Girls, Girls, Girls

So perhaps Fashion Week is an attempt to cook the books:

[O]n most weekdays, there are more women in the park than men. This is how . . . Dan Biederman, would like it to be. Biederman, the longtime president of the Bryant Park Corporation, was a protégé of the urban sociologist William (Holly) Whyte, whose theories about the dynamics of public space included the idea that the presence of women indicates civic health.

“Women pick up on visual cues of disorder better than men do,” Biederman said the other day. “They’re your purest customers. And, if women don’t see other women, they tend to leave.” Biederman visits the park several times a day and sometimes goes undercover. (Look out for a fit, middle-aged gentleman in a pin-striped suit, reading “The Red Badge of Courage.”) He has discerned that women notice homeless people more than men do, object more to crumbs on picnic tables, and are more sensitive to foul odors, such as that of urine, which signals that there are no clean, functional bathrooms nearby. Twenty years ago, Bryant Park was an infamous shambles. Few women — or men — would go near it. Now it’s a handsome place, with flower beds, pétanque games, a lending library, a carousel, thousands of portable chairs, theatrical performances, and many other inducements. And so the women come. Presumably, a female preponderance not only emboldens more women but also entices more men. “There’s great girl-watching,” Biederman acknowledged.

. . .

“Go to any public space in the world,” Biederman had said. “If it’s skewing overwhelmingly male, get out as soon as possible.”

Location Scout: Bryant Park.

Slumping Markets Portend Shift From Quaff To Sip

When the Dow drops, the ice plops — or, scotch as economic indicator:

Just as a storm of change has been rattling the New York Stock Exchange of late, so has there been a change in the weather at the New York Wine Exchange, a well-stocked shop on Broadway near Battery Place, just a few blocks from its namesake.

. . .

According to Paul Couto, the owner, sales of hard liquor have risen several percentage points since Aug. 16, the day the major stock indexes plunged to more than 10 percentage points below their July peaks.

Are the gods of finance smiling down on Mr. Couto even as they chuck lightning bolts at the financial companies that employ many of his customers?

More than a decade’s experience selling wine has taught him otherwise. He has found that when finance workers go for the hard stuff, it’s not because they want to drown their sorrows, but because liquor is a better bargain than wine.

“You open a bottle of Scotch,” he lamented, “it lasts you a week.”

. . .

Mr. Couto said that he wouldn’t be able to fully gauge the effects of the recent financial turbulence until next month, when many of his regular customers return from vacation. But even if they don’t all switch to hard liquor, he worries that some of them may soon exit the neighborhood.

In: Security Cameras; Out: 30-Sided Dice

Is it a convenient way to use up some of that Homeland Security money or a profound cultural shift? You know, like role-playing games once were:

E-Tech Computers, located at 71-06 Grand Avenue in Maspeth, recently introduced a new security camera system that offers 360-degree views, making them ideal for warding off burglars, prowlers and other miscreants.

Eric, the proprietor of the store, said the time seemed right to expand into the field of home security. Currently, E-Tech has a variety of high-tech models for sale, some having the familiar security camera shape, while others are half-spherical and offer full-room views to guard against blind spots.

The employees of E-Tech take great personal pride in the cameras and security they offer. Not only are the cameras on the cutting edge, Eric said, but he believes they have never been more necessary in Maspeth, Middle Village or just about any part of the big city. “People get robbed,” he said. “Bad stuff happens.”

Staff members at the store agreed. “Right now, New York is becoming less safe,” one worker claimed. “People need something to record what happens.”

Still, the cameras represent a slight departure from the usual merchandise E-Tech sells. The store, which has been in business for five years, is best known for dealing in hardware and software, not surveillance technology.

Eric and his E-Tech co-workers, however, have the freedom to change directions depending on what they presume the market demands. After all, the store is not part of a computer conglomerate, but like so many Grand Avenue retailers, a homegrown business financed out of Eric’s own pocket. As such, the store offers some items one wouldn’t expect in a traditional computer store, such as 30-sided dice and replicas of samurai swords.

Why Do You Cut Off Your Sleeves?

No sense in wasting a good detail:

All across the city, the watchers take up their posts, pillow or towel spread across windowsill, Bible or remote close at hand. The white-haired woman leaning on a golden cushion above Nostrand Avenue in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The retired pizza maker on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in his undershirt and khakis. The tragic-looking woman with pulled-back hair over the Drama Cafe in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and the long-sideburned deaf man two windows down.

And they sit there. And they look out at nothing; and at everything.

From the city sidewalk, there are few summer sights more archetypically urban than the face glimpsed in an open window, gazing silently out at the street. In a world where entertainment is delivered via modem and iPod, the very idea of someone drinking deep from the well of unmediated, nonvirtual reality exerts a strange pull. It also taps into our own voyeurism: to see someone inside a home, after all, is to witness a private moment.

The view from the other side of the window frame turns out to be no less engrossing. For the committed window gazer, there is no better place than the exact juncture of the public and private realms.

“Instead of going outside,” said Willie Taylor, 69, who holds court over his block in Harlem, “you sit at the window and you are outside. It’s better than being outside.”

The sociologist and window-gazer extraordinaire Jane Jacobs, in her 1961 polemical valentine “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” championed “the ballet of the good city sidewalk,” an intricate dance which, she wrote, “never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.”

. . .

On East 107th Street in East Harlem, a square-jawed woman in a sleeveless T-shirt answered a request for an interview with a cigarette butt flicked from the third floor.

When That Engine Roars, It Enters My Blood Like A Fever

As the last of the Four Hundred passes on, a new dynasty emerges:

For almost nine hours on Sunday, Eliot Spitzer, the Upper East Sider with the Princeton and Harvard education and the reputation for a hyperkinetic braininess, indulged his other side. Nascar, possibly the vehicle for the nation’s most overt display of country fried machismo, has recently become a calculated interest for ambitious politicians trying to appeal to a working-class male demographic.

Mr. Spitzer, however, can lay a legitimate claim to fandom, and appears to relish the sport as fervently as he does the Yankees.