The Best Economic Indicator Since Housing Starts Turns Out To Be The Lincoln Town Car

Market watchers have a new economic indicator — the number of Lincoln Town Cars idling in front of banking industry offices in Lower Manhattan. And if you don’t feel like counting, the next best thing is the mood of the ornery cranks on Community Board 1:

Every community activist feels that his neighborhood has too much of something. Too many strip clubs. Too many curb cuts. Too many liquor stores. Too many warehouses. In Battery Park City, circa 2006, the problem just happens to be a little more upscale — too many Lincoln Town Cars.

Call it black-car blight.

To wit: Paul Goldstein, the district manager of the local community board, says that he regularly fields phone calls from Battery Park residents who are fed up with the unseemly sight of so many seemly vehicles.

“In the evening hours, we end up with loads of these vehicles staging all over the district,” says Goldstein. “We get complaints about them. Now that we have more and more residents in the neighborhood, they are not thrilled with these vehicles popping up everywhere.”

Linda Belfer, the chair of the community board’s Battery Park City committee, can readily tick off a list of the black-car transgressions. They double park. Triple park. Congest the streets. Run their engines. Pollute the sky. Park illegally. Block emergency vehicle routes.

. . .

Every work night, the clusters of black cars congregate at certain predictable spots, including Vesey Street (outside Merrill Lynch and American Express), Wall Street (outside Deutsche Bank), and Liberty Plaza (outside of Scotia Bank, the bank of Nova Scotia). In short, anywhere there are bankers.

As it turns out, the economy seems to be chugging along nicely:

On a recent Tuesday night, local resident Jim Vail is out walking his dogs alongside the esplanade in Battery Park City. As he strolls along the empty sidewalks, he passes a black Lincoln Town Car, idling at the curb. A few steps later, he passes another. Then another, and another.

At roughly the same time, a few hundred feet away, a Town Car pulls up in front of the Merrill Lynch headquarters on the north side of the World Financial Center. From there, the caravan of black cars stretches back down the block, past a movie theater, around a corner, past a hotel, around another corner, past the Irish Hunger Memorial, around one final corner, and past the tree where Vail’s dog has just taken a whiz.

Vail hardly seems to notice the 50 or so Town Cars, the smattering of well-tinted SUVs, and two stretch limousines. Just part of the backdrop of Battery Park City. “They could be more observant of stop signs,” says Vail. “Otherwise I don’t think they’re doing much harm.”

Ultimately, the invisible hand of the marketplace may have a greater impact on the fate of man and black car in and around the financial district than the outcry of neighbors less sanguine than Vail. In the aftermath of the ’87 stock market crash, for instance, many black-car companies simply went belly-up.