Cruise Ships in Red Hook

Work is set to begin next month on a new cruise ship passenger terminal at Piers 11 and 12 in Red Hook. First IKEA — now cruise ships. It boggles the mind.

“Immigrant Street Poetry”

Yes, “Immigrant Street Poetry.” Ugh. The Times details “The Grate Amrican Dreem”:

This may be the age of Internet pop-ups and text-message marketing, but lots of businesses – especially small businesses – still do most of their advertising with old-fashioned low-tech signs. And just as the eyes are said to be windows to the soul, these storefront signs – which often come with fractured grammar and mysterious spelling – can be portals on a great city that is regenerating itself with a flood of new immigrants.

The signs are there to lure customers, of course, but they can do much more. Four out of 10 current New Yorkers were born in a foreign country, more than at any other time since the 1920’s, and many have gone immediately into business. Their signs can form a style all their own, and style, as E. B. White, a passionate New Yorker at heart, once observed, is sometimes nothing but “sheer luck, like getting across the street.”

With such luck, the errors in usage add unintended meaning, like the East Side pizzeria that for a long time listed “1 litter” bottles of soda on its menu. So many one-liter bottles end up as litter that such a change might be appropriate.

Which is a long-winded way of saying, all you all can’t spell for shit but you’re loveable just the same!

But as usual, our hard-working, slightly less literate bretheren have the last laugh:

One pizzeria on 41st Street has spaguetti with clam sause, and a lunch cart on Lexington Avenue and 46th Street helps out-of-towners by spelling knish “kanish.”

“People tell me it’s wrong and I told my brother-in-law, who is the owner, but he doesn’t want to change it,” said Wael Ahmed, 39, an Egyptian immigrant who works at the stand with kanish and chees steak on the menu. “Sometimes people on the street also tell me it’s wrong, but I tell them it doesn’t matter because we don’t sell knish anymore.”

To crudely paraphrase New York City uber-Historian Ken Jackson, history is for losers — step off, Times!

Red State Revolution

In honor of our visitors from the so-called “flyover states” (and because no one else is around), the Times op-ed board extols the virtues of tailgating:

The proposal for a $1.4 billion Jets football stadium on the Far West Side of Manhattan has many flaws, which we’ve enumerated on other occasions. Now the Times sports columnist Dave Anderson has added another. The new stadium would offer mostly garage parking, and would thus interfere with a pastime that a lot of fans find more enjoyable than watching the Jets themselves: tailgating.

On two recent Sundays, Mr. Anderson toured the vast concrete parking lots surrounding Giants Stadium in New Jersey’s Meadowlands, and conducted an admittedly random and unscientific poll of about 150 tailgating fans.

The results were clear: 80 fans wanted to stay where they were, 55 would attend games at a stadium on Long Island or in Queens (like Shea, where the Jets once played, and where fans could keep tailgating). Only 15 preferred a stadium in the city.

Proximity to one’s home was a factor, but the most important reason to oppose the stadium plan was the feeling that a Manhattan stadium would not just trifle with the tailgating tradition, but pretty much destroy it. The Jets, who say they have conducted polls in which the “West Side came out on top,” insist that fans will be able to gather on the streets and at local bars and restaurants.

But that’s not tailgating. Tailgating is acres of S.U.V.’s and pickups, grills and trestle tables groaning under mounds of chicken and ribs and burgers, tents to keep out the rain and the cold, and R.V.’s to house the TV for watching another game.

“Your team can’t always be great,” Mr. Anderson quoted one fan as saying, “but the tailgating is.”

Unibrow for the Working Class

Story by story, bit by bit, those effete elitists at the Times are dismantling the myth of the working man. “Tough Guys, Shapely Eyebrows”:

In a quiet revolution sweeping the blue-collar precincts of metropolitan New York, mechanics, firemen and construction workers – most of them insistently heterosexual – are unapologetically doting on their eyebrows. Inspired by “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” and the well-coiffed rap artists on BET, cowed by tweezers-wielding girlfriends and goaded by wisecracking co-workers, they are plucking and waxing as never before. And they don’t lie about it.

“Eyebrows were the last frontier,” said Louis DeJesus, a hair stylist whose Bronx salon, International Nails and Beauty, started seeing an influx of men about two years ago. “Everyone’s doing it now. And once a guy starts doing it, he gets addicted.”

. . .

From the immigrant enclaves of Queens to the minimalls of Long Island, modest salons that once catered to women find themselves inundated by primping, preening men, most of them young working-class guys who tend to spend their weekends at dance clubs. Even the Gotti brothers, the ones with their own reality television show, have embraced a minimalist approach to facial hair.

Carol Cedeno, a manicurist at Tom’s Scissorhands, a salon in Paterson, N.J., has seen the trend. “A lot of the guys used to be embarrassed, but now they just walk in and say it proudly: ‘I want my eyebrows done,’ ” she said, noting that her salon offers a wax job for $5. “Sometimes their eyebrows end up looking more dainty than their girlfriends’.”

When he first started tweezing last year, Al Bernal, a 31-year-old auto mechanic from Newark, said his friends called his sexuality into question. “They said I looked, you know, gay,” said Mr. Bernal, whose style is maintained by his fiancée. “Of course, these days they do it, too, and they love it because they get a lot more attention from chicks.”

Unintentionally adopting a look that got its start in gay clubs, Mr. Bernal and his friends – who once aspired to the roughneck street thug look – have also discovered the allure of the year-round tan, the shaved chest and the eye-catching clubbing outfit. Diamond studs are in. Flashy gold chains are out. Guys, without even a pause, call it “the pretty-boy look.”

Robbie Wootton, the owner of Spirit, a Chelsea nightclub that caters to the bridge-and-tunnel set on Saturday nights, says the transformation has been stunning. “Never mind the eyebrows,” he said. “These guys shave their whole bodies, even their arms. If you bump up against them in the early morning you can feel the stubble growing back. It’s like rubbing sandpaper.”

The New Carhartt Guy

It’s official — The Christmas Tree Man is the New Carhartt Guy:

Once a year, something magical happens in New York. The metrosexuals, the unemployed artists and the unattainable are brushed aside. For five short weeks, the real men are in town. The Christmas Tree Men. They hail from Montreal, upstate New York and even Brooklyn. They are rugged and good-looking, and if you hurry, you might still find one packing up the remains of the holiday.

Some women like them because they are reliable. “He is there when I leave for work and when I get home at night,” Sara Booth, a filmmaker, said of the blue-eyed Canadian she often saw on her way to the A train from her Washington Heights apartment. “I don’t always know where my boyfriend is, but I always know where he is.”

Lindsey Schaeffer, a teacher who lives in the East Village, found them a pleasant break from the pressures of the usual dating scene. “They see me in sweat pants going to the gym,” she said, “and they still smile at me.”

They are almost too good to be true. “Not only is he nice, burly eye candy, but I know he has a job,” said Lisa Green, a graphic designer. For a holiday fling, you can’t ask for more.

Approaching a Christmas Tree Man is easy. Bring an offering – coffee or a slice of pizza will do. Remember, they are cold, hungry and would probably love to take a shower in your apartment. (After all, these are guys often known for sleeping in their cars.)

Of course, Jen notes that this story is old news: “Who among us hasn’t swapped spit with a Christmas Tree Guy?” Who among us, indeed!

See also: Carhartt Guy, as per Sunday Styles.

The Real Men are in Town: