The $700 German

For some unknown reason people still prioritize living in Manhattan:

Oh, to be a young bohemian with a Manhattan apartment — these days it seems difficult to pay rent without a trust fund. But Jessica Delfino — comedian, musician, voiceover artist — has found a way.

She and her boyfriend converted their living room into what essentially is a studio apartment, and they rent out the bedroom to travelers.

“We did have a roommate at one point, but the apartment is kind of small,” Delfino said. Tourists help offset the roughly $1,600 monthly rent. “We don’t do it every night. In between we take a night off to wash and clean everything and have some privacy.”

Whenever they post on Craigslist — the current rate is $70 a night for a private room in an elevator building with Wi-Fi, A/C, unlimited local calls and balcony access — Delfino, 30, gets nearly 100 e-mails during the first three days.

. . .

She discourages people from bringing guests or staying more than a week.

“The longest stay was 10 days — an older German couple,” Delfino recounted. “It was kind of a disaster. She broke the bathroom door knob and it was locked for days. I couldn’t get the super to come fix it. She walked around naked. I walked into the kitchen in the middle of the night and there she was naked, peeing in a cup.”

And Here You Were Scoffing At The Idea Of Ferry Service From Schaefer Landing

The benefits of several years of work on the L train are still several years away:

Riders on the crowded L subway line, who at peak hours frequently have to wait for two or more trains to pass at some stations before squeezing aboard, will have to keep on squeezing for at least a few more years, according to a report released yesterday.

The report, provided yesterday to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s board, said that an additional 64 specially equipped subway cars cannot be fully up and running before January 2010. The additional cars would allow fuller use of a new high-tech signal system intended to increase the line’s capacity.

The crosstown L line, which stretches from Eighth Avenue and 14th Street in Manhattan to Rockaway Parkway in Canarsie, Brooklyn, currently runs with 15 trains an hour during the morning and evening rush, or one every four minutes.

Once more of the computerized trains are added, the authority will be able to run as many as 26 trains an hour on the line during the rush, according to Paul J. Fleuranges, a New York City Transit spokesman. That works out to one every 2 minutes 18 seconds. Mr. Fleuranges said the agency expected to have the new cars up and running by mid-2009. But a consulting engineers’ report to the authority’s board said the system was not likely to be fully operational with the new cars until January 2010. He said that in the interim some conventional trains will be added to the line later this year to increase peak capacity to 17 trains an hour.

The Distinctive Facade, The Expert Mortar Work And The Mitchell-Lama Period Touches Combine To Make This Building An Excellent Candidate For Preservation

Is it creeping Gioiaism or is landmarking a building really the only way to preserve affording housing in some neighborhoods? Things are pretty bad when you have to resort to having the Landmarks Commission step in:

Hip-hop was born in the west Bronx. Not the South Bronx, not Harlem and most definitely not Queens. Just ask anybody at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue — an otherwise unremarkable high-rise just north of the Cross Bronx and hard along the Major Deegan.

“This is where it came from,” said Clive Campbell, pointing to the building’s first-floor community room. “This is it. The culture started here and went around the world. But this is where it came from. Not anyplace else.”

O.K., Mr. Campbell is not just anybody — he is the alpha D.J. of hip-hop. As D.J. Kool Herc, he presided over the turntables at parties in that community room in 1973 that spilled into nearby parks before turning into a global assault. Playing snippets of the choicest beats from James Brown, Jimmy Castor, Babe Ruth and anything else that piqued his considerable musical curiosity, he provided the soundtrack savored by loose-limbed b-boys (a term he takes credit for creating, too).

Mr. Campbell thinks the building should be declared a landmark in recognition of its role in American popular culture. Its residents agree, but for more practical reasons. They want to have the building placed on the National Register of Historic Places so that it might be protected from any change that would affect its character — in this case, a building for poor and working-class families.

Throughout the city, housing advocates said, buildings like 1520 Sedgwick are becoming harder to find as owners opt out of subsidy programs so they can eventually charge higher rents on the open market.

The Sedgwick building is part of the state’s Mitchell-Lama program, in which private landlords who receive tax breaks and subsidized mortgages agree to limit their return on equity and rent to people who meet modest income limits.

Of course this is in the paper, so maybe it works!

It Won’t Seem Like Running For President If He Just Thinks Of It As A Sort Of Redistribution Of Wealth

After all, that $100 million isn’t only good for challenging Ross Perot’s relatively impressive 19 percent of the vote benchmark — it also could do a lot of good trickling down through the economy! And if you don’t think he’s considering running (and 2012 still counts!), here are some numbers to consider:

Over the past year, our very private mayor has made very public trips to fifteen states, with a combined 284 electoral votes, more than the 270 needed to win the White House.

If You Lie Down On Your Private Parts With Dogs, You’ll Come Up With . . . Very Odd Cindy Adams Stories!

When profiles of Cindy Adams are really chugging along on all four cylinders they tend to take on a surreal quality, something you might dream while nodding off on the subway:

“Hello! I’m your hostess!” Cindy Adams was saying as she stood in the entryway of her Park Avenue apartment, welcoming a small group of women to a ladies’ tea for Marianne Williamson, the New Age author, and Ellen Burstyn, the actress and memoirist. Adams did not know all her guests, since the party had been conceived in Burstyn’s public-relations office rather than in the generous heart of New York’s saltiest gossip columnist, but she struck a note of instant intimacy.

“Can I tell you, these crappy dogs just cost me nine hundred dollars to do their teeth, and that’s with the fifteen-per-cent discount the vet gave me?” Adams asked, as her two Yorkies, Jazzy and Juicy, swirled around her feet in a brown-and-black blur, before disappearing behind a concealed door into the kitchen.

. . .

Adams’s attachment to her own small animals was clear: mid-party, she lay down on the marble tiles of her hallway and fed a pastry to Juicy from her mouth, a transfer requiring much licking and wagging from the canine party. Shortly afterward, Adams retreated to her tabloid-papered inner sanctum and, when asked if she considered herself a spiritual person, struck a note of uncharacteristic gravity. “I am somebody who is a seeker,” she said. “There are two parts to every person. There’s the brittle part that everybody sees. And then there’s the part that would rather lie on the floor with the dog. The private part.”