You’ve Got Estrogen

You know a place is frou-frou when the Sunday Times refers to it like this:

Indeed, the feminized décor [of Cafe Lalo, the dessert place on West 83rd Street featured on You’ve Got Mail] may serve a purpose beyond aesthetics. After a man spends an hour surrounded by fluffy desserts and the lulling sound of Norah Jones on the stereo, his more carnal tendencies will probably be all but cowed on the walk home. If he musters the testosterone required for hand holding, he should consider it a victory.

Gentlemen, they’re calling you out! What are you gonna do about it?

Law & Order Redux

Not to minimize tragedy (believe me, this story is sad enough as it is), but am I the only one who senses a Law & Order episode coming on?

Good Fences Don’t Help Much in a Co-Op

A Chelsea co-op successfully evicted a so-called “neighbor from hell” whose transgressions included boning a homeless dude in the building’s gym:

The complaints started just four months after Davis moved into the elegant apartment complex, which occupies a city block from W. 23rd to 24th Sts., between Ninth and 10th Aves. Home to some famous names over the years, including photographer Annie Leibovitz and Debbie Harry of the rock group Blondie, the 75-year-old complex has a roof garden and an indoor swimming pool. And it has at least one very unpopular resident. “He’s a little nuts,” said an eighth-floor resident who has lived in the building 12 years. “He’d always be scavenging in the stairwell. … He had this big dog that just stinks up the elevator.”

Davis also was accused, according to court records, of sneaking a “foul-smelling” homeless man into the complex’s health club shower and having sex with him there.

He denied stealing people’s clothes, insisting he took a raincoat on the laundry room floor and planned to mail it to Cuba. He denied having sex with the homeless man, and said he was simply picking something off his back.

Bonus Point: bartelby.com’s New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy “Good fences make good neighbors” explainer.

The Gates

Preparations on Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Gates project in Central Park began yesterday:

Under the watchful gaze of the creators, a crew of roughly 100 workers began lowering thousands of steel bases onto the walkways of Central Park yesterday in preparation for the biggest public art project the city has ever seen, at least since the park itself was designed in 1857: “The Gates,” by the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

The workers, who ranged from musicians to out-of-work actors to forklift operators, gathered at 7 a.m. at the Central Park Boathouse for a briefing by, among others, the artists. A little while later, at the staging area at 102nd Street just beneath the Harlem Meer, where the steel bases were stacked, men and women in yellow vests waved orange caution flags at pedestrians while others, wielding measuring tapes and string, began carefully placing the bases in areas designated with a stenciled maple leaf, about 12 feet apart. Eventually, the bases will support 7,500 gates festooned with saffron-colored fabric panels along 23 miles of the park’s pedestrian walkways – from 59th Street to 110th Street, east and west.

The $20 million project, a quarter-century in the making and financed by the artists, will go on full view on Feb. 12 and remain until Feb. 27. It is expected to attract thousands of art lovers from around the world. The artists are trying to create “a visual golden river appearing and disappearing through the bare branches of the trees, highlighting the shapes of the footpaths,” according to a brochure explaining the project. The color was chosen to cast a warm glow over the park at a gray time of year.

Octagon Tower

The Times’ Following Up column reported on Roosevelt Island’s Octagon Tower in yesterday’s paper, noting that work has finally begun to incorporate it into a new residential building:

In the 1830’s and 40’s, when Roosevelt Island in the East River was Blackwell’s Island, the New York City Lunatic Asylum was built there. It included a five-story, eight-sided stone structure called the Octagon Tower, which was rich with architectural features like a gracefully spiraling cast-iron interior staircase.

Metropolitan Hospital occupied the site in the 1890’s, remaining until the 1950’s, by which time the island was Welfare Island. The former asylum was later razed except for the Octagon Tower. The tower was to be preserved as part of the new residential community whose construction began in the 1970’s, on what had become Roosevelt Island.

But financing problems stalled the plan for the Octagon Tower, and it decayed perilously. It was finally stabilized in 2002. Last month, the biggest step to preserve it was taken: construction began on a new apartment development that is to incorporate a fully rehabilitated Octagon Tower.

The print version of the Times had a nice picture of the Tower with more of its former features intact. Here’s a picture of it from June:

See also: Roosevelt Island Big Map Pages