Entries Tagged as 'Simply The Best Better Than All The Rest'

Sunday, May 11th, 2008

To Paraphrase R. Kelly, Zip Codes Ain’t Nothing But Some Numbers

Almost a year after dividing the posh 10021 zip code into three atomized bastions of wealth, people finally seem to be getting used to just how wealthy “10065″ sounds (after all, “65″ is more than three times as great as “21″):

The new neighboring 10065 — formerly part of 10021 — is now the Upper East Side’s most expensive address.

Since the split, in July 2007, the average real-estate sales price in the 10065 has hit $2.9 million — topping 10021’s $2.2 million average, according to Streeteasy.com, a real estate-tracking Web site.

The hot ZIP’s stock continues to soar, too — with the current market price for homes selling at an average $4.1 million, nearly $1.5 million higher than residences in 10021.

Moviemaker Spike Lee, The Donald’s ex, Ivana Trump, corporate raider Henry Kravis, Revlon’s Ronald Perelman and NBC “Today” show host Matt Lauer all reside in the flush 10065 neighborhood, which spans 61st to 68th streets from Fifth Avenue to the East River.

Coveted real estate in the 10065 includes The Pierre hotel, whose penthouse is on the market for $70 million, and the renovated Lexington Avenue Barbizon Hotel, with apartments for sale for $12 million.

Since July, 10021 hasn’t been able to keep pace, despite being home to 740 Park Ave., once home to John D. Rockefeller and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and where the city’s richest man, billionaire businessman David Koch, hangs his hat.

Up the street, Brooke Astor’s famed 778 Park Ave. duplex just hit the market for $46 million this past month. And real-estate tycoon Aby Rosen is asking $75 million for his town house at 22 E. 71st St.

“People work their whole lives to get into the 10021 ZIP code” — which now covers 68th to 76th streets from Fifth Avenue to the East River, said Brown Harris Stevens Realtor Nancy Candib. “They were upset when it was taken away from them.”

In July, the US Postal Service carved up the historic 10021 ZIP code, which once stretched from 61st to 80th from Fifth Avenue to the East River, into three sections, creating the new 10065 ZIP code and its smaller cousin, the 10075, the area from 76th to 80th.

But now, those who ended up in the new 10065 are lording it over the 10021.

“[The 10065's] most beautiful and notorious buildings compete with anything in the 10021,” said Candib.

Wednesday, May 7th, 2008

For Fans Of Other Teams, Starting Under .500 In April For The Second Straight Year Is Business As Usual . . .

. . . but Yankees fans aren’t like other fans. Add to the annals of Yankee-hating lore:

The boozed-up Yankee fan from hell who ran over and killed a Red Sox supporter last week had a crush on Derek Jeter and a living room dominated by Pinstripe regalia.

A neighbor of Ivonne Hernandez, 43, who was charged with murder for allegedly running down Matthew Beaudoin in her Dodge Intrepid in Nashua, said the Bronx-bred fan loved the handsome shortstop.

“She thought he was hot and had beautiful eyes,” said the 28-year-old mom, who declined to be identified.

She was less excited by Alex Rodriguez, who she felt was a “wuss,” the Nashua neighbor recounted.

. . .

Hernandez, taunted by Red Sox fans outside a bar, bounced the 29-year-old off her windshield at up to 60 mph, witnesses said.

. . .

Officials said Friday’s events turned deadly not long after Hernandez slapped a female bartender outside a bar. The bartender’s friends chased Hernandez to her car and, seeing the Yankee logo on her rear windshield, began chanting, “Yankees suck!”

Hernandez hurriedly drove away, then stopped.

“She turned her car around and gunned the engine toward Matthew,” a witness told The Post yesterday. “She hit him and he was on the windshield. He flew 40 feet in the air.”

The witness said he cradled Matthew’s body in his arms, as he gasped for air. Beaudoin was taken off life support the next day.

Officials said Hernandez claimed she only wanted to scare the hecklers and expected them to get out the way.

Hernandez is being held without bail on charges of murder and aggravated DWI.

Sunday, April 27th, 2008

You Get What You Pay For

But you know what they say about guys who drive Lamborghinis:

New York sports teams scored miserably with their fans when it came to performance and likability, with the awful Knicks dead last in a nationwide fan-satisfaction poll, according to ESPN The Magazine.

Even the Big Apple’s pride and joy — the Super Bowl-champion Giants — placed 48th out of the 122 pro teams that comprised the Web-site survey of NBA, NFL and NHL and MLB rooters.

. . .

The survey graded fan satisfaction based on the affordability of tickets and the stadium experience, their team’s win-loss performance, and the accessibility of players.

Unfortunately, you have to go all the way to No. 40 to find the first of our nine local teams — the New Jersey Devils.

. . .

The Yankees bombed out in 65th place, well below last year’s 48th.

Part of the reason is that new manager Joe Girardi “is no Joe Torre,” according to fellow analyst Eddie Matz.

“Throw in price hikes for beer [up a dollar to $7], soda [up $1.50 to $5] and parking [up $2 to $14], and the imminent destruction of Yankee Stadium . . . and the Yanks drop by 17 spots overall, giving them their lowest ranking in [ESPN] standings history,” he blogged.

But the Yanks did beat the Mets, who scraped the bottom at No. 93, behind even the hated Boston Red Sox, which claimed 89th place.

Tuesday, April 8th, 2008

Isiah, Prophet Of Doom

Is it perverse New-York-is-the-center-of-the-world braggadocio to say that Isiah Thomas’ Knicks are “Absolutely, Positively the Worst Team in the History of Professional Sports”? No, actually it seems about right:

When the venerable Donnie Walsh arrived on Wednesday as the Knicks’ fourth president in seven years, he supplanted the least-loved incumbent since LBJ. During the four years and change of the Isiah Thomas era, the team lost more than 60 percent of its games, a ratio that got worse after Thomas added the title of head coach in 2006. Over that span, the Knicks have amassed the largest payroll (peaking at more than $160 million with luxury tax) and the third-worst record in the National Basketball Association. Never has so much been spent for so little in the world of sports. They’ve been called the worst team in the history of pro basketball, but they’re really much worse than that. These Knicks are worse than the fire-sale ‘41 Phillies or the expansion ‘62 Mets or the ‘76 Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who were perfect in their winlessness. They’re the worst of the worst because of how they’ve lost, in petulance and complacency — and with management that bulldozed any critic it could not ignore.

. . .

Not surprisingly, the current edition leads the league in forced shots, blown assignments, sideline spats, mini-mutinies, and wholesale mockery. Old nemesis Reggie Miller, now on TNT, called the Knicks “a leaguewide joke.” The Phoenix Suns’ Leandro Barbosa was distraught when a prankster said they had traded for him. “My heart was hurting,” the Brazilian said. “I went a little crazy.”

. . .

The HMS Thomas was a loose ship. Practices went short, with scant focus on defense and off days galore. When Isiah got bored, he’d invite a special guest like boxer Roy Jones Jr. to join their drills or hang around the locker room. Perhaps the Knicks ran out of things to do, as their playbook was the slimmest in the league. “Scouts love going to see them because it’s an easy night,” the Eastern scout said. When in doubt, Thomas fell back on “isolation,” where Randolph or Crawford went one-on-one before chucking. This didn’t take much practice; the players had been doing it since they were 8 years old.

Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008

Kelo, Sweet Vacant Lot, Coming For My Prospect Heights Home

Atlantic Yards opponents are aiming high with their latest, and possibly last strategy:

The proposed Atlantic Yards development near downtown Brooklyn could prompt the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider when government may use eminent domain to seize private property.

About a dozen holdout residents within the project’s planned boundaries are petitioning the high court to forbid their eviction. If the residents win, the development, which entails 16 towers of residential and office space and a basketball arena, would be halted. One resident, Daniel Goldstein, said his two-bedroom apartment is near center court of the proposed arena.

If four justices agree to hear the appeal, it would be the court’s first to test the power of government to seize property through eminent domain since a landmark decision in 2005 in the case of Kelo v. the City of New London. In that decision, which produced a groundswell of public opposition across the country, the court ruled 5–4 that the government can seize property and transfer it to a private developer to foster economic development.

“If they had the stomach for it, they could accept this case to overrule Kelo,” the lead attorney for the residents, Matthew Brinkerhoff, said of the justices.

Mr. Brinkerhoff’s petition to the Supreme Court focuses on a more modest aim than convincing the court to scrap its opinion in Kelo just three years after issuing it. The residents are asking the court to give them a chance to prove their allegation that the primary motivation behind the Atlantic Yards project isn’t a desire to benefit the public. Instead, the plaintiffs claim the project is mainly a conspiracy to benefit the interests of the project’s developer, Bruce Ratner, and his company, Forest City Ratner.

Location Scout: Atlantic Yards.

Tuesday, February 26th, 2008

Suckup

The vaunted Bloomberg terminal, applied to health care records, makes the health commissioner gush:

After two years of planning and a public investment of more than $60 million, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said on Monday that New York City was ready to equip doctors with computer software that can track patients’ medical records in order to provide better preventive care.

. . .

The new system, a software package developed with $30 million from the city and roughly $30 million from the state and federal governments, would let doctors do much more than is possible with paper charts by integrating a patient’s medical history, lab results and current medications into one electronic interface.

Among its important advances, city officials said, the system will give up-to-date information to doctors through a series of alerts, like overdue dates on prescriptions or cholesterol checks. It will share data with other doctors and provide information about the current best practices for treating illnesses. City officials hope that the system will help reduce overall costs by eliminating expensive and repetitive tests.

Two hundred doctors with 200,000 patients have committed to use the system, and the city hopes to have 1,000 doctors with one million patients using it by the end of the year, said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the New York City health commissioner.

Dr. Frieden said the system would provide more finely tuned information to doctors quickly than anything now available.

“This can do for health what the Bloomberg terminal did for finance,” he said in an interview.

Monday, February 18th, 2008

New York Just Has A Way Of Making Elections Irrelevant

The first election in years that actually meant something actually ends up not meaning much:

Supporters expect Barak Obama to pick up one or two delegates when primary results from New York City are recounted.

The unofficial results were strikingly under-recorded in several districts around the city — in some cases leaving him with zero votes when, in fact, he had pulled in hundreds, Board of Elections officials have said.

Those results gave Obama no votes in nearly 80 districts, including Harlem’s 94th and other historically black areas — but many of those initial tallies proved to be wildly off base.

“Every election has problems, but in this case, all the problems seem to have been his,” said state Sen. Bill Perkins (D-Harlem). “He got all the zeroes and undercounting.

“Some gross mistakes have been made. Very often, there are clerical errors. In this case, it was strictly with regards to Obama.” Perkins told The Post the issue is more than the “one or two delegates” that could be added to Obama’s tally, noting that if the results were accurately represented, there would not have been a “false momentum” for Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

One Way To Recycle

50 tons . . . why that’s 100,000 pounds of paper — this for a team that plays in New Jersey:

About 50 tons of shredded paper is expected to rain down upon fans and members of the 2008 Super Bowl champions, the Giants, as the team travels up the storied Broadway route to City Hall for a ceremony to commemorate their win over the Patriots.

The parade marks the first victory march through the Canyon of Heroes for the Giants, a franchise that before Sunday’s upset victory had won the Super Bowl twice. The Yankees were the last New York team to receive the honor, after winning the World Series in 2000.

In preparation for the 11 a.m. parade, the city yesterday procured 1,000 pounds of shredded paper donated by a packing company in Brooklyn, Atlas Materials. The rest of the expected 49 tons of paper will likely come from the bowels of shredders belonging to companies along the route.

Following its first Super Bowl victory, in 1987, the team was denied the opportunity to hold a ticker-tape parade because Mayor Koch said he didn’t recognize the Giants as a New York team after their decision to move to New Jersey for a lucrative stadium deal.

In 1991, the Giants won the Super Bowl for a second time, but with the Gulf War weighing on the country, it was decided a parade would not be appropriate, an assistant commissioner of the New York City Department of Records, Kenneth Cobb, said.

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

Decline And Fall Of The Empire State

The end is near when New Yorkers start embracing the underdog role:

In this town, a sports championship usually consists of the Yankees winning in October. Which is to say, another year to hang on the stadium walls, another ticker-tape parade.

Yet no matter how good such victories may feel — and it’s getting somewhat harder to remember — Yankee championships have always felt a bit more like the divine right of a king than the conquest of a warrior; a bit more about the payrolls than the putouts; and, when you really get down to it, a bit more of the same.

Not so the Giants’ stunning win in the Super Bowl on Sunday night, a victory that actually felt victorious. In the unfamiliar role of the underdog, New Yorkers finally had a chance to savor the sweet taste of a triumph that wasn’t only unexpected but was utterly deserved.

“The wine tastes better when you think the cup is full of coffee,” said Paul Majors, a superintendent from the Bronx who stepped onto a downtown No. 2 train Monday morning in an Eli Manning jersey and a dark blue Giants cap. By Mr. Majors’s lights, the great enjoyment of the game revolved around a single word: “surprise.”