A Rental Broker Hero Myth . . . Somewhere Joseph Campbell Turns In His Grave

Broker-columnist Brian Carter seems like a good guy, but this kind of special attention seems like a stretch and, frankly, I’m skeptical:

If ever there was someone who needed a good rental agent, this was the kid, and this is where I got into trouble. Not a one of them had any idea of what to expect, or what they were really looking for, or how the process worked, or how badly they could get screwed. But regardless of your reasons or intentions, the one rule not to be violated in this business is: Never want the deal more than they do. I’m not sure I did, but I was certainly pulling for these guys. Their enthusiasm was contagious, and their simple search for any landlord willing to take them was humbling.

The young artist fell in love with the first apartment I showed him. Small and pretty beat up; it was exactly what he had imagined a New York apartment should look like. But what did he know? He’d never been here before. I called the management company and waded delicately into the conversation. As I suspected, there was no way around the employment letter without a stronger guarantor.

We saw a few more places, but everywhere we went we ran into the same problem. It was late Friday night, and we had gone as far as we could. They headed to McDonalds or someplace for dinner and I went back to the office. I tried calling everyone I knew in the restaurant business to see if I could set him up with a job or at the very least an employment letter. But no one seemed to need an inexperienced waiter, nor was anyone willing to write the stupid employment letter.

I think somewhere in the back of mind I refused to believe that in a city this large and supposedly diverse, there wasn’t a place for this kid. It was time to pull my resources together and to summon all of my real estate power and knowledge. This amounted to going through every landlord I could think of and finally searching Craigslist for no-fee places in Queens. Nothing came up. Even if I had better contacts in the outer boroughs, they weren’t about to consider Brooklyn yet. Never the super agent, I had screwed this one up good.

This Way There Won’t Be Anyone Around To Make A Fuss

And this way there won’t be any unseemly reminder of what happened:

The parents and sister of a man convicted of conspiring to bomb the Herald Square subway station were detained yesterday by federal immigration authorities, who have been seeking to deport them to Pakistan.

The arrests came a day after the convicted man, Shahawar Matin Siraj, 24, was sentenced in United States District Court in Brooklyn to 30 years in prison.

The family, who came to the United States in 1999, had been seeking asylum since 2003, citing religious persecution in their home country.

A spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement said that Mr. Siraj’s father, Siraj Abdul Rehman, 54, was arrested because a final deportation order had been filed against him. But a lawyer for the family said his case was still under appeal.

The agency spokesman, Mark Thorn, said that the man’s mother, Shahina Parveen, 50, and his sister, Sanya Siraj, 19, were arrested and detained on immigration violations.

. . .

The lawyer for the family, Mona Shah, disputed that a final order of removal had been entered against Mr. Rehman. She said he still has an appeal pending before the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

“It’s absolutely disgusting that they’ve picked him up under the guise of a deportation order,” Ms. Shah said yesterday. “Fine, punish the son. But why punish them like this?”

She could not offer an explanation for the timing of the move, but suggested that it might stem from pressure on the authorities because the family’s immigration status was cited in news reports about Mr. Siraj’s case.

Earlier: Just Imagine How Long We Could Have Put Him Away For Had He Actually Come Up With The Idea On His Own.

“The Big Stink”

Blame for what is now being called “the Big Stink” is pinned on New Jersey, that old standby:

Blame the big stink on New Jersey.
The mighty stench that blanketed swaths of the city, forced building and school evacuations, disrupted commuter train service – and even stoked fears of a terrorist attack – appears to have come from the other side of the Hudson River.

While the exact source and cause of the odor is still not clear, Charles Sturcken of the city Department of Environmental Protection said the agency was “pretty sure it came from New Jersey.”

Specifically, the heavily industrialized Hudson County waterfront with its chemical plants and port terminals as well as the Secaucus area, Sturcken said. Seven people in the Garden State were briefly hospitalized as a result of exposure to the stench.

Sewell Chan also smelt it:

Adding to the alarm was the strength and duration of the odor, which may have been aggravated by a weather phenomenon known as a temperature inversion. Inversions, which often occur when a warm front moves over a cooler, denser air mass, cause the temperature closer to the ground to be cooler and the air higher up to be warmer — a reversal of the usual pattern. Inversions can trap pollutants and odors, preventing them from being dispersed upward.

David Wally, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s forecast office in Upton, N.Y., said a warm front approached the city between 7 and 8 a.m., making it “very possible” that an inversion trapped the pollutants and gaseous odor closer to the ground. The inversion eroded later in the morning, he said.

. . .

Michael Williams, an accountant in Jersey City, said he delayed taking a smoking break for more than an hour because the odor was so intense. “I didn’t want to spark an explosion or anything,” he said.

Earlier on The Big Stink: Another Mystery Smell . . .,
Finally, The Gas Has Passed.

It Was For The Birds

Sure, spin it as a way to save the birds:

They spent $1.7 million to re-light the Parachute Jump earlier this summer — but the landmark will soon go dark to save birds.

Last week, the Parachute Jump became the first Brooklyn building to join the “Lights Out New York” program, which encourages tall buildings to douse their lights to protect migratory birds.

“On a foggy night, when the birds don’t have the moon or the stars as a navigational guide, they [can] start circling lighted towers,” said Yigal Gelb, of New York City Audubon.

Once the birds begin circling, they get disoriented, and crash into each other or the tower. And sometimes they get so tired flying around that they drop simply from exhaustion.

. . .

The Parachute Jump is the program’s only Brooklyn member, and one of only six members citywide, a group that includes the Chrysler and Citicorp buildings.

Parachute Jump lightning designer Leni Schwendinger said she was more than happy to re-program the tower’s lighting scheme during the fall and spring migratory seasons.

“I’m happy to be a poster child” for the “Lights Out” program, Schwendinger said.

But careful readers may remember that the lights weren’t all that bright to begin with:

The reviews from those assembled were muted. Phyllis Carbo, 70, who rode on the Parachute Jump as a girl, hesitated when asked for her opinion. “I’m running for Assembly on the Republican line, so I have to be very careful,” she said. “I’m impressed.”

Even the evening’s master of ceremonies, Dick Zigun, one of Coney Island’s leading boosters, pronounced the light show “very subtle.”

Others were less restrained.

“Did they light it already? Is this it?” asked Joe Joya, 63.

His wife, Jane, 61, said, “I thought it was going to be a lot brighter. I thought that the lights were going to be more of a Vegas type of thing.”

He Came Dancing Across The Water, Cortez — What A Killer

Neil Young has dispatched a crew of soundmen to steal our soul:

All week, a man with a microphone has walked the subway platforms to collect the clattering of the rivets and the whistling horns, the distortion in the loudspeaker, the hush in the compressor’s song and the dying of the brake like some wounded thing.

Even in that racket, some find value. The recordings are the chief selling point of a new reproduction of a subway train by the Lionel model train company made under a license from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for completion by year’s end.

Other companies have made models before, but this one pays unparalleled attention to sonic detail, recreating the subterranean soundscape in elaborate hi-fi to win the favor of collectors and self-styled train geeks, keepers of a nostalgic anachronism to rank alongside comic books and baseball cards.

Among their number count the musician Neil Young, so devoted that he conceived a control system to reproduce the sounds of the rails, then acquired a minority interest in Lionel more than a decade ago.

“Realism is the byword,” Mr. Young said by telephone. “It’s a heavy thing moving down a track, like a real thing even though it’s a miniature.”

. . .

Recording began below Brooklyn on Monday, in the tunnels of the New York Transit Museum. There [Bruce R.] Koball was joined by a few transit supervisors and Mark Wolodarsky, an off-duty conductor. Mr. Wolodarsky was standing in the cab of Car 9306, a model R33s introduced in 1963 to run the 20-minute route from Times Square to the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens.

“I’m more or less ready to rock and roll here,” Mr. Koball declared.

Mr. Wolodarsky activated the train’s generator to charge the batteries, then opened and closed the doors. The men on the platform deemed the action too fast, and Mr. Wolodarsky tried again.

“There was no puff of air,” lamented a supervisor, James Harris. Mr. Wolodarsky tried again. In this manner they recorded the compressors and the generator, the brakes and the brake release. There were two long buzzes and two short, signals between conductor and motorman, then a low whistle, a guttural rumble and a high lonesome sound.

. . .

“It’s a symphony of motion and sound,” Mr. Young said. “New York City. What’s more American than that?”