“Low-Revenue Loafing”

The Times goes a long way in investigating a pet peeve of ours: the conspicuous weekday idling of the idle rich:

New York is a city of professionals and predawn discipline, an empire meant to be conquered not by wanderers but by the lusty achievement of the hyperemployed. Languorous weekday afternoons are the province of those deemed to be lacking in power.

Still, a fair portion of the city’s employable population can be found, midweek, far from any office, whiling away the hours in restaurants and cafes. Unlike the corps of freelance writers with their laptops, these loiterers do not appear to be engaged in any income-producing work. Call them flâneurs, if you want to romanticize them with a French name. Some are princes of leisure, who clearly have never learned that a bank account may approach zero. Others are conscientious objectors to the rat race, who have decided that their personal freedom is worth more than the compromises that might gain you a flat-screen TV.

All of them – superrich, rich or merely upper middle class – have somehow inoculated themselves against the fiscal anxiety that drives most unemployed people to try to get a job. And they have enough disposable income to afford the minimum entry (a cup of coffee) into one of the precious places that allows low-revenue loafing.

The Times identifies three categories of Loafer: the sons & daughters of the superrich, who really should hide themselves; American Dream-worthy refugees from the rat race who live off of earned income, e.g., the fortunate beneficiaries of the 1990s tech bubble; and unlikely retirees, generally those who put in excrutiatingly long hours in their 20s and 30s in order to walk away from it all in their 40s.

Hearty big-cheer props to the Times for looking a little deeper into this — next stop, the trendy outer-borough cafes which I continue to scratch my head over when I see them packed in the middle of the day.

Too Much Disposable Income!

In case we needed another example of why the superrich have too much disposable income, producers announced plans to turn Adam Sandler’s “The Wedding Singer” into a Broadway musical. For once, the Times is appropriately snarky:

In the history of Broadway, it is the names of composers that echo in the ether: Cole Porter. Stephen Sondheim. And now, Adam Sandler.

That’s right. If all goes forward as planned, Mr. Sandler, the star of popular teenage films like “The Waterboy” and “Billy Madison” and the composer of the holiday-themed “Hanukkah Song,” will soon be represented on the Great White Way in a new musical version of his 1998 movie, “The Wedding Singer.”

The producers of the show, including Margo Lion (“Hairspray”), said yesterday that they planned to open the show on Broadway next April after a tryout run at the 5th Avenue Theater in Seattle. And while Mr. Sandler’s exact role is still being worked out, Ms. Lion said that two of the film’s original songs, composed by Mr. Sandler with Tim Herlihy, will be part of the stage version.

Ms. Lion, who hit gold with “Hairspray,” set in 1960’s Baltimore, said she suspected that “The Wedding Singer,” set in 1980’s New Jersey, would touch a similar chord with audiences.

“The real appeal of this was that like ‘Hairspray,’ it takes place in a very specific time and place,” she said. “Plus, we can finally say we’re doing a show for all the good people who live in New Jersey.”

A surprise hit on screen, “The Wedding Singer” tells the story of a brokenhearted, mullet-headed crooner (played in the film by Mr. Sandler) who falls for a woman who already has a fiancé. Much hilarity ensues.

Tribe: Plaza Grandstanding Unconstitutional

You know you’ve got trouble when Constitutional whiz Laurence Tribe (who on an admittedly imperfect liberal-conservative axis is like the polar opposite of, say, Antonin Scalia) says your bill is likely unconstitutional:

One of the nation’s leading constitutional scholars is scheduled to testify today that a bill aimed at halting the conversion of The Plaza hotel to condos is illegal.

“I started with an open mind,” said Harvard University Professor Laurence Tribe. “I was retained to do an analysis. I have concluded it’s unconstitutional.”

The legislation would prevent hotel owners from converting more than 20 percent of their rooms to condos or co-ops.

Tribe, one of the nation’s foremost authorities on the Constitution, performed the analysis for Elad Properties, which wants to convert part of the hotel to condos.

At the behest of the hotel workers union, the City Council is considering a bill that would ban such conversions except in cases of financial distress.

Tribe will testify before the council’s Economic Development Subcommittee today.

Tribe said in an interview that the council’s action amounts to the taking of private property by a government body, for which there must be just compensation.

“Here, there is no compensation, and that’s what makes it unconstitutional,” he said.

Will this stop the Council from moving ahead with the bill and wasting everyone’s time and money? Probably not . . . but at least they can tell the unions they tried!

Coney Island Mall

Shopping mall developer speculates on real estate along the Coney Island Boardwalk, Joey Clams out by the end of summer, Applebee’s to open in its place?

Reaganomics Takes Manhattan

New York Magazine’s Daniel Gross wants us to believe that there is a trickle-down effect of “ridiculous wealth”, and sommeliers all over the city should be counting their lucky stars.

Point taken — rich bastards spend absurd amounts of money propping up an absurd service economy, but I’m skeptical. Doesn’t the housing market — one in which a frightening number of New Yorkers spend more than 50 percent of their income on — quickly become unaffordable as average housing prices rise? To be sure, it’s part of their “to be sure” paragraph:

Before we get too carried away in enumerating all the great gifts New Yorkers humbly receive from the very rich, let’s admit some limits. The ever-climbing cost of living hits us all. It’s not just the price of apartments; everything from sneakers to a jug of milk costs more here and prices are rising fast. The Consumer Price Index in New York City has been growing at a 30 percent greater clip than the national rate. For the vast majority of people, inflation cuts directly into their standard of living.

As for real estate, if this boom does turn into bubble, the really rich will be bummed, but they’ll disappear for a week to St. Barts and return good as new. People with mortgages they can barely swing—like those three-year, fixed-rate, interest-only “deals”—could be wiped out.

But it’s inescapable. Of course rich people make our lives better — they fix Central Park, they contribute to MoMA, they subsidize two operas (take that, L.A.!). So on behalf of the squeezed middle class all over the city, thank you for helping us eke out a living.