Can Boot-Blacks And Scrap Peddlers Be Far Behind?

Dire economic times are linked with a rise in the cobbling arts:

As New Yorkers cut back on spending and cobble together their cash, the city’s shoe repair stores are getting an unexpected boost.

“It’s getting better and better,” said Cesar Andrade, who owns Andrade Shoe Repair in the West Village.

“We’ve been getting more customers for the past two or three months, and they’re coming in with more expensive shoes to be repaired.”

As people look for ways to tighten their belts, splurging on a new $150 pair of shoes or boots is no longer an option, says John McLoughlin, president of the Shoe Service Institute of America.

The roughly 7,000 cobblers nationwide are all reporting soaring trade and many of those doing so are here in New York City.

“It’s tough to go and buy a new pair of shoes. I’ll leave these and pick them up tomorrow and they will look like new,” said Kathleen Owen, 30, a financial adviser who always brings her worn out heels to Gary’s Top Shoe Repair in Rockefeller Center.

“I’m a New York City woman, and I hit the pavement a lot. I would not be able to afford nice shoes every time the soles get holes.”

Igor Nabatov, her regular cobbler, has been giving shoes a new lease of life for 17 years and says he has seen a 15% increase in business this year.

Wow

Who knew a picture of a tunnel was could be so enraging, in that where-the-fuck-is-all-this-money-coming-from kind of way:

Construction, it seems, is indeed under way for the extension of the No. 7 line, the cornerstone of the Bloomberg administration’s planned development of the far West Side.

The MTA’s capital construction page shows an update for November with pictures from below, where the agency is hollowing out the cavern for the station and making way for the eventual launch of a tunnel-boring machine, which will slowly dig its way along the 1.5-mile route.

The project, budgeted at $2.1 billion, would extend the line from Times Square to the base of the Javits Center on 34th Street, adjacent to the West Side rail yards. The Bloomberg administration has been the driving force behind the extension, which it says will help spawn tens of millions of square feet of West Side development.

The cash-strapped MTA had no desire to pay for the project, so the city is footing the entire bill, up to the $2.1 billion. Should costs exceed the budget (which many onlookers assume they will, given rising costs everywhere), the city and the MTA have yet to negotiate an agreement on who would cover them.

(Given the lack of real funding sources for the MTA’s next five-year capital plan and the $1.2 billion deficit in its operating budget, it’s safe to assume the agency isn’t eager to pony up any cash for a project the Bloomberg administration pledged would be paid for entirely by the city.)

Bold Cost-Cutting Measures Continue!

As in bold, public relations-scamming cost-cutting measures amounting to precisely 0.52 percent of a $1.3 billion deficit:

The MTA’s doomsday budget may take a huge toll not only on drivers’ wallets but also on their time.

The agency is weighing a plan to close some cash lanes at the nine bridges and tunnels it operates.

And as if that won’t create enough congestion, it may also begin stopping drivers without enough money on their E-ZPasses instead of letting them through and billing them later – saving $3.4 million in mailings.

The possible changes are part of the agency’s plan to close a $1.3 billion budget gap unless city and state lawmakers step in with a crucial bailout package.

MTA officials expect to save $3.4 million by closing cash booths at times when fewer cars use the crossings. Still, it would likely slow traffic to a crawl as cars pile up behind the remaining tollbooths.

The 21st Century Flaneur* . . .

. . . is a New Yorker writer with a bicycle:

The Greenway is especially well suited to bicyclists, who, if they are moderately fit and don’t blow a tire on a broken apricot-brandy bottle, can cover the entire distance in a single leisurely morning or afternoon. Biking the Manhattan shoreline turns the city inside out, and gives the cyclist firsthand answers to questions that often stump even lifelong residents, such as: are there any decent places in Manhattan to go rock climbing, and what the heck do they keep under the Henry Hudson Parkway? Perhaps you yourself rode the Greenway on a recent, spectacular Friday afternoon, beginning and ending at the Battery, where, when you started, a man wearing a broad-brimmed hat was baiting a fishhook with a half-dollar-size crab, which he had selected from a joint-compound bucket at his feet.

*Fuck the circumflex — pour it into my hand!

In Case You Ever Wondered Why Bus Rapid Transit Isn’t More Appreciated . . .

Ask the Lionel-Industrial Complex, which has — GM-like — slowly indoctrinated railfans to never accept transportation alternatives:

Subway car No. 8026 stopped, and the public-address system announced, a little too clearly: “Sheepshead Bay. This is a northbound Brighton local. Next stop, Kings Highway.”

“This was my line,” said Thomas C. Nuzzo, who was driving the train. “I can name all the stops.”

But No. 8026 was nowhere near where he grew up in Brooklyn. It had been circling a track inside Grand Central Terminal — a model railroad track, that is. No. 8026 and the three drab-green cars it was pulling are the first New York City subway cars ever built by Lionel, which has made model electric railroad trains for more than 100 years.

Of course, in the 21st century, electric trains have wireless controls. Mr. Nuzzo, Lionel’s events manager, pushed a button on the device in his hand. The doors snapped shut, and the train sped off.

Mr. Nuzzo said the four cars look like the R-27 cars that went into service in 1960, down to the checkered floors inside. Outside, they match the original color — “kale green,” he said. (Most R-27 cars were painted red in the late 1970s and early ’80s; they were retired from the fleet in the 1990s.)

The signs identify the train as a QB. Mr. Nuzzo said the QB went over the Manhattan Bridge; the QT was routed through a tunnel under the East River. Mr. Nuzzo, 57, remembers it well. “It was the line my mom used to take me to Macy’s on,” he said.

Lionel announced more than two years ago that it was venturing into official New York replicas under a licensing agreement with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Lionel’s president, Jerry Calabrese, said the project fell behind schedule after Lionel decided to copy the QB cars. (They stopped close to where Lionel’s showroom was, on East 26th Street, until the company moved to Michigan in 1969.)

“I felt it was important to go back to our roots on the East Coast, the city in particular,” said Mr. Calabrese, who moved Lionel’s executive offices to Manhattan two years ago. During its years in Michigan, he said, Lionel had “redirected its vision of trains in a broader national sense instead of a more local metro sense.”

He said the move “re-established our geographic interest, and that’s why we did the subway.”

But he also said that he was emotionally involved in the subway car project, and that figured in the delay: “The more we decided to make it better and better, the longer it took.”

No. 8026 works with Lionel’s latest operating system, which is more elaborate than the one that powers another new Lionel model, a replica of a Metro-North commuter rail car. The system on No. 8026 is so authentic that it mimics the noises that subway trains make. Lionel sent a sound engineer to record noise in Brooklyn subway tunnels and on modern subways. That noise is played back as the four-car train makes its rounds.

So how real is the little QB? Mr. Calabrese answered by telling a story: On Lionel’s version of Amtrak’s Acela, the doors, brakes and pantographs — which connect the train to electrical wires overhead — break down at about the same rate as on the real thing.

He said that not long ago, he was a passenger on an Acela train that had to pull over because a pantograph had broken. “I offered to send in some of our people to help,” he said. The Amtrak crew members, however, “weren’t in a joking mood.”

Earlier: The Long Arm Of The Lionel-Industrial Complex Returns To Wrap Its Filthy Fingers Around Our Fair City; He Came Dancing Across The Water, Cortez — What A Killer.