You could call it an elevated train track that was converted into a park. Or you could conceive of it as an “urban catwalk,” if you prefer:
Gaspar Libedinsky, one of the High Line park designers, was all for the voyeurism: “It is like an urban catwalk. It is a place to see and be seen.”
Location Scout: High Line.
Buried in the reaction to Cintra Wilson’s gratuitously obnoxious Critical Shopper piece about J.C. Penney in today’s Public Editor column is this admission exposing the Thursday Styles section for the sleazy high-end advertising vehicle that it is:
Wilson told me she usually writes about “obscure stores that don’t exist outside of Manhattan,” and she thinks of her audience as “1,300 women in Connecticut and urban gay guys in Manhattan.” She said it was “kind of provincial of me” not to realize how big The Times was and how her audience would expand when she reviewed a store like Penney’s. She said she also thought she hit a raw nerve with people already disposed to think of The Times as disconnected and unsympathetic. “It was dumb on my part not to see this coming,” she said.
But give bonus points to Wilson for ripping on Connecticut ladies in the process . . .
JC Penney opens in Manhattan, much to the consternation of fashion writers:
Why would this perennially square department store bother to reanimate itself in Manhattan — in the sleekest, scariest fashion city in America — during a hair-raising economic downturn, without taking the opportunity to vigorously rebrand itself? Why would this dowdy Middle American entity waddle into Midtown in its big old shorts and flip-flops without even bothering to update its ancient Helvetica Light logo, which for anyone who grew up with the company is encrusted with decades of boring, even traumatically parental, associations?
. . .
It took me a long time to find a size 2 among the racks. There are, however, abundant size 10’s, 12’s and 16’s. The dressing rooms are big, clean and well tended. I tried two fairly cute items: a modified domino-print swing dress with padded shoulders by American Living (a Ralph Lauren line created for Penney’s) and a long psychedelic muumuu of a style generally worn by Rachel Zoe. Each was around $80; each fit nicely andlooked good. I didn’t buy either because I can do better for $80, but if I were a size 18, I’d have rejoiced.
And herein lies the genius of J. C. Penney: It has made a point of providing clothing for people of all sizes (a strategy, company officials have said, to snatch business from nearby Macy’s). To this end, it has the most obese mannequins I have ever seen. They probably need special insulin-based epoxy injections just to make their limbs stay on. It’s like a headless wax museum devoted entirely to the cast of “Roseanne.”
Where’s the gun? Here’s my head:
Our choice of words should be thoughtful and precise, and we should never talk down to readers. But how often should even a Times reader come across a word like hagiography or antediluvian or peripatetic, especially before breakfast?
. . .
Some entries seem self-referential: it’s no coincidence that a list of obscure and difficult words includes abstruse and recondite, not to mention solipsistic. And while many of these words may look like a foreign language, some actually are: sui generis, bildungsroman and my old friend schadenfreude all make appearances. And some entries just seem baffling: how did we end up using louche 27 times?
Oh my god . . . Adam Gopnik actually sounds like the way he writes:
Shameful confession: I have never driven a car and, ever-longer odds are now, never will. On summer holidays I sit beside my wife, trying to look like a man who had his license suspended for compulsive, if entertaining, speeding. How this came about is a long story, involving a life spent only in city blocks and city flats and city sneakers, not to mention a bad case of odd wiring and jumpy coordination.
. . . is a New Yorker writer with a bicycle:
The Greenway is especially well suited to bicyclists, who, if they are moderately fit and don’t blow a tire on a broken apricot-brandy bottle, can cover the entire distance in a single leisurely morning or afternoon. Biking the Manhattan shoreline turns the city inside out, and gives the cyclist firsthand answers to questions that often stump even lifelong residents, such as: are there any decent places in Manhattan to go rock climbing, and what the heck do they keep under the Henry Hudson Parkway? Perhaps you yourself rode the Greenway on a recent, spectacular Friday afternoon, beginning and ending at the Battery, where, when you started, a man wearing a broad-brimmed hat was baiting a fishhook with a half-dollar-size crab, which he had selected from a joint-compound bucket at his feet.
*Fuck the circumflex — pour it into my hand!
The posh Yale Club in Midtown is fast becoming a cheesy wedding hall, with old-money members complaining of steady invasions of crowds from such lowbrow places as The Bronx.
“It’s crappy,” said a woman who insisted The Post identify her only as “Mrs. Harrison DeSilver.”
“I just want to put my feet up here, but instead, weddings are being shipped down from The Bronx,” groused DeSilver, a member for 50 years.
“On the weekends, it just gets ridiculous.”
DeSilver said the majority of the weddings at the club seem to involve people from The Bronx.
If they let people in more often, maybe they’d see they’d get better press than the occasional Anheuser-Busch local reax story:
Local lore has it that Budweiser is, or at one point famously was, the drink of choice in Breezy Point, a flyspeck of a beach community that sits at the western tip of the Rockaways. The talk is that Breezy Point’s ZIP code — 11697 — once had the highest per capita consumption of Budweiser in the world.
And so it was with bitterness, and resignation, that many Breezy Point locals met the news on Monday that Anheuser-Busch, the St. Louis-based maker of Budweiser, was to be sold to a Belgian company for $52 billion.
“I don’t like it, I don’t like it a bit,” Mr. Dooley said. Then he raised his empty glass, which the bartender, Tom Coady, promptly refilled.
Breezy Point is overwhelmingly Irish-American, with an official year-round population of 4,226, a figure that is estimated to more than double in the summer. It is also fiercely insular, a private community that is run as a cooperative with its own security force.
A reporter and a photographer, setting out to gauge local reaction to Anheuser-Busch’s sale on Monday, were intercepted by a security guard at the community’s tiny shopping plaza, escorted back to the bungalow that houses Breezy Point’s security headquarters (along with several boxes of Budweiser cans confiscated from local teenagers), and tersely told to leave town. Officials later relented, and gave the reporter and photographer the go-ahead, so long as they promised to leave within the hour.
One hour, as it turned out, proved to be enough time to capture at least a fleeting sense of the devoutness instilled in the people of Breezy Point: They are as committed to their favorite beer as they are to their privacy. They would continue drinking Bud, they said, so long as its price and taste stayed the same.
It wouldn’t be a Times article if it weren’t dripping with condescension, so slippery when wet:
Tens of thousands of people flocked to Central Park on Saturday to cheer on not only their favorite, oft-ridiculed rock band, but their favorite, oft-ridiculed state: New Jersey.
They crossed the Hudson River from Jersey City, Franklin Township and other parts of New Jersey to attend a free concert by Bon Jovi, the rock group from the Garden State that once released an album titled, simply, “New Jersey.”
“I would say 98 percent of the state loves Bon Jovi,” said Cheryl Vergara, 33, an administrative assistant from Clifton, N.J., one of thousands of people in a line that stretched for about 15 blocks on Fifth Avenue alongside the park on Saturday afternoon as they waited for the entrance at East 72nd Street to open.
. . .
On Saturday, about two hours before the concert began, Mr. Bon Jovi, wearing sunglasses, and three of his bandmates sat on a bench outside their dressing room trailer and answered questions from reporters about scalpers (”We did what we could for our fans,” he said), their set list (”Nothing but hits, baby”) and the experience of playing Central Park.
“It feels fantastic,” Mr. Bon Jovi said. “It’s pretty rarefied air to play the Great Lawn.”
And since when is it OK to use the term “guido”? I had no idea:
Making my first trip to the Jersey shore, rattling along the ol’ local North Jersey coast line, felt a bit like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. I was journeying farther than civilization’s reach, in search of something mysterious, powerful, awe-inspiring. In short, I hoped to glimpse the mighty and legendary Guido.
Okay, forgive the melodrama, but my New York friends did a good job of hyping this stereotype. “Asshole Jersey folk are cheesy and rude,” they warned, adding that “they have a name for people like you too: Bennys.”
For a Londoner, this sounded all too familiar. Jersey translated to me as Essex. Always in London’s shadow, also by the coast and populated by shirtless lads who love to pound the daylights out of each other, Essex natives tend to be drunk off their heads on luminous-colored alcopops while dancing to some primal beat. To be avoided at all costs. This Jersey voyage promised to bring all of my cowardice flooding out. Thus, when I passed a pack of Guido-looking guys outside a summer house recently in Belmar, I quickened my pace and looked straight at the pavement. Except soon I was unsure of my bearings (I was looking for a place called Bar A), and these guys’ beer-strewn yard made me think they would know the location of virtually every bar on the Shore (they did), so I doubled back and approached with caution.
Within a few minutes, I was kicking back in a deck chair and shooting the breeze with beer in hand.
. . .
I also got to witness the famed (yet still inexplicable) pride. “Jersey’s great, I love Jersey,” one declared. And at that moment, I couldn’t help but agree. So as I said goodbye to my new Guido friends, I’d like to think I bid farewell to some lazy stereotypes as well.
Oh, what I would give for a stronger dollar . . .
Carpetbagging hedonists are disappointed to find that the South Bronx doesn’t really offer the libertine atmosphere they expected:
Some creative types streaming across the Harlem River in search of the city’s “next” neighborhood are starting to find their new home to still be more South Bronx than “SoBro.”
At least that’s artist Emily Stedman’s conclusion after her show, “Erotic Watercolors,” was pulled off a neighborhood gallery’s walls when patrons at adjacent restaurant deemed it offensive.
“I expected it to be an anything goes, sky’s-the-limit, open kind of place,” said Stedman, 59, who left her loft in TriBeCa for Mott Haven in December after tiring of hearing people at gallery openings talk more about real estate prices than art on the walls.
“I’ve been in New York a long time and there’s always a neighborhood where people move to — a Williamsburg or a Long Island City, and it seemed like Mott Haven was going to be the next place. I don’t know if that is still going to happen.”
Her show features soft watercolors of couples or threesomes in various states of embrace. The opening earlier this month at the Bruckner Gallery attracted dozens of art patrons.
But the owner of the Bruckner Bar and Grill, a hip new dining spot which owns the gallery, ordered the show to come down after some of the neighborhood old guard — who rented out the space for golden wedding anniversaries and the like — considered the paintings pornographic.
“A lot of young people have moved here, but you still have a lot of old timers coming in for parties or what not,” said Alex Abeles, the bar’s owner. “We didn’t want to take it down but you could see that it collided with the ideas of people.”
Stedman, who has shown at the Brooklyn Museum and at galleries in Chelsea, said she was shocked that the show was closed, and added that it was hard to imagine something like it happening in Manhattan or Brooklyn.
The City Section takes on spirituality and nail salons in one article:
As noon approached on a recent Sunday, the mostly Jamaican congregation of New Life Tabernacle gathered in its small storefront on White Plains Road in the Wakefield section of the north Bronx. Women in elaborate, wide-brimmed hats and men in dark suits filled six rows of pews and two dozen wooden chairs. The pastor’s wife, Paulette Randall, wearing a violet dress and holding a microphone, stood before the congregation.
“Is your soul right with God?” she asked the crowd of about 60, her voice exploding into the microphone. “That is the question.”
. . .
If this were not enough spiritual fervor for one block, worship at three more storefront churches was also about to begin. As the afternoon wore on, the worshipers became increasingly ardent, cries of hallelujah turned to shrieks, and White Plains Road between 239th and 240th Streets, home to seven houses of worship in all, throbbed with the ardor of believers readying their souls to meet their maker.
The abundance of churches in Wakefield is not limited to this block, which sits opposite a desolate strip of auto body shops. Amid the retail stores on the two-mile stretch of White Plains Road that runs from 240th Street south to East Gun Hill Road, there are about 30 storefront churches.
While the faithful often attribute the proliferation of churches to the will of God, a few earthly factors help explain their numbers in this particular part of the Bronx.
Starting in the 1970s, in a trend echoed throughout much of the city, Wakefield was plagued by crime that drove many of the neighborhood’s residents, among them large numbers of Italian and Irish families, to the relative safety of the suburbs. In response to their departure, many of the butcher shops, travel agencies, pharmacies and other small businesses along White Plains Road closed, leaving behind empty storefronts.
During the 1980s, immigrants from the Caribbean began replacing residents who had left. The immigrants brought with them faiths like Pentecostalism, and they established fledgling churches in the cheapest and most convenient places they could find, the White Plains Road storefronts widely available at low rents.
The houses of worship do not, however, inspire praise from all quarters.
. . .
While the churches offer their members spiritual reinforcement that helps them endure life’s trials, some neighbors view the sheer number of houses of worship with exasperation.
“There are too many churches,” Mario Ferrante, the gray-haired owner of Fairbanks Lumber and Home Center, said one recent afternoon as he stood outside his lumber yard, flanked on either side by a church. “How many gods are there?” he asked with a shrug. “How many popes?”
Donna Stewart, owner of Salon Express, a business sandwiched between two storefront churches, would agree. “Business could be better,” said Ms. Stewart, who was working near four hair dryers that sat dormant. “If we had other kinds of businesses around, we’d have more people walking by.”
According to Ingrid Gould Ellen, a director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University, there may be some truth to this claim. “They fail to attract the 24/7 street traffic so critical to urban retail,” she said of the churches, which are typically shuttered most days. “Retailers want to be around other retailers.”
Yet there are other reasons business could be better here. Nail and hair salons, seemingly immune to laws of supply and demand, are in oversupply on White Plains Road, and shoppers seeking more options head north to malls in the nearby suburbs. And on this particular block of White Plains Road, auto body shops and a New York City Transit yard add to the desolate mood.
I guess storefront churches are to the Bronx what banks are to Manhattan . . .
Next we can start talking about those service delays that brought this on in the first place:
It was nearly hidden on a New York City Transit public service placard exhorting subway riders not to leave their newspaper behind when they get off the train.
“Please put it in a trash can,” riders are reminded. After which Neil Neches, an erudite writer in the transit agency’s marketing and service information department, inserted a semicolon. The rest of the sentence reads, “that’s good news for everyone.”
Semicolon sightings in the city are unusual, period, much less in exhortations drafted by committees of civil servants. In literature and journalism, not to mention in advertising, the semicolon has been largely jettisoned as a pretentious anachronism.
. . .
Louis Menand, an English professor at Harvard and a staff writer at The New Yorker, pronounced the subway poster’s use of the semicolon to be “impeccable.”
Lynne Truss, author of “Eats Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation,” called it a “lovely example” of proper punctuation.
Geoffrey Nunberg, a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, praised the “burgeoning of punctuational literacy in unlikely places.”
Allan M. Siegal, a longtime arbiter of New York Times style before retiring, opined, “The semicolon is correct, though I’d have used a colon, which I think would be a bit more sophisticated in that sentence.”
Sooner or later everything can be landmarked:
When New Yorkers talk about landmarking, they often think of genteel townhouses on tree-lined streets or distinguished cast-iron buildings. But concrete high-rises built in the 1960s?
Tuesday, the Landmarks Preservation Commission is expected to schedule hearings on preserving I.M. Pei’s Silver Towers, a modernist courtyard of concrete high-rises that towers above Greenwich Village.
“Even though this tower in the park superblock model was for the most part a failure, this was one of the most sensitive and well-designed ones,” said Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, which has pushed for protecting the structures for five years. “The complex weaves itself more sensitively into the neighborhood than most, and it is one of the few superblocks in the country designed by one of the greatest architects of his era.”
. . .
“A landmark is something that was built years ago, that is historical,” said a longtime local resident who would only give her name as Dorothy. She added that she has lived in tenements in the neighborhood “for 80 years.”
“They look presentable enough, sure, but what were they built, 30, 40, years ago? That doesn’t sound like a landmark to me.”
One way to make people feel stupid is by forcing them to look up five-dollar words you use in a lede*:
Look for Mayor Bloomberg’s limerence with running for president to fade away as Super Tuesday’s votes are counted tomorrow night if they show Senator McCain as the presumptive Republican nominee.
You are not just in love, you are limerent. This is a brand-new word made up by a University of Bridgeport psychologist, Dorothy Tennov, in her new book on romance, Love and Limerence. If you haven’t guessed it already, limerence is the ultimate, near obsessional form of romantic love. (Time Magazine, January 21, 1980)
But that’s not really the worst thing, which would be that apparently Bloomberg doesn’t have to actually decide not to run for several months, prolonging the citywide nightmare:
For those who believe they will wake up the day after Super Tuesday to hear Mayor Bloomberg making an announcement about his presidential plans — not so fast.
The billionaire independent may not make a decision for months and may even launch early-state petition drives to get his name on the ballot before fully committing to running, an associate says.
Doug Schoen, who was Bloomberg’s pollster in his mayoral campaigns, said Bloomberg operatives have spent the last several months preparing a nationwide ballot-access movement.
. . .
“This can play out over the next two to three months before he has to make a decision,” Schoen said.
*And if you’re going to use them, please at least use them correctly — Bloomberg may have a supersized billion-dollar ego, but I don’t get the sense that he’s obsessively infatuated — like a teenager — with the idea of being president . . .
Every so often it’s good to be reminded how self-obsessed people in Manhattan are. For example, Borough President Scott Stringer drawing a comparison between NYU’s occupation of Greenwich Village and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank:
Eager to cool its often rancorous relations with its neighbors in Greenwich Village — and to pave the way for its next 25 years of expansion — New York University has agreed to try to push some of its expansion farther from its central core, to consult the community when it designs new space and to develop policies to relocate tenants when they must be moved because of university construction.
The agreements are part of an unusual accord that the university has hammered out over the past year with many of its fiercest critics, including public officials and community leaders. The planning principles, which are aimed at making the university’s growth smoother and less disruptive, are to be unveiled on Wednesday by university officials and other members of a task force that drew them up.
“The county and N.Y.U. have been in turmoil for well over 20 years,” said Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president who led the task force that shaped the accord. “This is the first joint announcement ever. Like the Israeli peace plan, I can’t guarantee that there will be peace. But this is definitely N.Y.U. changing direction.”
In case you ever doubted your parenting skills, there is new reason to worry:
The Goldbergs live on the top floor of a rent-stabilized building on Broome Street. The loft is airy and neat, with tall ceilings and skylights. Alex’s father, Richard, gut-renovated the place himself when he first moved in, in the early seventies. He now works as a wine consultant and has just uncorked a bottle of Côte du Rhône. He pours a glass for Alex’s mother, Robin, dressed in skinny jeans and a designer blouse, as they sit down to talk about their son.
Alex is “a phenomenon,” says Robin. “A self-made man.” She’s constantly surprised by how many people he knows. In California, a man recognized Alex from the salad line at Peasant. In the Hamptons, people ask, “Is that cool little kid your son?” Her trainer at the gym knows Alex; he bought shoes from him at NikeID. Occasionally, she even thinks about asking his help to get into places. “It’s cool,” she says. “He’s master of a universe that he’s created for himself.”
Richard credits Nolita for Alex’s development. “Look around,” he says. “Look at what and who Alex has at his disposal.” This is why Robin has worked to help keep the corporate intruders out of their neighborhood, at least as much as possible. Peasant will show him how to cook a goose; Starbucks won’t. “It’s hard to imagine Alex growing up the way he has anywhere else,” she says.
Robin worries, of course. She worries about “maintaining his childhood.” She worries that he’ll develop an inflated ego. And she worries that all the attention he receives for playing grown-up could lead to problems with other kids. While Alex does have friends his own age, like Julian Schnabel’s twin boys, Cy and Olmo, he can be a bit of a schoolyard bully. And earlier this year, Alex was temporarily suspended from school for calling his teacher a “dick” under his breath. His teacher needn’t have taken the comment personally. Alex curses at everyone, even his parents. “Like, he’ll be in the middle of the restaurant and say, ‘Fuck you, Dad.’ I mean, it’s crazy,” says Frank DeCarlo, the Peasant owner.
Richard and Robin try to discipline Alex about his language, but overall they’re lenient. In Miami, instead of grounding him for sneaking out, Robin let him hang out with the Delano crew all weekend. (At one point, Alex found himself chatting up three topless women on the beach. “He was literally surrounded by six grade-A Miami titties,” says Fernando Gil, a former “Page Six” reporter who met him there. “He was like a kid in a candy shop.”)
The Goldbergs don’t consider themselves a traditional family, and they’re proud of Alex’s precociousness and ingenuity. Richard is impressed when he goes to Knicks games with Alex and watches his son chat up Jay-Z and Beyoncé. He feels the same way when Alex calls from the golf course near his camp in Maine, asking him to send Cuban cigars by FedEx so he might bribe his counselors. Richard was never like that as a kid. He never had that uninhibited ability to create these kinds of opportunities. “All you really have to do is let him loose,” he says.
And for those of child-bearing age, a cautionary tale: Manhattan is better earned than learned.
Is Long Island City big for its britches? How about just big and it bitches? Battery Park City on the East River is starting to get picky about who it wants in the neighborhood:
A plan to build a six-story grad school dormitory and a 13-story residential tower across from the massive Queens West development in Hunters Point is meeting with stiff opposition from the local community board.
This month, the land use committee of Queens Community Board 2 unanimously voted to reject a Board of Standards and Appeals variance application for the dorm, which would house 220 CUNY Graduate School students, and the apartment tower, with a planned 169 units and ground floor retail.
“Dormitory housing in itself is transient housing at its best and offers no stability to the community. We believe that it is a detriment to the growth of Hunters Point,” said Board 2 Chairman Joseph Conley in a letter to the BSA.
But Howard Goldman, attorney for O’Connor Capital, the developer, said it is the dorm that is driving the project, which is slated to be located on 47th Ave. at Fifth St.
“Like many other institutions in the city, they [CUNY Graduate School] have a need for affordable housing for their graduate students,” he said.
The site, said Goldman, “seems like a good candidate because it is just across the river [from the Manhattan-based grad school] and relatively accessible by subway.”
Saying that he understood the community board’s “concerns about the size and density of the project,” nevertheless, the attorney said, the project’s neighbors are much bigger.
“The project is basically across the street from Queens West, where you have 30- to 40-story towers, and is one block south of a proposed high-rise development, Anable Basin, that has been in discussion for a couple years now,” he said.
Unfortunately, there are lies, damn lies, and elitists:
The Sunnyside Arch, on Queens Boulevard at 46th/Bliss Street, below the No. 7 elevated station, is perhaps an object only Sunnyside could love; therefore, Sunnyside might be forced to defend it against the Municipal Art Commission of the City of New York, which evidently wishes it would fall apart or be torn down.
At the November luncheon meeting of the Sunnyside Chamber of Commerce, Joseph Conley, chairman of Community Board 2, told the chamber members he had recently attended a commission hearing that looked into the case of the arch. Those who would preserve it have money in abeyance for needed repairs, but the Art Commission, which has existed since the consolidation of the city in 1898, must approve of such repairs. Conley said that the Art Commission had nothing but disdain for the arch, and suggested that those interested in preserving it should get an artist to redesign it. Somebody from the commission told him the arch should be more “kitschy” — a term he said he could not understand. And though the arch may be shabby at the moment, it is not dilapidated; the Department of Transportation inspected it, Conley said, and declared it “overbuilt”, so its basic structure is sound.
(They want more kitsch?)
Location Scout: Sunnyside Arch.
As Lady Macbeth might say, “Unsex me here”:
A production of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” will replace a hip-hop festival next summer in a DUMBO venue controlled by the Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy — and organizers of the rap show believe that race played a role.
The Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival — which brought thousands of people and big-name rappers to the park-and-condo waterfront development site in 2006 and 2007 — had already scheduled its 2008 production for the weekend of June 22.
But organizers were shocked last month to discover that the Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy had given those days to St. Ann’s Warehouse to stage a Polish rendition of that Scottish play.
Festival organizers believe the move was racially motivated.
“Hip hop brings a lot more brown people to this neighborhood, and people who live here are not comfortable with it,” said Wes Jackson, whose Room Service Production founded the festival in 2005.
“[People have told me that residents say], ‘The festival should be in Commodore Barry Park between the projects and the BQE, not next to my $2.5-million condo.’”
Whether racially motivated or not, the rejection of the hip-hop festival sounds very much like the scenario long imagined by critics of Brooklyn Bridge Park, where condo and commercial development will finance greenspace along a 1.3-mile stretch from DUMBO to the foot of Atlantic Avenue. Opponents believe that public events will not be public at all, but subject to the whims of the wealthy condo-dwellers whose maintenance fees will pay for the park’s upkeep.
Again, lay off the “sixth borough” talk — spare hard-working Philadelphians your evil scheme to turn their city into the next Ridgewood:
“The vibe here,” said Shawn Hennessey, “is the jawn.” The 27-year-old musician gestured at the neon sign for Silk City, a club-cum-restaurant housed in an old dining car in the gentrifying Northern Liberties neighborhood.
“The jawn is a Philly word,” said Brian Nadav, Mr. Hennessey’s friend and bandmate. “It means ‘a good thing.’ It can be a noun, like you can say, ‘Yo, pass me that jawn’ or ‘I’m the jawn.’” But, he cautioned, “It is never a verb. You never say, ‘I jawned.’”
A pre-9/11 take on the Mets’ ineptitude:
As mortified fans watch the Mets fritter away their once-commanding grip on first place in the National League East, dread infects the city that it might be witnessing a collapse of unprecedented proportions. Even those who far prefer the Yankees can’t escape the fact that such a nose dive would be downright humiliating to New York.
How could they? How dare they?
John Glendinning, 53, a retired laborer from Brooklyn who goes by Whitey, is so agitated he can’t watch the games without losing his sense of civility. “I get too nervous,” he said. “I start throwing things at the wall.”
But, hey, calm down. Collapses happen.
Indeed, where would the city be without its grandiose collapses? The all-out falls from grace or riches or first place, or even a simple upright position, are a familiar and infuriating and perhaps even necessary part of the New York experience. And while collapses smart, they can also be spellbinding.
These breakdowns, of course, aren’t confined to baseball teams that suddenly forget how to hit or pitch, not to mention catch fly balls. They materialize in every aspect of life.
Roads collapse, stores collapse, financial markets collapse, egos collapse. They’ve all happened throughout New York’s history, again and again. During the 1975 fiscal crisis, in fact, the entire city just about collapsed.
Collapses can be aberrant or telling. They can reveal something about larger societal verities. Or they can be vacant of meaning — simply perversely breathtaking to watch.
Part of what makes these sour episodes so intriguing is the velocity at which they can happen. Part of what makes them so frightening is that they can upend our world, even cause us to root for a different team. People and institutions that we thought we knew and trusted to always be there are — poof — gone just like that.
Then again, one of the worthwhile things about collapses is that they allow the often pleasing challenge of recovery, which isn’t always that hard.
. . .
Infrastructure Collapses are pretty common: Walls go, roads go, especially when no one takes care of them. Thus in May 2005, a 75-foot-high retaining wall collapsed onto the Henry Hudson Parkway in Upper Manhattan, burying parked cars in mounds of debris and dirt. The road, at least, held. Not so in 1973, when an 80-foot section of the West Side Highway fell onto West Street near Canal Street.
No one was seriously injured in these collapses, but many New Yorkers worry a lot about pieces of the city falling apart.
Then again, Dan Doctoroff’s big reshape-the-untamed-city-like-Robert-Moses moment was always really more about getting rid of those pesky downmarket nail salons*:
The City Council overwhelmingly passed the largest rezoning in New York City’s history Monday, voting to radically reshape Jamaica in eastern Queens.
The 368-block plan, which spans across four councilmembers’ districts, allows for hotels and office towers in downtown Jamaica, permits six-story buildings along Hillside Avenue and restricts development in some residential areas.
“To have the biggest rezoning in the history of the city not be in Manhattan but be in Queens sends an important message,” said Council Speaker Christine Quinn, a major backer, along with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, of the new rules.
. . .
Supporters of the rezoning hope to transform Jamaica into a transportation and retail hub, taking advantage of its close proximity to the AirTrain and the Long Island Rail Road.
The neighborhood was once the city’s fourth largest shopping district, but has been transformed during the past three decades into vacant strip malls, discount stores, and nail salons.
Baseball people may be superstitious, but baseball writers are just out of control:
If a scholar of Norse mythology had been in the stands of Yankee Stadium on Tuesday night, he or she probably would have advised Yankees fans to not make too much out of the 5-3 victory against the Red Sox.
The result, after all, still left the Yankees trailing Boston by an imposing seven games in the American League East. But more significant, perhaps, was the pesky and distracting squirrel that scampered up and down the right-field foul pole during the game and that, according to Norse mythology, just might have foretold that the Yankees will not prevail over the Red Sox this season.
Believe it or not, the squirrel’s actions closely resembled those of Ratatosk, or “gnawing tooth,” a squirrel in Norse mythology that climbed up and down a tree that represented the world. Snorri Sturluson, an Icelandic scholar and poet, recorded the story in his 13th-century work “Prose Edda.”
As the story goes, Ratatosk carried insults as it traveled to opposite ends of the tree, fueling a rivalry between the evil dragon residing at the bottom of the tree and the eagle perched at the top.
. . .
The Yankees said the squirrel came down about 20 minutes after Tuesday’s game and was allowed to go on its way. It joins a cast of baseball creatures that includes the black cat that crossed in front of the Chicago Cubs’ dugout during their ill-fated pennant-race battle with the Mets in 1969 and the bird that Dave Winfield killed with a throw in Toronto in 1983.
I know it’s a good deal, but you never want to get to the point where you become “that guy”:
For twenty-two years, the photographer Josef Astor (no relation) has had a studio above the stage at Carnegie Hall. It’s on the eighth floor, although technically the eighth is below the seventh; to get to it you take an elevator to six and walk up half a flight of stairs. The Carnegie Hall Studio Towers, as these quarters over the concert hall are known, contain many such oddities, but they also harbor one Manhattan commonplace: a band of artist-occupants whose tenancy is venerable, tenuous, and probably doomed.
Astor is one of the leaders of the tenants’ association, which is fighting the landlord, the Carnegie Hall Corporation, which wants them all out. It intends to gut the building and make space for its own offices and programs. It has recently commenced eviction proceedings. The fifty or so artists who occupy the studios — most of them have been here for decades — contend that a provision in the lease between the corporation and the city, which owns the property, guarantees their right to stay.
Astor’s studio, with creaky wood floors, faces north; the indirect light, from a giant skylight, twenty feet overhead, is ideal for photography and painting. There is a balcony, with room for a bed, and a kitchenette. Last Wednesday, he’d arranged a dozen chairs—no one like the other — in a circle, in anticipation of a meeting, that evening, between some tenants, their lawyer (a woman named Ms. Boop), and local politicians, whose vaguely articulated sympathies they hoped to convert into tactical support. A Senegal parrot named Zoltan flew freely about the place. Astor ticked off the names of some of the studios’ former residents (Isadora Duncan, Agnes de Mille, Leonard Bernstein, Marlon Brando, Norman Mailer) and current ones (such as the ninety-five-year-old photographer Editta Sherman, known as the Duchess of Carnegie Hall, and the Times photographer Bill Cunningham, seen occasionally in the hall on his way to the showers) and evoked the days when the corridors were filled with the sounds of piano and clarinet.
. . .
Astor led the way up some stairs to the fourteenth floor, then across the building and down some more stairs to the eleventh, to a studio occupied by the writer and radio host Jonathan Schwartz, who was eating an avocado, under a framed print that read “AVOCADO.” He’d been in the space since 1970, having inherited it from his father, the composer Arthur Schwartz. “I represent Carnegie Hall when I’m out in the world,” he said. “I hope that’s not presumptuous.”
He lives here with his cat, Nelson (named after Nelson Riddle), and occasionally with his wife, whom he married in the building in 1984. The wedding was in Studio 906, which had belonged to Joe Raposo, who wrote music for “Sesame Street.” Wilfrid Sheed and Jerzy Kosinski had been there. “The party spilled out onto the landing,” he said. “We had a big glass bowl of caviar.”
The studio, full of books, CDs, and not much else, gave rise to that old misguided desire for a prison sentence that would afford a man the time to catch up on his reading. “That’s one of the points here,” Schwartz said. “There are dozens of studios like this in the building that have, if not this essence, then another like it. It’s not a conceit — it’s a feeling. To dislodge us is insulting.”
(Exit question: should a rent-control parasite admit that he’s also a “die hard Red Sox fan”? We’re coming for that songbook, Schwartz!)
Thank goodness consumers are still shallow enough to care about a Midtown Manhattan address:
Small business owners who want the cachet of a Manhattan address but can’t afford the real estate prices are increasingly looking to virtual office plans, forgoing big rents for small spaces in favor of leasing a mailbox, receptionist, and conference room when needed, all for about $300 a month.
When a public relations executive, Shirar O’Connor, wanted to start her own firm, she didn’t have the capital to find, furnish, and fully wire her own office, so she looked into a virtual plan. Within 24 hours, Ms. O’Connor had a Midtown Manhattan address, administrative support, and a desk should she need it.
“The Manhattan address was the logical decision for us,” Ms. O’Connor, whose firm, the Pont Group, specializes in economic development, said. “All the media is based in New York.”
The average price per square foot for commercial real estate in Manhattan is nearly $60, up from $44 last year at this time, according to the brokerage firm Cushman & Wakefield. Those high prices can quickly add up, forcing small businesses to think more creatively about maintaining their urban presence. As a result, firms that offer virtual office plans, such as the Regus Group, are sprouting up across the city.
. . .
Another firm, ManhattanVirtuals.com, advertises an assigned 212 area code phone number as part of its package deal. The traditional New York City code makes companies appear as if they were established in the city before 212 numbers became scarce, the firm’s managing partner, Kareem El-Heneidi, said.
To Ms. O’Connor, the virtual office setup has been a “godsend.” Her business cards advertise her Midtown address, even if her mail ultimately goes to her Putnam Valley home.
On the 30th anniversary of the 1977 blackouts, the City section buys a first-person account on the bootstrapping ethic of looting — otherwise known as “stealing”:
In Spanish Harlem back then, when I was 11 and living in a tenement on East 111th Street and Lexington Avenue, too many families were hungry, and too many fathers were unemployed and angry. And so when the lights went out that evening three decades ago this Friday, many of us were going to take what we wanted, and what we wanted most was what we needed.
Lucky G’s father did not have a criminal record, but like the looting housewives, he understood the needs of the neighborhood. I don’t remember his real name, but I knew his 12-year-old son Gilberto. Everyone called him G until one day Yvette Sanabria, one of the most beautiful girls in Spanish Harlem, fell in love with him, and from that day on he became known as Lucky G.
During the blackout, Lucky G’s father and his brother hot-wired a van to carry stuff away. But unlike most of the looters, who went after jewelry or electronics stores, Lucky G’s father and uncle followed the housewives and made for supermarkets.
If the housewives hadn’t gotten there yet and broken through the gates, Lucky G’s father would smash the hot-wired van right through supermarket windows. They loaded the van with entire aisles of Pampers, including the diapers in the stock room. They hit most of the supermarkets in Spanish Harlem, stopping only long enough to dump their booty before heading to their next target, hoping the housewives hadn’t yet cleaned out the place.
The following morning, there was not a diaper to be bought in the neighborhood. Word spread quickly as to who had Pampers and who didn’t. For weeks Lucky G’s father sold Pampers at discount rates. He made a killing.
But Pampers are just a gateway to Yemeni-esque ransom plots:
In the days following the blackout, I took a cue from Lucky G’s father and the other looters and began searching for an opportunity. There were no jobs for adults, let alone for a scrawny wannabe tough guy like me, so when the chance arrived in the name of dog-napping on the Upper East Side, I took it.
During the blackout of ‘77, the Upper East Side was left unscathed. With a bustling economy of its own, it was the destination for the mothers of many of my friends, who woke up every morning and took a bus to the Upper East Side to clean apartments for next to nothing. As a teenager, I’d see Upper East Siders walking down Fifth Avenue, young girls in summer dresses, young men in khakis and crisp white shirts. I dreamed of living their lives, in their buildings, in their neighborhoods. I wanted to know where they were going. What doorman building did they call home? What smoothly operating elevator carried them to lofty and wonderful heights?
Back then, I felt that the only advantage I had over the Upper East Siders was that I sensed their fear that the damage we had done to our neighborhoods during the blackout we would one day do to theirs.
Yet I knew one of their weak spots: Furry creatures they treat like children. As good as gold. We’d call our dog-napping forays hunting. “You want to go hunting?” I’d ask a friend. We would take a laundry bag and a folding knife with a six-inch blade and roam the swanky streets of the Upper East Side. We were on the lookout for small dogs leashed to lampposts while their owners were running an errand or inside a cafe drinking coffee. We would unleash the dog or cut the leash, stuff the dog in the laundry bag and run as if the devil were behind us.
We would take the dog home, feed him, walk him, groom him, and two or three days later, we would prowl the street where we had stolen the dog in the first place, looking for the reward fliers. When we found them, posted to a bus stop or lamppost or the window of a beauty salon, we would return to Spanish Harlem to get the dog and my 6-year-old cousin. I would practice the word “aimlessly.” My cousin’s job was to be the cute, innocent child who had become attached to the dog.
Then we would all dress up, comb our hair and return the dog. The dog usually lived in a doorman building, and the owner was usually a woman.
“Lady, is this your dog?” I would say. “We found him aimlessly wandering around. My little brother loves him, but when we found out he was lost, we brought him back.”
The woman would be so happy and would reach out to take the dog from my cousin, who in turn would hold onto the dog and start crying as if his mother had died in his arms.
“I’ll get you another one, one that looks just like that one,” I’d tell him. And right then and there, the woman would fork over the reward.
I ran this scam to get money to buy stuff I wanted — Pumas, jeans — and sometimes, if there was money left over, I’d help pay the phone bill. I ran this scam with precision and skill.
The period during the blackout and its aftermath was the most dishonest in my life, but I will never shy away from what I did in El Barrio.
In the ’70s, the city was a cold place, but its residents were far from defeated. In the ghettos we waited for daylight, and when that first luminous ray broke through the crack on the wall, like the restless people that built this city, we saw an opportunity and we took it.
We built this city on stolen pets!
All I know is that it’s taken far too long for O.J.’s “If I Did It . . .” conceit to catch on in popular culture:
Street artists have speculated for months about the identity of a mysterious figure who has become known as “the Splasher” because he or she hurled colorful blobs of paint at prominent pieces of art on exterior walls in Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan.
The only clues left behind in the paint assaults were bold manifestoes — phrases like “destroy the museums, in the streets and everywhere” — that appeared to critique the commercialization of art.
Now it appears that there may be more than one Splasher, and those claiming responsibility for the attacks have offered additional information about themselves.
One hint came Saturday night, when several people showed up at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery in Chelsea during a reception for the artist Shepard Fairey, who is known for his stenciled images of the wrestler Andre the Giant. They distributed a 16-page newsprint tabloid with the title, “If We Did It, This Is How It Would’ve Happened.” The cover was illustrated by a photograph of a piece of art by Mr. Fairey that had been splattered by paint.
Evidently Tom Finkelpearl still harbors some fantasy that MoMA will one day return:
When discussions ranking the boroughs of New York come down to numbers, Queens is near the top of many lists.
At 109 square miles, it is geographically the largest, and it is also the most diverse; 54 percent of residents speak a language other than English. Although second to Brooklyn in population, it is also home to the city’s tallest tree (the Alley Pond Giant at 133.8 feet), the most stations on the Long Island Rail Road (22) and the most historic chrome diners converted into Punjabi buffet restaurants (one).
But in recent months, a phrase has appeared in The Queens Tribune, a weekly newspaper, that suggests that Queens occupies only a fair to middling place in the citywide pecking order. The phrase is “third borough syndrome,” and the implication is that in terms of buzz and cachet, Queens is forever resigned to third place behind Brooklyn (recently hot) and Manhattan (traditionally hot).
In response, Queens boosters insist that the borough has other, less obvious charms.
“We feel like Queens is real New York,” said Tom Finkelpearl, executive director of the Queens Museum of Art, who is believed to have been the first person to use the phrase when he uttered it last year in a Tribune interview. “That middle-class aspect of Queens is one of the things that gives us that less exciting image.”
Mr. Finkelpearl does not accept the notion of Queens as a third-place place. His museum has emblazoned the borough’s name on T-shirts and infants’ onesies, for sale in the gift shop, to counter those shirts from elsewhere that say “Brooklyn” or “New York.” (Ideas like “Queens: We’re Number 3!” and “Come for the Airports and Stay for the Food” were considered but rejected.)
New Yorker profiles aside, it’s possible that Will Goldfarb is overestimating the public’s fascination with the way he desconstructs dessert:
Last week Will Goldfarb, who has a sliver of a restaurant in SoHo called Room 4 Dessert where he manipulates desserts the way Magneto does metal, said he was angling to take to the streets in a plexiglass-walled truck armed with a whirring fleet of high-tech Pacojet ice cream makers churning fresh batches every few minutes.
. . .
In addition to his see-through ice cream laboratory on wheels, Mr. Goldfarb has plans to open a virtual pastry shop called Mama Sugar in the online community Second Life. He also has plans for a children’s cooking show (his daughter, Loulou, will turn 3 this fall) and plans to write a cookbook on how to use Willpowders — his line of basic chemical building blocks of modern cooking, like sodium alginate and calcium chloride — at home.
