Don’t You Know Where I Am?

New Yorkers are known for playing it cool in the face of celebrity, not caring that they just passed, say, George Hamilton while walking on the Upper East Side except that secretly they really do care — much more than you know:

As the stars swarm among us, you have to wonder: Are we now destined to become just another L.A., where fawning nobodies hound celebrities, who then escape behind gates and smoked glass? Are Soho penthouses the new Hollywood Hills, where the super-famous retreat to gaze on the milling serfs below, chuckling like feudal lords? Well, no. Heath Ledger’s house hasn’t been thronged by chanting mobs, even though everyone and his dog knows where it is. And now comes the news that Ledger’s bought a $2.3 million modernist box shrouded by trees in Los Angeles, which means there’s even less chance of spotting him on Smith Street. (Not that you care.) Even Gawker Stalker is presented partly tongue-in-cheek, a guilty pleasure that’s heavy on the guilt, its meticulous missives a halfhearted joke about how silly it is to obsess over the whereabouts of Ryan Adams. As for the rest of us, did we ever truly not care? I mean, wouldn’t you have been just as psyched to see Patti Smith in the East Village in the seventies as you are to see Jay-Z today? Or way more so, for that matter?

“I don’t think L.A. and New York are as different as some people make them out to be,” says Michael Imperioli, an oft-sighted Tribeca fixture. “I think it’s more about how people approach you and how they behave — that determines your reaction much more than any difference between L.A. versus New York.” In other words, it’s not that we in New York don’t care but that we know enough to pretend that we don’t care. Which, in essence, is almost as good. You know the drill: Ignore the star as she walks toward you, then start texting all your friends the moment she’s passed you by.

See also: New York Magazine’s Star Map.

Dwayne Schneider As Father Figure

Last we left Brian Carter, he was explaining why you shouldn’t feel bad about ripping off brokers. This week he highlights the importance of bribing the super, with varying results:

Still relatively new to the real estate game, I figured it was time to up the ante. I needed to take the next step in my career. I decided to bribe my first super.

In this slightly confused business, it’s often the guy fixing the toilets and hauling the garbage that has the most influence. Supers know everything. A couple of Yankees tickets or a $100 bill slipped under his door can go a long way in a tight market.

A good super has the inside track on who is moving out and more importantly, when. They open the doors for some agents, and can’t seem to find the keys for others. It took me a while before I learned to interpret, “Sorry Pal. Can’t get you in, just had the floors done.” What he really means is that another agent is already slipping him enough cash to keep the door closed to competition.

Unless you had a stable of exclusives, which I didn’t, most agents are showing the same “open listings.” A few days ahead of the pack is a huge advantage when solid apartments are renting the day they hit the market. Armed with only a set of business cards and 40 bucks, I set out for the East Village in search of anyone in work boots and a garden hose in their hand.

I had little experience in bribing anyone (other than my younger brothers), and wasn’t really sure of how to start the conversation.

. . .

Getting ready to call it quits and head back to the office to start thinking “outside of the box” again, I passed a hardware store on First Ave. An older and well-built Spanish man was leaving with a bundle of rat traps. I was too tired to play it coy.

“You a super?”

“Yup.”

“Got any apartments available?”

“Not right now, but I might in a week.”

I felt it was going ok, and waded in a little further.

“Great. How can I, you know, get into to see it?”

“Just call me up,” he said flatly.

“I’m sort of new to this, but is there any way I can make sure I get in first?”

He thought about it for a moment, but seemed a little confused by the question.

“I guess so . . . if you’re the first one who calls.”

Don’t you know who I am? (You think Bonnie Fucking Franklin had to bribe her super!?)

She Died From Our Expectations

Again, it’s never the wrong time or place to ghoulishly call attention to a social problem*:

The suicide of a 25-year-old Upper West Side woman, who jumped to her death a day after breaking up with a boyfriend, has brought to light the pressure put on young Orthodox Jews to marry.

Sarah Adelman, a Brandeis University graduate who managed a dental office in Midtown, on Monday afternoon leapt from an eighth-floor window of 35 W. 96th St., where she resided. Ms. Adelman left no note, police said, but was suffering from depression and had called another former boyfriend to say goodbye, the New York Post reported.

It’s difficult to know what role societal preoccupation with marriage played in Adelman’s suicide, but her death has initiated a conversation about the Orthodox community’s premium on coupledom, a singles columnist who is an observant Jew, Esther Kustanowitz, said. “I think it’s really sad that it took an incident like this to mobilize the community,” she said.

Anecdotal evidence of Orthodox Jews staying single longer in recent years has prompted religious leaders to trumpet a shidduch, or matchmaking, crisis, according to Ms. Kustanowitz, 35, whose Web log, JDaters Anonymous, provides a forum for Jewish singles to discuss online dating. “Traditional Judaism, as a whole, doesn’t know what to do with singles in their 20s and 30s,” she said.”There’s a temptation to try to marry everybody off. On one hand, that’s admirable, but on another it places pressure on people that they might not be ready for.”

In certain Orthodox circles, unmarried women of a certain age are stigmatized, according to a 27-year-old rabbi and teacher, Chananya Weissman, who started End the Madness, a movement devoted to changing the culture of dating in the Orthodox community. The effort, Rabbi Weissman explains on the End the Madness Web site, is dedicated to a relative “who at the age of twenty was considered ‘over the hill’ by her society,” and died without having married. “‘Over the hill’ is pretty young, especially for women,” he said yesterday. “It can be 22 or 25 or 30.”

*See also: The Point Of Which Should Hit You Like A Ton Of Bricks . . .

Out: Unsightly Coin-Op Laundromats And Check Cashing Places; In: Dog Walkers

Development brings upscale professionals. Upscale professionals bring dogs. And dogs demand dogwalkers:

With huge residential developments in construction all along the East River waterfront, and hundreds of upscale professionals flocking to the neighborhood, Long Island City now has a new growth industry: professional dog walking.

“I’m going to need an assistant soon, once all these buildings go up,” said Cynthia Zapata, 36, who walks dogs from the Avalon Riverview building on 50th Avenue.

Zapata started walking dogs part time two years ago “to make a few extra bucks,” she said. Now she walks 10 or more dogs a day. At $10 for a walk, a run in the park and a few minutes playing catch or Frisbee, the job soon became a major source of income.

She’s not the only one to see profit at the end of a leash. “I have a few customers who have their dogs walked seven days a week, every day of the year,” says Hanna Polaski, who works at the City Dog Lounge on Vernon Boulevard. City Dog’s walking service doesn’t come cheap either — at $12 for a half hour, five weekday walks add up to almost $300 per month. But with many commuters leaving early in the morning and returning late at night, their dog’s comfort is worth the price.

And if the residents of Avalon Riverview are any indication, the additional residential towers under construction will swell Long Island City’s population — four footed and two footed alike.

“There are more dogs than there are kids,” said Rob McSparron, the concierge of the 372 unit rental building that opened in 2002. He estimated that one out of every four apartments has a dog. At an average rent of $3,000 per month, and some apartments fetching more than $6,000, the dogs reflect their owners’ upscale tastes.

“It’s mostly purebreds,” McSparron said. “You see a lot of bulldogs and Labradors, and a lot of the yippy little Paris Hilton dogs.”

. . .

The character of the neighborhood is already changing quickly, according to Polaski. Having worked at City Dog Lounge for two years, she can tell by the dogs. “No more mutts,” she said. “All the city people that are coming, they bring in purebreds and more of the little dogs.”

One of the most popular new breeds she sees is the Maltese, which Polaski describes as a “small, fluffy, white ball of fur.”

The type of dog owners are changing too.

“They come in here and ask for clothes for the doggies, for nail polish,” Polaski says. “We don’t sell that here. For us, a dog is a dog. We love doggies but we treat them like dogs and not like little kids.”

Suspense, Bro

The Times’ report on local Italian soccer boosters has nothing on the Queens Chronicle’s coverage of the proud day:

Waving Italian flags and honking their horns, droves of soccer enthusiasts and proud Italian Americans stormed Queens’ streets on Sunday to celebrate the country’s first World Cup title since 1982.

“Incredible, absolutely incredible,” said Howard Beach’s Saverio Blasi of the overtime thriller. He was standing at the corner of 157th Street and Cross Bay Boulevard.

With a snare drum, harmonica and red, white and green kazoo all strung around his neck, the native Neapolitan covered his ears while his wife, Savina, shouted over the crowd’s noise, “The French were tough today. It was a close match, a great game.”

The Blasis were joined by an estimated crowd of 1,500 who came out and celebrated into the evening. Several officers from Ozone Park’s 106th Precinct were called out to supervise the revelry.

Meanwhile, a motorcade paraded up and down Cross Bay Boulevard, its cars and trucks carrying fans climbing out of sunroofs, hanging out of windows and cheering from the beds of pickup trucks.

. . .

To stay calm, Ozone Park friends Anna Sabatino, 21, and Antoinette Composto, 20, moved a television set beside Sabatino’s swimming pool and took in the game from two floats.

Showing her pride, Sabatino came out to Howard Beach to celebrate, wearing a red, green and white skirt.

Standing in the right lane on the southbound side of Cross Bay Boulevard, which police officers had reserved for celebrators, John Passarella, 18, said that he took the game in with 20 friends at his Howard Beach home on a 6 foot by 8 foot plasma television.

“Suspense, bro. Suspense,” was the only way he could sum up the day, his arm around jubilant friend, Vincenzo Argento. After the game ended, the group of 20 lit fireworks and piled on top of each other on Passarella’s front lawn.

“Being Italian is more than just a nationality. It’s a gift,” he said. “Now we get to celebrate it.”