Build Your Own No Parking Zone

Renegade signage causes havoc in DUMBO; DOT flummoxed:

A “No Parking” sign mysteriously appeared on a stretch of Front St. in Brooklyn this week, prompting the police to ticket and tow cars left there.

The only problem, the city Transportation Department said yesterday, is that there are no parking restrictions on the south side of Front St., between Washington and Main Sts. — and they have no idea who put up the official sign.

“This is crazy,” cried towing victim David Bourgeois, a 38-year-old freelance writer who lives in the neighborhood.

It was the latest twist in a Twilight Zone-like week for Bourgeois, who parked his Mini Cooper on Front St. Sunday night when the sign — barring parking from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekdays — wasn’t there.

When he went to check on his wheels Wednesday morning, the sign was there — and his car was gone.

He found his Mini in a police tow pound in Brooklyn Wednesday night. He paid $205 to drive it to freedom. Adding insult to injury, a $60 parking ticket was on the windshield.

“It’s just outrageous,” he said. “I’m definitely going to fight this.”

DOT spokeswoman Kay Sarlin said the agency would work with the city Finance Department to dismiss the ticket. An NYPD spokesman said officials were looking into waiving the towing fee.

The Golf Simulator Is Either A Coal-Mine Canary Or A Way Of “Empowering New Yorkers To Become The Overachievers That We’re All Expected To Be”

The latter is clever but developers don’t offer amenities unless they have to . . . the housing bubble is upon us:

When luxury condominiums open early next year at 20 Pine St., a former bank in the Financial District, tenants will be able to cap off their days by soaking in a Turkish bath, practicing their swings with a golf simulator, or perfecting their yoga poses in a private exercise studio.

Instead of hailing a taxi, those moving into 255 Hudson St. in SoHo will be able to slide behind the wheel of one of the vintage automobiles at the building’s disposal. Residents at 15 Central Park West will be able to watch a DVD in that condominium’s screening room or select a book from its private library. Meanwhile in Brooklyn, overwhelmed parents living at the Court Street Lofts can call on a “nanny concierge” to arrange playdates for their toddlers.

With a bevy of condos hitting the market, many residential developments are luring apartment-hunters with amenities that are transforming apartment buildings into veritable self-contained villages.

Call it “assisted living” for the family set.

“The market has demanded it,” a senior managing director of Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group, Anne Young, said. “People in New York work so hard. At the end of the day, we do not want to leave our homes, but we still want the gracious lifestyle we think we’re entitled to. We want to go home to our own gym, our own movie theater, our own golf simulator.”

In this newly condo-crowded city, developers are looking to stand out, an executive vice president of Prudential Douglas Elliman, Tamir Shemesh, said. “They’re saying, ‘You’re going to pay $2,000 per square foot, but we’re going to give you extras that you won’t be able to find at other places,'” he said. “They’re not looking at reducing the price, but they are looking to give you more for your buck.”

. . .

The Ariel — two luxury high-rises in the West 90s — will offer tenants access to an on-site La Palestra fitness center, a billiards room, and a “pet salon,” where residents can “bathe their dog, without putting them into your tea-for-two tub in their $3 million home,” Ms. Trazzera said.

“We’re empowering New Yorkers to become the overachievers that we’re all expected to be,” a managing director of Corcoran Sunshine, Daniel Cordeiro, said.

Mr. Cordeiro said building-based services — from dog spas to steam rooms to at-your-service concierges — are quickly becoming commonplace in new condominiums. “To me, it’s like the Internet or a Blackberry,” he said. “It’s not a luxury anymore.”

He added: “These amenities, in hindsight, you think, ‘How could we live without this?'” [Emph. added to underscore hopeful spin]

From “Flea” To “Boutique”

Twelve hours on how to sell factory-seconds electronics and cheaply made socks:

Starting next month, aspiring entrepreneurs will be able to attend a seminar that will teach them the marketing skills they’ll need to be vendors at an indoor flea market in Far Rockaway, Queens.

The “How to Become a Successful Flea Market Vendor” workshop was set up by organizers of the Seaside Flea Market, who are seeking locals who yearn to own their own businesses and are willing to set up shop at the market, which reopens this fall.

“When we saw there was an opportunity for something to happen in the Rockaways, we jumped at the chance,” said flea market vendor Valerie Vargas, 45, who co-owns Pisces Arts & Crafts with her husband, Max.

The Far Rockaway couple took the 12-hour course earlier this year and on summer weekends have sold their handmade jewelry and oils at the flea market, located at 1700 Seagirt Blvd.

“We went there open-minded. We didn’t know we had a knack for this, and I’m enjoying it,” said Vargas, 45, who also works as a production editor. “We’ve done quite well this summer, and we have repeat customers. Our goal and dream is to have our own store.”

The vendor course instructs participants how to choose a product for sale, how to set uptheir selling area and salesmanship.

“Anyone who is interested in extra income or starting their own business can learn how to do it on their own,” said Abbey Feldman, course instructor and a market organizer. “It is ideal for people who like the boutique business concept.”

Dude, That Totally Reads Like A Talk Of The Town Piece!

Where do all the Talk of the Town rejections go? To silenceofthecity.com*:

The prospect of breaking into the seemingly impenetrable fortress that is The New Yorker can make a writer contemplate crazy and desperate things. So it was for Mac Montandon, when, a couple years ago, he received an assignment to write an article on spec for the magazine’s Talk of the Town section. To Montandon, who’d been trying, unsuccessfully, to break into the magazine, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. But on the day he’d arranged to conduct the crucial interview, one that couldn’t be postponed, his wife went into labor with the couple’s first child. “I’ll probably sound like the bastard of all time,” the 35-year-old journalist says, “but I was a little conflicted.”

On the day his daughter, Oona, was born, he was to meet Bob Pollard, the frontman of the band Guided by Voices, who, Montandon had learned, planned to announce the dissolution of the band to a capacity crowd at the Bowery Ballroom that evening. It promised to be one of those offbeat New York moments that Talk of the Town stories capture so well, and Pollard seemed the type of quirky, yet complex, persona that might intrigue New Yorker readers. Luckily, Oona was born in time for Montandon to meet Pollard that afternoon. And making trips back and forth from the venue to the hospital, he even caught one of Guided by Voices’ final performances. Later, Montandon framed his story with the elegance, wit, and detail he believed were the ingredients of a successful Talk story. In the end, though, the magazine never published it. “I think that was the closest I’ve come to cracking into the golden tower,” recalls Montandon, a senior editor at the soon-to-be-relaunched Radar magazine, who estimates he’s pitched Talk of the Town 15 times over the past four years. (One of his most recent: a piece on the etiquette of holding subway and elevator doors open for other passengers—do you make a token effort with the “dainty one-toe” technique or take “the full-body approach”? In retrospect, he concedes, his pitch may have been a bit too “high-concept.”)

Rejection, of course, is simply a rite of passage for most writers. For Montandon, though, it formed the seed of an idea. Since there was no shortage of writers like him who’d tried and failed to make The New Yorker’s pages, he figured there was an abundance of unpublished Talk stories lying around New York City. About a year ago he set out to provide a home for the orphan submissions, quietly launching silenceofthecity.com, where he resurrects the unpublished contributions of Talk of the Town rejectees.

. . .

Though Montandon has yet to receive any feedback from The New Yorker about Silence of the City and was unsure whether anyone there had even come across it, staffers at the magazine have been aware of the site for some time. “We were flattered by it more than anything,” says Lauren Collins, a 26-year-old New Yorker staffer who writes for Talk of the Town and assists in putting the section together. “I think it’s good-humored and a fun spoof on what we do.”

“I thought that the stories were pretty good and fun to read,” adds Susan Morrison, who’s edited Talk for the past 10 years, “so it’s providing a service, I suppose, because we don’t have that much space to run many stories.”

*This Voice article is the most meta thing you’ll read all year.

See also: Silence of the City.

If You Lived Here You’d Be Laid By Now

Debate rages over whether using sex to sell condos is “fun” or if it just reveals that the market for high-end real estate has, er, shot its wad:

A woman with tousled hair straddles a grinning, shirtless man on a bed alongside the words: “Try This at Home.” This was not an advertisement for beer, perfume or instructional Kama Sutra DVD’s. It was an advertisement for the Herald Towers condominiums in Midtown Manhattan.

In a print advertisement for the Link condominiums, also in Midtown, a red-lipped topless woman (only a sliver of one breast was visible) is shown sitting in an apartment while a tattoo is applied to her exposed back.

A glossy advertisement for the Altair 20 in Chelsea has lush greenery framing a shower stall and a svelte, wet, naked woman with a strategically positioned banner that reads “To the Altair 20 Rainforest.”

Some of the advertisements for new condominiums this year look more like ads for condoms, and that has caused more than a few eyes to linger on traditionally staid real estate listings. These provocative advertisements have also raised eyebrows among real estate and advertising professionals who say sex has never been germane to real estate marketing the way it is, say, to music and underwear.

. . .

Lizzie Grubman Public Relations has increasingly been sought by real estate companies in the last year, including Corcoran, which calls itself the city’s largest residential real estate company. “Companies have come to our agency because they want to go beyond the tradition,” said Sabrina Levine, Ms. Grubman’s partner. “Now it’s all about making their building buzz-worthy.”

. . .

Mr. [Neil] Binder of Bellmarc and [NYU Stern Business School] Professor [Sam] Craig suggested that when marketers play the sex card, it is an indication of trouble, though no marketing executive would admit to such a thing.

Still, Mr. Binder said, “I can’t deny the legitimacy of the strategy.”