If this doesn’t make you finally want to leave the city, I don’t know what will:
According to a 2005 NYC Housing and Vacancy survey, 40 percent of Big Apple citizens live in one-bedrooms or studios. While there’s no breakdown of how many of those dwellings house kids, anecdotal evidence indicates that a lot of families are making do — and making whoopee — in uncomfortably close quarters.
Even an image of a jaywalker pinned underneath a double-decker tourist bus won’t deter New Yorkers from their cultural right to cross against the light:
It happened again — this time, leaving horrific images of the consequences.
But despite the grim photos of a jaywalker pinned beneath a double-decker tour bus, New Yorkers’ death-defying habit of darting into traffic against the light is unlikely to ever be broken.
While technically against the law, law-enforcement officials determined long ago that writing tickets does little to stop such a widespread practice. Some veteran cops say they have never issued a single jaywalking ticket.
“Jaywalking is an urban cultural issue. There are certain cities where jaywalking has been accepted for 50 years or more, so to stop it is like trying to stop the tide from coming in,” said one ex-cop familiar with transportation issues. “You can’t address the whole culture through policing.”
In fact, one source conceded, “There’s no one person assigned to give jaywalking tickets in a precinct.” A recently retired cop with 25 years on the job said he “wouldn’t know how to write a jaywalking ticket.”
Eid-al-Fitr at Chuck E. Cheese:
For at least five years, Muslim families originally from Beirut and Bangladesh to Khartoum and Kuala Lumpur have flocked to Chuck E. Cheese on Eid, which marks the end of the month-long Ramadan fast. The tradition has spread from Bedford-Stuyvesant to Bay Ridge entirely by word-of-mouth.
Reads like a cross between a Talk of the Town piece and the New York Post:
Jessica Weinschenk and her boyfriend Justin Urra, 24, woke up at 3 pm and were shocked to learn that Mormons had briefly descended on their neighborhood.
“Really? Mormons?” asked 22-year-old Jessica Weinschenk. “I guess it’s not that weird because religious people do stuff like that. And hey, it’s cool if someone wants to clean our park for us. But why Williamsburg?”
. . .
The act of largesse confused Weinschenk, who said she had not volunteered since high school. Urra has never done community service and even chose to go to jail rather than do a court-mandated subway cleanup.
“I threw my bike through some guy’s window who hit me and they ordered me to clean-up the Houston street station. I got the date, and went there, and some guy handed me cleaning stuff,” he said. “I sat down for a minute, thought about it, and was like, ‘I’m out of here.’ So I went to brunch at Café Colonial.”
New York is another character in another book:
One recent afternoon, the writer Amy Sohn sat at the Third Street Playground in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, a few blocks from her apartment, and explained the central paradox of her neighborhood. “Every mother knows what a Park Slope Mother is, but no one thinks she is one,” she said.
. . .
Ms. Sohn and Mr. Miller moved to Park Slope in 2005, paying around $600,000 for a two-bedroom third-floor walk-up in a co-op on a block between Eighth Avenue and Prospect Park West — prime north Slope territory, though Ms. Sohn prefers not to reveal the exact street.
. . .
The apartment has a graceful layout, and the sort of prewar details sought after by the characters that populate “Prospect Park West,” like a working fireplace and an antique wood radiator cover in the living room. The kitchen was recently renovated because Mr. Miller likes to cook. The walls are covered with his paintings — striking portraits of old-time boxers. A pair of boxing gloves dangles from the fireplace mantel.
It’s a masculine look for a home where a 4-year-old girl is often running the floors. “I like the fact that it doesn’t feel like a day care center,” Ms. Sohn said. It’s difficult to be totally chic with a toddler, however. Asked about the peculiar, low-rise coffee table, Ms. Sohn explained that it has a chalk surface, which is used by the youngest in-house artist.
That Ms. Sohn has such concerns might come as a surprise to people who remember her “Female Trouble” column from the late-’90s in New York Press. In sexually explicit language, she chronicled her escapades as a single woman in New York — dates and dalliances with a litany of pale, wispy, downtown artist-types. One reader, in a letter to the newspaper, likened her writing to Penthouse Forum in that “I can’t believe it’s true, but I can’t stop reading, either.”
Ms. Sohn was a literary girl-about-town, but she said that even then she wanted a family. “When I was 25, I felt like a spinster,” she said. “That was where a lot of the comedy from my column came from — I wanted to marry every guy I met.”
In the span of two dizzying years, Ms. Sohn met and married Mr. Miller and became pregnant. Asked if she misses her old life, she said: “I don’t miss the anxiety. My joke is that the conversations around infant sleep are like the conversations around when-should-I-call. It’s like, ‘Last night he slept from 9 to 12, and then he woke up at 12.’ It’s the same as: ‘He said he’d call on Thursday. Then Friday came. By Saturday I called him.’ It’s ultimately very boring.”
Is Norman Lear still alive? If so, he should start working on the pilot because it’s a sit-com waiting to happen:
It’s an impressive space they live in, and one that is decidedly “grown-up” for a neighborhood teeming with party-loving youths who share messy apartments four or five to a lease. They have two floors. High ceilings. Terrace off the master bedroom. Brand-new everything, including granite countertops in the kitchen. By any measure, their domestic life is one that any young couple living in New York City would envy, with the exception, perhaps, of one small detail: They have a roommate.
His name is Juan Carlos “J. C.” Villars, and he was sitting on an adjacent couch with his legs kicked up on an oak-colored coffee table, a stubbly faced fellow in a dark blue dress shirt and jeans fiddling alternately with a set of hex head wrenches and a controller for the Nintendo Wii.
Mr. Bronstein, 31, a marketing consultant in dark-rimmed glasses (you might also remember him as a former editor-at-large at FHM magazine, or from Road Rules season four), and Ms. Hoge, 27, a pretty event manager for Lincoln Center who wore her brown hair clipped up, said that they couldn’t imagine ever not living with Mr. Villars, 32, an engineering project manager — even if, one day in the not-so-immediate future, marriage and kids entered the picture.
“We talk about not moving, and we talk about not imagining J. C. leaving,” said Mr. [Jake] Bronstein, who’s been close friends with Mr. Villars for more than three years, longer than he and Ms. [Kristina] Hoge have been dating. “So I think, by transitive property, that all adds up to getting married and still staying with J. C.”
“We’ve joked about it, and none of those things seem like a reason why we’d wanna get rid of him,” Ms. Hoge said with a laugh.
“I can’t even imagine how I’ll ever get there, quite honestly,” Mr. Bronstein said. “How I’ll ever get beyond . . . this.”
No, literally! And there is data:
Still, the prime time for murder is clear: summertime. Indeed, it is close to a constant, one hammered home painfully from June to September across the decades. And the breakdown of deadly brutality can get even more specific. September Saturdays around 10 p.m. were the most likely moments for a murder in the city.
The summer spike in killings is just one of several findings unearthed in an analysis by The New York Times of multiyear homicide trends. The information — detailing homicides during the years 2003 to 2008 — was compiled mainly from open-records requests with the New York Police Department, and a searchable database of details on homicides in the city during those years is available online for readers to explore at nytimes.com/nyregion.
. . .
Summer is when people get together. More specifically, casual drinkers and drug users are more likely to go to bars or parties on weekends and evenings, as opposed to a Tuesday morning. These people in the social mix, flooding the city’s streets and neighborhood bars, feed the peak times for murder, experts say.
And the trend occurs in other cities, in places like Chicago, Boston and Newark, according to criminologists.
Some of the same trends are on display around Christmastime and are believed to be behind the slight increases in murder that occur then, criminologists say.
Message to New Yorkers, how about this year you don’t try tackling the rodeo clown when he runs into the stands? As the Daily News explains, it’s part of the show:
Flint Rasmussen is more than a rodeo clown.
As the barrelsman for the Professional Bull Riders, Rasmussen, 40, fills gaps in the competition by singing, cracking jokes, heckling the audience, running, jumping, tumbling, hurling T-shirts and souvenirs into the crowd, and dancing to “Thriller” and “Sexyback.”
“You’re in Madison Square Garden and you’re expecting all these cowboys,” says Rasmussen, “and I’m out here doing Michael Jackson and Justin Timberlake.”
The riders are wrangling bulls at the Garden through today, so I donned one of Rasmussen’s spare cowboy hats to learn his act. He spared me the bulls, not the workout.
On the packed dirt trucked onto the arena floor, I fumbled my way through a series of jumps and a kickin’ cowboy dance that Rasmussen seamlessly segued into a moonwalk.
“Anybody can do moonwalk in slick shoes on a stage,” he told me, “but not in soccer shoes on the dirt.”
In Rasmussen’s act, the arena becomes an obstacle course. The obstacles are the bulls, barrels, the riding area’s 7-foot fences and even audience members. Rasmussen has even been known to leap the fence and sprint up through the Garden’s stands – a trip that left me winded by the second tier.
Last year, he says, a wayward fan tried to tackle him, but most of the danger is bovine. “I’m having fun in a place where everything else that’s going on is very dangerous and very serious,” says Rasmussen.
Putting your utility lines underground:
Community Board 11 district manager John Fratta explained the call for action saying, “We’ve been getting complaints about the shoes on the telephone wires.”
More than a street-beautification effort, Fratta said area residents are deeply concerned with the connotations, false as they may be, the hanging footwear represents.
While no one really knows the reason behind the telephone line-sneaker trick, numerous theories have come to pass.
Most widely believed to be the sign of gang activity or site of street drug sales, folklore also denotes the sneaker sling as a celebration for men who lost their virginity.
Though more than a dozen explanations continue to claim the reasoning behind the obscure act, all continue to remain inconclusive.
. . .
Not knowing where else to turn, he said he looked to Councilman Jimmy Vacca for some needed assistance.
Though eager to get involved, Nivardo Lopez, constituent liaison in Vacca’s office, said their immediate response for involvement quickly turned into a drawn out investigation.
With Cable Vision, Verizon and FDNY wires, among others, creating a web of unmarked territory over the neighborhood, Lopez said determining which company owned the wire that coordinated with the hanging footwear was an increasingly difficult task.
Then, to his great luck and appreciation, Cable Vision stepped in.
“They took care of theirs right away,” Lopez explained about their cooperative efforts to remove the sneakers.
Lopez further explained the company took initiative to compile a master list that clearly identified which line was which company’s responsibility.
From then on, they soared.
“We’ve gotten a good response from the different utilities about removing the sneakers,” Lopez commented, pleased with results of the unique initiative.
See also: Hanging Sneakers.
All aboard the vomit comet:
They are off into the night as another group of revelers — mostly young ladies — comes off the 10:32 from Mineola. They don’t want to give their names, but one is glad to share the recipe for the cocktail she is sipping from a plastic Starbucks cup on the sly: Smirnoff Blue (100 proof), a little 7 Up and cranberry juice.
These must be the “beauties” that a Long Island Rail Road engineer speaks of a little later at Tracks Bar & Grill, where he is convening with two other co-workers at the end of a shift. They would only talk if their names weren’t used.
“It’s beauty coming in and the beast coming home,” the train engineer says of the transformation partying commuters make when they come in fresh and leave haggard.
The engineer and his conductor buddies know too well the iniquities of the weekend ride, a shift usually reserved for rookies.
“At the 12 o’clock hour, there are a lot of fights. At the one o’clock hour, it’s the ‘vomit comet,’” one of the conductor says.
“And by 2 or 3, they’re zombies; the leftovers that couldn’t make the ‘vomit comet.’”
Fabio Bari and Phillip Prado, both 23, are familiar with the weekend routine. It’s barely 1 a.m. and they are making sure to hit the 1:19 a.m. to Manhasset, which if they miss leaves them only with the 3:19. Not an option. “It’s full of drunken animals,” Bari says.
There are worse possibilities, however, than missing the 1:19: “God forbid you miss the 3:19. You’ll be contemplating all the wrong directions you took throughout the night and your life,” Bari says.
Location Scout: Penn Station.
After a summer of being spurned daily by people who, frankly, don’t have the time to consider the environment, “dialoguers” try a different tactic — negging:
They spot you as you’re walking near Union Square on your lunch hour. Two impossibly fresh-faced, college-age canvassers with clipboards station themselves at either end of the block. They’re facing each other, so that no pedestrian heading in either direction can escape the trap they’ve set on this sunny summer afternoon.
As you approach them, you do what you can to pretend not to notice. You adjust the headphones of your MP3 player as a way of advertising that you can’t hear anything lower than the sound of an airplane engine. Or you pull the celebrity trick — holding a cell phone up to one ear, even though you’re not really on a call. And whatever you do, you don’t make eye contact.
But there’s no way you’re escaping the pitch.
“Got a minute for the environment?”
Or . . .
“Got a minute for gay rights?”
Or . . .
“Got a minute for the ACLU?”
And despite your evasions, you just can’t keep going, because the canvasser — who is younger and lither than you — has pounced into your path with the quickness of a jungle cat and is staring at you with an expectant, disarming smile.
. . .
It’s noon, it’s over 90 degrees, and Garth Mramor, late of Buffalo and Colorado University, overtakes a woman before she has time to run away. With sweat dripping down his ruddy face, he stares into her eyes and delivers his pitch at breakneck speed, knowing that he has only seconds to get it all out.
“Hi-my-name-is-Garth-and-I’m-from-Children-International-and-we’re-trying-to-help-children-in-poverty. Children-in-abject-poverty. There-are-kids-dying-every-day- because-they-don’t-have-something-as-silly-as-food-and-water. I-mean-even-a-bum-in-New-York-can-have-two-meals-a-day!”
Despite the fact that his breathless spiel is all monologue, Garth’s job title is “dialoguer.” It’s a term coined by an Austrian company known as the Dialogue Group, which helped to develop this brand of street confrontation and brought it to U.S. cities a few years ago with a subsidiary called Dialogue Direct.
Garth pauses to catch his breath and then whips out a laminated picture of his own sponsored child, an innocent-looking boy sitting in a hut thatched with palm fronds. The location, he says, is the Dominican Republic. He checks to see whether he still has the attention of the woman in front of him. He does, but then realizes he’s talking to a reporter.
“Children are dying and you’re wasting my time!” he says, scowling. Mramor drops the laminated photograph back into his duffel bag. He doesn’t apologize for seeming rude. “Being nice doesn’t work,” says the irritated college student. “I signed up two people today by being an asshole, and I’ll continue to do that. Have a nice day.”
The dirty secret of parks is that while they’re great for real estate values (and therefore a boost to city property tax revenue), the people who live next door treat them like the ornamental gardens they are:
[Arlene Harrison] has added to a list of regulations (no dogs, no feeding of birds, no groups larger than six people, no Frisbees or soccer balls or “hard balls” of any kind) that, in turn, have served to dictate how [Gramercy Park] is — and is not — used. Most recently, she helped pave the way for Zeckendorf Realty to redevelop a 17-story Salvation Army boarding house on the south side of the park, and for the company’s plan to convert the 300 rooms into 14 floor-through apartments plus a penthouse duplex. The company would not confirm the transaction.
. . .
She added: “It will change the neighborhood for the better. It will be less use on the park.”
Indeed, while a key to Gramercy Park — or, more precisely, an address that entitles one to such a key — is among the most coveted items of New York real estate, under Ms. Harrison’s stewardship, the park has become perhaps the least-used patch of open space in the city. Most days, in nice weather, one would be hard-pressed to find more than a handful of people in the park at once, and few linger.
Gramercy is one of two private parks in New York City (the other, in Queens, is Sunnyside Gardens Park), and a key is required not only to enter, but to leave through a gate in its wraparound wrought-iron fence.
Each of the 63 lots on which the current 39 buildings sit gets two keys, which residents (and guests at the Gramercy Park Hotel) may borrow from their doormen. In addition, residents of those buildings — but only those — may purchase keys for $350 per year; the keys are all but impossible to copy and cost $1,000 to replace.
About 400 people now have keys, but many of them apparently sit unused in junk drawers in the grand foyers in the apartments overlooking the park. One sunny morning last week, as Ms. Harrison chatted with the Rev. Thomas F. Pike, rector of Calvary-St. George’s Church, there were three others in the park: a woman checking her BlackBerry, a custodial worker and a jogger. On a Saturday morning three days later, about two dozen people could be spotted in the park over the course of four hours, and never more than six or eight at a time.
“Honestly, we don’t use it that much,” said Gale Rundquist, a real estate broker who has lived on the park for five years. Still, she said, access “adds a lot to a listing; it’s panache.”
“Because we work during the day, and we leave town on the weekends,” she explained of her own nonusage. “But it’s beautiful to look at.”
Actual use of the park is not Ms. Harrison’s measure. “It was always an ornamental park,” she said. “A lot of people don’t even go in to enjoy it. They’re so thrilled just to see it. It’s like a hotel room with a view of the ocean.”
. . .
[Harrison] knows the rhythms of the park intimately. “Between 5:30 and 6:30 in the morning, there are two people here,” she said. “One walks, the other breaks into a jog and stretches occasionally. Two women walk here at 7, and then a third joins them at 7:15. The nannies come in with the small kids around 11, and then again around 4.
“Saturday, it’s empty,” she added. “People are doing their errands.”
There is, to be frank, not much to do in the park. Music is forbidden. So are alcoholic beverages, bicycles and furniture. A gravel path around the perimeter provides the only opportunity for low-impact play, or, for that matter, running or walking. Ms. Harrison said parents constantly offer to donate playground components for the park, but she won’t have it.
“Too much wear and tear,” she said. “But do you know what? The children who grow up here learn to use their imagination.”
Even people in hip, post-cool Brooklyn line up days in advance for IKEA openings:
The doors to Brooklyn’s new Ikea have yet to open, but the madness has begun.
Shoppers in Red Hook were plotting ways to get their hands on a bargain Friday after hearing thousands of dollars of free furniture would be up for grabs Monday morning.
“I’ll camp two days for a couch,” said student Kashmere Square, 20, when he found out the first 35 customers would receive a $699 sofa, and the next 100 will be rewarded with a $199 armchair.
“It’s cool. I’ll definitely be shopping there. I need a computer stand, a table and chairs.”
Michael Malgonada, 17, quickly called friends to work out how they would take turns to secure a spot at the front of the line.
“For a free sofa from Ikea? [I'll] definitely [line up],” he said.
“If you have to be 21, I’ll bring somebody older. We’ll do shifts.”
Ikea’s doors officially swing open at 9 a.m. Wednesday, and giveaways will be handed out throughout the day at the 346,000-square-foot store on Beard St.
Annotation: “Ikea Riot” (Gridskipper, February 10, 2005); “Three die in Saudi shop stampede” (BBC, September 1, 2004)
New tenement dwellers scraping by in new tenements:
Drinking and eating carry their own complications. Especially if you are, say, Noah Driscoll, a 25-year-old project manager for a Chelsea marketing company whose salary is comparable to what a rookie teacher might make.
“For a little while I only ate grapefruits for my lunch,” said Mr. Driscoll, who pays $400 a month on his college loans, “because they have a lot of nutrients and they got me through the day.”
Mr. Driscoll has since started packing two peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for lunch. Dinner might be two baked potatoes. On a recent Monday, it was franks and beans. On a good night, he might spend up to $6.
“To live like a human being on the salary that I make is very difficult in this city,” he said. “You’ve got to forget about brands, you’ve got to forget about, you know, what your mom made you growing up, and take what’s out there.”
Mr. Driscoll’s rent is reasonable: $725 for a room in a converted loft space that he shares with five friends in Gowanus, Brooklyn, near Park Slope. Most of his friends, however, earn far more than he does, and Mr. Driscoll is guilty of that quintessential New York sin: coveting thy neighbor’s salary. One recent night, his roommates went to Peter Luger Steak House. Mr. Driscoll waved them goodbye and stayed home.
. . .
Allison Mooney, 27, whose first job in the city was in publishing, often skipped dinner before going out, and instead took along mixed salted nuts in her purse. When things got really tight, she occasionally sneaked a flask filled with vodka into bars. Other times, she reluctantly resorted to flirting.
“I find in other cities guys are more apt to buy you drinks and expect nothing from it,” Ms. Mooney said.
“Here, if they do buy you a drink, which is rare, you have to suffer through flirtations. It’s true,” she said, adding, “It’s really cheesy.”
. . .
Sarah Avrin, a 23-year-old music publicist, said she was struck recently by the sacrifices that some people make to sustain their New York lifestyle when one of her friends endured the long, painful process of selling her eggs.
Which is to say, when they start imitating Celebrity Rehab, we should talk, but until then:
Life is imitating television on the Upper East Side, where an anonymous eighth-grade girl has founded a gossip Web log modeled after the one that is the backbone of “Gossip Girl.”
While on the TV show the fictional parents and school leaders appear oblivious to the catty Gossip Girl blog, the real-life provocateur, who calls herself Miss ITK (for Miss In The Know), has caused an incredible stir. School hallways are buzzing with the name of her URL; eighth-grade girls across the city are reportedly breaking down in tears, and, in the final climax, an unknown force has pushed the site offline.
Before it was shut down earlier this week, the blog had generated more than 300 comments, with some posters remarking on Miss ITK’s accuracy and others begging her to kill the blog, describing many tears shed and some friendships broken.
Miss ITK chronicled the social lives of what she described as the class of 2012’s “elite A-list.” One post described two girls’ attempts to revamp their images: one through eye-coloring contact lenses and another by dancing suggestively at a bat mitzvah. Another crowned a couple “our very own Queen and King.” Later, a post cataloged the class of 2012’s “A List” and “B List.”
Parents and students said the blog seemed like a deliberate copy of the one that is the heart of “Gossip Girl,” and whose author, Gossip Girl, narrates the show.
Like the television Gossip Girl, Miss ITK had her own signature salutation. On television, it’s “XOXO.” In real life, the line that reverberated with students was “Hello my butterflies.”
And now they don’t know what to do now that alternate-side parking has been temporarily suspended while the Department of Sanitation replaces street signs this summer:
Park-Anywhere Day arrives Monday, with the indefinite suspension of alternate-side parking rules in Park Slope, and no one knows just what to expect, with bring-it-on bravado and it-can’t-get-any-worse resignation meeting just-you-wait-and-see predictions of the worst. The city announced the suspension in Park Slope this week, to give workers time to change 9,200 parking signs. In the meantime, drivers may park along the curbs of Park Slope without being forced to move their cars as they did up until now, often twice a week for three hours at a stretch.
Rosemary Fine, 47, a coffee shop owner born in Limerick, Ireland, plans to greet the new day in high style.
“I’m going to pop open a bottle of Champagne, sit in my car and celebrate!” she said on Thursday. “What if that’s what all the Park Slopers did on Monday, we went into the streets with Champagne?”
But elsewhere, outrage.
Another seasoned immigrant, Marlyse Henchoz, who did not give her age, stopped sweeping in front of her home and said, “Terrible.”
“Whoever thinks up these schemes, I don’t know what they are thinking,” she said. “That’s why I want to move back to Switzerland. They couldn’t do this. We have referendums and we vote.”
. . .
The Department of Transportation estimates that the suspension will last a few months. So after the Champagne is gone, there will be several lingering questions about what people are and are not allowed to do with their vehicles.
City law prohibits “street storage” of vehicles: “When parking is not otherwise restricted by posted signs, no person shall park any vehicle in any area, including a residential area, in excess of seven consecutive days.”
The police said Thursday that they did not have records of how often such a ticket was written, or how such a violation could even be tracked, short of cumbersome surveillance of every vehicle.
. . .
One benefit of the new signs in Park Slope will be that alternate-side rules will now be in force only 90 minutes once a week, down from three hours and twice a week.
But even that concept seemed to backfire with some residents, like Barat Ellman, 49, a university Bible instructor.
“I work out and plan my work schedule based on car parking,” she said. “Ninety minutes may be too short of a time to be able to get things done and move the car. We’ll see.”
Post Spitzer, the rent-a-pet story has new resonance:
“There are a lot of people out there looking for companionship,” said Chris Haddix, 28, who runs the New York branch of Flexpetz. There are usually five or six dogs available for rent, many of them on display in the Wet Nose storefront window, attracting crowds.
[Sarah] Stevenson explained why she was a customer: “I’m single and moved here from Scotland two years ago, and it’s been difficult to meet people because everyone in New York just kind of goes about their business. But when I’m walking around with Oliver, I seem to get into so many conversations about him. It becomes a nice way to meet people.”
But it isn’t cheap. A monthly membership, which includes four one-day rentals, costs $279.95. Additional rentals cost $45 for a day, or part of a day.
Anyone interested must first register at www.flexpetz.com before meeting Mr. Haddix. “I ask them a lot of questions,” he said. “I want to know if they have ever owned a dog, why they can’t own a dog full time, how renting a dog benefits them, stuff like that.”
If the head office in San Diego gives the go-ahead, there is a mandatory one-hour training session on handling and training. Then members can choose one of the dogs pictured on the Web site for rental.
Mr. Haddix said his customers were a mixed bunch.
“There are people from other states and other countries who couldn’t take their dogs with them when they were transplanted to New York,” he said, “and there are families with small children who enjoy taking these dogs on vacation with them.
“There are also people who live in places that do not allow pets, and a lot of single people who wouldn’t mind just hanging out with a pal every now and then. There are all sorts of reasons for renting dogs,” said Mr. Haddix . . .
Leaving the house without makeup does not a trend make, though some will try*:
“I dress like a boy because I feel like boys are generally more comfortable than women,” said Ali Tenenbaum the other day, sitting at a West Village coffee shop and wearing a “typical” outfit of black Hudson jeans, blue J. Crew cardigan, yellow T-shirt and designer sneakers. Ms. Tenenbaum, 38 (whose family was the inspiration for the Wes Anderson film The Royal Tenenbaums, though she said the actual resemblance is slight), has unfussy brown hair that falls to several inches above her shoulders, and clear, radiant skin. She doesn’t wear makeup. She is a professional photo organizer who meets with her (largely) Upper East Side clientele wearing sneakers. “Sometimes it throws them off a bit, but then I charm them and they’re fine with it!” she said.
It was just a few years ago that everyone was nattering about the metrosexual, the New York man who, though straight, loved his Kiehl’s and Thomas Pink tattersall shirts and is addicted to Grey’s Anatomy. Less discussed has been his female counterpart: gals who, while not lesbians, dress like guys (young guys), well into their 30’s; who leap into games of pickup basketball with male friends while the rest of us watch wanly from the sidelines; who affect a wry detachment from their sex’s conventional concerns of shoe-shopping, man-hunting and family. Think of the comedienne Sarah Silverman, mugging and shrugging and strumming her way through an “I’m F*cking Matt Damon” video, a birthday gift to her boyfriend, ABC talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel. Or matter-of-fact Juno actress Ellen Page. Or surly pop star Avril Lavigne.
And these gals are everywhere in New York. Urbane tomboys in $200 jeans, they wear sneakers to the office or the studio (they probably work in a creative industry). They’ve largely given up on mainstream women’s fashion, with its expensive, often unflattering vicissitudes, finding refuge in an eternal sporty girlhood that may or may not be tied to any real athletic bent. They borrow from men’s wear, which is more constant, comfortable and, lately, focused on well-made basics like jeans and T-shirts, and they profess ignorance of female grooming rituals, even if they have a secret love of eyeliner. Ever self-deprecating, this kind of woman is quick to tell you she “wears the same thing every day,” or that she dresses like her husband or boyfriend.
. . .
They like to order Scotch at bars, rather than fruity drinks like cosmos; roll their own cigarettes; and profess to not know their way around a powder puff.
. . .
Many fellas, as girly girls can attest, are all too enchanted with the novelty of the urbane tomboy.
“If you go to a club and you pick someone up and they’re all dressed up and they have a lot of makeup on, you take them home and you roll around in bed and they wake up and take a shower, who knows what they’ll look like?” said Adam Parker Smith, 29, a sculptor from Brooklyn.
Avril Lavigne? For reals?
*[checks calendar; no it's not April 1 yet]
On the list of red light-districted activities in city parks — dog runs, for one — now add skate parks:
Work on a $1.25 million skateboard park that a local Councilman has been trying to have built in Astoria Park for years is finally scheduled to get underway soon.
“This project will give kids a place to skate that is far away from the busy sidewalks and parks where they sometimes inconvenience other people, especially seniors,” said Councilman Peter Vallone Jr., who provided most of the funding.
. . .
Currently, skateboarders use Athens Square Park at 30th Ave. and 30th St., among other areas.
“I have been working to bring this project to Astoria for a long time. It is fulfilling to see something go from an idea to a completion during my term as a Council member,” Vallone said. “Before, all we had here was trucks and equipment. Now, we will have a great park for kids to come and have fun.”
Queens Parks Commissioner Dorothy Lewandowski said the new park will offer the obstacles skateboarders crave while at the same time limiting the city’s liability.
“What we are creating in Astoria Park replicates in many ways a lot of the municipal street furniture that kids skate on already. But this gives them a destination location where they can meet in a safe, secure environment,” Lewandowski said.
The new skate plaza “will have ramps that have a maximum height of three feet, which for the city meets our criteria for limiting liabilities,” she added. “Anything over three feet requires that Parks have supervision and that it be gated and closed when we don’t have park staff on duty.”
Contractors are scheduled to break ground on the project in early May and expect to finish in nine months, Vallone said.
Located under the bridge and near Shore Blvd., the skate park site, he said, is situated far enough away so as not to disturb Astoria residents.
Hmm . . . can a city-sponsored graffiti park be far behind? Mr. Ecko?
Time was, you could rub hot peppers on your child’s genitals. That’s apparently not true anymore:
A 10-year-old boy from Charleston did not want to sit at his desk at a Staten Island elementary school last week, his teacher noticed.
She soon discovered why: His rear end was sore and bruised from a belt lashing he received from his stepfather the night before.
If this had happened 25 years ago, it may have been met with an ambivalent shrug.
But today, stricter reporting requirements, more aggressive prosecution and growing public awareness means “traditional” childhood discipline can lead to criminal charges much more frequently.
The man who allegedly doled out the corporal punishment, 30-year-old Ukraine native Alexandr Privler, was charged with a felony, assault with intent to cause physical injury with a weapon, and a misdemeanor, acting in a manner injurious to a child.
. . .
Over the past five years, arrests and convictions of cases in Staten Island in which endangering the welfare of a child — the most common charge in child-abuse cases — have gradually risen, according to the state Department of Criminal Justice statistics.
. . .
The unusual case of Clifton resident Ganganue Gonseh last April is a glaring example. A native of Liberia, Gonseh punished his then 8-year-old and 11-year-old boys by making them strip naked, then rubbing a hot yellow pepper on their faces — including their eyes — and on their genitals. The boys were brought home by police for skipping school and allegedly shoplifting video games at a Hylan Boulevard store earlier that day.
The two kids were treated at Richmond University Medical Center in West Brighton for itching and skin irritation, and Gonseh was charged with third-degree assault and endangering the welfare of child.
The father argued that the disciplinary practice — called “Hot Peppering” –is common practice in many African countries and in parts of this country. He eventually pleaded guilty to endangering the welfare of a child and a disorderly conduct violation, with the provision that the endangering charges would be dropped once he completed a parenting course.
A edict is handed down and a show is canceled:
For thousands of Orthodox Jews, the “Big Event” — a concert featuring the popular Hasidic entertainer Lipa Schmeltzer — was supposed to happen next Sunday at the WaMu Theater at Madison Square Garden. But fans and organizers were shocked to learn late last month that a group of rabbis had issued an edict against the show, effectively canceling it.
The decree, published in Hebrew in the Orthodox newspaper Hamodia and signed by 33 rabbis, warned that the sight of dancing and singing performers would cause “ribaldry and lightheadedness” that would lure young people away from spiritual purity. It prohibited Orthodox Jews from attending the concert and called on Mr. Schmeltzer to back out.
The ban has inflamed tensions among ultra-Orthodox Jews over how to address the influences of popular culture, and it has thrust what has largely been an internal debate into public view.
Assemblyman Dov Hikind, whose Brooklyn district includes many Hasidic neighborhoods, said the ban had triggered unprecedented dissent and outrage among Hasidim. “In all my 26 years of representing this community, I can’t remember anything that has so shaken the people,” Mr. Hikind said on Sunday.
The growing fame of Mr. Schmeltzer, who weaves pop melodies with traditional Hasidic songs, has troubled some Hasidim, who have chided him for introducing Jewish youth to secular musical styles. Others fear his popularity could rival that of the rabbis, who wield spiritual authority over Hasidic daily life.
In an effort to assuage those fears and uphold the religious practice of modesty, the concert organizers had promised separate entrances and seating for the more than 5,000 men and women who had been expected to attend, and Mr. Schmeltzer had agreed to perform only traditional Hasidic songs.
But that was not enough to prevent two community leaders in Brooklyn from mobilizing opposition to the show, which was raising money for an Israeli charity that finances weddings for orphans.
Sure, keep worrying about “appearances” . . . this as it takes me 45 minutes to use an elevator that stops at every floor on a Saturday:
Popular Upper East Side restaurant Talia’s Steakhouse recently began cooking up what is believed to be the city’s first kosher cheeseburger — a real-beef patty topped with tofu cheese in American or mozzarella flavor.
The formerly forbidden food is now being served as a “Kosher Parve Cheeseburger” at the popular glatt kosher eatery, which does not serve meat and dairy together, in accordance with Jewish law.
While many are excited to give the taboo take-out a taste, others are kvetching that the burger is bad news.
“I would never entertain the thought of eating cheese — real or fake — with meat,” comedian Jackie Mason, who keeps kosher, told The Post. “It makes me nauseous just thinking about it.”
Trying to skirt tradition is what irks others, also.
“Jewish law is very concerned for appearances,” said Rabbi Basil Herring, the executive vice president of the Rabbinical Council of America. “Not only should you always do the right thing, but it should be seen as the right thing.
“Any Jew who keeps kosher knows a cheeseburger is not permissible. But . . . what happens if a young kid, a 10-year-old, goes in there and says, hmm, maybe cheese on a burger is OK?”
New York’s linguistic heritage isn’t necessarily threatened but it does seem to be changing:
Hollywood gangsters planned rub-outs in a city where hoodlums said “Toidy Toid and Toid.” Archie Bunker confused “terlet” for “toilet” and called his long-suffering wife “Edit.”
Does anybody really speak that way anymore? Did anyone ever, really? In the New York of 2008, where small shops and whole blocks meet the wrecking ball at every turn, is the New York accent on the way out, too, shamed into obsolescence as each generation adopts a kind of speech Ralph Kramden wouldn’t recognize?
You can take that concern and just fuggedaboudit.
The New York accent is very much alive, linguists will happily tell you, but like all dialects — and that’s what our accent is — it’s changing. To be sure, it’s been a long time since anyone called a toilet a “terlet.” But many of us still drink “cawfee” and call our “fathas” on Father’s Day. What’s also true is that fewer of us, especially younger New Yorkers, are speaking this way in our increasingly mobile and diverse city. That said, you’d be mistaken to conclude that means New York talk is going the way of the Third Avenue El.
. . .
The New York accent is part of a broader East Coast way of speech, with major distinctions in places such as Boston and Philadelphia. Our accent fits like a glove in between these two geographic zones, and the forces buffeting it include immigration waves, the city’s transient young population and New Yorkers’ tendency to clean up their speech. So it should come as no surprise that if indeed any part of the city is sounding less like New York, it’s Manhattan.
“New York more than a great many other places is subject to homogenization,” Jochnowitz said, “And I think that has already happened in Manhattan, where kids growing up in most of the neighborhoods in Manhattan don’t have New York accents anymore.”
What they’re hanging on to in Manhattan, Jochnowitz said, are certain pronunciation distinctions he feels are worth preserving.
“New Yorkers who may be losing their accents are not losing the distinction between Mary, marry and merry. That really seems to be very much alive,” Jochnowitz said, speaking of the distinctions (cot and caught is another one) that are rarely seen outside the East Coast.
Marty Scorsese has blood on his hands:
A wiseguy wannabe who killed for the mob apologized yesterday to Italians everywhere for being a living, breathing stereotype — and blamed Hollywood for turning him into one.
“Although I made all my drastic decisions on my own, Hollywood intensified my love for that life and in the process blindsided what being Italian meant,” Bonanno crime-family informant Francesco Fiordilini said at his sentencing for killing a drug dealer in 1993.
“The mob is a gang. It’s made up of individuals with very low self-esteem who together feed on the weak — and most of the time their own,” Fiordilini told Brooklyn federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis.
After apologizing to the drug dealer’s family, Fiordilini offered a sweeping apology to Italians everywhere for “conspiring and utilizing our culture in the same manner the entertainment industry does with its stereotypes.”
The miracle of childbirth . . . with bonus Betsy Gotbaum sighting:
The rate of babies delivered by cesarean section in New York City increased to 30.6%, in 2006, up from 29.7% in 2005, in a trend that some politicians, doctors, and women’s health advocates say is cause for concern.
The citywide increase reflects a national upward trend in the number of cesarean deliveries in recent years. Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the national cesarean rate in 2006 reached a record high, 31.1%, according to its preliminary birth data for that year.
“There is alarming concern throughout the country that there are too many cesarean sections,” said Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum, who in 2006 released a report based on 2005 data detailing individual hospitals’ cesarean section rates. “It’s additional cost and it’s additional risk,” Ms. Gotbaum said, adding, “I hate to impart motives on hospitals and doctors . . . I can just tell you the numbers speak for themselves.”
“It’s clearly been rising,” the head of obstetrics at Brooklyn’s Lutheran Medical Center, Dr. Iffath Hoskins, said. “On a day-to-day basis, there will be three or four cesareans going on at a given time,” she said, estimating that one in three deliveries at Lutheran results in a cesarean.
. . .
The overall increase in cesareans has also been triggered by the changing perception of cesareans among women.
“There’s such a relaxed attitude about induction and c-sections that it’s not considered risky anymore,” the president of the group Choices in Childbirth, Elan McAllister, said.
She said women were getting a message from their peers and from their doctors that vaginal delivery is dangerous, while cesareans are more civilized. “A lot of women today are career women who are used to being in control, so the idea of being able to micromanage their birth is appealing,” she said.
Mormonism as big city coping method:
“I think it’s exciting to be in New York and experience the city in a more wholesome manner because I’m Mormon,” said Colin Wheeler, 30, who recently moved to Manhattan from Sacramento and works for the CW network’s morning show. “This city would be very cold and very lonely and very depressing if I wasn’t Mormon.”
Sometimes after a long day off-island, you just want to catch the boat back to the Rock and head for Town, maybe do a little train crawl along the way.
Translation: Upon returning to Staten Island by ferry from a long day elsewhere, a person might want to stop at a few of the bars that flank the stations of the Staten Island Railway, en route to an evening in downtown Great Kills.
As befits a place that can take pride in its otherness and even in its relative isolation, Staten Island has evolved, if not exactly its own language, then certainly a lexicon of words and phrases that require explanation to off-islanders.
And a linguistic journey into the heart of Staten Island leads inexorably to the Talk of the Town Tavern, a train-station bar on Great Kills’s very smalltowny main street, where Statenisms flow nearly as freely as the $2 draft mugs.
. . .
Eugene Machules, a locksmith who was feeding dollars into the Talk of the Town’s jukebox, offered one more local neologism: “Voo-da-la.”
“You say that like when you make a great shot in basketball,” Mr. Machules said. “When you hit the home run, the best shot — the top of the pinnacle, that’s it. Or if you toast someone who’s passed away, you say ‘Voo-da-la.’”
Voo-da-la, Mr. Machules said, was the signature phrase of Monte Vandenburg, a longtime bartender at another Great Kills watering hole, the Swiss Chalet.
“He’d just turn and say ‘Voo-da-la,’ and nobody knew what the hell it meant,” Mr. Machules said.
Mr. Vandenburg died suddenly in September at the age of 46. It is not clear how long Voo-da-la will survive him.
Location Scout: Talk of the Town.
Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities,” 20 years later:
To some New Yorkers, Mr. Wolfe’s satire was bitingly accurate, nailing both a racist criminal justice system and the politicians who played on white fear and minority anger for personal gain.
To others, it was a cynical endorsement of racial stereotypes that did not so much critique white paranoia as cater to it.
Either way, though, the New York of “Bonfire,” to a degree that might well have shocked people in 1987, no longer exists. Not in reality, and not in the collective imagination.
New York is on track to have fewer than 500 homicides this year, down from 2,245 in 1990. The white population is no longer shrinking, and diverse immigration has made the city less black-and-white.
The crime drops that marked the Giuliani era — along with some divisive police confrontations with minorities — have continued under a Bloomberg administration that civil rights leaders credit with bringing more interracial respect.
More locally, the Bronx neighborhoods near the site of Sherman’s accident are now dotted with owner-occupied row houses and apartments. Artists have moved into Mott Haven lofts.
And here they are now to entertain us:
You could tell the tribes apart by variations in dress: the tartan kilts and pleated skirts of Nightingale-Bamford, Sacred Heart and Spence; running shoes on the girls who had made their way over from Chapin and Hewitt; leggings and anoraks for students at Dalton, with its relaxed dress code.
Beyond that, the girls looked a lot alike, particularly when it came to accessories: pendant earrings, orthodontia, camera phones. All this week and part of last, the cast and crew of “Gossip Girl,” the CW network series based on the young adult novels, have been camped out on 93rd Street between Madison and Park Avenues. They are shooting an episode at the grand Georgian complex that in its workaday life houses the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia.
. . .
Three from Hunter College High School, the public magnet school a block away, edged toward the gates of “St. Jude’s.” They said they had been taking all their free periods, plus lunch, here. “Not that we’re obsessed or anything,” Alexa Levy said.
“We saw the person who plays Dan,” said her friend Sophie Zucker. “He’s actually, notoriously, like, nice.”
“It’s really refreshing to see a star who’s like that,” said Charlotte Weiss.
“Because she knows so many, of course,” Miss Zucker said, teasing her.
“Do you want to know the honest truth?” Miss Weiss said. “It’s based on private school girls, and they’re very superficial. The woman who wrote the novels said it’s based on Nightingale. We go to Hunter. It doesn’t relate.”
“So these girls –” Miss Levy gestured around her. “These are the girls it’s making fun of.”
“And I think they’re proud of it instead of being ashamed,” Miss Weiss said.
Buried lede — the researchers at Media Matters may be the only ones who pay attention to him:
After eating dinner at a famed Harlem restaurant recently, Bill O’Reilly of the Fox News Channel told a radio audience, he “couldn’t get over the fact” that there was no difference between the black-run Sylvia’s and other restaurants.
“It was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there and they were ordering and having fun,” he said. “And there wasn’t any kind of craziness at all.”
Mr. O’Reilly said his fellow patrons were tremendously respectful as he ate dinner with Al Sharpton.
The comments were made during Mr. O’Reilly’s nationally syndicated radio broadcast last week. The liberal media watchdog Media Matters for America called attention to them by distributing a transcript and audio clip on the Internet. Karl Frisch, a Media Matters spokesman, called Mr. O’Reilly’s comments “ignorant and racially charged.”
