Grandstanding (Or, What Not to Say to a Bunch of Angry Ironworkers)

Mayoral hopeful Anthony Weiner convened a press conference to outline his ideas for the city’s future only to be met by a counterprotest from a group of ironworkers looking for work, in a manner of speaking:

Ironworkers crashed a news conference of mayoral hopeful Anthony Weiner held on the steps of City Hall yesterday, taunting the congressman over his opposition to the planned West Side stadium.

“Tony, Tony!” they shouted over and over. “Stadium yes, Weiner no!”

Weiner scheduled the event to issue a booklet spelling out his campaign of “ideas.” But most of the press questions focused on his opposition to the Bloomberg-backed Manhattan stadium plan.

Weiner wants the stadium to be built in Queens, near Shea Stadium.

Short of having my personal life exposed for all to see by the Post, the second worst thing I can imagine is to be bumrushed by a bunch of pissed off union guys. I live in fear that inflatable rat:

Still, it wouldn’t occur to me in a million years to try to drown them out with an alternative chant, as apparently happened with Representative Weiner:

After his news conference, Weiner tried to speak to the demonstrators, who repeatedly drowned him out with chants of “Build it now!”

He answered with chants of “Jets in Queens, Jets in Queens!” before giving up.

“Jets in Queens.” Hmm, has a ring to it. Not! Dude, they tried that already!

A Bubble of Participatory Narcissism That It Will Be Pitiable to Have Missed

The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl weighs in on The Gates:

Those who deplore “The Gates” as ugly aren’t wrong, just poor sports. The work’s charm-free, synthetic orange hue—saffron? no way—is something you would wear only in the woods during deer season, in order to avoid being shot. The nylon fabric is sullen to the touch. The proportions of the arches are graceless, and dogs alone esteem the clunky bases. As for the sometimes heard praise of the work for framing and, in the process, revealing unsuspected lovelinesses of the Park—C’mon, people! You don’t need artificial aids to notice things. “The Gates” does trigger beauty when, as on the aforementioned Sunday afternoon, a low sun backlights the fluttering fabric, which combusts like stained glass in a molten state. This effect lasts all of about two seconds—the time span suggested in the observation of the art historian Kenneth Clark that we can enjoy a purely aesthetic sensation for only as long as we can keenly savor the smell of a fresh-cut orange. (Yes, he said an orange.) “The Gates” succeeds precisely by being, on the whole, a big nothing. Comprehended at a glance, it lets us get right down to being crazy about ourselves, in a bubble of participatory narcissism that it will be pitiable to have missed.

I don’t have a problem with that reading of it!

Administrative Note: Remember “A bubble of participatory narcissism that it will be pitiable to have missed” for future reference!

That’s “Smells” In a Good Way (I Think)

The Times takes glee in noting that NYC2012 planners kept IOC members on a short leash in Queens:

Since the International Olympic Committee’s evaluation commission arrived in New York on Sunday night, organizers of the city’s Olympic bid have constantly reminded commissioners and their news media entourage that one of the city’s strongest selling points in trying to land the 2012 Games is its ethnic diversity. That Olympic ideal, they insist, could well catapult the melting pot of New York over its four rival cities also bidding for the Games.

But yesterday, when the news media followed in the footsteps of the tour arranged for commission members, the sights and smells of Queens, the city’s most diverse borough, were a bit hard to detect.

The organizers of the city’s Olympic bid claim that the commission was on a tight schedule. The Times acknowledges that they did get to “set foot” on some part of the borough, though not the Times’ conception of what constitutes typical Queens:

The I.O.C. and its news media entourage managed to set foot on a street for a few moments, after they were bused to Long Island City and let off at the Avalon, a luxury high-rise next to the site where the proposed Olympic Village would be built.

The guests were quickly taken up to a $6,500-a-month duplex with sweeping views of the city and the proposed athletes’ village site, on the East River across from Midtown.

Finally, the obligatory “submitting to sumptuous spreads” paragraphs — part reporting, part confessional (including props, well deserved, to the Waterfront Crabhouse!):

Aware that a good press corps travels on its belly, organizers have made sure that all tours and presentations include free food and drink. And indeed, many of the reporters and photographers seem content to be herded into hermetically sealed tours of New York and to submit to sumptuous spreads with the eagerness of a decathlete chugging Gatorade.

Organizers have also presented a smorgasbord of former Olympians from around the world to testify that the Olympics and New York City are a match made on Mount Olympus.

At lunchtime, the news media contingent was ushered into the Waterfront Crab House in Long Island City, where it dined on filet mignon, wine, pecan pie and coffee, and listened to Bill Bradley, the former senator and Knicks star. Revising an ad slogan for New Jersey, he called New York and the Olympics “perfect together.”

The Gates As Massive Trickle-Down Economic Engine

This story in the Times’ City Section might be the best one about Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Gates Project — “Apricot Fabric Plus Gray Panes Turns Squeegees Into Bits of Gold”:

Patrick Shields, a residential window cleaner in Manhattan, was just settling into his annual winter break in late January when the phone began ringing off the hook. At first he couldn’t account for the volume of calls for his services, but then he spotted a pattern: all the customers, many of them anxious, lived on streets bordering Central Park.

It was then that Mr. Shields realized that he was personally reaping the vaunted economic benefits of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s public art project “The Gates.” And Mr. Shields has been hanging out at high-rise apartments ever since, earning unaccustomed profits by wielding his suddenly in-demand squeegee on more than 200 windows along Central Park West, Fifth Avenue and Central Park South.

“This is two grand in my pocket that I never make this time of year,” Mr. Shields said between jobs the other day. “And what’s most interesting to me, in terms of the importance people give ‘The Gates,’ is that in a lot of cases I’m cleaning windows that aren’t that dirty and don’t really need it, but they want to get a good clean shot at this thing.”

Other window washers report a similar surge in business around the park’s periphery.

“We’re probably doing at least 50 windows a day around the park,” said Richard Kulzer, owner of Frank’s Window Cleaning Company, which specializes in Yorkville and the Upper West Side. “Increases in those locations could be a hundred percent over normal. And there’s an increased urgency: the sooner the better.”

See, we told you it’d have an economic impact!

Saturday Night Fever Club Closing

You might be surprised to hear that the Bay Ridge club where the dance scenes in Saturday Night Fever were filmed finally closed last week. Yes, it still existed!

The Times has a piece in Sunday’s City section about how pieces of the club’s famous floor are being auctioned on Ebay:

In front of the closed dance club at 64th Street and Eighth Avenue in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, a red velvet rope lies in a trash bin, an echo of a legendary place and era.

The velvet rope is a remnant of Spectrum, which is being sold and which shut its doors a week ago. It was here in 1977, at a place then called 2001 Odyssey, that a white-suited John Travolta strutted across the lit-from-below dance floor and into cinematic history in “Saturday Night Fever.”

In the nearly three decades since, even as Asian immigration changed the face of a neighborhood that was once heavily Italian and Norwegian, the dance floor remained a constant, welcoming a diverse new generation of gay clubgoers along with those nostalgic for the movie and the disco era.

Jay Rizzo, who has owned the club since it became Spectrum in 1987, said the place was an especially popular stop for Europeans. “I guess it was on a list somewhere of things to see in New York,” he said. “They would take a cab from Manhattan just to see the dance floor, and of course we wouldn’t charge them.”

The wood-and-plexiglass floor was built specifically for the movie and remained essentially unchanged over the years. “The only things that were different were the light bulbs,” Mr. Rizzo said.

I can’t believe no one took the velvet rope as a souvenir! What exactly is the Museum of the City of New York there for if not for detritus like this?