Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner In His, Uh, Colorful $150 Hoodie?

The Styles section attempts to write a story about “urban” “street styles” without referring to race, with varying results:

Scouring street-wear shops in downtown Manhattan on Saturday, Dimitri Viglis zeroed in on a hoodie he hoped would put some cool in his wardrobe. Mr. Viglis, a 23-year-old construction worker from Brooklyn, chose a black and purple style with a kinetic computer-graphic pattern by the label Orchard Street, a garment splashy enough, yet insulating enough, for a night on the town.

“Wear this,” he said contentedly, “and I won’t have to put on a heavy jacket while I wait on line at the clubs.”

He paid about $150 for his hoodie but would have parted with twice or even three times the price, he said. “Look at the quality,” he said, turning the cuff inside out to show its meticulous construction and stitching. Better yet, he said, he felt reasonably assured that he would not be seeing it on every Tom, Jamal and Harry.

Silver: That’s Oversight For MSG, Not For Kings

Sheldon Silver is eager to show that he doesn’t just block any major project:

A state oversight board voted yesterday to approve the Atlantic Yards project near Downtown Brooklyn, removing the last regulatory hurdle for one of the biggest real estate projects in the city’s history.

The vote by the Public Authorities Control Board capped three years of battles between opponents and supporters of the $4 billion project. The version approved yesterday — eight million square feet over 22 acres along Atlantic Avenue — includes a huge residential housing complex with about 6,400 market-rate and subsidized apartments, a basketball arena for the Nets, and a smattering of office space, with a design punctuated by elaborate towers that dwarf nearby residential neighborhoods.

The approval of Atlantic Yards, which would be built by Forest City Ratner Companies, came after several other ambitious development projects in New York City — like a West Side football stadium and the Moynihan Station, both in Manhattan — were rejected or stalled by community opposition and political rivalry. Atlantic Yards still faces two lawsuits, with more probably on the way, but Forest City officials say they are confident that they will prevail in court.

. . .

A once-sizable chunk of office space was given over to yet more apartments, to woo Brooklynites eager for housing, and to allay potential concerns by Mr. Silver that the project would compete with commercial properties in the speaker’s Lower Manhattan district.

On paper, the project grew to a peak of more than nine million square feet, before shrinking back to the roughly eight million square feet originally planned — a decrease that did little to mollify those residents and officials who said that the project had been far too big and dense from the beginning.

. . .

Opponents of the project strongly criticized yesterday’s decision.

“From the beginning, the project has been a public-private partnership in which the public has not been represented,” said Kent Barwick, president of the Municipal Art Society, part of a coalition of civic groups known as Brooklyn Speaks that had urged Mr. Silver to delay the project. “The vote today reflected a process that simply did not allow New Yorkers to shape the project, and the result is a plan that will not work for Brooklyn.”

Location Scout: Atlantic Yards.

They Find A Way To Replace All Mechanical Parking Meters With Cheat-Proof Computerized Models But Something Truly Useful — Computerized Subway Signals, Say — Is Still Like 40 Years Away

The last mechanical parking meter was taken out of commission yesterday, in a heavily attended ceremony:

The last New York City mechanical parking meter — an emblem of street life, object of driver frustration and source of fascination for children since 1951 — was withdrawn from service yesterday.

The demise of the mechanical meter was painless but not swift. Since 1995, when the city began using battery-powered digital meters and quickly found them to be more accurate, reliable and vandal-resistant than the older spring-loaded devices, the days of the mechanical meter have been numbered.

By the start of this year, the mechanical models made up only 2,000 of the 62,000 single-space meters in the city.

Yesterday morning, in a somber but unpretentious ceremony on the southwest corner of West 10th Street and Surf Avenue in Coney Island, Brooklyn, the last one was retired.

Fifteen employees of the City Department of Transportation watched as the meter was lifted out of its iron casing at 10:25 a.m. (The mechanical and digital meters both fit the same casing, which includes the transparent plastic display.) A new digital meter was slipped into its place, ready to take quarters.

“The world changes,” the transportation commissioner, Iris Weinshall, said by telephone. “Just as the subway token went, now the manual meter has gone.”

Ms. Weinshall admitted to a measure of nostalgia. “A lot of our employees feel very connected to these meters,” she said. “This type of meter will go into museums, just like other memorabilia of the city.”

Ms. Weinshall, 53, recalled that as a child in Midwood, Brooklyn, her father, a cabdriver, would use his taxi to run errands on weekends. “Whenever my father would park, it was really a thrill to put the coin in the meter and turn that little handle,” she said.

Yes, what a thrill.

In other news, the most prolific Times writer, like, ever again shows up his slacker colleagues by going the extra mile, as it were:

The first parking meter was introduced in Oklahoma City in 1935. After a trial run, meters were introduced in New York City on Sept. 19, 1951, to ease congestion — and provide revenue.

“It’s just another way of getting money out of people,” the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson grumbled at the time as an official dropped a dime into the first meter, on West 125th Street.

Mechanical meters work like wind-up clocks, with gears and springs. The original meters had no handles, according to Stephen Kerney, a meter-repair supervisor. Coins activated the devices, but, like old watches, the meters had to be wound every week, by a worker using a detachable handle.

Eventually, handles were installed, but they promptly became targets of vandalism.

“People would just knock the handles off using a hammer, to break the meters so they could park for free,” said Theodore R. Collins, chief of meter collections.

Other mischief-makers inserted gum, paper or foil into the coin slot. Still others — cheap drivers and confused tourists — inserted metal slugs or foreign coins. So many metal slugs accumulated in the meters that the city took to burying them at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. The city sold the foreign coins to collectors.

The city stopped buying mechanical meters about 10 years ago. Since then, as the meters were retired, they were disassembled, their parts used to repair other meters.

From a heyday of 69,000 on the streets in the late 1980s, the city has fewer than 5,000 intact mechanical meters now, all in storage. They will be sold for scrap or sold as mementos, said Michael Pipitone, director of field services at the parking bureau.

Some writers — even Times writers — just crib from the press release. Not Chan!

Now about those mechanical subway switches . . . (and just guess who wrote that article, too!)

Never Forget . . . Proper Flag Etiquette

When dealing with an important national symbolic gesture like placing the first beam at the Freedom Tower site, remember that stuff like proper flag etiquette is important:

An American flag plastered on the first steel column for the Freedom Tower was removed yesterday after the builders realized the stars and stripes were on the wrong side of the flag.

The Port Authority removed the decal on the 31-foot column after media outlets and readers questioned the display of the flag, with the 50 stars on the right side instead of the left.

Federal flag code requires that, whether displayed horizontally or vertically, the blue field displaying 50 stars is always on the left side to the viewer. When construction workers put the decal onto the column as it lay on its side at Ground Zero, the stars were on the left and in the correct spot, said PA spokesman Steve Coleman.

Once a giant crane raised the column and the flag was displayed vertically, “it was inadvertently put in the wrong position,” Coleman said.

(Let the good folks who snapped up the “ushistory.org” domain explain the rest of it.)

Drink Your Whiskey, Drink Your Grain, Bottoms Up And You Don’t Feel Pain

Is bottle service a concrete example of economic sclerosis, symptom of cultural decay or simple douchebaggery? Probably all of the above:

The scene on Chrystie couldn’t be more different than the one that happens every weekend on the stretch of West 27th Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues. Club Row, as it’s called, resembles a better-dressed version of Mardi Gras. Girls with flat-ironed flaxen hair, wearing glittery tops and tight jeans, totter on their high heels from one velvet rope to another. The clubs all have exotic, glamorous names — Cain, Marquee, Bungalow 8, Pink Elephant — and offer the promise of opulence and intrigue once inside. The reality is far less interesting. Inside, the clone-like crowds come to party the only way they know how — the way they learned from watching hip-hop videos. They stand on the little booths and shake and shimmy, hoisting bottles of vodka — priced 1,000 percent over what you’d pay in a store — over their heads. As some Jay-Z song plays over the speakers, for a minute, they are Bling. They feel fabulous. And then they order another $300 round.

Bottle service gained popularity in the early ’90s as a complimentary service offered to VIPs and moneyed clientele. Sevigny remembers when the O Bar, a long-closed club, started offering the service in a way that seemed more quaint than snobbish: A patron could buy a bottle, and if he or she didn’t finish it, they’d hold it behind the bar. Bottle service today, though, entails a customer buying a normal bottle of liquor — vodka or champagne, usually — for $150 to $500 (if not more), served with a mélange of mixers and a booth to sit in for the duration of the night. Once this was a rare luxury, even somewhat practical. When a club was too crowded, or a patron too famous, it was a way to keep the star relatively secluded and sated. In the ’90s, at the Tunnel’s Green Room, “once in a while a European would come in and buy a bottle,” says longtime nightlife veteran Steven Lewis. “It was done, but very rarely. There wasn’t really a program of bottle service.” But as the ’90s wore on, the quirky club-kid world faded and the real estate market exploded, making bottle service not just trendy, but almost necessary to stay in business. Lewis, with his partners Mark Baker and Jeffrey Jah, brought bottle service over to the now defunct Life, on Sullivan Street. “Rents are 300 percent more expensive” Jah, a co-owner of Lotus, says. “Insurance can be up to half a million a year.” Meanwhile, drink prices and cover charges stayed mostly the same. Something had to give.

As club owners quickly figured out, everyone wanted to be a VIP, or at least feel like one. Bottle service was an easy and very financially sound means of achieving mutual happiness for both the club and the clientele. A 38-table club like Marquee, selling bottles at $350 a pop, can rake in $20,000 a night minimum, and that’s not counting bar sales or cover charges.

But while clubs were flush and clients were drunk, the results of the bottle service boom were showing on nightlife, which now had all the excitement and pizzazz of a corporate party thrown in a hotel conference room. “Bottle service only makes sense for six to eight people in a crowded room and you don’t want to wait,” says Jah, who estimates that 30 percent of his profits are due to the trend. Nonetheless, he says the current all-bottle model has “gone too far.”

(Feel free to add to the wiki.)