One Word: Pedicabs

Enough said:

He would have gotten the job — if only he hadn’t stolen the interviewer’s wallet.

And Marco Marabotto, 31, would have never gotten caught if he hadn’t listed his name and address on the job application.

Now Marabotto faces up to four years in the slammer after lifting Carly Miller’s wallet from her purse during an Aug. 15 job interview, sources said.

“This is one of the dumbest criminals alive,” said Bill Clinger, Miller’s boss at Revolution, a pedicab courier service on Ninth Avenue.

Clinger advertised for a driver on Craigslist and Marabotto, who lives in Manhattan, made an appointment for an interview.

Miller, 22, did the interview from behind a desk as Marabotto sat across from her. Her purse was on a chair next to him.

Miller got good vibes from Marabotto.

“I would have hired him, absolutely,” she said yesterday. “I had a good feeling about him. He was very friendly and warm.”

The Tautological Brilliance Of The MTA

Useless train announcement of the day goes to:

Due to an incident involving trains at the Flushing-Main Street Station, there is no train service in both directions between the Flushing-Main Street Station and the Willets Point-Shea Stadium Station.

Leading Economic Indicator: The Laid Off I-Banker Trend Piece

Don’t look now — the $405 Club is back:

In the wake of continuing, even worsening, layoffs in the financial industry (10,000 in New York since last August, Bloomberg recently reported, with behemoths like Citigroup cutting 10 percent of its investment bank alone); as double-digit drops in net worth have top executives wringing their hands in The Times, much of Wall Street’s young are simply throwing up theirs and saying, “Whoo-hoo!”

Tommy Kim, 27, formerly of UBS, for example, logged 37 days of snowboarding in 2008 after being fired last January. “When I got laid off, it was like, hallelujah,” he said.

After the snow melted, he came back to New York, where “I went paint-balling,” Mr. Kim said. “I went to Six Flags.” Now: “I stay up late, wake up late, go to the beach a lot. I play a lot of video games when I can’t find people to hang out with. I started reading again for pleasure, which is something I haven’t done since before college.” (Currently on the nightstand: Freakonomics).

He doesn’t have a three-bedroom in Westchester or a country club membership. He’s single and owns a one-bedroom in Queens that he bought “really cheap” in 2004.

Recently, Mr. Kim turned his attention to organizing his vast music collection and playing DJ gigs around town, including a Saturday party at the Brooklyn Museum and a few weddings (he was a well-known DJ during his undergrad days at Dartmouth). He’s also taking break-dancing classes. And he built himself a new computer, just for the hell of it. Looked up the instructions online, bought the parts, et voilà!

And his job search? “I’m kind of looking,” Mr. Kim said. “I decided last week maybe I should be more proactive.” It’s hard to get worked up, though, because “President Bush extended unemployment by another 13 weeks!” That’s $405 a week on top of the “generous” UBS severance.

Buried Lede: Unemployment Benefits Stagnate; Unaccountably Rich Hardest Hit!

China Could Extend The N Train To LaGuardia!

So bascially Thomas Friedman is holding Peter Vallone, Sr. responsible for the United States’ alarming lack of transportation infrastructure:

As I sat in my seat at the Bird’s Nest, watching thousands of Chinese dancers, drummers, singers and acrobats on stilts perform their magic at the closing ceremony, I couldn’t help but reflect on how China and America have spent the last seven years: China has been preparing for the Olympics; we’ve been preparing for Al Qaeda. They’ve been building better stadiums, subways, airports, roads and parks. And we’ve been building better metal detectors, armored Humvees and pilotless drones.

The difference is starting to show. Just compare arriving at La Guardia’s dumpy terminal in New York City and driving through the crumbling infrastructure into Manhattan with arriving at Shanghai’s sleek airport and taking the 220-mile-per-hour magnetic levitation train, which uses electromagnetic propulsion instead of steel wheels and tracks, to get to town in a blink.

Then ask yourself: Who is living in the third world country?

Buried Lede: Authoritarian regimes can do a lot of cool shit, can’t they?

“An Instant Hit” (Like A Mack Truck)

Broadway Boulevard has been “an instant hit” for thrill seekers:

As if New York wasn’t stimulating enough already, the city has provided a new kind of thrill right in the heart of Midtown: an esplanade carved into Broadway where people can sit and relax as cars and trucks whiz by.

And while the esplanade seems to have become an instant hit with office workers and tourists — the metal benches, tables and chairs (some under red umbrellas) were rarely empty on Monday morning, even though they have been out for only a few days — many eyed the traffic warily.

“I think it’s dangerous,” said Vicki Lee, who nonetheless sat with two friends eating lunch at a cafe table on the esplanade just south of 38th Street. Ms. Lee, a clothing designer at a Midtown fashion company, was careful to sit so that she could keep an eye on the traffic heading downtown.

Her concern, she said, centered on the gray plastic planters arrayed every few feet along the edge of the esplanade as a buffer for the passing traffic. The planters were filled with soil, flowers and other plants and were too heavy for one person alone to budge. Yet they did not make Ms. Lee feel safe.

“You hear so many accidents of the cars going out of control and all they have here is plastic pots,” she said. But she dug into her salad and added, “We’re going to roll the dice and eat lunch here today.”

Not far away, Eric Sachinis and Grace Ong sat on two metal chairs pulled up to the edge of the esplanade closest to the traffic. They ate sandwiches and gazed at the passing cars.

“It’s a death trap,” Mr. Sachinis, a network administrator for a garment company, said with a laugh. “It’ll be up for a month and then somebody’ll get hit and they’ll take it down.”

“I like it, though,” said Ms. Ong, an administrative assistant, who observed that a pedestrian would be no safer on the sidewalk than on the esplanade if a car lost control. Besides, she said, the esplanade was a good spot for people watching. “That’s why you live in New York,” she said, “to watch everything go by.”

Creating Axioms: “New Yorkers Sit Anywhere”