Union Square Metronome Co-opted By Olympics Boosters

The Metronome — that massive backward-forward digital clock on the south side of Union Square — has been reconfigured to count down the days until the IOC announces the 2012 Olympic host city. How crass! The Times explains:

A few weeks ago, passers-by began to notice a change in the Metronome, the enormous public art project on the facade of One Union Square South. Instead of telling time in its usual way, by counting the hours while simultaneously subtracting the remaining time left in the day, the artwork’s digital clock seemed to be counting down to some future date. Last Tuesday, the clock had 70 days remaining, which would place Day 0 at July 6.

With its rapid blur of digitized numbers, the Metronome had always confounded out-of-towners, but now it was bewildering New Yorkers, too. The clock was installed in 1999 and had not wavered from its format. So why the change? What is the significance of July 6?

. . .

It turns out that July 6 is the day the International Olympic Committee will announce the host city of the 2012 Olympics. According to Jay Carson, a spokesman for NYC2012, the group spearheading New York’s Olympic bid, the clock countdown is a joint venture between NYC2012 and the Related Companies, which manages the building and commissioned the Metronome, and was created so that “thousands each day would feel the urgency.” After July 6, the clock will return to its old form.

And while the NYC2012 folks are “enthusiastic about the project,” the artists who created the clock aren’t so sure:

The creators of the Metronome, Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel, had a more tepid reaction. Works of art, Mr. Ginzel said, “are like children,” and he likened the Metronome change to “sending your child off to school and hearing that the teacher has decided to dress it in different clothing.”

Ms. Jones said having the Olympics in New York might be good for the city, but added, “I don’t think artwork should be used as advertising.”

“Source”: HoJo Gone By New Year

The Post reports that the the Times Square site on which the Howard Johnson’s restaurant sits has been sold and the restaurant will likely be gone by the new year:

Times Square’s Howard Johnson’s, a neon-lit, fast-food landmark in the Crossroads of the World for 50 years, will soon be razed to make way for a glamorous new retail development, The Post has learned.

No closing date has been set, but the favorite eatery of Times Square sentimentalists “will not likely see another New Year’s Eve ball-drop,” a source said yesterday.

The four-story building with the winking blue and orange lights at Broadway and 46th Street “will soon come down,” confirmed Cushman & Wakefield real-estate broker C. Bradley Mendelson, who represents the new owner, Jeff Sutton’s Wharton Acquisitions.

Longtime owner Kenneth Rubinstein and his family just sold the HoJo’s site at 1551 Broadway, next-door 1555 Broadway, and a building on West 34th Street to Sutton for “more than $100 million,” Mendelson said.

And by “glamorous new retail development” they mean a box-like Toys-“R”-Us-type store. Glamorous, indeed:

Don’t expect another low-cost eatery: Sutton is the owner of such “trophy” retail venues as the Fifth Avenue sites of Hugo Boss, American Girl Place, and the new Abercrombie & Fitch.

Sources said he plans to level both Broadway buildings and construct a gleaming new “retail box,” similar to the nearby Toys “R” Us, that will “offer a world-class branding opportunity for international or Fortune 500 companies.”

Personally, I’m holding out for the return of the WWF restaurant, or better digs for the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company.

The Post, unable to veil its extreme partisan bent, notes that what really is at stake here is a storied tradition of cheap drinks and fried clams:

Its blue-and-brown booths, old-fashioned counter and bar serving $3.75 cocktails — “except premium brands” — seems an anachronism amidst the “new” Times Square’s concentration of media and financial skyscrapers, hip hotels and bright electronic displays.

The grungy but cozy spot for fried clams and open-faced tuna sandwiches is flanked by more recent landmarks, such as the giant Bank of America supersign, the W Hotel and Toys “R” Us with its indoor Ferris wheel.

Manhattan Preschool Admissions More Competitive Than Harvard

The Post notes that the the preschool admissions process is more competitive than Harvard’s admissions process, with 15 applicants for each spot compared to Harvard’s 11:

Manhattan toddlers have a harder time winning acceptance to private preschools than students have trying to get into Harvard.

An average of 15 applicants vied for every spot in about 200 preschools in Manhattan, said consultant Amanda Uhry, founder of Manhattan Private School Advisors.

Harvard had 11 students competing for each of its approximately 2,030 slots.

Thousands of New York parents received notice last week that their children had been rejected or put on a waiting list for preschool.

“It is a very punitive process,” said Roxandra Antoniadis, admissions director at St. Hilda’s & St. Hugh’s, on the Upper West Side.

“Think of how educated New York City parents are, how sophisticated, how accomplished their children are,” she said. “When they don’t get in, it is horrible for them.”

. . .

Brick Church School, on the Upper East Side, had over 300 applicants for 53 spots, director Lydia Spinelli said. Next year, its annual tuition will range from $12,000 for half a day to $15,400 for 4- and 5-year-olds.

Uhry, the consultant, advises her clients to try 12 to 14 schools. Parents then may have to wait in lines for applications, take tours, write essays, have their toddlers tested and observed at play or even interviewed, and secure letters of recommendation from friends and family members.

The “Smorgasbord of Salacity” Reestablishes Itself in Times Square

Adult shops are making a comeback in the Times Square area:

Ten years after Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani declared war on Times Square’s X-rated peep shows, strip joints and video stores, shops selling sexually explicit materials have slowly begun to creep back into the area, adroitly exploiting loopholes in the law – and property-owners’ demand for high-paying tenants – to stage their comeback.

. . .

The areas that have seen the biggest resurgence are on Eighth Avenue near the Port Authority Bus Terminal and on 37th and 39th Streets near the Avenue of the Americas, where the number of sex shops has tripled, to 18 from 6, in a year and a half. North of 42nd Street, the increase has been smaller, with only three of the 17 stores in the area opening since 2003.

Part of the growth owes to the agility with which store owners have learned to comply with city zoning regulations adopted in the mid-1990’s to keep them out of residential neighborhoods and away from schools and churches.

But development officials and local business owners say that another factor has been the shops’ willingness to pay well above market rents.

“There’s a disparity between what the porn guys will pay and what the market will bear,” said Tom Tompkins, president of the Times Square Alliance. “And it tends not to be the bigger landlords. It’s a guy who owns a three-story building, and the apartments above are rent-stabilized, so the great majority of his return on the building comes from the ground-floor retail.”

It’s easy to get around the city’s formerly tough zoning laws, which were watered down after court challenges:

Today, any store with at least 60 percent non-X-rated merchandise is not technically considered an “adult entertainment” business under the law.

“If they stock their shelves with enough copies of ‘Bambi,’ they can come within compliance,” said John Feinblatt, the city’s criminal justice coordinator.

Since stores that obey the 60/40 rule are not subject to the rules restricting sex-related businesses, they are free not only to open but to cluster-that is, open near each other – making the law a “close to impossible thing to enforce,” Mr. Feinblatt said.

Perhaps the biggest such cluster is on Eighth Avenue, where business was brisk on a recent Friday afternoon.

“There’s one,” said Bill Daley, slyly nudging his elbow toward a middle-aged man in a jacket and tie who, just seconds earlier, had darted into a doorway marked with a movie poster for “The Bourne Supremacy” but beyond which were visible titles of a saucier variety.

Mr. Daley sighed grimly. “People always think it’s the creeps and bums who go to these stores,” he said. “But if you go there after lunch or after work, you’ll see all these guys in suits. It’s usually family guys who stop on their way home.”

Closing the Tab

Now that the (insert Dr. Evil voice) $21 million worth of Gates are being dismantled (they are, aren’t they?), some are questioning the project’s opaque accounting:

One million square feet of nylon fabric. Five thousand tons of steel. Sixty miles of vinyl tubing. Lots of nuts and bolts.

And a $21 million price tag.

Along with the lofty questions posed by “The Gates” (Is it art? What is art? And haven’t we heard enough of this project?), another query has flitted through the minds of some visitors to Central Park in recent weeks. How did the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude manage to spend that much money on their tangerine dream?

To pose the question out loud smacks of ingratitude, particularly given what is widely viewed as the project’s benefit to the city: drawing thousands of foreign tourists and pumping an estimated $254 million into New York’s economy. And the artists have paid for the project entirely on their own, using no public or corporate money, and therefore do not need to justify their expenses. They financed “The Gates” by selling other pieces of their own artwork, which their associates say increased in value over the past year as anticipation for the Central Park project grew.

On the other hand, it is that unique financing system, of relying on the promise of “The Gates” to maximize the profits needed to pay its $21 million bill, that poses the question of how the bill was determined. And while Christo and Jeanne-Claude have freely volunteered the project’s high cost, they steadfastly refuse to explain how they came to that figure.

Despite their reticence, or perhaps because of it, the question has taken root in the usual places. On the Internet, bloggers have calculated the probable prices of extruded vinyl and rip-stop nylon, but have come up millions of dollars short. Journalists have pestered the artists’ representatives to break down the costs, to no avail.

A New York filmmaker who dared to dissect the $21 million figure on his Web site was savaged in an anonymous e-mail message, which included a suspiciously European-sounding putdown: “You ridiculous apprentice of nothing!”

Using New York’s public spaces as a sort of outdoor gallery always increases an artist’s value, but if the Gates accounting is wrong, doesn’t it mean that it’s also possible that they actually made a buttload of money off of the project? Or am I reading this incorrectly?

Bonus Point: That “suspiciously European-souding” commenter’s story.