Daily News vs. The Post

Another New York Institution, inter-tabloid snarking, is on display today, this time the Daily News calling out the Post. Breaking News: The Post is Wrong!:

Rest easy, Brooklyn homeowners: Your investment is more than safe after all.

Despite a published report, prices for single-family homes across the borough are skyrocketing – as they are in other parts of the state – and not tanking, real-estate agents said.

“The demand for Brooklyn is hotter than it’s ever been,” said John Reinhardt, president and CEO of Fillmore Real Estate, which has 20 offices across Brooklyn.

. . .

A report by the New York State Association of Realtors found that prices for single-family homes in Brooklyn dropped a whopping 29% between 2002 and 2004, from $332,000 to $235,000.

The New York Post reported the decline and called Brooklyn’s supposed free fall “a notable – and unexplained exception” to the state’s thriving real estate market.

But Realtors’ agency spokesman Salvatore Prividera said the Post report was misleading. He said he explained to a Post reporter the Brooklyn data was incomplete and gave an inaccurate portrayal of the borough’s housing market.

The agency’s statistics were skewed because only 19 Brooklyn housing sales were reported to their organization in 2004, Prividera said.

By comparison, 12,642 home sales were reported for Suffolk County.

“We were disappointed that our explanation for the data – that we did report – was not adequately portrayed nor relayed to the [Post] readers,” Prividera said.

Post spokesman Howard Rubenstein declined to comment.

Bonus Point: The Post’s Gephardt Mistake

The Most Backwards State in the Union

Before you go off on how New York is so socially progressive that it needs to secede, and in the midst of the all the movement on gay marriage going on, remember that its laws still don’t provide for no-fault divorce, one those truly crazy Trouble-in-River-City Destroying-the-Fabric-of-Society things that, oh, like every other state in the country provides for!

Metropolitan Diary Shorthand

Nothing especially snarky to say about today’s Metropolitan Diary (What? Snarky — us? Never . . .) except that a deft turn of phrase in one of the anecdotes unwittingly (or perhaps wittingly — these New Yorkers, so meta and smart about shit like that!) reveals new shorthand for the feature itself: “All was right on East 88th Street.”

For posterity’s sake, here is the full anecdote:

Dear Diary:

I am the secretary at the Church of the Holy Trinity on East 88th Street, and on the Saturday of the recent blizzard I was helping with last-minute preparations for a party that evening for our departing interim rector. I was also worried that far fewer people than expected would come because of the snow and anticipated wind.

I stepped out on the porch of the parish house to take a breather and delight in the snow-covered dogwood and magnolia. Three corpulent (or very bundled) well-into-middle-age women came up the walkway. One was in a wheelchair. I was prepared to tell them that our Saturday Thrift Shop closed at 3:30, but they went away from the building, onto a path that even on good days is difficult: It is narrow, it has slate tiles, and it meanders. Why, I wondered, were they pushing a wheelchair on this path in this weather?

I got my answer when they stopped in front of a snow-covered bench. On the count of three, two of the women helped the one in the wheelchair up and plopped her on the snow- covered lawn. She sat upright for a couple of seconds, then lay down and started to make a snow angel, flapping her “wings.” After much giggling, the other two women helped back in her wheelchair. Then they plopped onto the lawn and made their angels. More giggling. Lots of it.

The snow kept falling. The people came to the party. All was right on East 88th Street.

Schwartz Chemical Company Building

A quick City Section story on the Schwartz Chemical Company Building (the former Pennsylvania Railroad Power Station) in Hunters Point yields some interesting details on the site’s development, for those who are interested in such neighborhoody things:

The Long Island City skyline has but a few jewels. One, the Citigroup tower, is a tall skyscraper of aqua glass. Another is the old Pennsylvania Railroad Power Station, a brick survivor from 1909 with four smokestacks that sits in the shadow of two new condo towers.

As this Queens neighborhood experiences a revival, newer residents have championed the area’s industrial past. Last year, a cafe on Jackson Avenue called Ten63 began selling shirts depicting the power plant, its smokestacks adopting the mantle of a neighborhood icon.

But recently, some intrepid Web surfers on queenswest.com uncovered an application for a permit filed last month by a developer calling for “demolition of all 4 existing chimneys” of the plant, a prelude to converting the building for residential use. Community reaction, on the whole, has not been positive.

“It would basically disfigure the building,” said Monte Antrim, a co-owner of Ten63 and an architect. “At that point it’s really a lump of bricks.”

Mr. Antrim, along with his wife and co-owner, Talitha Whidbee, has begun a postcard campaign to get landmark status for the plant. “It is a critical part of the aesthetic character of the neighborhood and an important part of its history,” said Paul Parkhill, co-director of the educational group Place in History.

Despite the hubbub over the apparent demise of the smokestacks, the developer of the project said on Friday that he had no such plans. “We have no intention to take down the smokestacks,” said Cheskel Schwimmer, vice president of CGS Builders, a Brooklyn firm. “We want to try to preserve the smokestacks as much as possible.”

The intention behind applying for the permit, he said, was to get permission to remove small pieces of the smokestacks and incorporate them into the design.

To that end, Mr. Schwimmer and the architect he hired, Karl Fischer, have produced a rendering that includes a cube of glass resting on top of the existing building and attached to the smokestacks, which would actually become part of the new building and be equipped with windows. “We will both reinforce the smokestacks and create good living space within the building,” Mr. Schwimmer said.

For the time being, he and Mr. Fischer, who was the architect for the renovated Gretsch Building in Williamsburg, are working with the city’s departments of buildings and city planning to get the cube design approved. In the meantime, it seems that the smokestacks, beacons of Queens past, will continue to point their brown spires into the sky.

Another Mystery Solved!

From time to time you may have asked yourself, “How does one raise the capital to open a store below 14th Street devoted to rice pudding?” I know I have!

But now we know the answer to another one of New York’s great mysteries: you don’t — instead, you open a store devoted to rice pudding in order to launder gambling profits:

A multimillion-dollar sports gambling ring – allegedly masterminded by a wealthy “rice pudding entrepreneur” – was sacked yesterday when authorities raided the operation just days before Super Bowl Sunday.

Taking individual bets of more than $10,000 on football and baseball games, the high-stakes ring raked in about $21 million a year, said Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota.

The lucrative operation was headed by Peter Moceo, 45, who lives in the luxurious Trump Tower and owns a chic eatery in NoLIta, prosecutors said.

Investigators seized $25,000 in cash at Moceo’s Spring St. pudding shop, Rice to Riches. But Spota said it wasn’t the rice that brought Moceo his riches.

“We have evidence that he used [gambling] proceeds to start up and actually run Rice to Riches,” Spota said.

The Post (which didn’t even have to embellish its self-evident headline, “Rice to Riches”) adds some details, including this great quote:

Residents living near Moceo’s Little Italy pudding shop said they thought there was something shady about the store, which opened in April 2003.

“Who the heck is going to get rich off rice pudding?” asked Ozbbel Baez, a local carpenter.

Boom! Another mystery solved, which again solidifies our theory that the only people able to succeed in New York are, in fact, just doing something illegal.

Bonus Points: “This Store Sells Rice Pudding. Nothing Else.” article (New York Times, April 2, 2003)