If I Can Make It There, I’ll Make It Anywhere

At least in a “little town” it doesn’t take a Freedom of Information request to uncover the nepotism:

Of course, it is not unusual for young people with connections to win choice internships in all kinds of workplaces. But the records offer a glimpse inside the social and power circles of the Bloomberg administration, which has accommodated dozens of young people with connections to the mayor’s friends, business associates and government appointees for the prestigious, if unpaid, slots.

Take Jacob Doctoroff, whose father, Daniel L. Doctoroff, was deputy mayor and is now the president of Bloomberg L.P. He had an internship in 2002. He was in the eighth grade.

“It was either that or going to summer camp,” Jacob Doctoroff said in an interview. Now at Yale, he recalled enjoying his stint at the mayor’s office of management information systems. “I truthfully couldn’t tell you how I got the internship,” he said. “But you’d be working with a bunch of 35- to 45-year-olds, and you didn’t have a sense that you were in an internship program.”

The Problem The Public Theater Created

And of course the simple way to fix it is not relying on film and television starts like Al Pacino in the first place:

A band of amateur businessmen have launched a service that lets theatergoers skip the line for Shakespeare in the Park — always one of the hottest free tickets in town.

. . .

Here’s how it works: Hand over anywhere from $75 to $125 to a professional line-sitter and you can forgo the mind- and butt-numbing side effects of queuing up for a fix of the classics. Al Pacino starring as Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice” promises to be a must-see show this season.

Maybe this is part of what they meant when they said “For every one dollar, we generate eight”?

Location Scout: Delacorte Theater.

Another Way The Suburbs Screw You

Your subway service is in danger of being cut because of the salaries of LIRR employees:

In fact, more than a quarter of the Long Island Rail Road’s 7,000 employees earned more than $100,000 last year . . .

Compensation varied widely within the authority’s various divisions. About 24 percent of Metro-North Railroad workers earned more than $100,000, along with 18 percent of bridge and tunnel workers, the data show. At the authority’s biggest sub-agency, New York City Transit, only 6 percent of workers earned six figures.

Then you have the Post, which tries to pin it on Q53 bus drivers who “still get paid” to show up for extra runs to Rockaway Beach during summer weekends, “rain or shine” (what do you want them to do, start a snow chain?).

We Are All Seattle Now

If by “Seattle” you mean spend more on a cup of coffee than you would for a cocktail:

At $12 a cup, the coffee at Cafe Grumpy makes Starbucks seem like a bargain brew.

Made from handpicked beans grown and coddled in Ethiopia, the pricey grind will be sold starting today at the chain’s locations in Park Slope and Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and Chelsea.

“There are flavors you would expect in a really nice glass of wine — it’s a cacophony of nuances,” said Steve Holt, vice president of Ninety Plus Coffee, the company distributing the beans.

“You detect flavors of apricot, pineapple, bergamot, kiwi and lime. The deeper tones are levels of chocolate, and the finish is super clean.”

Just don’t ask for cream and sugar.

The Ballet Of Candy Wrapper-Dropping Teenagers, Beer-Swilling Longshoremen And Punch Bowl-Pooping Sociology Professors

Not so long ago observers hailed the mayor’s foresight in updating the Jane Jacobs school of thought by both preserving a neighborhood’s character and allowing for smart redevelopment. Jane Jacobs herself seemed to disagree, but whatever — it became a useful campaign talking point. Contrarian voices questioned. Then they finally pooped in the punch bowl:

[Brooklyn College sociology professor Sharon] Zukin — whose own book, “Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places,” was published in December — peered through the window at rows of glass candleholders. “Tchotchkes!” she said. “Oh, the sheer ignominy.”

Ms. Jacobs’s continuing influence on the city is clear. As Amanda M. Burden, chairwoman of the City Planning Commission, wrote a few years back, “Projects may fail to live up to Jane Jacobs’s standards, but they are still judged by her rules.”

But if Ms. Jacobs is much hailed as an urban prophet, Ms. Zukin is a heretic on her canonization. She views Ms. Jacobs as a passionate and prescient writer, but also one who failed to reckon with steroidal gentrification and the pervasive hunger of the upper middle class for ever more homogenous neighborhoods.

The pattern in places like Williamsburg and Atlantic Yards, Ms. Zukin said, is dreary and inexorable: Middle-class “pioneers” buy brownstones and row houses. City officials rezone to allow luxury towers, which swell the value of the brownstones. And banks and real estate companies unleash a river of capital, flushing out the people who gave the neighborhoods character.

Ms. Jacobs viewed cities as self-regulating organisms, and placed her faith in local residents. But Ms. Zukin argues that without more aggressive government regulation of rents and zoning, neighborhoods will keep getting more stratified.

“Jacobs’s values — the small blocks, the cobblestone streets, the sense of local identity in old neighborhoods — became the gentrifiers’ ideal,” Ms. Zukin said. “But Jacobs’s social goals, the preservation of classes, have been lost.”

Observers also love — love! — irony, and any story about Jane Jacobs now carries with it requisite colorful there-goes-the-neighborhood details:

Ms. Jacobs, who died in 2006, waged heroic war against planners who dreamed of paving the Village’s cobblestone streets, demolishing its tenements and creating sterile superblocks. Her victory in that fight was complete, if freighted with unanticipated consequences. The cobblestone remains, but the high bourgeoisie has taken over; not many tailors can afford to live there anymore. Ms. Jacobs’s old home recently sold for more than $3 million, and the ground floor harbors a boutique glass store.

. . .

Ms. Zukin recently acted as tour guide on a stroll through Ms. Jacobs’s urban village, where Irish and Italian grandmothers once watched from windows as children played on the streets, and milkmen delivered bottles as chain-smoking playwrights typed in grotty flats. It began just north of Christopher and Bleecker Streets in the West Village, once a working-class haven, then the black-leather heart of Queerdom, and now something like the back lot in a Paramount Studios version of New York.

There’s the Magnolia Bakery, where perpetual lines snake out the door not so much because of its excellent cupcakes as because of its appearance on “Sex and the City.” There’s Marc Jacobs, where the lines are no less endless. A Ralph Lauren, a Madden, and a children’s store with the most adorable petite $250 pants. Ms. Zukin sighed.

“It’s another Madison Avenue, or the Short Hills mall,” she said, waving her hand dismissively. “Really, did we need that?”