And if Robert Burck wins the upcoming mayoral election in New York City, we’ll get our Spielberg film. For now, let’s sketch the intro:
“How did your son get to be the Naked Cowboy?” the keynote speaker asked.
“Well, it wasn’t easy, and it didn’t happen overnight,” Kenny Burck replied. “My wife and I did not set out to raise a Naked Cowboy. . . .”
I’d also settle for a cross between Hoosiers and Showgirls.
The NYPD is reminding its officers that it’s perfectly legal to take beautiful pictures of New York City’s iconic infrastructure*:
Faced with complaints from photographers and tourists alike, the NYPD has issued a department order reminding cops that the right to take pictures in the Big Apple is as American as apple pie.
“Photography and the videotaping of public places, buildings and structures are common activities within New York City . . . and is rarely unlawful,” the NYPD operations order begins.
It acknowledges that the city is a terrorist target, but since it’s a prominent “tourist destination, practically all such photography will have no connection to terrorism or unlawful conduct.”
. . .
But cops are not without successes in confronting what might appear to be innocent videotaping.
In Manhattan, cops spotted a man — who turned out to have ties to a terror group in Pakistan — videotaping the underbellies of the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges.
They did? When exactly was that?
*Finally exonerating Woody Allen thirty years after the fact.
But an exciting moment almost turned ugly when the sirens and whistles sent everyone to the floor:
An Ohio choirgirl got a big city thrill Friday when she became the 1 millionth person to visit Ground Zero’s tribute museum.
Shaique Gamble stepped over the threshold of the Liberty St. visitor center shortly after 10 a.m. and cheers rang out.
“It was kind of funny and shocking at the same time,” said the 16-year-old, who was wide-eyed but all smiles at the surprise welcome.
“I just expected to come and take a tour and then this happened.”
And Mildew, Roaches and Bed Bugs!:
The Hotel Carter was named the dirtiest hotel in America Tuesday by TripAdvisor.com, marking the third time in four years that the W. 43rd St. dump has topped the list.
. . .
The hotel, used as a homeless shelter in the 1980s, gained infamy two years ago when a cleaning lady found a woman’s corpse stuffed under a bed.
A 17th-floor room rented by the Daily News was thankfully corpse-free. And while it was small and sparsely appointed, it wasn’t dirty. The bathroom was nearly spotless and the bed linens unstained.
The room’s most serious flaw was a lone picture frame, covered in a substance one can only hope was mildew. In the hallway outside, a garbage bag filled with used tissues, lay open on the dark-green carpet.
The hotel’s wretched reputation wasn’t news to one worker.
“Just Google ‘Carter and bed bugs.’ You’ll read all about it,” she said. “Roaches, bugs — you’ll find everything inside here.”
Hotel manager Erwin Lumanglas brushed aside its reputation.
“We are not bothered at all,” Lumanglas said. “Even when they tell us we’re the dirtiest hotel in the world, people are still interested in coming because of the price and the location.”
Location Scout: Hotel Carter.
Yes, you know New York is over when the city has to tell you what to see or where to go, but hipping everyone to the supposed joys of Mars 2112 is just plain negligent:
Mayor Michael Bloomberg has a blog entry on the official Google blog announcing a partnership with the Internet’s most important company to unveil a new city tourism site: nycgo.com.
Launched yesterday, the site “is the official resource on the web for all there is to see, do and experience in the City,” the mayor wrote. It features listings of events, dining, and entertainment recommendations. The site will be managed by NYC & Company, New York City’s official marketing, tourism and partnership organization.
Google chipped in with their Google Maps and Google Earth applications. Users can find recommended destinations from famous New Yorkers with the “Just Ask the Locals” feature (From Cynthia Nixon: “My kids are crazy about Mars 2112″), then get directions and send the info to their phones with Google Maps for mobile. Other partners like Travelocity will offer discounts and deals. Media outlets, including Time Out New York, Paper and, well, we here at The New York Observer, have partnered with the city to offer some of their favorite destinations.
Not only does New York have about 60 gazillion guidebooks already devoted to it but there doesn’t seem to be a shortage of web content about it, either. So yeah, maybe it is duplicative for the city to reinvent Fodor’s but hey, then you might not have learned about Mars 2112 . . .
And you wonder why we’re in debt.
Wow, that’s really cool. Who knew you could do so much with a web-based mapping application? Technology is neat:
Google’s technological expertise helped turn New York City’s main visitor center from a place to collect brochures into an interactive hub for planning a day — or a week — in the city. But the related Web site — NYCGo — proved so popular that it crashed almost as soon as it was unveiled and continued to operate slowly through Wednesday afternoon.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and other city officials showed off the Official NYC Information Center, at 810 Seventh Avenue and West 53rd Street in Midtown, on Wednesday morning. At a cost of $1.8 million in private financing, the center was outfitted with video tabletop touch-screens equipped with Google Maps that allow users to assemble itineraries.
Mr. Bloomberg emphasized that the center was not just for tourists. “By extending these new travel resources to our residents, we are giving New Yorkers the chance to more actively take advantage of the city’s diverse and exciting neighborhoods,” he said.
The city’s tourism-promotion arm, NYC & Company, also officially unveiled a revamped Web site, linked to Travelocity’s reservations system, so that prospective visitors can immediately purchase airline tickets or hotel rooms.
Apparently NYC & Company gets 40% of its financing — and the obvious official stamp of approval — from the city. So it seems not kind of but actually really fishy that the Maps section of the site features the “7 Karaoke Bars Worth Singing About”, for example, with detailed directions how to get to each one. If I were a competing karaoke bar owner, I’d be pissed. Or a hotelier. Or a restauranteur. Or the proprietor of an “environmentally conscious watering hole” that wasn’t picked by the site’s editors. Or anyone who could benefit from the use of taxpayer money to stir up business.
Or take on Las Vegas, if you think all it takes to compete with good weather and slot machines is an oversize photograph of City Hall to be used as a backdrop for wedding pictures:
[W]ith revenues tight and tourist dollars desperately needed, the Bloomberg administration has created a 24,000-square-foot wedding palace, in the hope of increasing the number of couples who marry at the city clerk’s office.
“We want to be the wedding destination of the world,” said First Deputy Mayor Patricia E. Harris.
And it’s not just the $25 wedding fee the city is selling. Forget the wedding band? No problem. The new bureau offers an elastic faux-diamond band for $9. No flowers?
They are available as well — $4 to $7 for a single stem and $25 to $50 for a bridal bouquet. There is also hairspray ($4), disposable digital cameras ($16.25) and tissues, at $1.75 a pack, for the weepy types.
The $12 million project, overseen by the designer Jamie Drake, who did Madonna’s Los Angeles home and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s Upper East Side town house, involved the renovation of an old Department of Motor Vehicles office up the street from City Hall.
Mr. Drake created two separate wedding chapels off the building’s central rotunda. In the east chapel, the sofa and walls feature apricot and peach colors; the west chapel is done in purple and lavender. Each chapel has an abstract painting that matches the walls and hangs next to the lectern from where the clerk performs the ceremonies.
Nearby bathrooms were turned into expansive dressing rooms, with full-length mirrors and long vanity counters lit by the soft hue of recessed wall fixtures.
The city has even set up an oversize photograph of City Hall to be used as a backdrop for pictures.
Bloomberg administration officials declined to estimate how much money the weddings would generate. But the city’s marketing agency, NYC & Company, has already struck a partnership with TheKnot.com, a Web-based wedding clearinghouse, to create travel packages that would include a ceremony at the bureau followed by a weekend in a hotel.
“I have a warning for Las Vegas: You better watch out,” said Carley Roney, founder of TheKnot.com. “With these new digs, there might just be a new world wedding capital.”
It got a lot less crowded at Scores* now that the Wall Street yabbos are gone and it will become a lot easier to walk around in Midtown when tourism declines in 2009:
Those flocks of tourists clogging Manhattan streets were thicker than ever this year, but the sinking economy will mean fewer visitors in 2009, officials said Monday.
The city estimates a record 47 million people visited New York this year and spent a record $30 billion, Mayor Bloomberg said.
“We do predict that there’ll be a single-digit decline, and no more than that, for certain,” said George Fertitta, head of NYC & Company.
*Whoops . . . be careful what you wish for!
Mormons on the Upper East Side, now evangelicals in Midtown:
Out of the myriad and random tenants that fill the Empire State Building, there is one that seems both perfectly situated, yet jarringly out of place.
It is the King’s College, an evangelical Christian school that is all but hidden in plain sight, occupying three of the building’s floors — two of them subterranean — since 1999. On the one hand, it seems apt that a school claiming close adherence to God’s word would occupy New York’s tallest skyscraper.
On the other hand, most of the college’s 258 students are politically and economically conservative, opposed to abortion and generally against gay marriage, drunkenness and premarital sex. The polar opposites, in other words, of the kind of boozing, godless, kick-up-your-heels, bed-hopping liberals that Manhattan supposedly draws.
Which raises a question: What is an evangelical Christian college doing in the middle of New York?
Location Scout: Empire State Building.
Authorities say a resident of the Netherlands who came to New York as a “graffiti tourist” has been indicted on charges of spray painting a subway car and leading police on a dangerous chase.
Queens District Attorney Richard A. Brown said Thursday that 23-year-old Robbert Boxem of Zwolle, Netherlands — who uses the graffiti tag “KRAE” — faces charges including criminal mischief and reckless endangerment. If convicted, he could get up to four years in prison.
Part of the police chase occurred on subway tracks.
Brown says it’s believed Boxem, who was arrested on Sept. 9, came to New York for an international graffiti event known as Meeting of Styles.
Time was, you’d inflate the rat and people would notice, they got disturbed. Now, things are different, and in ways I just don’t understand:
More than just a symbol of labor grievance, the giant inflatable sidewalk protest rat has apparently also become a symbol of New York City for out-of-town visitors. By and large, it is safe to assume, there’s nothing quite like it back home.
Take this cigar-chomping, money-bag-clutching behemoth, stationed last week in front of the Lincoln Building, across East 42nd Street from Grand Central Terminal.
His handlers — Laborers’ Local 78, on this particular day — intended to convey the message that only responsible contractors ought to be permitted to perform the hazardous work of asbestos removal.
That message, however, seemed entirely incidental to the groups posing for snapshots in front of the rat every couple of minutes. Radek Korek, one of the Local 78 members on the scene, said the creature seemed popular with foreign visitors, especially those from China, where the Year of the Rat is being observed.
See also: Union Rat.
Or make that “Tijuanans” . . . or “Andorra on the Hudson” — New Yorkers get slapped down, now that Manhattan resembles a very large outlet mall:
This summer, New York is awash with visitors from abroad, who are expected to top last summer’s record number, tourism officials say. Thanks in part to home currencies that are holding strong against the dollar, even middle-class vacationers from Hamburg, Yokohama or Perth can afford to scoop up New York style — the clothes, the hot restaurants, the nightclubs — at bargain prices.
But for New Yorkers trapped on the other side of the currency imbalance, it’s easy to feel ambivalent about the invasion. An infusion of foreign money is welcome in a city faced with a wobbly economy and a possible budget gap in the billions. But even some locals who consider themselves cosmopolitan and internationalist confess to feeling envy, not to mention territorialism, in watching a outsiders treat their city like a Wal-Mart of hip.
Their party is raging just as the hangover has started to set in for Americans. Frictions do arise — especially in a summer of looming recession, where many locals do not feel rich enough or secure enough to travel abroad themselves. (And let’s not even get into their weeks of summer vacation).
“It’s Psych 101 — jealousy,” said Randi Ungar, 30, an online advertising sales manager who lives on the Upper West Side. “I’m jealous that I can’t go to Italy and buy 12 Prada bags, but they can come here and buy 18 of them.”
Steven Schoenfeld, a 45-year-old investment manager who lives near Lincoln Center, said that he welcomes the influx of visitors, in theory, as a boost to the local economy, but “sometimes you feel like it’s going to become a situation where they stop and take picture: ‘Look at that endangered species — a native New Yorker, with a briefcase, going to work.’ ”
Polly Blitzer, a former magazine beauty editor who now runs a beauty Web site, said she believes that a turf war is going on this summer between free-spending Europeans and locals over the chic bistros, spas, boutiques and department stores that she, a native New Yorker, used to consider her playground.
She said the point was driven home to her on a recent trip to Bergdorf Goodman to help her fiancé select a pair of shoes to go with his tuxedo for their wedding.
Wearing the sort of outfit that usually acts as a siren for department store salespeople — a Tory Burch shift dress and Jimmy Choo slingback heels — she instead found herself waiting behind a European couple in sneakers and bike shorts who “had made such massive purchases that we couldn’t get anyone to give us the time of day for our size 11 ½ Ferragamo party slippers,” recalled Ms. Blitzer, 32.
The Europeans, she said, “brought over bags and bags of shoes” while the salesman wrapped their orders and chatted them up about restaurants and travel. “I didn’t want to do the ahem-I’m-sitting-here thing, but we had to sit there for 5 or 10 minutes while these big spenders small-talked.”
She was always used to first-class service, she said, adding, “But now, there’s an ultra-first.”
. . . stay for the Joni Mitchell trivia:
When the ferry docked at Staten Island, a wave of tourists funneled down the ramp and made a U-turn to board the same boat they had just gotten off.
Few seemed to have heard of anything worth sticking around for in New York City’s southernmost borough. Only a handful ventured over to the makeshift tourist kiosk at the ferry terminal.
“Yes, can you tell me where is Alcatraz?” one woman asked.
Andrew Yuen, 22, who was on duty at the kiosk, maintained a chipper demeanor in the face of such demoralizing questions. He cheerfully handed out maps and brochures, and directed a few people to the red faux trolley outside.
“There’s a tour bus that just opened three weeks ago,” he told one couple from England.
A man in a red vest picked up on Mr. Yuen’s cue and rushed to hand out a flier that begged, “Don’t hurry back on the ferry! New! Discover Staten Island Tour.” The salesman pointed to three small photos of unrecognizable tourist destinations and promised, “You’ll see this, this and this.”
The tour, Staten Island’s newest year-round attraction, is operated by Gray Line New York Sightseeing, which also runs bus tours of Manhattan and Brooklyn. In an hour, visitors get an overview of the island’s north shore. The $15 tour stops at places like the Snug Harbor Cultural Center; the house of Alice Austen, a pioneering photographer in the 19th century; and the Staten Island Zoo. Riders have the option of getting off at any of these places and catching the next trolley an hour later, but one tour guide said that most choose to stay in the bus.
“We’ll just wait to see the Bronx Zoo,” Karim Pacheco said.
. . .
What Staten Island may lack in breathtaking skyscrapers, it makes up for in historical tidbits, most of them involving celebrities. The tour drove by the cream-colored stucco building of the Mandolin Brothers guitar shop, which has been visited by the likes of Jimmy Buffett, George Harrison and Suzanne Vega.
“Joni Mitchell wrote a song called ‘Song for Sharon’ that starts, ‘I went to Staten Island, Sharon, to buy myself a mandolin,’” Ms. McGann said into the microphone.
After passing Wagner College, where Joan Baez’s father taught, the bus merged onto the Staten Island Expressway. Later, Ms. McGann pointed out the Stapleton station of the Staten Island Railway.
“That’s where Madonna filmed her music video for ‘Papa Don’t Preach,’” she said.
. . .
Gray Line declined to say how many people had taken the tour so far, saying it often takes up to five years before a new tour catches on. But the company is optimistic that the numbers will grow as Staten Island — once reputed for its enormous Fresh Kills landfill, which has closed — earns some credibility in the tour books.
“It’s a huge market,” said Eva Lee, Gray Line’s tour guide manager. “And they should be educated that Staten Island is important.”
. . . stay for the soy milk:
In 2006, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that he was filing suit against 27 out-of-state gun dealers. He called the gun sellers a “scourge on our society,” and claimed that they were illegally selling weapons that kept ending up on the streets of New York.
Most of the dealers Bloomberg sued quietly settled their cases, agreeing to allow the city to place monitors in their stores to oversee transactions. Others shut down their operations or had their cases tossed out of court. But one man, Jay Wallace, owner of a 12,000-square-foot firearms supermarket outside Atlanta, decided he was willing to pay any price to keep New York from sending someone to monitor his store.
So he borrowed $700,000 and moved to New York — a city he’d never been to before.
In May, Wallace, his wife, and three grown sons rented an apartment in Brooklyn, determined to wage war against the city’s lawsuit right from the belly of the beast itself.
And then two strange things happened.
First, on June 2, the very morning that his case was to be heard in court, Wallace threw in the towel, convinced that he wouldn’t get a fair trial from a judge he considered too biased.
And second, even more surprisingly, by the time he decided not to show up in court, Wallace — a gun-loving, rock-ribbed, Second Amendment–quoting Georgian — had fallen in love with the city he’d vowed to fight to his “last breath.”
He’s even thinking of moving here permanently.
“When you sneeze on the street, five New Yorkers say ‘Bless you’!” Wallace says, wearing a satisfied smile. To his surprise, none of the negative things he’d heard about the city conformed to reality.
On a blazing Sunday afternoon, he’s distractedly picking at a chicken sandwich at the Smoke Joint, a Southern-style barbecue place in trendy Fort Greene. The 51-year-old is wearing a green plastic “Save Our Troops” bracelet and an NYPD baseball cap, a gift from a sympathetic police officer who’d contacted him after reading about the case in the news. The cop had even driven the Wallaces out to Long Beach the day before.
Wallace’s wife Cecilia, a blonde in a bright-pink top and wearing a silver necklace with a cross, eats barbecue pork at his side. After three years of obsessing over the lawsuit, the couple would soon be heading back to Georgia, having given up their day in court. But at least they’d always have New York.
. . .
Now that the Wallaces are no longer preparing for trial, they’ve had time for some sightseeing: Times Square, Central Park, Broadway shows, two pilgrimages to Ground Zero. But Wallace wanted more than a tourist’s perspective; he wanted to experience the city the way the locals live it. And he found that some of the best spots were right in Brooklyn. At Red Bamboo, a vegetarian restaurant, Wallace sampled fake meat in the form of “chicken” Parmesan. He also tried soy milk: “I came here, and I noticed New York had a lot of soy milk. I’d never had it before, but I tried it — first the sweetened kind. It was good!”
Even the nursing staff at the hospital on DeKalb Avenue, where Wallace spent Memorial Day weekend because of chest pain, proved to be some of the loveliest health-care professionals he’d met. (He’s composing a thank-you letter to the hospital director. As a small-business owner, he says, he knows the value of a customer’s kind word.) And despite being somewhat “mustardy,” the barbecue sauce at the Smoke Joint deserves an A, he points out.
Wallace is so impressed, he says he could actually consider living here one day. Not that some things don’t need improvement. He and Cecilia are worried about the destruction of the old Coney Island — where they’d eaten a Nathan’s hot dog — and about the taxi drivers who can’t afford the price of gas. Mostly, Wallace finds it unfortunate that such a wonderful city is suffering under a despot-in-chief for a mayor, one who is turning New York into a playground for the rich. “Living here, I know how New Yorkers feel — overtaxed!” Wallace exclaims, half-furious, half-smiling. But nothing seems to detract from his down-to-earth Southern charm.
The Bad Old Days or a Law & Order set? What the MOFTB hath wrought:
Times Square tourists were stunned yesterday when a 23-year-old Manhattan man was stabbed, leaving a blood-splattered crime scene that had some wondering whether it was real or a movie set.
Police said the victim, Juan Garcia of Riverside Drive, was stabbed in the back on 46th Street at about 7:20 a.m. Garcia managed to get away, but his knife-wielding assailant pursued him on foot to 45th Street and Broadway, where he stabbed Garcia again.
Witnesses said they saw Garcia collapse to the ground and then saw police running to the scene where they quickly handcuffed Antoine Poprilo, 37, of Manhattan, who they said was still holding the knife.
. . .
Scattered on the corner of 45th Street was blood-stained medical gauze, the victim’s breakfast sandwich and coffee, as well as his broken headphones and shirt. Confused tourists walking by did double takes, and some stopped when they realized they were walking by a real New York City crime scene that was cordoned off by yellow tape and uniformed police officers.
Marianne Wedgeworth, 43, of Lake Charles, La., said she heard emergency vehicles’ sirens as she was leaving her hotel.
“I wasn’t sure. I thought they were shooting a movie,” said Wedgeworth, who stopped to take a closer look at the scene.
Hmm. Doubtful. I say milk it for all it’s worth:
Mayor Bloomberg is balking at a proposal by City Council members to increase the hotel tax to 8% to avoid budget cuts to public schools.
“We don’t want to have more taxes that would hurt the economic well-being of this city. For example, a tax on tourists is a terrible idea. We desperately need tourists from around the world,” he said yesterday. “International tourism is down throughout our country something like 17%. It is up 9% in New York. Killing the golden goose is not a smart thing to do.”
A council member of Queens, John Liu, said the hotel tax increase is a serious proposal that some members find more “palatable” than cutting $450 million from the Department of Education budget.
Fewer hot-sheet motels, more places you can put up Mom and Dad:
The people who published AAA’s 2008 New York tour book had a hard time recommending any hotels in the Bronx. They could find only one, in fact, a rather bland-looking building a mile north of Yankee Stadium by a service road to the Major Deegan Expressway.
The hotel fared better than restaurants, since the automobile club’s guide does not list a single place to eat in the Bronx.
It is an odd distinction for that lone hotel in the guide, a Howard Johnson of no particular architectural significance. And given the borough’s long battles against hot-sheet motels that rent rooms by the hour, a casual observer might assume this place was no different.
But it is a real hotel catering to real tourists. One day last week, the parking lot was filled with cars from out of state, most belonging to guests who had come to see the Yankees play Cleveland. Retirees from Oklahoma and families from upstate New York eagerly hauled suitcases upstairs as they prepared to change into baseball jerseys and take in a game.
Chadd Morris and Brandon Bebout had driven eight hours from Cleveland to buy game tickets. They asked a local police officer for the nearest hotel and were directed to the HoJo, at 1300 Sedgwick Avenue just north of 167th Street.
“We got to New York with no idea where we were going to stay,” Mr. Morris said. “I had heard negatives and positives about the Bronx. We’ll see what happens.”
. . .
The hotel itself has Yankee pinstripe wallpaper in the lobby and a breakfast nook dominated by a photo mural of the stadium. The rooms and windows are tiny, but clean and well appointed, with Wi-Fi access (and plasma screen televisions coming soon, too). A southbound highway ramp is nearby. The garage even has a waiting area labeled “High Class Passenger Pick Up and Drop Off.”
“High Class” is not (necessarily) referring to the passengers, but to High Class Bronx, a livery cab service that takes guests to the stadium or back and forth to the subway.
Gaurang Parikh bought the 45-room hotel two years ago when a friend told him the previous owner was having a hard time making a go of the place.
“I came to see the property and fell in love with it,” he said. “It has a river view of the Harlem River.”
Not to mention it was a 20-minute walk to Yankee Stadium. It was his idea to redo the décor in a baseball theme.
“I am from India, but I have always been a diehard Yankees fan,” he said. “For me to have a hotel next to Yankee Stadium is a dream come true.”
. . .
He said that about 40 percent of his guests are baseball fans, and that the place is packed when Boston or Baltimore comes to play. The rest are people who want to visit Manhattan but do not want to pay Manhattan hotel rates. At most, his rooms go for $139 a night.
[Heart] the brand, lest things get out of control:
This year, state officials plan to introduce new tools — like a difficult-to-reproduce hologram — that will assure consumers that a product is officially licensed by New York State.
For those who sell unofficial “I ♥ NY” products, officials plan to warn and then penalize offenders.
Thomas Ranese, 37, chief marketing officer at Empire State Development, admitted, “We haven’t always invested in protecting the brand as much as we should have.”
Trademarks were allowed to expire in the 1990s in the United States and abroad, leading to the widespread perception that the heart symbol was in the public domain and did not require a license, he said. The trademark registrations have been renewed, he said, but the damage had already been done.
New York State has lost millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars in licensing fees since the symbol was introduced in 1977, Mr. Ranese said.
The result, visible all over New York City but especially in Midtown Manhattan, is a vast alternate universe of “I ♥ NY” products, almost all of which are unlicensed fakes.
Is there any way for a public-spirited tourist to detect a fake? “The simple answer is no,” Mr. Ranese said. Even the registered trademark symbol is easily counterfeited, he said.
Still, the products are fun.
In need of something sartorial? There is a “I ♥ NY” men’s tie (with Statue of Liberty) for $4.99 and a Betty Boop “I ♥ NY” T-shirt for $19.99. Crave something culinary? There’s a dinner bell for $3.99, salt and pepper shakers for $8.99, a beer can holder for $4.99 and a dinner plate for $12.99. And a kitchen towel, $8.99, to clean up.
Need something for the children? There are teddy bears ($9.99 small, $19.99 large) and baby clothes for $9.99. Need authentic New York tchotchkes? There’s a computer mouse pad for $8.99, a thimble for $3.99, a glass paperweight for $14.99.
Feel the need for exercise? There is a baseball for $9.99, golf balls for $12.99, and a fur football for $9.99.
Only one of the above is an officially licensed product.
Come for the tall iconic buildings, stay for your eventual self-inflicted death:
Recently, however, researchers stumbled on a striking fact about suicides in New York: A surprising number of people who kill themselves in the city come here from out of town, and many appear to come expressly to take their own lives. In a report published last fall called “Suicide Tourism in Manhattan, New York City, 1990–2004,” researchers at the New York Academy of Medicine and Weill Cornell Medical College found that of the 7,634 people who committed suicide in New York City between 1990 and 2004, 407 of them, or 5.3 percent, were nonresidents. More strikingly, nonresidents accounted for 274, or 10.8 percent, of the 2,272 suicides in Manhattan during that time (the numbers did not include college students, who were considered residents for the purposes of the study). The researchers didn’t look at comparable data from other cities, but, says the study’s lead author, Charles Gross, “One in ten people that commit suicide in Manhattan don’t live here. That’s a big chunk.”
. . .
New York, with all of its tall buildings and bridges, makes a perversely attractive place to kill oneself. Through suicidal eyes, the skyline can appear to be “a lot of opportunities to die from heights,” says Gary Spielmann, the former director of suicide prevention for the New York State Office of Mental Health. “A lot of windows and doors and balconies that can easily be negotiated by a jumper.” And jumping, says Kay Redfield Jamison, a Johns Hopkins psychiatry professor and the author of An Unquiet Mind, has the twisted appeal of being “practical, final, and irrevocable.” It can also seem dramatic. Gary Gorman, a retired policeman who was assigned to the NYPD’s Emergency Service Unit, which responds to suicide calls, says that some people who jump from bridges or buildings may want people to look up at them, to know about them, to notice them in death in a way they hadn’t been noticed in life. According to the NYAM study, nonresidents who kill themselves in Manhattan are less likely to have done so by methods commonly used in the home, such as overdosing or hanging, and are 30 percent more likely to have died from a long fall. They’re also almost three times as likely to have died by drowning and twice as likely to have died after being hit by a train or other moving object, a function of New York’s subways and waterways. The two neighborhoods where the most nonresidents kill themselves are midtown, with its dense concentration of tall buildings and hotels, and the Washington Heights area, home to the George Washington Bridge.
More NYC & Company overreach:
Tree-lined Henry Street was briefly turned into one long billboard, but Brooklyn Heights residents erupted after seeing commercial banners on the mostly residential street, so the city removed them.
On Monday, banners reading “Brooklyn loves to shop” were hung on lampposts from Clark to Montague streets — and locals slammed the commercialization of the strip.
“I absolutely detest them,” said Veronica Rylander, 48. “They’re so out of place here above all these houses. I feel like it cheapens the look of the neighborhood.”
For Liana Schwartz, 36, it wasn’t the aesthetics, but the practicality of the banners that provoked her disdain.
“I just don’t even get why they’re hanging here,” said Schwartz. “Wouldn’t it make more sense to put them Downtown or on streets where there are actually places to shop?”
After The Brooklyn Paper started asking local officials about the appropriateness of posting ads in a residential corridor, the banners were taken down and relocated to commercial Court Street on Wednesday morning.
Brooklyn Bridge RealtyThe banners — which are sponsored by Greek natural skincare company Korres, which just opened on Montague Street, and NYC& Co., the city’s tourist board — also annoyed people who think tourism officials don’t get Brooklyn — or maybe get it too well.
“They put those signs on Henry because they know there are lots of cars speeding through here,” said one man.
Blame NYC & Company, blame a weaker and weaker dollar for why Sex and the City is premiering in London:
Is Carrie Bradshaw fooling around on New York?
Absofrickinlutely not! say the makers of the “Sex and the City” movie after news broke Monday that the flick will debut first across the pond.
“Sex and the City: The Movie” will show in London’s Leicester Square on May 12 — two weeks before its much-anticipated debut in New York.
“London will be much smaller,” a New Line spokesman said. “The whole cast isn’t even going.”
Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Cynthia Nixon and Kristin Davis all will make the trip, but other big names, including Mr. Big himself, Chris Noth, and Jennifer Hudson, will not.
. . .
Overseas premieres are hardly a new concept when it comes to blockbuster movies with large casts and lots of planning. “Spider-Man 3,” “Lord of the Rings” and “Wedding Crashers” all had world premieres outside the U.S.
There’s also hope the British debut will stoke overseas obsession with all things Carrie – and all things New York.
“It creates additional buzz for our U.K. customers,” said Cathy Epstein, marketing directing of New York-based On Location Tours, which runs a daily “Sex and the City” Hotspots tour.
“Anything that brings more tourists to New York is good for our restaurants,” said Chuck Hunt, executive vice president of the New York State Restaurant Association.
And even though The News has learned that Mayor Bloomberg’s cameo has been cut, a City Hall spokesman said the film, which employed more than 1,750 cast and crew over the 50 days of shooting in the city, will “draw even more tourists to our city and pump more money into our economy.”
And I’m assuming that’s a typo at the end there:
As one might imagine, security is extremely tight in both Washington D.C. and New York City. With Pope Benedict XVI’s much-anticipated landing Tuesday at Maryland’s Andrews Air Force Base, the NYPD has already begun beefing up its police presence underground.
“Mind if we check the train?” That’s the question NYPD officers will be asking hundreds of train conductors when the pope arrives in NYC on Friday morning.
Over the course of the pontiff’s three-day visit, the NYPD will have round-the-clock coverage of high-profile MTA stops starting as soon as the pope arrives in the city. Officers will take a peek inside every train that comes through the station.
“It’s probably necessary,” one passenger said. “The pope is a big worldly figure so he needs that kind of security.”
With hundreds of thousands of people expected to flock to the pope’s motorcade route through Manhattan on Friday and pack Yankee Stadium for his mass on Sunday, police expect the subway to be extremely busy. The NYPD’s presence, cops say, is all about letting the public know they are around. Police are hoping commuters will stay vigilante.
And you don’t really need tourist offices on every continent to attract them:
New York City has started to slide into the economic downturn that is enveloping much of the country. But the city has a counterbalance against recession that few other American cities share: a rising tide of free-spending foreign visitors.
After a record year of tourism and business travel in 2007, the influx has continued to grow this year, city officials said. About one million more visitors came to the city — more than one fifth of them foreigners — in the first three months of 2008 than in the first quarter of last year, according to a preliminary estimate from NYC & Company, the city’s marketing arm.
Foreign tourists are filling up the tables at the city’s pricier restaurants. Danny Meyer, who operates several highly rated restaurants in Manhattan, said that he added the Euro equivalent to prices on the wine list at the Modern, the restaurant in the Museum of Modern Art, to impress upon tourists what bargains the bottles were.
The device worked: “We have sold more wines and more expensive wines,” Mr. Meyer said.
. . .
Mike Stengel, who oversees five full-service Marriott hotels in the city, said that guests were coming from all over the globe, attracted by a weak dollar and New York’s polished-up image overseas. On Tuesday morning, Mr. Stengel ate breakfast at the Marriott Marquis with 15 travel agents from China, only five of whom had been to the city before.
After breakfast, the group was going to go shopping at Woodbury Common, an outlet mall an hour north of the city. To get there, Mr. Stengel said, the group planned to walk, unescorted, the six blocks from the hotel to the Port Authority Bus Terminal and catch a public bus, a venture around Times Square that he said a tour group would not have considered four or five years ago.
. . .
On Broadway, attendance and revenue are off only slightly from last year, even after a three-week strike by stagehands last fall, according to the Broadway League. But some shows, including “Wicked” and “Jersey Boys,” are still filling all of their seats at average ticket prices of more than $100.
Stoop culture, alive and well and un- and underemployed:
Last summer, two young girls appeared on Charles Street between Bleecker and West 4th Streets. They perched themselves on the front steps of the brownstone at No. 90, and they’ve stayed there, nearly every day, chatting and smoking and playing with their dogs from late morning to early evening, even in the bitter cold. Block residents are used to celebrities — Sarah Jessica and Matthew live there, after all — but they’ve been flummoxed by these new ladies of leisure, who’ve inspired a flurry of intra-block e-mails with titles like “The Girls” that report sightings as late as 4:30 a.m. Few Charles Streeters seem to know who they are or why they’re there.
You can learn a lot by asking. Haley, the brunette, is 23 and from Alabama; blonde Rebecca is 22 and from Pennsylvania. (They declined to provide their last names.) They grew up spending vacations together with their best-friend grandmas before moving to New York last year, basically for kicks. Haley, who dropped out of premed in Alabama, just started English-lit classes at Hunter. “I don’t like to write, but I like grammar,” she says. Rebecca basically does nothing, nor does she know what she wants to do. They share an apartment a few blocks west; their parents paid months of rent in advance. But even in the dead of winter, they prefer the stoop to their living room — although they chafe at their status as block icons. “We’re not into the fame thing,” Haley says. “But this is what we do.”
Add Nikola Tesla tourism to the ever-expanding list of reasons people want to visit New York:
According to Joseph Kinney, the chief engineer and unofficial archivist of the New Yorker Hotel (an ancillary enterprise not of this magazine but of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church), three types of inquisitive visitors regularly make pilgrimages there: (1) electrical engineers and technology enthusiasts; (2) people interested in U.F.O.s, anti-gravity airships, death-ray weapons, time travel, and telepathic pigeons; (3) Serbs and Croats. (A guest last year, Bozidar Djelic, the deputy prime minister of Serbia, inscribed for Kinney a copy of his book “Serbia: Things Will Get Better.”)
What these callers have in common is a wish to pay homage to Nikola Tesla, the tragically underappreciated Croatian-born ethnic-Serb immigrant visionary who lived at the hotel, at Thirty-fourth Street and Eighth Avenue, for ten years and, in 1943, died there, at the age of eighty-six. Despite having conceived — but, inconveniently, not necessarily having perfected patents for — dozens of revolutionary devices, Tesla during his lifetime failed to receive proper credit, or royalties, for theoretical work that made possible wireless power transmission and X-rays. It’s generally agreed that Tesla was an earlier inventor of radio than Guglielmo Marconi, who won the patent and a Nobel Prize. At the time of his death, Tesla was nearly destitute, having been bamboozled by, among others, Thomas Edison. He was undone as well by his own impracticality, deficient business acumen, and a predilection toward delusion.
Lady, if you can’t figure out something else to do in this town . . . really:
As if the Grinch really had stolen Christmas, children cried and parents were crestfallen. Confusion, surprise and anger played at box offices, and dispossessed theatergoers shared the sidewalks with grim pickets yesterday as the stagehands’ strike shut down most of Broadway’s plays and musicals.
Up and down the Great White Way, and in the side streets where Broadway’s theaters are clustered, marquees fell dark and the electric playland of Times Square — normally pulsing with anticipation for Saturday matinees — was a canyon of gloom in Midtown Manhattan’s petrified forest.
Crowds of American and foreign tourists, busloads from suburbia, throngs who had come by train or cab with children or grandchildren were caught off guard by the walkout and abruptly drawn into chaos: scrambling for refunds, seeking tickets to the few shows that remained open and looking for other attractions to ease the disappointment.
. . .
“It’s very disappointing,” said Linda Partner of Port Royal, Pa., who rode four hours on a bus with her three sisters and their two children to see “The Little Mermaid” at the Lunt-Fontanne at Broadway and 46th Street. “We don’t have a clue where to go or what to do.”
Definitely something all New Yorkers can take pride in — a bunch of upscale chainstores drove up rents and turned Fifth Avenue into one giant overvalued loss leader for retailers:
Rodeo Drive? Puh-leeze!
The country’s far-and-away leader in elite retail remains Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, by a $7 million mile.
Real-estate firm Colliers International ranked the most expensive shopping streets in the United States by price paid per square foot, and Fifth Avenue took top honors, with an average rent of $1,350.
Rodeo Drive, by comparison, ranked third with a relatively bargain-basement price of $480 per square foot.
“Retailers, and in particular luxury retailers, continue to desire prime street-front locations,” said Ross Moore, senior vice president at Colliers.
And more than anywhere else in the country, “prime” means Fifth Avenue.
“Fifth Avenue is iconic. It’s synonymous with fashion and shopping,” said Tiffany Townsend, communications director at the city’s marketing organization, NYC & Company.
. . .
The influx of such global brands as Apple, Hugo Boss and others has dramatically driven up prices along Fifth, rising from an average of just $1,000 a year ago.
Gucci last year agreed to a record retail price of $1,500 per square foot for the right to bring back their flagship store to The Trump Building.
“Fifth Avenue is by far the greatest retail street not just in the nation but, in my opinion, the world,” said Stephen Siegel, chairman of Global Brokerage at CB Richard Ellis, who brokered the Gucci deal.
. . .
Fifth Avenue, however, just misses being the priciest stretch on Earth, with London’s Old Bond Street taking the top spot at $1,400.
Apparently they assume that people go there for the ambiance and good service:
Mayor Bloomberg is giving a wedding gift to lovebirds who tie the knot at the city chapel — a multimillion-dollar Marriage Bureau makeover overseen by Hizzoner’s personal interior designer — in a bid to make New York the nation’s coupling capital, The Post has learned.
“It’s going to be fabulous,” said one source of the planned revamp, which will move the City Clerk’s Office — where a major function is issuing marriage licenses and performing weddings — from its current, dingy digs at 1 Centre St. to the first floor of 80 Centre.
It will occupy the offices that once housed the Department of Motor Vehicles, with a fresh look designed by society decorator Jamie Drake.
Drake adorned Mayor Bloomberg’s Upper East Side townhouse with Egyptian marble, and also was tapped by the mayor to give Gracie Mansion a face lift five years ago.
The city will use the new chapel as part of a worldwide marketing effort to lure marriage-minded visitors, sources said. It’s part of a goal to bring 50 million tourists here by 2015 and contribute to the economy.
“Vegas might be one location where people go” to get married, the source said.
“But a lot of Europeans, if they go somewhere romantic and are coming to America, one of the first things they think about is New York City.”
The goal is to replace Las Vegas and make New York “the premier marriage location in America,” the source added.
. . .
The Marriage Bureau, now on the second floor of the Municipal Building, has sterile marble, and the door to the wedding chapel is painted deep red.
Couples sit on plastic chairs lining the walls in the hallway until their names are called; there is graffiti scratched into the walls; and, worst of all, there are no bathrooms nearby.
Sources said Drake, who also decorated the billionaire mayor’s London townhouse, will work at a reduced rate on the project, which has a $13 million budget and should be finished by spring 2008.
The new space will be about 6,000 square feet larger, and will have proper seating areas, attractive marble floors and columns, as well as bathrooms and vanity rooms where brides and grooms can primp.
It will be a storefront, with a streamlined security system. As of now, brides dressed in white must walk through a magnetometer to get hitched.
“I feel like I’m at the DMV,” said one man, who was at the clerk’s office to witness a friend’s wedding.
The bride-to-be agreed, saying, “It’s so institutionalized — not really what you picture your wedding day” to be.
Location Scout: City Clerk’s Office.
. . . you really are best seen and not heard:
“I have never had such a nice bathroom,” said Nastya Zhelkovskaya, a 17-year-old Russian fashion model who was in town for fashion week. In August 2006, the slender blonde was standing outside her school in Moscow when a modeling agent approached. Now she was giving The Observer a tour of her new, temporary digs — a two-bedroom, second-floor apartment on West Broadway and Prince Street which she was sharing with five other models. (Three Russians in one bedroom, two Brazilians in another bedroom, one Romanian in the living room.) It was one of the many so-called model apartments that crop up this time of year. “In my city, in my apartment, I don’t have such a bathroom,” she said.
. . .
So what goes on in this cramped little room in the wee small hours? Pillow fights? Endless boy talk?
“No, we don’t talk very much about boys, we have enough problem of our own,” she said.
Political discourse?
“No, we’re girls, we are not talking about politics,” she said. “Sometimes we talk about shows we have done. Every morning, we talk about what clothes to put on.”
Nastya recalled that on this morning, “Maria put on her jeans and a white shirt with a belt. Tanya, a black dress. And me, jeans and this gray shirt.”
“Actually, usually we don’t like each others’ outfits,” she added.
. . .
Nighttime activity centers around the Internet and telephone. They don’t have a TV. If Nastya is not surfing the Web, she’s chatting with friends on instant messenger or talking to her mother.
“She misses me a lot,” Nastya said. “She wants to know all about me, actually. What I’m doing here? What do I eat here as well?”
Nastya said she usually buys her own food at the “little Chinese market” (it’s a bodega) across the street. Mostly apples and strawberry ice cream. “I like ice cream very much,” she said.
On a bed in the living room Alexandra Sandor, 17, of Romania, was engrossed in her laptop and a bottle of Coke. She is rod-skinny, with pouty lips, perfect baby skin and wavy brown hair. She wore Hello Kitty pajamas. She had come down with a lung infection but had been a trooper and suffered through the Lela Rose show.
. . .
She took a swig of Coke. “I love Coke,” she said. On her headboard rested a giant log of Toblerone and a carton of Marboro Lights. There was a Titanic DVD on the floor amongst pairs of high heels. “I could live on chocolate and Coca-Cola only, I think.”
“I found a very good sandwich from Starbucks,” said Maria. “So usually I’m eating that one in the morning, if I have time. If not, I’m just taking something from the shop — like chocolate.”
Why do models like chocolate so much?
“Because it’s good, it has a good taste.”
Over on the couch sat Tanya Chubko, the oldest girl in the house at 20. She wore all black and was chain-smoking while playing solitaire on her laptop. Her red hair was pulled back, exhibiting those big blues Nastya so admires.
. . .
In the year and a half since, she’s traveled much of America and Europe. Her favorite place so far is Italy’s Amalfi coast. Her favorite food in America is McDonald’s. “I really love Big Mac. I know it’s not good. I used to love chocolate, I was crazy about chocolate when I was younger, but not as much any more.”
This should be easy to monitor because it’s not like the Staten Island Ferry is one of the three top tourist attractions in New York City or anything. Yup, right:
Taking pictures aboard the Staten Island Ferry? Watch where you’re pointing that camera, bub.
The recent scare in Washington state — two men, apparently of Middle Eastern descent, were spotted photographing sensitive areas of the ferryboats that ply Puget Sound — has triggered heightened sensitivity to shutterbugs.
Photography is officially permitted onboard and in terminals here, and with so many tourists enjoying the views of New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty from the boats each day, “picture-taking is a part of the experience,” acknowledged city Department of Transportation spokeswoman Molly Gordy.
An official memo sent to ferry staff in 2005 indicated that crew members were “not to prohibit anyone from taking photographs in any areas open to the public,” while remaining vigilant and informing security and supervisors if anything seems unusual about a passenger’s photo op.
“If pictures are being taken that seem suspicious, just as if a person is acting suspicious, NYPD on board would be alerted and the parties would be questioned,” Ms. Gordy said.
