He Walks The Line Between Health Policy And Civic Boosterism

Outmigration and a more-educated population aside, you’re living longer because you walk more. Ooh-kay:

In essence, there is a health gap emerging between our massive metropolis and the rest of the country — some X factor that’s improving our health in subtle, everyday ways. In fact, a back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that once you take out those uniquely New York ways to die — AIDS, homicide, etc. — we’ve still added at least 200,000 extra years onto the city’s life-expectancy tables since 1980, making crucial advances in the same health areas the rest of the country struggles with. Like many New Yorkers, I’d moved here with some trepidation — always figuring that the stress, pollution, and 60-hour workweeks would knock about five years off my life. I was wrong — precisely wrong. But where, exactly, is our excess life coming from?

I take this question to Thomas Frieden, New York’s commissioner of public health. Frieden is a wonk’s wonk — a handsome, energetic doctor who has gained a nationwide reputation for his aggressive effort to push New York’s average-life-expectancy figure ever higher. The smoking ban of 2003? The trans-fat ban of last year? You can thank Frieden for both. These measures have already begun to lengthen life spans in the city. The smoking ban had an immediate effect: The number of deaths attributable to smoking has decreased from 8,960 in 2001 to 8,096 in 2005, a drop of 10 percent. Lung-cancer rates should begin to see the same effect a few decades from now, since it takes longer for the body to repair smoking-related lung damage.

But even Frieden admits that public policy can’t account for all the gains. When I ask what the X factor is — where the “excess life” is coming from — Frieden goes over to his desk and returns with a clear plastic statuette. It’s from the American Podiatric Medical Association and Prevention magazine: BEST WALKING CITY, 2006.

“We’ve won it a couple of years in a row,” he tells me with a grin. He’s got a bunch of them kicking around.

Just keep telling yourself that . . .

After Sept. 11 Everything Changed . . .

Or maybe there’s just less of a desire on the part of New Yorkers to look like leathery Jerseyites:

A lone cluster of clouds gathers demurely behind the Con Edison Building as Claire Kuhn and Jessica Watson spread their striped beach towels into a pristine pool of sun that has formed on the roof. Un-self-consciously, they splay their bikini-clad bodies toward the light.

On a quest for that ultimate summer badge — casually sun-tinged skin — Claire, 15, and Jessica, 16, are here on the blacktop nearly every day on East 10th Street in Manhattan. If they remember, on the half-hour, they flip onto their stomachs to make sure they brown evenly. They usually can stand an hour or so before it gets too hot.

As long as there have been sun worshipers in search of the perfect tan in the city, there has been the tar beach. Roofs have long been the urbanites’ slightly hotter, slightly gooier answer to the backyard pools and lawns of the suburbs — like private little plots without bothersome trees to throw shade.

Jessica even insists that she likes this urban substitute better than the real beach; she cites the view, the pleasurable sense of being part of a members-only world, and of course the fact that “there is no sand to get stuck to your skin.”

But in this she may be a vanishing breed. This time-honored summer escape is a diminished, perhaps even dying habit. This has been noted by those who have a bird’s-eye access to the city: helicopter pilots, water tank repairmen and occupants of tall buildings in otherwise low-lying neighborhoods.

There are many explanations: security and insurance concerns since 9/11, real estate prices so high that roof space has become a lucrative commodity, and the rise in popularity of summer beach shares among young people.

From the skies above New York where he reports on accidents and fires in a helicopter for WCBS-TV, Joe Biermann has noted that rooftop tanning is a declining pastime. “Since 9/11 we don’t see a lot of people on the roofs,” he said. “Maybe it is a security issue. We think the landlords must be keeping the doors locked.”

. . .

Richard Casciato and April Dinsmore, married artists who live off Flatbush Avenue in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, resist the trend.

The living room window of their four-story walk-up opens onto 600 square feet of roof space, and their use of it effectively doubles the size of their apartment for six months of the year. They have covered part of the roof with beige AstroTurf, but they leave a fringe of honest-to-goodness tar (silver-coated to reflect heat).

They insist that the breeze from the harbor, visible in the distance, keeps them cool even in hot weather and that the sound of traffic on Flatbush is a little like the roar of the surf.

They are out here every day for breakfast, reading the paper and, of course, soaking up the rays. Mr. Casciato, 39, who is Irish-Italian, is particularly devoted to the task. “He sweats a ton,” Ms. Dinsmore, 37, explained, “and eventually he turns a different ethnicity.”

The Pick Up (A Gallon Of Non-Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone Milk) Scene At Your Local Whole Foods

Like WNYC’s attempts to cash in on its wonky, somewhat female-overloaded Soterios Johnson-loving unattached demographic, the new Whole Foods on Houston is hosting events for, er, thin-slicing singles:

Over samples of aged Gouda and amid aisles of extra-virgin olive oil, New Yorkers shopping at Whole Foods Bowery are turning the grocery into a thriving pick-up scene. The gelato bar, the upstairs café, the chilled, private cheese room, and long checkout lines are where flirting is most rampant in the 71,000-square-foot store that opened last March, Whole Foods employees said.

. . .

While many pick-up lines fall flat, single shoppers said the floodlit aisles provide a “safer” space to start up conversations with strangers than most bars in the neighborhood. Peeking into each other’s grocery carts, they said, could also be more revealing of a person’s lifestyle choices than an online profile on a social networking or dating Web site.

“I’m really health conscious,” a 28-year-old singer in the band edible red, Collette McLafferty, said. “I want to date health conscious people, and that could be why Whole Foods seems like a good place to meet people.”

After chatting with an attractive man at Whole Foods two nights ago but forgetting his name, Ms. McLafferty, who lives on the Lower East Side, posted a message on Craigslist looking to reconnect with him.

“He had dark, curly brown hair, blue eyes, he was well built, probably about 5-feet-10,” she said. She is waiting for a response to her posting, she said. Ms. McLafferty, who said she has often been approached by shoppers who comment on the tattoo of a dragon around her upper arm, added that flirting was easy at Whole Foods because of low expectations. “When you go out with the intention of meeting someone, you never meet anyone,” she said.

. . .

“I make eyes at people,” a 27-year-old actor who lives near South Street Seaport, Ari Rossen, said. “It’s a hip neighborhood, everyone who shops here is young, and there are plenty of things around to talk about.”

Whole Foods Bowery is actively boosting its reputation as a place for singles to meet, a spokeswoman for the store, Rebecca Ulanoff, said. In August, the store is hosting “Check Out,” a singles night co-sponsored by the Web site Gothamist.com. The store is also hoping to attract a fashion-forward, eco-friendly crowd tomorrow morning when it sells Anya Hindmarch shopping totes printed with the message: “I’m Not a Plastic Bag.”

I guess the singles events at the Pathmark by the Manhattan Bridge were sparsely attended?

Potential sociology dissertation topic ca. 2014: “The Rise Of The Co-Optation Of Interpersonal Relationships By Corporate Entities In The 21st Century.”

The Noose, Er, Bun Tightens On The Hipster-Nerd Nexus As A Whisper Turns Into A Roar

Confirmation of what we always sensed was the case:

Williamsburg is known for cool bistros and trendy hangouts, but few realize that the neighborhood and its environs are a magnet for hip, young librarians. Although “hip” is not an adjective generally associated with librarians, a stack of archivists, publishers, illustrators, librarians, and other bibliophiles called the Desk Set is out to challenge their image as staid.

The traditional idea of a librarian is “uptight in a bun,” the group’s co-founder, Maria Falgoust, said. “It would be nice if we could change that.”

To follow up on a well-attended Desk Set dance party Memorial Day weekend at Enid’s in Greenpoint, Ms. Falgoust is planning a screening of “Desk Set,” the 1957 Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy romantic comedy from which the group took its name, for the end of this month. She is also considering a Labor Day weekend dance party.

“Being smart and having fun are not opposites,” a digital imaging specialist at the Brooklyn Museum, Sarah Gentile, who has a master’s degree in library science, said at the Desk Set dance party. Ms. Gentile and others wore pins with such statements as “Withdrawn” or “She blinded me with Library Science.” The mood was more merriment than Merriam-Webster.

“Prepare to be shushed!” read the announcement for the event, at which the reference desk revelers downed cocktails with Dewey Decimal numbers instead of names. No one guessed the identity of a concoction of Champagne and raspberry vodka that had the call number of “The Joy of Sex.” Lime Rickeys were served in honor of F. Scott Fitzgerald, as was gin and pineapple juice, said to be a favorite of Vladimir Nabokov.

. . .

At Enid’s, the crowd was checking out each other rather than books.

“I wore my glasses because I wanted to maximize my look,” a children’s librarian, Andrea Vaughn, said. “I already got hit on,” she added. “It’s working.”

I Guess This Means WASPs Support Catering Halls And Fabulous Restaurants?

Joe Sitt knows just as well as the next guy that blacks just want jobs, Jews just desire bookstores and Russians have got to have their nightclubs:

Joseph J. Sitt, who says his company has spent $120 million buying up land underneath and around the rides, said on Friday that he had “rolled over” in response to the criticism of his earlier plans for an entertainment and residential complex.

So the looming 40-story tower planned for the Boardwalk at Stillwell Avenue is gone. So are the hundreds of rental apartments and luxury condominiums in the old plan. The new proposal is less dense, he said, but has more of “the new, the edgy, and the outlandish” rides and attractions that America’s first resort was once known for.

“This is our way of showing the New York community that we’re responsive to what they want,” said Mr. Sitt, the founder and chief executive of Thor Equities, which buys and develops commercial, residential and retail properties nationwide. “Our design, in all its greatness, is a way of showing the world what Coney Island can be.”

. . .

The hotels, Mr. Sitt said, would offer black residents not only jobs, but careers. The Russian immigrants, who enjoy a “quality of life and activity by the water,” would flock to the hotels and nightclubs. Jewish and Italian-American residents would get the “quality retail, bookstores and entertainment venues” that they want. As for everyone else, “what’s better than having fabulous restaurants, catering halls, shows and concerts?”

“Tell me, what issue any one of these constituencies would have with our plan,” he said. “We’re asking for motherhood, motherhood. Apple pie, Chevrolet and Coney Island.”