Blame The Victim

The MTA wants you to know that you, the rider, are one of the biggest reasons its trains are delayed:

Subway riders behaving badly is a leading cause of train delays, transit statistics reveal.

More than 4,270 trains were thrown off their schedules last year because riders blocked subway car doors from closing in stations, according to Transit Authority statistics. It’s now the fifth-leading cause of delays, up from 20th place just five years earlier.

Unruly behavior as a cause for sluggish trains, meanwhile, spiked in December, moving into the top 10 reasons for tieups.

Transit officials said they couldn’t explain what appears to be an increase in boorish behavior on the rails.

“It’s really annoying,” door-hold victim Steve Cunning, 24, said yesterday at the Union Square subway station. “Just this morning at 51st St., this guy put his foot in the door to hold it for his friends, who were like a minute behind him.”

Cunning, a stockbroker from Manhattan, said most of his fellow riders meekly accepted the slowdown.

“He was gigantic, so there weren’t that many comments, and if there were, they were from way in the back,” he said.

Daryl Johnston, 46, who was waiting for an uptown No. 5 train at the Wall St. station, called for aggressive enforcement of TA rules against impeding the flow of trains.

“It’s wrong,” he said. “They should be given a ticket.”

The TA records a train as delayed if it arrives at its terminal station at the end of the line more than six minutes late.

Pot . . . kettle . . . pot . . . kettle.

The “It Scares Me” Approach To Urban Planning

East Village residents are going to great lengths to argue against bars operating in their neighborhood:

Death & Co., an upscale new nightspot that serves drinks and appetizers, has attracted glowing reviews and throngs of patrons since it opened at the beginning of January. But the bar and restaurant at 433 E. Sixth St. has also attracted sharp criticism from several neighbors and Community Board 3. In fact, with its ominous name and décor, Death & Co. actually has some neighbors scared, dredging up their worst nightmares — while other neighbors say their nights are literally haunted by the bar’s din.

. . .

. . . Members of Synagogue Anshe Meseritz, at 415 E. Sixth St., object to Death & Co.’s name and appearance.

The windowless bronze facade stands out from the surrounding buildings, and features 100-year-old cedar planks, cast-iron columns and a black flag. Inside, gold-flecked wallpaper catches light from chandeliers and candles, and a long mirror reflects plush booths and the bar’s marble countertop.

“We don’t need another bar on the block,” said Les Sussman, an Anshe Meseritz congregant who attended the meeting but has not been inside Death & Co. “We don’t need one with Nazi devil symbolism, [with a] gothic satanic door and a black flag flying.”

The facade looks like a boxcar used to transport Jews to concentration camps, Sussman said, and disturbs elderly synagogue members who survived the Holocaust.

“They don’t want to pass a place that is frightening,” he said.

“I have a Holocaust relative myself,” [Death & Co. owner David] Kaplan responded. “I am Jewish, and I never considered it offensive in that way.”

Death & Co.’s name comes from the title of a Prohibition propaganda poster, and “has nothing to do with anything dark or gothic, and nothing to do with death itself,” Kaplan said.

You Not Only Repeat The Negative, You Spend $83,916 Doing It . . . Smart!

Doesn’t the fact that you have $80,000 to blow on a full-page ad in the New York Times basically prove Frank Bruni’s point that your restaurant is overpriced? I think most people would perceive it that way:

The owner of Kobe Club, Jeffrey Chodorow, may have spent more than $80,000 for a full-page advertisement in the New York Times that he used to defend his new steakhouse against what he called a personal attack by an unqualified food critic in a review in that paper earlier this month.

Mr. Chodorow attacked the Times reviewer, Frank Bruni, in his open letter yesterday, writing that the newspaper has been lacking a “real food critic” since Ruth Reichl left for Gourmet magazine. He wrote that he was the victim of a personal attack.

. . .

Mr. Bruni wrote in his review of Kobe Club that the menu presented “too many insipid or insulting dishes at prices that draw blood from anyone without a trust fund or an expense account.” In his advertisement, Mr. Chodorow claimed that other reviews of Kobe Club have been “overwhelmingly positive.”

Mr. Chodorow, who according to his spokeswoman was on an airplane yesterday and not available for comment, gained small-screen celebrity status a few years ago when he starred in an NBC reality show, “The Restaurant,” which documented the opening of Rocco’s on 22nd Street. That restaurant, financed by Mr. Chodorow, closed in 2004. Mr. Chodorow owns 22 other restaurants across the country.

The cost of a full-page advertisement in the New York Times Dining In/Dining Out section is $83,916, according to the company’s advertising department.

You Know A Cultural Institution Is In Trouble When Its Accounting Is More Inventive Than Its Collection

Because it’s not like you think about Glenn Lowry’s salary — sorry, shadow salary — when you plunk down $20 to visit the damn place:

Glenn D. Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art for nearly 12 years, has long been one of the highest-paid museum officials in the country, with salary, bonus and benefits totaling $1.28 million in the year that ended June 30, 2005, the most recent period for which figures are publicly available.

Yet for more than eight years, his income was even higher than the museum reported in its tax forms, thanks to a trust created by two of the museum’s wealthiest trustees, David Rockefeller and Agnes Gund.

Mr. Rockefeller, Ms. Gund and Ronald S. Lauder, another trustee, made tax-deductible gifts to the trust, the New York Fine Arts Support Trust, as did Mr. Rockefeller’s brother Laurance, who donated a Bonnard painting valued at $800,000 that was later sold. The trust used the money to make payments to Mr. Lowry.

Between 1995 and 2003, that trust paid him a total of $5.35 million — in amounts ranging from $35,800 to $3.5 million a year — aside from the compensation supplied by the museum.

. . .

Asked for comment, Mr. Lowry and the museum referred all questions to Kim Mitchell, a MoMA spokeswoman. Pressed for details, she said in an e-mail message that the trust had been created as part of the effort to recruit Mr. Lowry to take over the museum in 1995.

For example, while the museum covered the down payment Mr. Lowry made on an apartment he bought in Gracie Square that year, the trust reimbursed him for all his mortgage payments.

Then, in 1999, the trust bought that apartment for MoMA in a $3.4 million purchase from Mr. Lowry. Mr. Lowry pocketed the $1.3 million in profit on the sale, Ms. Mitchell said, “in lieu of any deferred compensation the museum would have had to provide in the future.”

Ms. Mitchell said Mr. Lowry paid income taxes on all the money he received from the trust.

And in 2004, the museum purchased an apartment in Museum Tower on the MoMA campus on West 53rd Street, where Mr. Lowry, 52, now lives rent-free.

Charles Barron Lecturing CUNY About Self-Determination Made Me Finally Understand “Irony”

The question this morning is what the most salient aspect of Councilmember Charles Barron’s role in this controversy — the notion that Barron celebrates fugitive cop killers, the apparent micromanaging of CUNY administration decisions (was this an official act?) or the idea that there’s any constituency at all for 1960s militants in 2007:

City Councilman Charles Barron considers Thomas Jefferson a “slave-owning pedophile.”

So perhaps it shouldn’t be any surprise that the former Black Panther restored a controversial City College sign honoring two fugitives, most notably Assata Shakur, a fellow Black Panther convicted of killing a cop and making terrorist bombs.

“We are here to say to the City University that we have a right to self-determination, that we have a right to free speech, that we have a right to freedom of expression,” Barron said. “We are saying that you can’t determine who our heroines and heroes are going to be.”

The sign, which was first put up in 1990, was removed Dec. 13 after causing outrage for celebrating the lives of two fugitives: Shakur and bomber Guillermo Morales.

Morales built bombs for a Puerto Rican terrorist group and now lives in Cuba. Shakur, known then as Joanne Chesimard, also fled to Cuba after she was wounded in a shooting that killed a New Jersey state trooper in 1973.

School officials ordered the sign removed saying trustees never approved it. Students hit back by suing over the decision.