imported Beer

The affluent have co-opted the stoop party, leading some compatriots to sneer, “How ghetto.” The Sunday Styles section treads carefully:

As Lori Coats dropped into a folding chair near the stoop of her apartment building on West 21st Street, she let out a deep sigh. “This is fabulous,” she said, cradling her 18-month-old baby, Cate, in one arm and a plastic cup of sangria in her other hand.

Her neighbor Robert Walker nodded agreement as he appraised the picnic table set up with plates of focaccia and pasta salad next to a giant pitcher of homemade sangria. Two neighbors from 10th Avenue maneuvered awkwardly through the crowd perched on the stoop or on chairs. When Mr. Walker heard a favorite disco classic on the iPod hooked up to computer speakers, he said, “That’s my song.”

Long a tradition in Harlem, Brooklyn and working-class neighborhoods throughout New York City, the summer stoop party has been a rarity on streets of $3,000-a-month apartments and single-family brownstones in the heart of Chelsea.

Seriously, crank up your “jam box” and pop open an imported beer — it’s time to let loose:

It is not even necessary to have a stoop proper to have a sidewalk party. Josh Hughes and Brian Ermanski began inviting friends to daily afternoon outdoor parties in NoLIta in the spring, with seating on trash bins and benches. They crank up the Velvet Underground on a jam box and crack open their Negra Modelo beer in paper bags.

“In the middle of all those models and filmmakers and rich women heading off to eat at Cafe Havana, it definitely creates a small scene,” said Mr. Hughes, the author of “Punk Shui: Home Design for Anarchists,” scheduled for publication next year by Three Rivers Press. “But that’s a part of the statement we’re making, that we’re not above it.”

As for the “ghetto” slur — it’s not a question of “whether” but “how”:

Both Mr. Hughes and Ms. Coats said that passers-by at the gatherings on their blocks have sometimes muttered that partying on the street is “ghetto.”

One who passed by and formed that thought, Ron Robinson, a beauty-trend consultant, said it was not meant as a derogatory comment. “Growing up in the outer boroughs,” Mr. Robinson said, “this seems to me like a long-gone pastime which is reoccurring.”

“I miss it,” he added.

So it’s ghetto in a self-hating kind of way — I like it!

Mister Softee On The Offensive

In an attempt to preserve that high level of quality one has come to expect from Mister Softee, the company is going on the offensive to root out impostors:

The black sport utility vehicle blended in perfectly with the row of cars parked along a Queens street on Saturday, but behind its tinted windows, three private investigators huddled inside, staking out their suspect.

There were staccato commands, the rapid snapping of long-lens cameras and the recording of license plate numbers in extensive dossiers.

“Is that him?” one investigator murmured. “O.K., now don’t lose him. All right, we got him.”

It was a surveillance job that would lead to car chases through side-street labyrinths. But the chases were all at very low speeds. After all, the target this day was not some elusive spy, desperate fugitive or stealthy adulterer, but rather a lumbering white truck stopping to sell soft-serve ice cream to sugar-crazed children, all while blaring the repetitive Mister Softee jingle.

“We’re lucky,” whispered one investigator named Joe, who, like his colleagues, would give only his first name because in his line of work, he makes a lot of enemies. “It’s a good ice cream day.”

He opened a leather portfolio and began scribbling notes in a packet titled, “Mister Softee Surveillance, Queens Location.”

What, you scoff, does the company care if someone else tries to evoke a Platonic Mister Softee-ness? After all, Mister Softee is synonymous with a down-market mobile ice cream experience. Alas, it’s more complicated than that — the brand is important to the company, and faux Softees go to great lengths to copy the look and feel of the trucks, even going as far as tape recording the theme to replay on their phony Softee vehicles:

Official Mister Softee operators must pay a franchise fee, work in designated areas and serve only Mister Softee ice cream. But Mister Softee officials say hundreds of other operators buy used trucks and slap on a blue and white paint job, create identical or similar menu boards and logos, including the famous cone-head trademark, and bootleg the famous jingle copyrighted to the Mister Softee company.

They wind up effectively posing as Mister Softee, company officials say, while avoiding the fees and standards.

In addition to depriving 10-year-olds of the true taste of Mister Softee, the practice means missed profits for the Mister Softee company and the independent contractors who drive its trucks, said James Conway Jr., 49, vice president of Mister Softee. Mr. Conway says he is determined to track down the entrepreneurs who operate look-alike trucks.

Mr. Conway said that the Mister Softee look, sound, taste and reputation had taken five decades to perfect, adding that the ice cream used on his New York-area trucks is made at a dairy in Long Island City according to a longstanding company formula. Now, he said, opportunistic ice cream vendors are unfairly cashing in on this by deceiving customers into thinking they are buying the real deal.

Beep to FMCP: Drop Dead!

Parkland be damned, Queens Borough President Helen Marshall is practically tripping over herself to lure the Jets to Queens. That’s the football Jets, not the thousands of airplanes that take off from and land at the borough’s two major airports.

But we digress. Let it be said that quotes like this tend to bite one in the ass. Like, ouch:

Queens Borough President Helen Marshall wants the Jets to come to Queens and she doesn’t mind sacking one of her own parks to make the point.

Mayor Bloomberg said giving up city parkland to build a stadium would be a tough decision; Marshall said no one would miss the swath of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in question.

“I went to the site,” said Marshall, who represented the area around the park during her years in the City Council and the state Assembly. “This is the Fountains of the something or other. It is really now just a big, big pool of stagnant water, with garbage thrown in.”

Marshall was talking about the Fountain of the Planets, a once-grand, 6-acre water display built for the 1964-65 world’s fair.

God, what a bitch! Leave that poor park alone already!

Economy Slumps; Actors Reduced To Pulling Rickshaws

It’s not that pulling a rickshaw is inherently degrading; there are so many degrading jobs out there, and if someone wants to pull one of these mofos for big-ass tips, more power to them. Still, you have to wonder who exactly rides in rickshaws. And as New York Magazine explains we’re talking about the old-school dude-on-foot-pulling-a-cart kind of rickshaw, not those newfangled cycle rickshaws:

Those droopy workhorses on Central Park South have nothing on Jeff Iftekaruddin, a 30-year-old actor, musician, and, now, rickshaw beast of burden. He can drag up to 600 pounds of tourist all over midtown, charging $40 for a twenty-minute ride. Still, he admits, “Some people don’t like the rickshaws. They find what we do degrading.”

Iftekaruddin’s rickshaw is one of five now deployed around Times Square and Central Park by Shanghai Rickshaw. They should not be confused with the pedicab, of which there are around 250 in the city, according to Frank Luo, Shanghai’s co-owner.

. . .

[Luo’s] partner, Arty Nichols, who already owns a fleet of horsedrawn carriages and pedicabs, thinks it’s the next big thing: “People don’t come to New York to take a rickshaw ride . . . yet.”

Nichols estimates the pullers — typically immigrants, actors, and athletes — make about $150 for a five-to-six-hour shift, with about two hours of actual pull time. Though Luo admits some get pretty winded, the majority find it’s easier than it looks because the rickshaws are so well balanced. But the appearance of difficulty works in the drivers’ favor. “I think people tip them to death,” says Nichols, “because they really feel these guys are busting their ass.”