Who Causes Reckless Deliverymen? We Are All Guilty!

Things are not all hoo-do-lee-doo Transportation Alternatives and everything as city officials tackle the dark, seemy underbelly of bicycling:

“The cyclists hit people left and right and just keep on going,” the president of the 20th Police Precinct community council on the Upper West Side, Sam Katz, said. Ms. Katz and other leaders are counting on a new law that takes effect Thursday to help address the problem. The law, passed in March, requires restaurant managers to provide their deliverymen with safety equipment such as helmets, bells, and headlights. It also obliges restaurant managers to hang up posters — written in both English and the language spoken by the deliverymen — outlining the rules of the road for cyclists.

Deliverymen on bicycles irk residents on the Upper West Side so much that they are the no. 1 complaint heard by the 20th Precinct there, Lieutenant Biagio Carbone said.

“Every community board meeting, they’ll ask us, ‘How are our bicycle summonses going?'” Lieutenant Carbone, who has worked in the 20th Precinct and the 19th Precinct, on the Upper East Side, said. The abundance of restaurants that deliver in the two precincts makes the areas the worst in the city for reckless cyclists, he said.

. . .

“I explain it to them 1,000 times,” the manager of Bagels and Co. at Amsterdam Avenue and 79th Street, Ronnie Wachsler, said. The deli’s deliverymen receive summonses from the police almost every week for breaking traffic laws, he said.

“Riding on the sidewalks, I agree it’s a problem,” Mr. Wachsler said. “But delivery guys in general, the faster they make a delivery and get back, the faster they make another one. Time is of the essence.”

On Lowering Expectations To Virtually Nothing (MTA Take Note!)

That the 1 train provides the best service, according to the Straphangers Campaign, is reason enough to stop you in your tracks (ugh). (If it’s so good, why bother with that fancy new train station then? Maybe because 1 train service actually sucks?)

So then it must be just a big joke that the G is rated “most reliable”? As in, it’s the most reliably sucky train? Read the report (.pdf) to find that the “G line ranks tied for 5th place out of the 22 subway lines.” No kidding!

They Shoot Steam, Don’t They?

The Times explains Manhattan’s good old steam heat and what to look for to avoid trouble:

The gray mist that rises from manholes when water touches the steam pipes below seems as much a part of the New York landscape as hot dog vendors.

But five days after a steam pipe exploded in Midtown, leaving one person dead and injuring dozens of others, New Yorkers had reason to be apprehensive about the vapor, particularly after heavy rains yesterday produced fresh trails of steam from manholes around the city.

Bob Flanagan, a 29-year veteran of Con Edison’s steam division, was particularly careful yesterday as he circled the city in search of vapor plumes, which might indicate a problem with the steam pipes below.

Because water collecting inside a steam pipe or seeping into one has been a cause of previous pipe ruptures, the company routinely checks manholes for vapor after rainstorms and pumps out water that reaches the height of the pipes.

There are several possible causes of vapor streams. One is rainwater, which vaporizes when it hits the hot pipes. Sometimes water mains leak onto steam pipes. And Con Edison sometimes intentionally lets off steam during underground construction.

“I’m looking for something over one foot high but with a little force behind it,” Mr. Flanagan said, before driving his minivan past a swirl of steam at the intersection of East Broadway and Pike Street in Lower Manhattan. Without a map, he drove over the steam mains beneath South Street, Water Street, Broadway and smaller roads, pointing to buildings that buy steam from Con Edison.

Every few minutes, he spotted a “whispering” vapor stream too thin to worry about. But about five times during his one-hour loop, he found a manhole that “gushed” steam strong enough that he radioed a dispatcher, who then sent a crew to pump out the water accumulating below.

Mr. Flanagan is one of 10 Con Edison supervisors who travel the city streets after rainstorms. There are also 12 two-person crews around Manhattan that pump out rainwater.

Then He Said Unto Them, Therefore Every Scribe Which Is Instructed Unto The Kingdom Of Heaven Is Like Unto A Man That Is An Householder, Which Bringeth Forth Out Of His Treasure Things New And Old

Any good newsman will tell you some stuff you just can’t make up:

A walk last week through the denuded ex-headquarters of the Times, on West Forty-third Street, was kind of spooky for a citizen already in an apocalyptic frame of mind. The paper’s empty offices, mid-gutting, suggested the twin desolations of war and obsolescence. But in the eyes of the “architecturologist” Kevin Browne, who searches modern ruins for loot, these wastes were full of possibility. Browne had come to the Times Building from another scavenge job (the old Queens County Courthouse — spectacular terra cotta) to look in on some of the spoils he’d been coveting since the Times decamped to Eighth Avenue, last month.

Browne, fifty, is the president of a salvage operation called Olde Good Things, which has showrooms in Chelsea, Chicago, Los Angeles, Florida, and Scranton, Pennsylvania. Olde Good Things is owned by the Church of Bible Understanding, a sect founded by a former vacuum-cleaner salesman. For a couple of decades, the church ran a cut-rate carpet-cleaning business that employed teen-age runaways. About a dozen years ago, Browne steered the church into the junk game. “It was totally Jesus leading us,” he explained. In the Lord’s name, he has salvaged artifacts from demolitions and renovation jobs all over town: the Plaza, Alice Tully Hall, the Morgan Library. The Times had already consigned most of its valuable stuff to be sold at auction. Now Browne had a shot at whatever leftovers he could find.

In the front lobby, Browne, a man with a Tommy Chong beard and a loping stride, put on a hard hat and led the way up some stairs to a vast newsroom. “You see anything you like, you can have it,” he said. There wasn’t much to like, just drifts of paper and trash: computer disks, laser printouts of war photographs, a sci-fi paperback (“Earth: Final Conflict — The Arrival”), a lei. Browne spoke into a walkie-talkie. “Junior, those glass doors to the newsroom that said ‘New York Times’ — they gone?” Junior assured him that they were not. “If it says ‘New York Times’ on it, it has value,” Browne said.

. . .

Down at the loading docks, Browne poked around in the back of his van. It was crammed with booty: a pair of oxidized bronze sconces, some antique iron nail pullers, a laser printer. He pulled out a giant black-and-white photograph, printed on poster board, of a Times reporter, in shirt and tie, sitting in front of a typewriter — a real Mohican. Browne had no idea who it was, but he was determined to find out.

How To Stay Relevant? We Hear Syphilis Might Be On The Rise . . .

When something should go without saying, you should really consider going without saying it:

Eleven years ago, the musical Rent made stars out of twentysomethings Anthony Rapp and Adam Pascal and forever linked them to that squat-filled, polysexual, Alphabet City version of La Bohème that seemed so utterly, tragically of the moment. Rapp and Pascal are reprising their roles beginning July 30 in a musical that’s become as much a period piece as the opera that inspired it. Nobody takes only AZT anymore, and starving artists live in other boroughs, if not other cities. Some changes are for the better. “The show definitely loses some of its resonance because of the fact that teenagers today don’t know a society where lots of people are dying of AIDS,” says Pascal. “But given the choice, I would certainly have fewer people dying of AIDS, and fewer kids connecting to Rent.”