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Are they back? I wouldn't call them new if they look like the old ones? Funny how they are calling the color gold!
Bold School: NY's New License Plate - Hot Or Not?
'Empire Gold' Plates Available Beginning April 2010ALBANY (CBS)
Design for New York's new "Empire Gold" license plate, available for motorists beginning in April 2010.
Bumpers across the tri-state are about to become a bit more colorful as the state's Department of Motor Vehicles unveiled its newest license plate design Tuesday. It seems as if many New Yorkers, however, aren't too pleased with the bold new design.
More than 80 percent of those who have taken part in a poll on WCBSTV.com as to whether they liked the new plate or not voted that they found it to be quite unappealing.
The "Empire Gold" design features a mostly golden-tinted plate with a navy bordering and lettering, along with a small, navy state silhouette in the center. The thicker blue border atop the plate features the words "New York" in gold lettering, while the bottom portion reads "Empire State" in navy lettering.
Motorists will be able to switch to the design when it's released in April 2010.
A plate fee of $25.00 will be added to the registration renewal fee. Single plate registrations for vehicles such as motorcycles will be charged a plate fee of $12.50. If you want to keep your old tag numbers, you'll have to fork out an additional $20 as well.
Officials say the new plate will bring in an expected $129 million in revenue over the next two years.
"This project will benefit law enforcement efforts, and therefore enhance public safety, in several ways," said Denise E. O'Donnell, Deputy Secretary for Public Safety and Commissioner of the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services. "For instance, nearly 300 police agencies in New York State are currently deploying approximately 500 computerized license plate readers (LPRs) that enable authorities to quickly identify vehicles that have been stolen or used in a crime. These new plates will ensure that the LPRs are as effective as possible."
The DMV will begin issuing the new plates for registration renewals that expire in May 2010. Customers renewing their vehicle registrations in person in a DMV office, over the phone, by mail or through the Internet, will receive their new Empire Gold plates in the mail. Customers completing an original over-the-counter registration transaction will receive their plates immediately.
The most recent New York license plate design was issued in 2001.
have you seen the new orange ny plates?
Two Car Models, New York Emblems, Discontinued
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
The Lincoln Town Car, left, and the Ford Crown Victoria.
They are the muscular, leg-roomy fixtures of New York’s crowded streetscape, the automobiles that came to represent the city.
The Ford Crown Victoria served as the mainstay of taxi and police fleets. Its close cousin, the Lincoln Town Car, could reliably be found idling outside Lincoln Center or waiting to whisk a Wall Street type home for the evening.
But in a little more than a year, both models will go the way of the Checker cab. Ford Motor Company plans to shutter the Canadian plant that manufactures the cars and discontinue the recognizably bulky frame that gives them their shape.
That means the end for vehicles that have come to symbolize the full spectrum of New York life, from private black sedans purring on Park Avenue to the ubiquitous sight of the yellow cab, great equalizer of the varied urban tribe.
“These cars are a facet of people’s everyday experience,” said David Yassky, the city’s taxi commissioner. “Whatever takes their place will have a real and tangible influence on the city’s aesthetic.”
Passengers should prepare for a bumpier, more cramped ride. Forget roomy trunks that fit a French-door refrigerator; the older models are yielding to smaller gas-and-electric hybrid vehicles with knee-bumping back seats and flimsier frames.
The impending departures have left New York’s livery world scrambling. The Taxi and Limousine Commission is holding a contest to design a new taxicab to replace the city’s 8,200 Crown Victoria yellow taxis. The Police Department will lose a fast-accelerating sedan it has depended on since 1992. And the black-car industry must replace 75 percent of its fleet.
Prophecies of the cars’ demise have come and gone: they survived one death notice in 2006 when Ford moved production from Michigan to Ontario. But widespread regulatory reform and industry financial troubles mean this is the true end of the road.
The company says it concluded that sales would drop off in coming years as more states required police and livery vehicles to meet stricter environmental standards — a high hurdle for gas guzzlers like the Crown Vic and the Town Car, which get about 16 miles a gallon in the city.
Fickle consumer tastes have also played a role: the models sell well with commercial fleets but not individual drivers, who tend to prefer slimmer sedans. One exception is the retiree market in Florida, which has a fondness for Town Cars. (The Crown Vic is now sold only to commercial customers.)
In other words, the lighter, greener hybrid has triumphed. “We need to move onto an improved, more sustainable product,” Rob Stevens, Ford’s chief engineer for commercial vehicles, said in an interview.
But some drivers and fleet owners maintain that the Town Car and Crown Vic are uniquely well suited to their task of comfortably ferrying all manner of city dwellers, from expense-account Wall Street bankers to criminals handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser.
“It is large, it is safe, it is easily repairable,” John Acierno, president of the Executive Transportation Group, said of the Town Car, which makes up more than 80 percent of his 1,800-car fleet.
“When you think of a black car or a limousine, your mind’s eye sort of goes to it,” Mr. Acierno said. “If there’s one sitting in front of a building, you think the car is waiting for someone.”
The cars also deliver a particularly smooth ride, die-hards say, thanks to a forgiving suspension and the sturdy steel frame that underlies both models. The Crown Vic’s plush leather back seat can resemble a sofa on wheels.
Replacements have begun to crop up in the city’s fleets, but some owners of yellow cabs say they are unimpressed.
Ronald Sherman, the president of the Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade, which represents 28 large fleet owners, said he had seen would-be taxi passengers ignore Chevrolet Malibu or Ford Escape cabs, opting for a longer wait in order to grab the more spacious Crown Vic. “These minis are ridiculous; passengers do not get into them,” Mr. Sherman said, asserting that the smaller back seat and low headroom made the hybrids uncomfortable and potentially dangerous for riders.
Kevin Healy, another fleet owner, agreed. Of the Volkswagen Jetta, another alternative taxi, he said: “Literally, I can’t get in. And I would need a doctor to get out.”
Despite such objections, New York City’s government is intent on greening its car fleet. A mayoral mandate is in place to depose the big gas guzzlers of yore: commissioners now drive hybrids, and the Police Department has reduced its Crown Victoria count to 1,400 cars today from 1,800 in 2006.
The city also wants to establish fuel emissions standards for taxicabs. Those regulations have been held up in court, but owners have pre-emptively started to adjust. Crown Victorias still account for 60 percent of yellow cabs, but their dominance has been threatened by growing numbers of Ford Escapes (2,637 cabs) and Toyota Sienna minivans (1,381).
The Lincoln Town Car remains a common sight on Park Avenue and outside the city’s gilded corporate headquarters. But there are signs that its clients’ tastes are changing, too.
Only half of the cars idling outside Lincoln Center on a recent weeknight were Lincolns. Instead, well-to-do clients stepped into Cadillacs, Mercedes-Benzes and a BMW.
A similar scene unfolded on a Wednesday morning at the Loews Regency Hotel, at Park Avenue and 62nd Street, where power breakfasters opted for Ford Expeditions, Lexuses and a Toyota Camry hybrid.
For most of the 35 years he has driven his private car in the city as a chauffeur, Ziggy Kingston used a Lincoln. But he recently made the switch to a Prius, saying that his clients, including the 30-minute meal maestro Rachael Ray and the actress Sarah Jessica Parker, often prefer the hybrid.
“It’s a good image for them,” he said, waiting for a pick-up outside the Barclays building in Midtown.
Gesturing toward a nearby Town Car, Mr. Kingston continued, “This was the car you wanted when no one cared about pollution and the mayor didn’t care.” Now, he said, “you got to go with what the environment is good for.”
Fleet owners are unsure about what will replace the Town Car, although Lincoln has created several new models intended for livery use. But none have the same Yao Ming-size legroom or trunk space.
Eager to retain the taxi market, Ford is offering a custom version of its Transit Connect van, whose oblong shape and tall roof resemble a London cab’s. The van gets 22 miles a gallon in the city and comes equipped with big picture windows for a scenic ride. More radical designs have been submitted to the city’s taxi commission, which has solicited ideas for a new taxicab built from scratch, rather than retrofitted from an existing car. The winner, which will not be announced for months, will have the exclusive right to build the city’s cabs for a decade.
Mr. Sherman, who owns a taxi fleet himself, said that his needs, like those of passengers, were simple: “What people are looking for in a taxicab,” he said, “is a safe ride from A to B.”
Drosselmeyer Wins the Belmont Stakes
By JOE DRAPE
June 5, 2010
The jockey and trainer of Drosselmeyer, right, built careers in New York.
Horses rarely blast away from their rivals in the Belmont Stakes. Unless their name is Secretariat, they endure the mile-and-a-half marathon. The third leg of the Triple Crown is much like the city of New York: grueling but rewarding, gritty but great.
When a heretofore undistinguished colt named Drosselmeyer went five wide into the stretch, you could not be blamed for thinking that there was no way the burly chestnut was going to pass the horses inside of him. There were a couple of Dudes, as in the Preakness runner-up First Dude and the swiftly improving Game On Dude.
Behind him, the highly regarded Fly Down was ready for takeoff. Mike Smith was riding Drosselmeyer for the first time. He is a Hall of Famer based in California and the regular rider of one of the best horses in the world, the undefeated mare Zenyatta.
“Keep pedaling, keep pedaling,” Smith said he thought to himself, “and he kept trying.”
Smith, 44, was no stranger here. He had made his reputation at Belmont Park in the 1990s, had haunted this circuit for 14 years, and had won every big race there was, except this one. In 12 previous tries at the Test of the Champion, as the Belmont is known, Smith had flunked it each time.
In the grandstand, another horseman was watching Smith, his new rider and old friend, help Drosselmeyer grind down the stretch.
That horseman was Bill Mott, another Hall of Famer and a trainer who also made his reputation in New York. He, too, had taken down about every piece of hardware there is in the nation — had even campaigned the great Cigar — but Mott had never won a Triple Crown race.
Suddenly, he was on his tiptoes. Mott had believed Drosselmeyer was better than his hard-luck finishes in the Dwyer Stakes here four weeks ago, in the Louisiana Derby and the Risen Star Stakes earlier this spring. The colt and his rider then, Kent Desormeaux, had found traffic in those efforts.
Mott and the colt’s owner, WinStar Farm, had decided to change up their luck and give Smith the mount. WinStar had already won a Triple Crown race this year when Super Saver won the Kentucky Derby.
“When I got the phone call and Bill asked if I was interested,” Smith said, his first thought was, “I’m going to win the Belmont.”
Now, here was Drosselmeyer in the middle of the track grinding away at his challengers and causing Mott’s heart to quicken. Smith and Drosselmeyer had a long way to go, but most of the 45,243 people in attendance were on their feet and seeing the same thing Mott was.
“Mike had him in great rhythm,” Mott, 56, said. “Nice and smooth.”
At the quarter pole, Smith smooched in Drosselmeyer’s ear, and took hold of his reins. He rattled them. He crossed them, once and twice, and then lifted his left arm and gave Drosselmeyer a couple of whacks.
“He really kicked in,” Smith said. “He kept on going and going and going.”
The Dudes were staggering. Game On Dude peeled back first. First Dude lost steam next.
“We just couldn’t hold it together right there at the end,” First Dude’s trainer, Dale Romans, said. “No excuses.”
Smith peeked beneath his shoulder, expecting to see Ice Box, the Derby runner-up with the monster late kick who was sent out as the 9-5 favorite. But Ice Box was nowhere — he was loping far back en route to a disappointing ninth-place finish that was upgraded to eighth after Uptowncharlybrown was disqualified and moved to last for losing a weight on the backstretch.
Instead, Smith saw that John Velazquez had Fly Down in full flight. Velazquez was trying to zoom Fly Down past him, First Dude and Game On Dude. Smith made Drosselmeyer stand his ground.
“He kept me there when I tried to ride my horse in between horses,” Velazquez said of Smith. “My horse was a little intimidated.”
Velazquez had to yank Fly Down to the outside. It was too late. Drosselmeyer was crossing the wire three-quarters of a length ahead of Fly Down.
“Once I had him out in the clear,” Smith said of Drosselmeyer, “he showed his heart.”
Drosselmeyer had outlasted all challengers. It took him a wearying 2 minutes 31.57 seconds, and he rewarded those who believed in him an ample $28 for a $2 bet.
But better than that, Drosselmeyer’s victory united a couple of New Yorkers in the winner’s circle. Smith had the one race that had eluded him, and Mott his first Triple Crown victory.
Mott’s and Smith’s stories are the same as those of tens of millions of New Yorkers who have come here for a couple of centuries: Make it here, you can make it anywhere, to paraphrase Frank Sinatra.
Smith was 24 when he took his place in the jockey’s room here next to Hall of Famers like Angel Cordero, Jorge Velazquez and Jerry Bailey. Mott was a newcomer to the circuit, having moved his stable from Kentucky.
“Billy and I have come full circle,” Smith said. “I’ve been riding so many years and to come to New York with him and finally win this race together is great.”
No is it finally finished?
did you see the new coney island amusment park?
At P. J. Clarke’s, the Bartender of Your Dreams
By FRANK BRUNI
May 26, 2010
Mr. Quinn, behind the bar.
My mother had eyes in the back of her head; Doug Quinn must have them in the palms of his hands. How else to explain the way he muddled mint for a mojito — and went on to make the rest of the cocktail — while glancing alternately at the door to see if anyone new was coming in, at the far end of the bar to see if anyone was telegraphing thirst, and at the guy in front of him, who was babbling anew about something or other? Not once did Mr. Quinn look down at the drink. It was like bartending in Braille.
He filled beer mugs without watching what he was doing. He could apparently tell, by the weight of them, when to stop. He plucked bottles from their perches without pausing to check labels. He apparently had, in his head, the whole liquor layout at P.J. Clarke’s, on the East Side.
And he remembered what my companion and I were drinking, even though we had ordered just one round so far, and there were at least 35 people clumped around the bar on this early May night, and he was dealing — alone — with all the tickets from all the servers in the adjacent dining rooms, and he wasn’t writing anything down, not that I could see.
“Another?” was all he asked, and a half minute later I had a Hendrick’s gin martini, up, with olives and jagged little floes of ice, just like the martini before it. My companion was sipping a second Manhattan with rye, not bourbon, per his initial request. Mr. Quinn works quickly, and he works without error.
It is legend, this efficiency of his. I learned of it one night at PDT, a faux speakeasy in the East Village — secret entrance, abundant taxidermy — that’s about as far in spirit (and spirits) from the blunt, timeless rough-and-tumble of P. J. Clarke’s as you can get. I asked Jim Meehan, the cocktail shaman there, whom he and other celebrated young mixologists of the moment looked up to.
Without hesitation he named Mr. Quinn, 42, and not because Mr. Quinn had pioneered some clever infusion or paired two ingredients no one had thought to pair before. Mr. Quinn, he said, did right by the classics and could handle (and coddle) a teeming crowd. He had speed, stamina, dexterity, personality and an awe-inspiring memory: the essentials of bartending, without which the cheeky chemistry is meaningless. Mr. Quinn was the bartenders’ bartender.
Dale DeGroff, arguably the city’s dean of mixology, told me that if he’s not away on business, he drops in on Mr. Quinn at least once a week, often past 2 a.m., when bartenders getting off work elsewhere congregate at P. J. Clarke’s — the original one on Third Avenue at 55th Street, not the spinoffs near Lincoln Center or at the World Financial Center. It serves food until 3 a.m. and drinks until 4 a.m., the legal limit, and isn’t as jammed in the wee hours as it is between 6 and 11 p.m.
“You’re not going to get a yuzu gimlet from the guy,” Mr. DeGroff said. “Ain’t going to happen. But you’re going to get a damned good martini.”
Mr. DeGroff actually prefers Glenlivet on the rocks, and said that a freshly made one will be waiting for him by the time he walks from the entrance to a barstool. More than that, he knows that if there’s someone at the bar whom he might enjoy talking to, Mr. Quinn will figure that out and make it happen, a master of human mixology above all.
You need to see him in action, not least because his 126-year-old stage is one of the city’s classic bars, what he calls “the Vatican of saloons,” a living diorama of a certain era and sensibility, with its penny-tile floors, carved mahogany bar, tin ceiling and stained-glass transoms.
Other servers there wear white shirts with dark neckties; Mr. Quinn wears pastels, sometimes with French cuffs and cufflinks, and always, always with a vividly colored bow tie — it’s his thing, plus a bow tie never flies up, flaps around or otherwise slows him down. A forelock of his hair, glistening with product, usually dangles low across his brow. He should be in a carrel at Oxford.
Or on a cricket field there. Along with the coordination of an athlete, he has the build of one: 6 feet 2 inches, broad-shouldered, trim. He has been known to leave P. J. Clarke’s after his 6 p.m.-to-4 a.m. shift, which he works Monday through Friday, and hit the 24 Hour Fitness club nearby before heading to the Upper East Side, where he lives with his wife and their sons, ages 5 and 3.
He grew up in Rockland County, majored in economics at Vassar, began bartending before graduation and never stopped. He popped up behind the bar at P. J. Clarke’s in 2003, when it reopened after a meticulous restoration.
It’s a lucrative gig. On many nights about 500 customers will cycle through, and while there are stretches when he has help, there are also stretches when he doesn’t. Most customers have more than one drink. Virtually all leave tips.
But to talk to him — as I did after two stealth visits when I merely drank and watched — is to know that money isn’t his main thing. He’s testing himself. Performing. Making people marvel at him. Making people love him.
“When they come here, they’re in my home,” he said. “They’re in my church.”
He packs a double-wide opener so he can flick the lids off two beer bottles at once. When smoking was allowed, he carried 10 lighters, because some would get wet and some lost, and he didn’t want to lose a second or a step by having to fetch another.
But being armed and agile isn’t the half of it. “A great bartender will get you a date for the evening, get you a job and get you a new apartment,” he said.
He is proudly anachronistic, calling female customers “doll,” “darling” and “baby,” a term of endearment he also uses for male customers, along with “brother” and “man.”
Of course he met his wife, an advertising executive, when he was behind the bar. “She was probably one of the most beautiful women who ever set foot in here,” he said. “She couldn’t take her eyes off me. She’ll tell you I hit on her.”
He certainly proceeded to, dispatching a barback to a nearby bodega to fetch a dozen roses for her the third time she came in. For a while she resisted his requests for a date, but then she brought her mother around. Showtime.
“Usually, I put the hook in someone’s mouth,” he said. “I had the hook in her mom’s belly.”
He said there aren’t any cheats or tricks to his memory, which one P. J. Clarke’s regular, a trial lawyer named Paul Hanly, described to me as “canny, totally uncanny — truly as photographic as it gets.”
He will brighten or dim the lighting if he senses the need, and he will nix Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” if the jukebox starts to play it when the bulk of the crowd are in their 20s and 30s.
But he has boundaries. “I try to teach people how to behave in a saloon,” he said. “Don’t ask for a Red Bull and vodka. You want an energy drink? I have coffee.”
The Tipsy Diaries is a new column about the city’s drinking life that will run every other week.
NYU Gobbles Greenwich VillageBy Lisa Selin Davis Mar 25th 2010 @ 1:30PM
It's hard to wander through Greenwich Village without feeling New York University's presence. Towering over the South Side of Washington Square Park, for instance, is Furman Law School, an enormous building on the site of what was, until 2000, Edgar Allen Poe's modest home; they quashed it to erect their new creation, preserving only the facade. They own most of the townhouse real estate on the north side of the park, too, and have systematically been buying up land and buildings throughout the neighborhood for years.
But piecemeal projects are nothing compared to NYU's grand expansion plans. Although the official language of NYU2031 states that the goal is to "maximize existing assets already owned," WNYC reports that their 20-year vision includes "a new tower at Bleecker Street next to the Silver Towers as well as buildings on Governors Island and in Brooklyn." In all, they'll be adding six million square feet to the campus, mostly to complete the transformation from commuter to residential college. But surely some of it stems from a long competitiveness with Columbia, which has similar plans -- no matter how contested -- to widen its stamp on Upper Manhattan's Morningside Heights.
The official announcement of the 2031 plan comes April 8, but you can already preview their proposal, which will be subject to a public review process. For Greenwich Village real estate owners, the expansion would mark the final ejection of any remnants from the Village's beatnik days, and continue the transformation of the neighborhood into half-dormitory, half-tourist trap. These days, the far West Village seems like a more desirable residence for folks over 21. The median sales price for that neighborhood, per Trulia, is $1.9 million. In Greenwich Village, it's $1.25 million. Guess that's good news for NYU's real estate acquisition team.
http://www.housingwatch.com/2010/03/25/nyu-gobbles-greenwich-village/
The PC crowd gone wild. growing up in NYC we would call each other by our ethnic slurs, mic, wop etc. We never took it seriously. It was all in good fun. I'd go over to an italian or jewish friend's house for dinner and they'd come to our house for an irish dinner.
We all celebrated the same holidays together and observed each other's religious days. Had to quit playing with my jewish friends when they had to be home by sundown and they couldn't play with me during Holy Week as I spent it in church. We never took our nationalities seriously and of course the jokes we told were aimed at everyone.
the anti new york...lol...poor guy....
I guess he really is in exile, living in Boston.
March 5, 2010
Tenor Adopted and Disowned by Yankees Leaves Town
By COREY KILGANNON
Ronan Tynan became a walk-on Yankee star in 2000, when he stepped onto the field with his artificial legs and clarion voice and belted out “God Bless America” during the seventh inning stretch of important games.
But that stopped on Oct. 16 of last year, when a woman accused Mr. Tynan of making an anti-Semitic remark. Since then, the charmed existence he enjoyed since emigrating from Ireland in 1998 has soured — from famous to infamous, as he puts it.
Mr. Tynan, 49, insists the fateful remark, a reference to “two Jewish ladies,” was overheard by someone who misconstrued it as a slur and immediately reported it to the Yankees and some local newspapers.
The Yankees told him not to show up that evening at Game 1 of the team’s playoff series against the Angels. A media storm followed, ending his tenure with the Yankees. Other work has dried up, and many old friends stopped calling, he said.
Now Mr. Tynan is headed to the anti-New York, as far as baseball is concerned. He has sold his apartment on the East Side of Manhattan and bought one in Boston.
He insists he has not given up on New York — he will keep a rented apartment here. Nor is he angry at the city. He said he was moving mainly for a change and because he had family and friends in Boston.
When pressed, however, he admits that life here has become strained: the barrage of angry e-mail messages and letters; the death threats; the surgeon who wrote saying he would let him die on the operating table, if Mr. Tynan were his patient; the prominent chef who steered him away from a table of customers because one of them was a Jewish man who refused to meet the singer.
“It hasn’t driven me out, because I love this city so much, but it has saddened me,” Mr. Tynan said in an interview this week at a friend’s apartment in Manhattan. “I’ve cried and I’ve laughed with New Yorkers, irrespective of creed or whether they’re Jewish or Catholic or Protestant.”
Mr. Tynan grew up hobbling around on heavy leg braces on a Kilkenny farm, became a doctor in Ireland and a successful Paralympic athlete before taking up singing at age 33 and rising to much acclaim.
Since emigrating, Mr. Tynan has become the voice of a certain strain of patriotic New Yorker. His powerful “God Bless America” — he often leads with Irving Berlin’s rarely heard first stanza, which begins “While the storm clouds gather far across the sea, Let us swear allegiance to a land that’s free” — has rung out in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Carnegie Hall and Town Hall, and at numerous 9/11 funerals and memorials.
He sang it at a smoldering ground zero for rescuers while volunteering on food lines. He has sung for American troops in Iraq and done many performances for Jewish groups. Most of this work, including for the Yankees, has been done free.
Mr. Tynan, who was part of the group the Irish Tenors, has been a fixture at events for the city’s Fire and Police Departments, and his patrons included Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan and Rudolph W. Giuliani.
The comment that led to his excommunication from Yankeedom was a reference to two women who were being shown the vacant apartment next door to his on the East Side. Mr. Tynan said a real estate agent referred to them innocuously as “two Jewish ladies.” Mr. Tynan chatted with them and concluded the “two Jewish ladies” might not enjoy living next to a loud tenor.
An associate of that agent saw Mr. Tynan on Oct. 16 and told him the apartment had been sold, joking, “Don’t worry, they’re not Red Sox fans.”
Mr. Tynan said his reply — “As long as they are not the Jewish ladies” — was misconstrued by a woman accompanying the real estate agent, who later complained to the Yankees.
“I made a comment that was misunderstood,” said Mr. Tynan, who said he was teased and singled out while growing up with heavy braces on his legs because of a congenital condition that would later lead to amputation. “If anyone knows the pain of discrimination, I do.”
Mr. Tynan said he used the term “Jewish ladies” not to disparage their religion, but as a shorthand identification of the people he believed would not enjoy the apartment. (They were not the eventual buyers.)
“The Yankees never reached out, and they never wanted to hear the real story,” said Mr. Tynan, who wore his diamond-studded 2000 World Series ring during the interview. Asked for comment this week, a Yankees spokeswoman, Alice McGillion, said simply, “We wish him all the best.”
Shortly after the remark, Mr. Tynan met with officials from the Anti-Defamation League in Manhattan. He agreed to join its education initiatives, and he sang at its annual dinner.
“It was a stupid comment, which he understands was hurtful,” the league’s national director, Abraham H. Foxman, said Thursday. “He publicly apologized, and he wants to be a soldier in the struggle against bigotry. What else can you ask for?”
In the interview, Mr. Tynan said he would dearly miss taking the field in the Bronx in the seventh inning and hearing that “chorus of patriotism” from New Yorkers singing along with him.
His decision to move to Boston was reported online this week by The Irish Echo in an article that envisioned Mr. Tynan singing for the Red Sox.
Asked if this might ever come to pass, Mr. Tynan would say only that he had had no contact with Red Sox officials. As for the possibility of developing feelings for the Red Sox, he said, “We’ll see how it goes.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/06/nyregion/06tenor.html?ref=baseball&pagewanted=print
After Three Months, Only 35 Subscriptions for Newsday's Web Site
January 26, 2010 | 3:04 p.m
In late October, Newsday, the Long Island daily that the Dolans bought for $650 million, put its web site, newsday.com, behind a pay wall. The paper was one of the first non-business newspapers to take the plunge by putting up a pay wall, so in media circles it has been followed with interest. Could its fate be a sign of what others, including The New York Times, might expect?
So, three months later, how many people have signed up to pay $5 a week, or $260 a year, to get unfettered access to newsday.com?
The answer: 35 people. As in fewer than three dozen. As in a decent-sized elementary-school class.
That astoundingly low figure was revealed in a newsroom-wide meeting last week by publisher Terry Jimenez when a reporter asked how many people had signed up for the site. Mr. Jimenez didn't know the number off the top of his head, so he asked a deputy sitting near him. He replied 35.
Michael Amon, a social services reporter, asked for clarification.
"I heard you say 35 people," he said, from Newsday's auditorium in Melville. "Is that number correct?"
Mr. Jimenez nodded.
Hellville, indeed.
The web site redesign and relaunch cost the Dolans $4 million, according to Mr. Jimenez. With those 35 people, they've grossed about $9,000.
In that time, without question, web traffic has begun to plummet, and, certainly, advertising will follow as well.
Of course, there are a few caveats. Anyone who has a newspaper subscription is allowed free access; anyone who has Optimum Cable, which is owned by the Dolans and Cablevision, also gets it free. Newsday representatives claim that 75 percent of Long Island either has a subscription or Optimum Cable.
"We're the freebie newsletter that comes with your HBO," sniffed one Newsday reporter.
Mr. Jimenez was in no mood to apologize. "That's 35 more than I would have thought it would have been," said Mr. Jimenez to the assembled staff, according to five interviews with Newsday staffers.
He argued that the web was not intended to be a revenue generator, but rather to provide extra benefit to loyal subscribers.
In the short time that the Dolans have owned Newsday, it's been a circus. When they were closing the deal to buy the paper in May 2008, they had their personal spokesman scream at an editor who assigned a reporter to visit the Dolans, seeking comment; there was a moment back in January of last year, when Newsday editor John Mancini walked out of the newsroom because of a dispute over how the paper was handling the Knicks; in the summer, the paper refused to run ads by Verizon, a rival; Tim Knight, the paper's publisher, and John Mancini, the editor, eventually both left.
The paper, which traditionally has been a powerful money maker, lost $7 million in the first three quarters of last year, according to Mr. Jimenez at last week's meeting.
In October, the web site relaunched and was redesigned. One of the principals behind the redesign is Mr. Mancini's replacement, editor Debby Krenek.
To say the least, the project has not been a newsroom favorite. "The view of the newsroom is the web site sucks," said one staffer.
"It's an abomination," said another.
And now the paper is in the middle of a labor dispute in which it wants to extract a 10 percent pay cut from all employees. The vote was turned down by a risibly high factor, of 473 to 10, this past Sunday.
Things are bleak in old Hellville, the pet nickname some reporters have established for life on Long Island.
"In the meeting with Terry, half the questions weren't about labor issues, but about why isn't this feature in the paper anymore?" said one reporter. "People are still mad about losing our national correspondents, our foreign bureaus and the prestige of working for a great newspaper. The last thing we had was a living wage, being one of the few papers where you're paid well. And to have that last thing yanked from you? It's made people so mad."
http://www.observer.com/2010/media/after-three-months-only-35-subscriptions-newsdays-web-site#
Fallout Is Wide in Failed Deal for Stuyvesant Town
By CHARLES V. BAGLI and CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY
January 26, 2010
In the beginning, investors and lenders could not get enough of the record-breaking $5.4 billion deal to buy the largest apartment complexes in Manhattan: Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village.
Now, three years later, they cannot get away from it fast enough.
The partnership that bought the 80-acre property on the East River announced on Monday that it was turning the keys over to its lenders after it defaulted on its loans and the value of the property fell below $2 billion.
Yet in walking away, the partners, Tishman Speyer Properties and BlackRock Realty, have left tenants in limbo and other investors with far bigger losses.
Many of the other companies, banks, countries and pension funds — including the government of Singapore, the Church of England, the Manhattan real estate concern SL Green, and Fortress Investment Groups — that invested billions of dollars in the 2006 deal stand to lose their entire stake.
“At the time, it looked like a sound investment,” said Clark McKinley, a spokesman for Calpers, the giant California public employees’ pension fund, which bought a $500 million stake in the property. “When the market tanked, we got caught.”
Calpers, he added, has written off its investment. So has Calsters, a California pension fund that invested $100 million, as has a Florida pension fund that put $250 million into the deal.
Even though nearly all of the attention and blame surrounding the default has been directed toward Tishman Speyer, it will lose only its original investment of $112 million. (BlackRock will also lose $112 million.)
Any collateral damage to Tishman Speyer, which manages a $33.5 billion portfolio of 72 million square feet of property in the United States, Europe, Asia and Latin America, was expected to be minimal; real estate experts said that Tishman’s reputation might suffer, but that the firm would still be able to put together deals and raise capital.
“This is a big black eye for them,” said John McIlwain, a senior fellow for housing at the Urban Land Institute. “But it’s not the end of Tishman. They own a lot of property. It’s a dent, but not the end.”
For decades, Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village were an oasis for middle-class New Yorkers; they were built in the 1940s by Metropolitan Life, which received tax breaks and other incentives in exchange for keeping rents low, initially for the World War II veterans who were the first tenants.
With rents and condominium prices skyrocketing in 2006, MetLife put developments on the auction block. A partnership formed by Tishman Speyer and BlackRock paid $5.4 billion. The acquisition cost was actually $6.3 billion, because the partnership had to raise $900 million for reserve funds to cover interest payments, apartment renovations and capital improvements.
The rental income did not cover the monthly debt service. But the two partners were betting that they could turn a healthy profit over time as they replaced rent-regulated residents with tenants willing to pay higher market-rate rents. But their plan fell apart when they could not convert enough apartments to the higher rents as quickly as they had planned. And in the past two years, average rents in New York have fallen sharply, along with property values.
Last year, analysts predicted that Tishman Speyer and BlackRock would default. That prediction intensified when New York State’s highest court ruled in the fall that the partnership had improperly deregulated and raised the rents on 4,400 apartments. The partners were forced to roll back rents and they have been in negotiations on rebates owed to tenants. (The eventual owners, not Tishman Speyer and BlackRock, are expected to inherit liability for the $215 million in rent rebates.)
On Jan. 8, the owners defaulted on $4.4 billion in loans ($3 billion in senior mortgages and $1.4 billion in secondary loans). They had also raised $1.9 billion in equity. The problem was that the latest appraisal put the value of the complexes at about $1.9 billion.
“It’s the poster child for the entire housing bubble,” said Daniel Alpert, managing partner of Westwood Capital. “There’ll be some other spectacular blowups, but this will be at the top of the pecking order.”
Mr. McIlwain said it may take a decade or more for the prices to reach the levels they did in 2006.
“You’re talking about a prime deal at the top of the market when money was fast and free,” he said. “You’re not going to see money that is fast and free until bankers’ memories fade, which typically takes 10 years.”
In the meantime, real estate analysts said the collapse of the Stuyvesant Town deal would send ripples throughout the real estate investment community.
“The fact that they have given the keys back is going to have a chilling effect,” said Keven Lindemann, director of real estate for the research firm SNL Financial, which covers publicly traded real estate. “This was such an enormous transaction that it looks like most, if not all, of the equity is going to be wiped out.”
The Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, which made a $575 million secondary loan, and invested as much as $200 million in equity, stands to lose all of that.
CWCapital, the company that is negotiating with Tishman Speyer and BlackRock on behalf of the mortgage holders, declined to comment. With Tishman Speyer stepping down as manager of the 11,227 apartments, CWCapital has talked to both the LeFrak Organization, which owns and manages thousands of apartments in Queens and elsewhere, and Rose Associates, the Manhattan company that had managed the two complexes before Tishman Speyer took over.
This month, several of the secondary lenders sent letters to Tishman Speyer and BlackRock threatening foreclosure because of the default. The partners tried unsuccessfully to craft a new deal that would have involved them putting up “several hundred million dollars,” in return for restructuring the loans, according to one real estate executive briefed on the negotiations.
The secondary lenders, he said, had “overplayed their hand” in the hope that they would get back some of their investment. Instead of being forced into bankruptcy, Tishman Speyer and BlackRock will walk away sometime after a new manager is in place.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may be in the best position of anyone involved in the deal’s financing. They acquired over $2 billion in securities backed, in part, by the $3 billion Stuyvesant Town mortgages. Fannie and Freddi Mac have to be paid before any other debtholders, but they are not parties to the negotiations over the property.
They may well become an integral part of the solution. In a report issued Monday, Deutsche Bank suggested that CWCapital’s most likely action will be to wipe out the existing mortgage and attempt to sell the complexes. “Given the size of the properties and an asking price likely to be well in excess of $1 billion, a sale may necessitate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac providing financing to a potential buyer,” the report said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/nyregion/26stuy.html?ref=business&pagewanted=print
Serpico on Serpico
By COREY KILGANNON
January 24, 2010
A SIMPLE LIFE Frank Serpico, former police officer, lives in a one-room cabin. No TV or Internet. “This is my life now,” he said. “The woods, nature, solitude.”
HARLEMVILLE, N.Y. — He looked like some sort of fur trapper, this bearded man walking through the snowy woods here in upstate New York. But then, Frank Serpico has always been known for his disguises.
Anyone who has seen the celebrated 1973 film “Serpico” knows that he often dressed up — bum, butcher, rabbi — to catch criminals. His off-duty look was never vintage cop either, with the bushy beard and the beads.
This is the man whose long and loud complaining about widespread corruption in the New York Police Department made him a pariah on the force. The patrolman shot in the face during a 1971 drug bust while screaming for backup from his fellow officers, who then failed to immediately call for an ambulance. The undaunted whistle-blower whose testimony was the centerpiece of the Knapp Commission hearings, which sparked the biggest shakeup in the history of the department.
Four decades later, Frank Serpico is still bearded, handsome and a flamboyant dresser. At 73, he seems spry enough to chase down and collar a perp; on that wintry walk through the woods, he interrogated a man carrying a sled, and followed a trail of blood drops in the snow until it disappeared. Not long before, he had sniffed out a dumper of garbage on his property and reported him to the police.
Mr. Serpico still carries the detective shield he was awarded as he left the department on a disability pension and, often, his licensed revolver, with which he takes target practice on his 50-acre property not far from this Columbia County hamlet. He also still carries bullet fragments lodged just below his brain from the drug shooting; he is deaf in his left ear, and has nerve damage in his left leg.
For many, “Serpico” conjures the face of Al Pacino, who won his first Golden Globe award for his star turn in the film. The movie — along with news reports and the best-selling biography of the same name — seared the public memory with painful images: of the honest cop bleeding in a squad car rushing to the hospital, where, over months of rehabilitation, he received cards telling him to rot in hell. Instead, Mr. Serpico took his fluffy sheepdog, Alfie, and boarded a ship to Europe; the film’s closing credits describe him as “now living somewhere in Switzerland.”
Which was true at the time. After years traveling abroad, Mr. Serpico returned to the United States around 1980 and lived as a nomad, out of a camper. He finally settled about two hours north of New York City, where he lives a monastic life in a one-room cabin he built in the woods near the Hudson River. In 1997, he spoke out after the brutal beatings of Abner Louima in a Brooklyn station house, but mostly he stays far from his old nemesis.
Now, all these years later, Mr. Serpico is working on his own version of the harrowing adventures chronicled by Peter Maas’s biography, which sold more than three million copies (royalties from the book and the movie have helped him live comfortably without working). The memoir begins with the same awful scene as the film: Serpico shot in the face during a heroin bust on Driggs Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Feb. 3, 1971. Working title: “Before I Go.”
“It’s the rest of the story,” he said recently over lunch in the self-service cafe of a health-food store here in Harlemville. “It’s more personal. I used to think, ‘How can I write my life story? I’m still living it.’ ” Though he is healthy, he added, “I’m getting close to the line, so I figure I better get busy.”
It is, ultimately, a story of healing. He wandered in Europe and across North America, he said, because “I wanted to find my life.”
“I had gone through a near-death experience,” he explained, “and that gives you an insight into how fleeting life is, and what’s important.”
After he settled here, his journey turned inward. He eschewed what he sees as an ugly American addiction to consumerism and media brainwashing. He eats mostly vegetarian and organic food, cooking on the wood-burning stove that heats the cabin, where there is neither television nor the Internet. “This is my life now,” he said. “The woods, nature, solitude.”
Mr. Serpico relies on Chinese medicine, herbs and shiatsu. He practices meditation, the Japanese Zen flute and African drumming, and dance: ballroom, tango, swing. He takes long walks at sunrise and rescues wounded animals. He raises chickens and guinea hens. He has a girlfriend: she is French, a schoolteacher, age 50.
None of which has exorcised the demons of being Serpico.
“I still have nightmares,” he said. “I open a door a little bit and it just explodes in my face. Or I’m in a jam and I call the police, and guess who shows up? My old cop buddies who hated me.”
•
Growing up the son of Italian immigrants in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, young Frank revered the local cops. He loved detective stories on the radio and dreamed of wearing the uniform. He had also cultivated a bit of worldliness from visiting Italy as a child and traveling abroad with the Army after enlisting at age 18. He joined the New York Police Department in 1959 and passionately pursued big game.
His partners and bosses resented his hippie looks and his zealousness to make arrests even while off-duty or on the turf of other officers. His intrigues with the ballet and opera rubbed against the conservative culture of the station house. He lived a bohemian life, with a small garden apartment on Perry Street in the West Village, where he was known as Paco and hid his police badge.
The street-savvy but idealistic Officer Serpico was appalled at the cliquishness and the payoffs — free meals as well as big, blatant bribes — from criminals, gamblers, numbers men and ordinary merchants whom he saw as a beat cop in Brooklyn’s 81st Precinct and later while working vice and racketeering. He refused to accept such grease, and became despised for it both inside and outside the department.
In 1967, Mr. Serpico began telling what he knew to high-ranking officials at police headquarters and City Hall. He presented names, places, dates and other information, but no action was taken. Frustrated, he and a friend on the force, David Durk, a graduate of Amherst College who had become an officer in 1963 after quitting law school, contacted a reporter for The New York Times.
The front-page story by David Burnham on April 25, 1970, pressured Mayor John V. Lindsay to form the Knapp Commission, before which Mr. Serpico testified that “the atmosphere does not yet exist in which an honest police officer can act without fear of ridicule or reprisal from fellow officers.”
The commission carried out the most extensive investigation of police wrongdoing in the city’s history and exposed a pattern of entrenched corruption and cover-up that helped usher in reform.
“It was terrifying in those days — they were really sticking their necks out,” recalled Mr. Burnham, who now works at a data-gathering and research firm. “We really shamed the city, and things really changed.”
Mr. Serpico does not exactly agree. He believes the department still does not acknowledge its internal problems because the leadership’s top priority is to avoid scandal.
“I hear from police officers all the time; they contact me,” he said. “An honest cop still can’t find a place to go and complain without fear of recrimination. The blue wall will always be there because the system supports it.”
Paul J. Browne, the chief police spokesman, dismissed Mr. Serpico’s indictment by saying, “It’s a very different department now.”
“Things have changed vastly,” Mr. Browne said, “and he is literally old enough to be the grandfather of some police officers now on duty.”
Mr. Serpico avoids the city now, but there is a part of him that has never left its station houses. Several years ago, he showed up at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan to confront Patrick V. Murphy, the police commissioner at the time of the shooting, who was in the audience. “I’ve been carrying a bullet around in my head for 35 years and I hold you responsible,” Mr. Serpico recalled telling Mr. Murphy, who did not respond.
Michael Bosak, a 27-year veteran of the Police Department who has served as its informal historian since retiring in 1995, said that for a time he kept in touch with Mr. Serpico by e-mail, and that his messages tended to be long diatribes on various topics, seemingly unaffected by the passage of decades. “The N.Y.P.D. is a thousand times more honest than it was 40 years ago,” Mr. Bosak said. “I think he’s still in a lot of pain. Going through what he went through, it can drive you off your rocker.”
Indeed, Mr. Serpico still brims with bitterness that he was made third-grade detective, rather than the top tier of first-grade; that the department’s museum in Lower Manhattan declined his offer of his uniform and his service revolver; that its leadership never asks him to speak about corruption or reform. The Medal of Honor he was awarded — the department’s highest commendation — remains tossed “in some drawer.”
“They never even had a ceremony for me,” he said of the honorary promotion. “They handed it to me over the counter with the Medal of Honor, like a pack of cigarettes.
“The department never recognized me for standing up for what’s right,” he added, “because I violated the omertà; I spoke out.”
•
During his years in Europe, Mr. Serpico bought a farm in the Netherlands and married a Dutch woman with two young children. But after the woman died of cancer, her parents took custody of the children and Mr. Serpico sold the farm and moved back to the United States. He wandered the continent from Mexico to Canada in his camper.
In 1980, a lover had a son and brought a paternity suit. He claimed to have been “deceived and entrapped” by the woman, and then waged a lengthy and unsuccessful court fight to avoid child-support payments. He did not raise the son, Alex Serpico, and has had limited contact with him in recent years.
Mr. Serpico refused to reveal the exact location of his current home. Instead, he was interviewed in various coffee shops and restaurants where he is a regular in a few small villages north of Hudson, N.Y., just off the Taconic State Parkway. He is known to the locals as Paco, his off-duty nickname in the Village in the late 1960s.
At lunches in the Harlemville health-food store, Mr. Serpico slipped a bottle of red wine out of his bag and poured it into paper cups. Afterward, cigars.
True to his cinematic self, he always showed up in a different outfit and hat: one day as the sheepherder, the next day the prospector, then the monk. He wears an earring in each ear and a magnifying glass around his neck for fine print. He would spout esoterica and draw from his knowledge of Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Arabic and Russian. In a coffee shop, he might quote from Dante’s “Inferno,” or pull out his harmonica and play “Danny Boy.”
Mr. Serpico said he had played, in local productions, the Arab in Saroyan’s “The Time of Your Life,” Gonzalo in “The Tempest,” a detective in “Ten Little Indians” and Johann Most in Howard Zinn’s “Emma.”
“My acting career began on the streets of New York,” he said. “When I was a cop, I played many impressive roles, from derelict to a doctor, and my life often depended on my performance.”
Back then, as he became suspect among fellow officers, Mr. Serpico began spreading the word that he was writing a book, but only as a bluff. “I said, ‘I’m going to name names, and if anything happens to me, I got it all written down right there,’ ” he recalled. “But I never really wrote anything.”
After several frustrating attempts at collaboration with co-writers — “They just don’t get it,” he said — Mr. Serpico enrolled in a weekly workshop through an arts group in Troy, N.Y., where his classmates also do not always understand his stories. “How could they?” he said. “We have women in the class writing about their kids — they don’t know what a bag man is.”
Frank Serpico writes out the story of his life daily in longhand, at the cabin, then types the pages on a computer at the public library, using the two-finger method he honed filing arrest reports on station house typewriters, gathering the pages in a manila folder. The memoir begins on the night of the Williamsburg drug bust, his bleeding body cradled by an elderly tenant who called for assistance when his fellow officers did not, the narrator floating above and recounting the life path that led him there.
It is not unlike the opening scene of the film. He said he had never seen the full movie, but agreed to watch it with me — on my laptop, propped on a windowsill at the public library in Kinderhook, N.Y. As Pacino, near death, was rushed to Greenpoint Hospital, the real Mr. Serpico stared out the window, unable to watch — too painful, he said.
He provided a running commentary: His own wardrobe was much better than in the film, as were his police disguises. The scene in which the police commissioner hands him a gold detective shield in the hospital bed was conjured; in reality, he picked it up from a clerk at police headquarters.
Afterward, Mr. Serpico seemed spent. He looked out at the snow and trees graying in the descending darkness.
“They took the job I loved most,” he said. “I just wanted to be a cop, and they took it away from me.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/nyregion/24serpico.html?pagewanted=print
The Gavel Falls on Tavern on the Green
By GLENN COLLINS
January 15, 2010, 5:22 pm
The three-day auction will include 1,000 lots of items that have been valued at $100 to $1.2 million (a chandelier). Decorative pieces from both inside the restaurant and from its gardens will go on the block.
Joanne Grant oversaw the auction of more than $3 million worth of items at Tavern on the Green.
Everybody was invited to a three-day auction at Tavern on the Green this week.
And everybody came.
Or seemingly so: before the marathon sale ended Friday afternoon, more than a thousand bidders were attracted to the Tavern’s Crystal Room and to an online auction site for the 25,000-item sale of flotsam from the foundering of the bankrupt, landmark restaurant in Central Park.
The auction of the vast trove of colorful, eccentric and memory-tugging items ranging from samovars to murals and leaded-glass ceilings took in more than $3.5 million, including the 22 percent premium, the fee that buyers paid to Guernsey’s Auction House, which conducted the sale.
All the major auction lots were sold, even the upright Yamaha piano, a fixture of Tavern for decades, which had been passed over on Thursday. A buyer emerged on Friday and nabbed it for $5,500, including the premium.
But by the time the auctioneer, Joanne Grant, ended the proceedings, the take fell far short of satisfying some $8 million owed to more than 450 creditors of the restaurant, which was padlocked early on New Year’s Day after seeking bankruptcy protection last September.
Sotheby’s auction house had assessed a portion of the sale items three years ago — before the economic downturn — at $8 million.
More money could be wrung from the sale of the Tavern on the Green name, if a federal judge rules, in a pending case, that the family of the restaurateur Warner LeRoy — who ran the restaurant since 1976 — owns the trademark, and not New York City, Tavern’s landlord.
Given the sale’s short lead time and its post-holiday bidding window, “we never knew what to expect from this auction,” said Michael Desiderio, Tavern’s chief operating officer. “But this chapter is ended. The sad reality is that it’s finally over.”
Arlan Ettinger, the president of Guernsey’s, said that the auction “was a sale of memories, and a lot of people went home with them,” adding that “it was never some dismal liquidation. I think the event was a celebration of the history of the place.”
The totals in four auction sessions open to the general public kept ratcheting upward as the days, and hours, went by. Wednesday’s afternoon session brought in about $360,000 including the premium, and an evening session nearly doubled that take, bringing Wednesday’s total to more than $1 million.
Two Thursday sessions brought in double that amount in a single day. Friday’s sale, of institutional equipment, supplies and 2,000 bottles of wine, dragged on for five hours and yielded several hundred thousand dollars more.
The family of Mr. LeRoy, the impresario who made Tavern one of the nation’s highest-grossing restaurants until its precipitous deflation, continued operating the restaurant after he died in 2001 at age 65. But in August the city conferred the 20-year operating license for Tavern, starting this year, to Dean J. Poll, operator of the Boathouse restaurant in Central Park. He has yet to sign a contract with the city, and the reopening date is uncertain.
A collection of items whose ownership had been disputed in bankruptcy court by the city and by the family of Mr. LeRoy was removed from the sale Thursday because the items had been purchased in a nonauction deal with the city for nearly $150,000, including the premium.
Included in this grouping were rare chestnut wall paneling, plaster and wood sculptural figures in the decorative ceiling of the Crystal Room and a 40-foot-long mural in the Park Room.
The much-haggled-over price for all of it was roughly equivalent to $123,288, the outstanding amount of rent owed by the LeRoys to the city for extending Tavern’s operating license, permitting the auction to be completed on site, in the restaurant.
“By acquiring these items, parks is making it easier for the new operator to open his doors quickly,” said Vickie Karp, a spokeswoman for the Parks Department. “It also speeds up the timetable for parks to receive revenue from the concession. Even better, in the future, the ownership of these items will be undisputed.”
Buyers thronged to the pickup tables in Tavern to claim their treasures. “Call this a keepsake of the legendary restaurant,” said one successful bidder, Molly McGuire of Fairfield, Conn., as she hoisted a silvered cake stand for which she had paid $900 plus the premium. She said it would be a memento of a 1981 pilgrimage she made to Tavern while she was a student at the University of Washington in Seattle.
At times on Wednesday the Crystal Room’s 470 chairs were full, with standees looking on; but as the hours, the days and the lots droned on, the crowds of curiosity seekers dwindled to a core of true bidders.
By Friday afternoon, as more than 300 lots of inventory items ranging from glassware to gratin dishes and cellared wine were gaveled away to the restaurant trade, the crowd had dwindled to 35 in the dining room. They vied with telephone and online buyers in bargaining that varied episodically from brisk to tepid.
At one point on Thursday, Mr. Ettinger found himself taking a telephone bid from a dentist who had a patient in the chair, so passionate was he about the auction. “I don’t think we’ve seen bidding like this since before the economic downturn,” Mr. Ettinger said.
Three leaded-glass ceilings from one of Mr. LeRoy’s restaurants, Maxwell’s Plum, sold for a total of more than $350,000 including the premium. A stained-glass peacock sold for $75,000. Some of the dozens of vintage Tavern chandeliers sold for as much as $70,000.
Mr. Warner’s ample red Nehru jacket went for $5,000. The purchasers, Marty Tinglehoff and Toby Pippin, had journeyed from Atlanta just for the auction. “I’m planning to wear it right under my chandelier,” said Dr. Tinglehoff with a laugh. Actually, they bought three chandeliers — the most expensive one for $18,000 — and eyeing one of them, he said: “Now we’ll have to finish the new house.”
Elizabeth Austin, the bankruptcy lawyer for Kay LeRoy, the restaurateur’s former wife, who is a major creditor of Tavern, said “it’s sad to see it all come apart.” She added: “There will never be anything like it again.”
But at the finale of the auction just before 3 p.m., Mr. Ettinger allowed that the sale “was never a prolonged bout of weeping after the restaurant’s demise.” He added: “despite the sadness, there were, for many, I think, some happy moments.”
http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/the-gavel-falls-on-tavern-on-the-green/
And,
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=45209556
At a Mighty 104, Gone While Still Going Strong
By MANNY FERNANDEZ and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT
January 12, 2010
NO MATCH Joe Rollino bending a spike with his teeth. He once raised 635 pounds with a finger; he called that his proudest feat.
Joe Rollino once lifted 475 pounds. He used neither his arms nor his legs but, reportedly, his teeth. With just one finger he raised up 635 pounds; with his back he moved 3,200. He bit down on quarters to bend them with his thumb.
People called him the Great Joe Rollino, the Mighty Joe Rollino and even the World’s Strongest Man, and what did it matter if at least one of those people was Mr. Rollino himself.
On Monday morning, Mr. Rollino went for a walk in his Brooklyn neighborhood, a daily routine. It was part of the Great Joe Rollino’s greatest feat, a display of physical dexterity and stamina so subtle that it revealed itself only if you happened to ask him his date of birth: March 19, 1905. He was 104 years old and counting.
A few minutes before 7 a.m., as Mr. Rollino was crossing Bay Ridge Parkway at 13th Avenue, a 1999 Ford Windstar minivan struck him. The police said he suffered fractures to his pelvis, chest, ribs and face, as well as head trauma. Unconscious, he was taken to Lutheran Medical Center, where he later died.
New York is a city of extraordinary lives and events, and here, indisputably, was one of them — one of the city’s strongest and oldest, struck down on a Monday morning by a minivan in Brooklyn.
“Pound for pound, in the feats that he practiced, he was one of the greatest performing strongmen we’ve ever had, if the lifts he’s credited with are accurate,” said Terry Todd, a co-director of the Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports at the University of Texas, who knew Mr. Rollino for more than four decades. “He certainly wasn’t one of the strongest all-time strongmen, because of his size. To ask a well-trained 130-pound man if he can lift what a well-trained 400-pound man can lift is asking an unreasonable question. But for his size, Joe was apparently one of the strongest men who ever lived.”
Mr. Rollino stayed away from meat. And cigarettes. And alcohol. He said he walked five miles every morning, rain or shine. At the height of his career, he weighed between 125 and 150 pounds and stood about 5-foot-5.
He was a teenager when he watched Jack Dempsey knock out Jess Willard in 1919. He later boxed under the name Kid Dundee, became a Coney Island performer, worked as a longshoreman, fought in World War II and had a bit part in “On the Waterfront” that never made the film, not necessarily in that order.
Among his many accomplishments, Mr. Rollino was proudest of one in particular. “My finger strength,” he told an interviewer for ESPN The Magazine. “Six hundred thirty-five pounds. See the size of it. At 150 pounds, nobody ever beat me in this world.”
He was a legend within that small Coney Island society in which few New Yorkers would want to become known as legends: the men and women who swim in the Atlantic when it is at its harshest and coldest. On a 6-degree day in January 1974, Mr. Rollino and six other members of the Iceberg Athletic Club swam into the waters off Coney Island. The freezing Atlantic was like steel: It didn’t intimidate him.
“People told me he holds the record for swimming every day for eight years,” said Louis Scarcella, 59, a former homicide detective and a member of the city’s oldest winter swimming club, the Coney Island Polar Bear Club. “He was known as the Great Joe Rollino, and he was great. You knew he was great just by standing next to him. He just had that humble confidence and strength. It shined.”
Mr. Scarcella, like many of those who knew Mr. Rollino, has a Joe Rollino story, or several Joe Rollino stories. And though some of them can be neither confirmed nor refuted, they get told and retold and told again, because they are too good not to. Mr. Scarcella heard that one winter in the 1950s, Mr. Rollino recovered the bodies of two people who drowned in Prospect Park, because the police did not have the necessary protective equipment and it was too cold for anyone else to jump in and bring them to the surface.
Mr. Rollino was a longtime member of the Association of Oldetime Barbell and Strongmen. Dennis Rogers, a fellow member and a professional strongman, remembered seeing him at the association’s annual dinner in June, at a hotel near the Newark airport. “He just came in to say hi to everybody and coached some of the guys that were performing,” said Mr. Rogers, who in 1995 prevented four motorcycles from moving at full throttle for 12 seconds, according to his Web site. “He would regularly work out in the gym. He was in pretty good shape. He walked a little slow but looked fine.”
Mr. Rollino had lately been living in Brooklyn with a niece, in a house on 14th Avenue, about a block from where the accident occurred. The driver of the minivan that struck Mr. Rollino, a 54-year-old woman who lives in the neighborhood and who remained at the scene, was not charged. She received a summons for having a defective horn, and the police said that neither speed nor alcohol was a factor. Mr. Rollino had been walking about 40 feet from the nearest crosswalk when the minivan hit him, according to the authorities.
Old photographs of Mr. Rollino are displayed in several neighborhood shops. People called him Puggy. “If he shook your hand, he’d break it,” said James Romeo, owner of Romeo Brothers Meats and Foods on 15th Avenue. “He wasn’t feeble.”
Charles Denson, a historian and the author of “Coney Island: Lost and Found,” first met Mr. Rollino at his 103rd birthday party at a neighborhood restaurant. “He was one of the last links to the old strongman days of Coney Island,” he said. “Coney Island was the training ground for strongmen. He was one of the best.”
Mr. Rollino wowed the crowd at the party, Mr. Denson recalled. He told stories about the old days, of course, but he was more than just talk, even at 103. Mr. Rollino put a quarter in his teeth. Then he bent it.
Stacey Solie and Karen Zraick contributed reporting.
What About George?
By SAKI KNAFO
January 10, 2010
COMMITMENT George Kramer, 71, at Kramer's Hardware in Flatbush, where he knows everything about everything, including the keys.
George Kramer sat hunched on his stool behind the counter of the small hardware store on Coney Island Avenue, gazing out the window at the passing traffic. He was bundled up in a heavy sweater, a maroon wool cap folded above his ears. Toward the back of the store, beyond Mr. Kramer’s field of vision, Isaac Abraham was rifling through a cabinet. Mr. Abraham, the store’s owner for many years, knows Mr. Kramer about as well as anybody, and he was about to give a demonstration.
Quietly, he removed a faucet knob from the cabinet and hid it behind his back. Then he approached the counter and clapped it down with a flourish.
Mr. Kramer gave it a perfunctory glance. “Gerber,” he said.
“Gerber what?” asked Mr. Abraham.
“Ninety-nine, eleven fifty-one.”
Mr. Abraham turned over the package to show the catalog number: 99-1151. Mr. Kramer — George to me — is my second cousin, and he has worked at Kramer’s Hardware, in Flatbush, Brooklyn, for 58 years. He has a developmental disability, which is obvious to people who meet him, but he also has a rare and less apparent ability: Like the late Kim Peek, the inspiration for the film “Rain Man,” George, 71, has a powerful memory for dates and numbers and facts. If you tell him your birthday, he can tell you what day it will fall on two years in the future. He studies phone directories and atlases in his spare time. As one relative recently put it to me, “If you drop him in Oshkosh or anywhere, he’ll find his way home.”
On the surface, a run-down hardware shop in Flatbush might seem an odd place for a person like George to thrive. But if you set aside the sheets of pegboard and the metal cabinets and the key-making machine, what is left are hundreds and hundreds of small, obscure utilitarian objects, many almost identical to the casual observer. George can identify each nut and bolt and screw on sight, as Mr. Abraham’s test was intended to show, and he knows where, exactly, in the store it is kept. He can tell you its cost. And he can tell you the name — and often the phone number — of the company that made it.
His command of the inventory is such that Mr. Abraham has never had to invest in a computer to track it. “My reliance on him is mind-boggling,” Mr. Abraham said.
That reliance began with a favor. Thirty years ago, Mr. Abraham took over the store from George’s father, David Kramer, who was worried about his son’s future. Mr. Abraham agreed to keep George employed until George was ready to retire, and when he transferred the store to a new owner about a year ago, his successor did the same. These owners well know of George’s value to the business; still, the fact that David ensured such a secure future for his disabled son is as striking a feature of Kramer’s Hardware as George’s memory.
WHEN George was a child, his parents were told to put him in an institution. Though it’s not clear whether doctors gave him a precise diagnosis at that time, they said he would never be able to get along in society. His mother visited a couple of schools — including the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island, which later became notorious for its brutal treatment of residents — but ultimately they kept him at home. George’s younger brother, a copywriter in New Jersey, said George was eventually found to be mentally retarded but has not been examined for his disability since childhood.
In retrospect, the choice his parents made may seem like an obvious one, but it went against the prevailing wisdom of the day, and it also raised a difficult question for them: Who would support their son after they were gone?
David Kramer, whose father, Gdal, founded Kramer’s Hardware around 1930, started giving George small chores around the shop — moving the stock, taking out the garbage. According to the accounts of some of our relatives, George had been an unruly child, yet he proved an eager and reliable worker, and over time, his responsibilities multiplied.
Three decades passed and Mr. Abraham, then a young Brooklyn entrepreneur, began expressing an interest in acquiring the store. By this time — 1979 — David was thinking seriously about retirement. “He was ready to teach me the business,” Mr. Abraham recalled, “but there was a ‘but’ — and this was a big ‘but’ — he wanted to make sure that George would be secure.”
George was now 41. He handled the phones, dealt with customers and counted the cash at the end of the night, and had long ago committed to memory the catalog number for every eye bolt and corner brace and turnbuckle. David asked Mr. Abraham to hang around the shop for a few weeks, and at the end of that period he sat Mr. Abraham down and asked him a pointed question: “What about George?”
If David’s plan in requiring Mr. Abraham to spend time at the store had been to show him George’s value as an employee, it worked.
“I saw that George was an asset,” Mr. Abraham said. “In the medical terminology they might call him autistic, but I immediately called him a genius.”
Mr. Abraham promised David that he would never need to worry about his son, and he says he repeated the promise 12 years later, when David, on his deathbed, asked about George one last time.
“If I shine shoes on Broadway,” Mr. Abraham said he told him, “he’ll be shining shoes next to me.”
MR. Abraham has not had to resort to shining shoes, but his three decades owning the little neighborhood hardware store have not always been smooth. Kramer’s has narrowly survived several rough economic periods, and has contended with the arrival in Brooklyn of two huge competitors, Home Depot and Lowe’s, both of which have outlets within three miles of the store.
Through it all, George has been an ideal worker: honest (perhaps because he is incapable of lying), uncomplaining and extremely punctual.
His routine is as inflexible as a brass-plated wood screw. Every day, without fail, he arrives in the neighborhood by bus at 7 a.m., an hour before the store opens. Every day, he eats breakfast in one of two places — a restaurant called La Guadalupana Taqueria Mexicana, next to Kramer’s, or a Dunkin’ Donuts a few blocks away. And every day, regardless of which place he patronizes, he orders the same thing: a bagel with cream cheese, coffee and orange juice — “the combo.” George raises the store gates at exactly 8 a.m. Most of the customers are building superintendents, and as they trickle in, they greet him playfully: “Hey, George, did you miss me?” “How’s your girlfriend, George?” Much to their amusement, he answers straightforwardly, with little inflection. “Yes, my friend,” he might say, or “No,” or “I don’t know.”
At exactly 5 p.m., George lowers the gates and takes the bus down Coney Island Avenue to his home. He lives in one of several Brooklyn residences run by the Adult Retardates Center, a group for people with developmental disabilities that his parents helped found in the 1950s. He eats dinner with the other residents at 5:15, showers at 8 and goes to bed at exactly 11. His weekends are similarly scheduled, with visits to the Young Israel synagogue on Avenue J and to a recreational center — “the Club” — where he plays games, drinks Diet Cokes and dances with his companion of 21 years, who lives in one of the group’s other residences.
Every year George sends out dozens of birthday cards to relatives; every year he calls to make sure the card has arrived on time. At family gatherings, which he begins talking about months in advance, he insists on taking a picture of every person at the table. His photo albums contain the most comprehensive record of my family that there is — thousands of unevenly framed snapshots documenting decades of Seders and Thanksgivings.
And yet, as devoted as George is to these routines, it is difficult to say exactly why he performs them or how they affect him. He seldom makes eye contact. Hardly anyone has seen him laugh, or cry, and although he is often pronouncing things (mostly restaurants) good or bad — “Garden of Eat-In on Avenue J! That’s good!” — it is hard to know whether he is expressing genuine feelings or repeating opinions picked up from others.
Most of the time, he is quiet. When he speaks, it is often to blurt out some phrase that has no apparent relevance. Only when he is pressed does it become clear that these utterances do, in fact, have meaning. “April 5th Monday night!” he shouted out one afternoon in December, prompting a request for an explanation. “I have to go shul April 5th,” he replied. “Mommy’s yahrzeit. That’s important. But electric bulbs only. No candles in the house. That’s dangerous.”
Jews commemorate the anniversary of a person’s death, the yahrzeit, by lighting a candle or a ceremonial light bulb and reciting the mourner’s Kaddish during daily prayers. George’s mother died in 1985 and his father in 1991.
He is the only member of the family who still marks their memory this way.
TO the extent George does engage in conversation, much of that conversation centers on the past. “I’m reading a book about Ansonia clock factory on 420 13th Street,” he announced at the store one time. “Who lived there? Pop Kramer and Mom Kramer lived there.”
Another time he got into an excited discussion with a customer over the pedigree of a local apartment building. George was excited, that is. The customer, a super, didn’t quite share his enthusiasm.
“1620 Caton. Is it the big building?” asked George.
“George!” said the super. “Write down 1620 and that’s it.”
“1620 Caton Avenue,” George persisted. “I remember that building used to be Waxman brothers!”
When George declares that the Waxman brothers owned this or that building, or that so-and-so lived at this or that address, it often seems as if he is rattling off an arbitrary, inconsequential piece of trivia. But these pieces of trivia, put together, form a jigsaw-puzzle picture of a world that exists more vividly in George’s mind than perhaps anywhere else.
In the many years that George has worked at Kramer’s, Brooklyn has transformed around it: high-rises have shot up, new immigrant populations have swept in, and most of the people who grew up with him have died or moved to the suburbs. Old businesses are forever “going out,” in George’s phrase, and he announces the passing of each with a staccato shout: “Brandz for Less 1351 Coney Island Avenue is going out December 31st!” “Bargain Hunters 1605 Avenue M closed up for good!”
Amid all these closings and openings, George appears to have changed relatively little. He observes a host of customs that his parents taught him years ago, and many of the obscure facts that preoccupy him have been preoccupying him for ages. Even the store is sort of a time capsule. Almost all of its products were bought years back, from companies that no longer exist. Piled on the shelves in the rear are boxes and boxes of screws and bolts with old-fashioned labels reading “Sturdy Nut and Bolt Co., New York, N.Y.” and “Universal Screw and Bolt Co., N.Y. N.Y., U.S.A.,” relics from the city’s industrial past.
At 71, though, George is slowing down. Mr. Abraham said that he did not expect him to last in the job much longer. “How long can he do it physically?” he said. “There were times two years ago where he wasn’t very well and I was under the full assumption that he was not going to make it back.”
The business is slower, too. Perhaps because of the recession, the flow of customers is more like a trickle. The shelves are half empty, and the bottles of cleaning fluid are covered with dust. George typically spends a good part of each day sitting at the counter and leafing through hardware and restaurant supply catalogs, and occasionally reeling off facts about the various companies whose names are displayed on passing trucks (“Driscoll Foods! Clifton, New Jersey!”).
Change has arrived at Kramer’s in one other way as well. Mr. Abraham, who had long served as an unelected advocate for Brooklyn’s Hasidic community, embarked in 2008 on a campaign for City Council. He ultimately lost, to Stephen Levin, but when he began his time-consuming bid, he handed off the business to a new owner, a 36-year-old friend of the family named Moshe Meyerson.
So, what about George? Where did this transition leave him? Mr. Meyerson, noting how long George has been at Kramer’s Hardware, said, “He’s going to be there until he retires.” Given George’s age, Mr. Meyerson added, he imagined that might happen in three or four years.
When I brought up the prospect of retirement with George, he told me that he, too, had been giving it some thought. But when I asked what he might do with his time, all he said was, “I don’t know yet.”
He was facing away as he spoke, toward the store window, with its charmless view of Coney Island Avenue and the auto-body shops and apartment buildings beyond. As usual, it was impossible to know what he was thinking. Nevertheless, it seems likely that, someday soon, he will wake in the morning and have no gates to open, no customers to greet, no shovels or wrenches or Gerber faucets to sell. All of it will be gone.
But not forgotten.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/nyregion/10hardware.html
36 Hours in New York City By AMY VIRSHUP
URBAN renewal. The phrase conjures up government-backed megaprojects from the ’70s, but it’s organic to New York, where someone is always getting off the bus, train or plane. In the last year, the city has opened a hot new park, Lincoln Center celebrated its 50th anniversary with a major face-lift that includes a new fountain with 353 custom-made, computer-controlled nozzles, and the center of cool shifted innumerable times (but it’s probably still somewhere in Brooklyn).
Friday
5 p.m.
1) GET YOUR TICKETS
As part of its anniversary celebration, Lincoln Center has remade the grim Harmony Atrium just southeast of the main campus (Broadway between 62nd and 63rd Streets) into a visitors’ center and ticketing space named for David Rubenstein (that’s what you get when you give $10 million). Along with a face-lift, the atrium got a new box office, selling same-day discount tickets at 25 to 50 percent off regular prices (with a two-ticket-per-person limit) for performances at Lincoln Center and all its constituent organizations — including the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic and the City Opera (new.lincolncenter.org/live/). Check what’s on and pick up a pair.
6 p.m.
2) PRETHEATER PRIX FIXE
Daniel Boulud’s New York culinary empire now runs from the Bowery to the Upper East Side. Just across from Lincoln Center, his Bar Boulud (1900 Broadway near 64th Street; 212-595-0303; www.danielnyc.com) is the perfect perch for a pre-performance meal. Terrines, sliced meats and cheeses (the last divided into categories like Bloomy, Stinky and Old & Hard) are the heart of the menu, but there’s also a $42 three-course prix-fixe option that includes such classic choices as a salade niçoise, roasted chicken breast and house-made ice cream or sorbet. For the full experience, sit at the charcuterie bar where the view includes fromage de tête “Gilles Verot” (that’s headcheese for those who don’t speak French). Afterward, grab a drink at the Alice Tully Hall lobby bar before curtain time.
Saturday
10 a.m.
3) BREAKFAST, RETRO-STYLE
The Standard Grill is tucked under the High Line at the base of the Standard Hotel (848 Washington Street at West 13th Street; 212-645-4100; www.thestandardgrill.com). Despite the hotel’s Brutalism-Meets-Miami-Beach exterior, the dining room is pure retro: a tile-vaulted ceiling, penny (as in real pennies) floor, red leather banquettes. The menu is pleasingly retro, too: Try warm cinnamon-and-sugar-crusted doughnuts made on the spot — 3 for $6 — or maybe ultra-sweet French toast with bananas and rum sauce, $10.
11 a.m.
4) WALK ALONG THE TRACKS
Just down the block at the corner of Gansevoort and Washington Streets are the southernmost stairs to the High Line, the immensely popular linear park created on what was once an abandoned freight rail line. After a decade-long effort, the first section of the park (running from Gansevoort to 20th Street) opened in June; on summer weekends as many as 20,000 people a day visited. Winter brings the walkway a quieter, almost derelict beauty, with bare tree limbs and the seed heads of grasses swaying in the wind off the Hudson. Winter hours are from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.; www.thehighline.org.
1 p.m.
5) BROOKLYN BOUTIQUES
Once known as the city of churches, Brooklyn these days might be called the borough of boutiques. For a taste of the local aesthetic, check out Court Street in the Cobble Hill neighborhood (take the 2/3 or 4/5 trains to Borough Hall and then walk south along Court to Atlantic). At Serene Rose (200 Court; 718-522-5927; www.serenerose.com), a dangly pair of earrings hand crocheted from gold-filled wire ($140) would be the perfect accent to one of the party frocks. Tiny Fork & Pencil (221a Court; 718-488-8855; forkandpencil.com) sells housewares, toys and antiques. The proceeds go to support local charities. Papél New York (225 Court; 718-422-0255; papelnewyork.com) sells sleek paper goods, including sheets of wrapping paper ($2.50 to $3 a sheet) that will class up even the smallest of gifts. Need to refuel? The Stumptown Coffee at Cafe Pedlar (210 Court; 718-855-7129; cafepedlar.com) is roasted nearby in Red Hook, and you can pick up a bag of Hair Bender blend beans ($12 for 12 ounces) along with your espresso ($2.50). Or stop at the Chocolate Room (269 Court; 718-246-2600; www.thechocolateroombrooklyn.com), which sells its own homemade chocolate caramel popcorn ($4.50 for a quarter-pound bag).
8 p.m.
6) SEAFOOD ON THE PARK
Sleek and highly polished, Marea (240 Central Park South; 212-582-5100; www.marea-nyc.com), in the old San Domenico space just east of Columbus Circle, is like some movie version of New York except, yes, that really is a fallen mogul pitching new investors at the table next to yours. The menu is devoted to an Italian spin on fish. Share an order of the unctuous ricci (sea urchin, lardo and sea salt draped bruschetta-like over toast; $15), then choose among the crudo (raw fish), oysters and antipasti. For a main course you can get a whole fish roasted or sautéed, then choose your sauce (the limone is good with the Dover sole) and side dish. The four-course prix fixe is $89.
10 p.m.
7) COCKTAILS AND CODES
If you’re talking cocktails in New York these days, you need to know two words: speakeasy and artisanal. Behind hidden entrances requiring secret codes, bartenders are mixing up concoctions with names like Corpse Reviver No. 2 (gin, Cointreau, Lillet Blanc, lemon and absinthe) that only seem old-fashioned. That particular drink ($13) is assembled by the garter-sleeved bartenders at Little Branch (20 Seventh Avenue South at Leroy Street; 212-929-4360). Cash only.
Sunday
10 a.m.
8) COMFORT FOOD
The name’s an oxymoron and the kitchen is probably smaller than yours, but Little Giant (85 Orchard Street at the corner of Broome; 212-226-5047; www.littlegiantnyc.com) turns out slightly refined comfort food that has crowds piling up on the sidewalks of the gentrifying Lower East Side. Little Giant serves a “Trucker’s Breakfast” ($16), but the bacon with it will be hand sliced and the mushrooms cremini. Cash only.
11 a.m.
9) ART SCENE STROLL
The anchor of the Lower East Side art scene is the New Museum of Contemporary Art (235 Bowery at Prince Street; 212-219-1222; www.newmuseum.org), designed by the Japanese firm Sanaa to look like a series of off-kilter boxes, which opened to raves in 2007. If Chelsea remains the hot spot for grand gesture galleries — old industrial spaces with room for massive Serras — the Lower East Side offers a growing number of storefront spots, where artists and gallerists with big ambitions work small for now. The Rachel Uffner Gallery at 47 Orchard Street (212-274-0064; racheluffnergallery.com) has been drawing strong reviews for its stable of artists, and the Bridge Gallery at 98 Orchard Street (212-674-6320; bridgegalleryny.com) specializes in architecture and design.
1 p.m.
10) SUGAR RUSH
A giant Gummi rat. How New York is that? You can pick one up to take home, along with giant pixie sticks (99 cents), wax fangs, Mallo Cups and classics like Hot Tamales and Mike and Ikes at Economy Candy (108 Rivington Street; 212-254-1531; www.economycandy.com). Crammed with what seems like every candy bar ever known, plus hard candies by the pound, nuts and dried fruits, it’s a playground for the sugar-obsessed.
THE BASICS
New York is served by three area airports: Kennedy, La Guardia and Newark Liberty. From J.F.K. to Midtown, the taxi fare is a flat $45, plus tolls and tip. You can also take the AirTrain to Jamaica ($5 one way), and then connect to either the Long Island Rail Road or the New York City subway to ride into Manhattan. From La Guardia, a taxi will cost from $21 to $30, plus tolls and tip. From Newark, the taxi fare is a flat $50 to $60, plus tolls and tip. Another alternative is the AirTrain, connecting Newark airport to Pennsylvania Station via New Jersey Transit (one way fare: $15). There are also bus, shuttle van and limousine services from all three airports.
Ink48 is the latest New York hotel opened by Kimpton, known for its collection of designy boutique hotels. The location, 11th Avenue and 48th Street, is convenient only if you’re planning on buying a car (auto dealerships line this stretch of 11th Avenue). But the rooms are spacious and well-designed (by the Rockwell Group). In December, the hotel was still in its “rough draft phase,” which meant the restaurant and bar weren’t open and construction was continuing. A king deluxe room with views to the north or east was $207; rates will go up once the hotel is fully open (653 11th Avenue; 877-843-8869; ink48.com).
The British group Firmdale (Number 16, among others, in London) has opened its first New York offshoot, the 86-room Crosby Street Hotel in the SoHo neighborhood (79 Crosby Street; 888-559-5508; www.thecrosbystreethotel.com). A 335-square-foot superior room is $495 a night.
Steps from Lincoln Center, the newly refurbished Empire Hotel (44 West 63rd Street; 212-265-7400; www.empirehotelnyc.com) couldn’t be more convenient for opera or ballet lovers. Standard queen rooms starting at $229 a night come with free Wi-Fi and iPod docking stations.
http://travel.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/travel/10hours.html?em
my pleasure bull, and a happy new year to you and your family also
thanks for the update and Happy New Year my friend.
Dick Clark is still having a ball on New Year's
By Gary Strauss, USA TODAY
Dick Clark and Ryan Seacrest will being rocking in Times Square; Fergie will be hosting from Las Vegas.
America's oldest teenager, Dick Clark, actually turned 80 in November. Despite lingering effects from a stroke in 2004, the former American Bandstand host will be back to roll in the new year on ABC's Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve With Ryan Seacrest 2010. Clark talked via e-mail with USA TODAY.
Q: How are you feeling these days, and how does the stroke affect your life?
ON TV: Count down with these live shows
A: I'm feeling fine, though the stroke has slowed me down and made it difficult for me to walk and talk.
Q: You just turned 80. Is it still as thrilling to usher in the new year as it was when you began hosting the show?
A: It's always an exciting evening when we bring in the new year at Times Square. In the early days, the crew consisted of the cameraman, stage manager and my wife. We stood on top of a building with a ladder. These days several hundred people are employed, and the live Times Square coverage is quite an extravaganza!
Q: What are your rituals for before the show?
A: I usually spend the day reading all the newspapers for a summary of the year's events and doing interviews ... then have a light supper at home. My favorite routine is our little after-telecast get-together for a hamburger and beer at my favorite New York pub, P.J. Clarke's, where I've been going since I was too young for a beer.
Q: What's your favorite anecdote about hosting the New Year's Eve show?
A: The year that the crew in front of me was paying no attention to what I was doing on camera. They were giggling and laughing throughout my comments about the crowd below. When we went off camera, they said, "Turn around." There, high above Times Square in an office window, were several naked celebrants enjoying the New Year's excitement in their own way.
Q: The economy has been in the doldrums, and unemployment remains stubbornly high. What's the effect on celebrations at times like these?
A: Though times are tough, it doesn't seem to have an impact on the spirits of the hundreds of thousands of people gathering to watch the traditional ball drop at midnight. Times Square is still the place to be on New Year's Eve.
Q: Do you make any New Year's resolutions? What are yours for 2010?
A: I avoid making New Year's resolutions, since I inevitably fail to fulfill them.
Q: Will you be back to help host for 2011?
A: I still haven't made up my mind. I still enjoy the honor of sharing in so many people's annual celebration. I wish my delivery was crisp and clean, but due to my stroke I'm happy that Ryan Seacrest now carries the heavier load.
I do the best I can and have been encouraged to continue because I hear it serves to inspire many others.
http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2009-12-30-dickclark30_ST_N.htm
Is Dick Clark still alive?
After Its Last Drop, the Ball Lands Here By JAMES BARRON
Jeffrey A. Straus turned the key in the padlock and pushed the door open.
“This is it,” he said. “The vault.”
This is where the balls from New Year’s Eves past go after they have fallen for the last time: a subbasement room that is more Fibber McGee than Harry Winston — junky, jam-packed and dusty. Mr. Straus, the chief executive of the company that produces the New Year’s Eve celebration at One Times Square, had promised a look at the famed balls that were retired after their final countdowns.
In all the new years that have begun after a crowd chant of “10, 9, 8, 7,” there have been seven balls that were the focus of a much-watched descent. Two of them not only preceded Dick Clark, but they were also on the job before Guy Lombardo’s first downbeat at the Waldorf-Astoria.
But as Mr. Straus led the way into the vault, only one of the balls was present and accounted for. What happened to Nos. 1 and 2? “I don’t know where they are,” Mr. Straus said.
So what about Nos. 3, 4 and 5?
It turned out they were all the same ball, the Methuselah of the New Year’s Eve celebrations. That one ball slid down the pole more than any of the others, from the mid-1950s until the mid-1990s.
But like some revelers in the crowd — and they know who they are — it had had a little work done over the years. So Mr. Straus counts it as No. 4 because it was turned into an apple in 1980, after the I?NY campaign caught on.
He also counts it as No. 5 because, for 1996, it got new skin and rhinestones. (To make the math more confusing, for 10 years starting on New Year’s Eve in 1985, it reverted to its original, 1950s look — no more apple. Mr. Straus counts that as No. 3, “with an asterisk.”)
And No. 7? Not in the vault, either. Mr. Straus said it and No. 3-4-3*-5 had been shipped out to be ogled: No. 7 by tourists at the Times Square Visitors Center a few blocks away, the other by visitors to the Atlanta headquarters of Jamestown Properties, the real estate fund that owns One Times Square.
But No. 6 stood proudly in a cage in the corner of the vault. It is, as New Year’s balls go, a neophyte, having made only one trip down the pole atop One Times Square, as 1999 yielded to 2000. It now looks more like a satellite from the 1960s. “Like Telstar,” said Mr. Straus, who is 48 and has overseen the annual production since 1995.
The vault is 50 feet beneath the slender, 24-story tower, which means it is 400 feet below where the ball will fall when Thursday ends and 2010 begins. It served as the electrical room after The New York Times sold One Times Square in the 1960s, Mr. Straus said. “The sides were filled with spare parts for the building engineers,” he said. “It was a natural place for the ball because of its electrical components.”
Still, there is more in the vault than just the Millennium Ball. On a shelf on one wall were silly looking hats from 1976 and T-shirts from 1997. “I never throw anything away,” Mr. Straus said.
And a few steps past the Millennium Ball were enough old numerals to welcome new years into the 26th century. The year 2543, anyone? That combination of numerals can be laid out from the ones on the floor. The “2” was made in 2001, when the clock was ticking toward a year with two 2s.
Last year, Mr. Straus stopped putting the ball away in January and installed one that is intended to stay outdoors, on its pole, all year long. It is covered with 2,688 Waterford Crystal triangles that are bolted to 672 light-emitting diode modules. Mr. Straus said it could generate 16 million colors.
That is 15,999,999 more than the first bulb, back in 1907. That one was made of iron and wood, was outfitted with 100 light bulbs and weighed 700 pounds.
The balls changed over the years, but the way they were lowered did not — until Mr. Straus came along. “Nineteen ninety-five, my first year, we converted from doing it by hand, six workers and a rope with a stop watch, to computer controls and an electronic winch,” he said.
But all the planning and technology did not avoid what was, undoubtedly, the first mistake of 1996.
“We turned it off halfway down,” he recalled. “I learned my lesson.”
He was not the only one. “My parents were at a party — ‘My son does the ball drop,’ ” he said, repeating his parents’ boast. “Now they don’t talk about it until after it happens.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/nyregion/31vault.html?_r=1&hp
Percy Sutton, Harlem political pioneer, dies at 89
NEW YORK -Percy Sutton, the pioneering civil rights attorney who represented Malcolm X before launching successful careers as a political power broker and media mogul, has died. He was 89.
Marissa Shorenstein, a spokeswoman for Gov. David Paterson, confirmed that Sutton died Saturday. She did not know the cause. His daughter, Cheryl Sutton, declined to comment Saturday when reached by phone at her New York City home.
The son of a former slave, Percy Sutton became a fixture on 125th Street in Harlem after moving to New York City following his service with the famed Tuskegee Airmen in World War II. His Harlem law office, founded in 1953, represented Malcolm X and the slain activist's family for decades.
The consummate politician, Sutton served in the New York State Assembly before taking over as Manhattan borough president in 1966, becoming the highest-ranking black elected official in the state.
Sutton also mounted unsuccessful campaigns for the U.S. Senate and mayor of New York, and served as political mentor for the Rev. Jesse Jackson's two presidential races.
Jackson recalled Sutton talking about electing a black president as early as 1972. Sutton was influential in getting his 1984 campaign going, he said.
"He never stopped building bridges and laying the groundwork," Jackson said Sunday. "We are very glad to be the beneficiaries of his work."
In a statement released Saturday night, Gov. David Paterson called Sutton a mentor and "one of New York's and this nation's most influential African-American leaders."
"Percy was fiercely loyal, compassionate and a truly kind soul," Paterson said. "He will be missed but his legacy lives on through the next generations of African-Americans he inspired to pursue and fulfill their own dreams and ambitions."
President Barack Obama called Sutton "a true hero" to African-Americans across the country.
"His life-long dedication to the fight for civil rights and his career as an entrepreneur and public servant made the rise of countless young African-Americans possible," Obama said in a statement.
In 1971, with his brother Oliver, Sutton purchased WLIB-AM, making it the first black-owned radio station in New York City. His Inner City Broadcasting Corp. eventually picked up WBLS-FM, which reigned for years as New York's top-rated radio station, before buying stations in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit and San Antonio between 1978-85.
The Texas purchase marked a homecoming for the suave and sophisticated Sutton, born in San Antonio on Nov. 24, 1920, the youngest of 15 children.
Among Sutton's other endeavors was his purchase and renovation of the famed Apollo Theater when the Harlem landmark's demise appeared imminent.
"The Apollo and its staff stand on the shoulders of Mr. Sutton as the theater continues to flourish," said Jonelle Procope, president and CEO of Apollo Theater Foundation Inc. "(He) will be greatly missed and will always be an integral part of the Apollo legacy."
Sutton's father, Samuel, was born into slavery just before the Civil War. The elder Sutton became principal at a segregated San Antonio high school, and he made education a family priority: All 12 of his surviving children attended college.
When he was 13, Percy Sutton endured a traumatic experience that drove him inexorably into the fight for racial equality. A police officer approached Sutton as the teen handed out NAACP pamphlets. "N-----, what are you doing out of your neighborhood?" he asked before beating the youth.
When World War II arrived, Sutton's enlistment attempts were rebuffed by Southern white recruiters. The young man went to New York, where he was accepted and joined the Tuskegee Airmen.
After the war, Sutton earned a law degree in New York while working as a post office clerk and a subway conductor. He served again as an Air Force intelligence officer during the Korean War before returning to Harlem in 1953 and establishing his law office with brother Oliver and a third partner, George Covington.
In addition to representing Malcolm X for a decade until his 1965 assassination, the Sutton firm handled the cases of more than 200 defendants arrested in the South during the 1963-64 civil rights marches. Sutton was also elected to two terms as president of the New York office of the NAACP.
After Malcolm's assassination, Sutton worked as lawyer for Malcolm's widow, Betty Shabazz. He represented her grandson, 12-year-old Malcolm Shabazz, when the youth was accused of setting a 1997 fire that caused her death.
Sutton was elected to the state Legislature in 1965, and quickly emerged as spokesman for its 13 black members. His charisma and eloquence led to his selection as Manhattan borough president in 1966, completing the term of Constance Baker Motley, who was appointed federal judge.
Two years later, Sutton announced a run for the U.S. Senate seat held by Jacob Javits, although he pulled out of the Democratic primary to back Paul O'Dwyer.
Sutton remained in his Manhattan job through 1977, the same year he launched a doomed campaign for mayor that ended with Edward I. Koch defeating six competitors for the Democratic nomination.
Sutton was among the first voices raised against the Vietnam War, surrendering his delegate's seat at the 1968 Democratic convention in protest and supporting anti-war candidate George McGovern four years later against incumbent President Richard Nixon.
In addition to his radio holdings, Sutton also headed a group that owned The Amsterdam News, the second largest black weekly newspaper in the country. The paper was later sold.
Sutton's devotion to Harlem and its people was rarely more evident than when he spent $250,000 to purchase the shuttered Apollo Theater in 1981. The Apollo turned 70 in 2004, a milestone that was unthinkable until Sutton stepped in to save the landmark.
Sutton "retired" in 1991, but his work as an adviser, mentor and confidante to politicians and businessmen never abated. He was among a group of American businessmen selected during the Clinton administration to attend meetings with the Group of Seven (G-7) Nations in 1995-96.
"He was a great man," said Charles Warfield Jr., the president and chief operating officer of ICBC Broadcast Holdings Inc., when reached early Sunday. He declined to comment further out of respect for the wishes of Sutton's family.
The Rev. Al Sharpton said he last visited Sutton in a nursing home Wednesday. He recalled meeting Sutton for the first time at age 12; Four years later, Sutton paid for his trip to a national black political convention because the teenage Sharpton couldn't afford to go.
"He personified the black experience of the 20th century," Sharpton said. "He started the century where blacks were victims. We ended as victors."
Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced Sunday that flags on city buildings would be lowered in Sutton's honor.
http://news.aol.com/article/percy-sutton-harlem-political-pioneer/832652?cid=12
Yet Another New York Holiday Travel Nightmare
Northeast Train Problems Strand Holiday Travelers At Penn Station For Hours
Amtrak Blames 'Low Voltage' For Outage That Stopped All Trains
Dec 23, 2009 4:39 pm US/Eastern
NEW YORK (CBS) ? Click to enlarge1 of 1
A power outage caused all trains in and out of Penn Station in Manhattan to be delayed for hours on Dec. 23, 2009.
CBS
Major train troubles caused yet another travel nightmare for New York commuters before Christmas. Service on Amtrak and NJ Transit lines in and out of Penn Station came to a screeching halt, leaving holiday travelers stranded Wednesday morning for three hours.
Would-be train passengers were forced to camp out on the waiting room floor of Penn Station after an apparent power outage occurred about 8:30 on Wednesday morning. Many were frustrated, and others just chalked it up to common troubles of traveling.
"You know something, this is always a very common thing. It's not just here, it's all over. Travel is not even remotely pleasant," one stranded commuter told CBS 2.
The power problems stopped trains going in and out of New York City.
"I'm not happy, not happy at all," said passenger Gene Chikowski. "Besides working, I have to run a number of errands around the house and get ready for Christmas."
NJ Transit said low voltage halted not only Amtrak, but Northeast Corridor, NJ Coastline, and Midtown Direct trains.
"I was listening to the announcement, it said, 'Low voltage.' I said, 'What the hell does that mean?'" said passenger Zack Manna. "But I guess it means the trains aren't moving."
Some trains were stranded just outside Penn Station, others were stuck between Newark and New York City.
Some travelers took it in stride.
"We're on holiday to an extent, and it's an experience. We're not used to being delayed on trains in Australia, not to the extent here," said Australian tourist David Smith.
Train service was restored around 11:36 a.m. with residual delays continuing through the afternoon. Amtrak is still trying to determine what caused the problems.
http://wcbstv.com/local/amtrak.power.problems.2.1387477.html
LIRR Passengers Reflect On 'Ride From Hell'
Riders Tell CBS 2 HD They Sat Stranded With No Warmth, Food Or Working Toilet For 6 Hours And Were Told Nothing
"When No Info Was Coming, They Started To Knock Out Emergency Windows"
Dec 23, 2009 6:11 am US/Eastern
RONKONKOMA, N.Y. (CBS) ? Click to enlarge1 of 1
CBS
The Long Island Rail Road has apologized to the riders who were stranded on a train at Wyandanch during the snow storm early Sunday morning.
But as CBS 2 HD found out, some of the passengers are still angry over the inconvenience that lasted six hours.
If only the trains were running normally early Sunday morning. Instead, one train was stranded with no power.
"For me it was the cold that was killing me. My jacket was my blanket," passenger Derek Gumin said.
Gumin and his friend Joe Iannello, both 24, experienced the train ride from hell.
"There was no bathroom except one which was flooded. It was the biggest concern to most people," Gumin said.
What should have been a trip lasting an hour and 20 minutes took a total of six hours with the passengers stranded for three hours.
It was a Ronkonkoma-bound LIRR train Sunday morning that departed at 2:54. But at 5:05 a.m. it was stuck east of Wyandanch. At 5:17 a rescue team was dispatched and a tow train left Hicksville. At 6:20 repair efforts failed, new a train was rerouted and the rescue train arrived. But by then some passengers, who were told nothing, were frantic.
"When no information was coming, they started to knock out emergency windows and they were attempting to get off, which they were not allowed to do," Iannello said.
At 7:30 the disabled train was pushed to Farmingdale. At 8 the new train took on the stranded passengers. At 8:45 it arrived at Ronkonkoma. The LIRR admits it needs to do better.
"We apologized to those commuters. It was a great inconvenience. We recognize that and we've instituted a review of the incident, top to bottom," LIRR spokesman Joe Calderone said.
One of the options being considered during such fierce weather is to cancel some trains before they leave, like the airlines have done for years.
There were no injuries, in part, said the railroad, because no one was allowed to leave the train in blizzard conditions.
http://wcbstv.com/local/train.ride.from.2.1385442.html
A Quiet End for Boys Choir of Harlem By SHARON OTTERMAN
For more than three decades, they sang Mozart in Latin, Bach in German, and Cole Porter and Stevie Wonder in English, from Alice Tully Hall in New York to Royal Albert Hall in London.
For the audiences that marveled at the Boys Choir of Harlem, it was an additional wonder that the young performers with world-class voices had emerged from some of the most difficult neighborhoods of New York. December was always a busy month, as the choir toured the country’s premier concert halls and appeared on television Christmas specials.
But this year, the boys are nowhere to be found. Last week, Terrance Wright, a 39-year-old choir alumnus, picked up a microphone in front of the altar of Metropolitan Community United Methodist Church in Harlem, the choir’s last home, and delivered news that surprised few people but saddened many.
“Tell the people. Let it be known,” Mr. Wright said, glistening and exhausted after leading a Christmas concert by former singers in the choir. “There is no Boys and Girls Choir of Harlem.”
The choir’s last official performance was in 2007, around the time of the death of its founder, Walter J. Turnbull. But no one ever announced that it was gone. Board members and alumni had hoped to revive it, but they acknowledged last week that they had not had any success.
For a famous organization that politicians had vowed would outlive its founder, it had a quiet end. Many of the choir’s materials, like copies of handwritten scores and its trademark burgundy blazers, now sit in black garbage bags and open boxes in the church’s damp dirt-floor basement, amid overturned tables and sacks of plaster of Paris.
Led by Dr. Turnbull, who started the group in 1968, the choir sang at the White House for nearly every president since Lyndon B. Johnson, and it was awarded the National Medal of Arts by Bill Clinton. But it did not survive long enough to perform for the country’s first black president.
The choir’s demise as a functional organization was a result of many factors, but everyone agrees it was set in motion by a single episode: an accusation by a 14-year-old boy in 2001 that a counselor on the choir’s staff had sexually abused him. The counselor eventually was sentenced to two years in prison.
The accusation and the scandal that followed — Dr. Turnbull did not report the claim to the authorities and allowed the counselor to continue working with children — set off a chain of events that led the city to oust the choir in 2006 from the Choir Academy of Harlem, the school building that had been its home. That, in turn, deepened the choir’s already serious financial problems.
Owing millions in payroll taxes and penalties, and immersed in a lawsuit stemming from the abuse accusations, the board of the Boys Choir gathered in the months after Dr. Turnbull’s death, said Howard Dodson, the leader of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. Mr. Dodson was brought onto the board, along with former Mayor David N. Dinkins, in an effort to save the choir.
“There were those who didn’t want to declare its end because they were wishing something would show up to make it real again,” Mr. Dodson said. “That was the hope.”
The meeting, he said, was spent with lawyers, who were negotiating with the I.R.S. about how the liens would be paid. “Trying to revive the choir, unfortunately, was not uppermost in anyone’s agenda at that time,” he said.
At the church, leaders were getting little information from the board. People kept calling — and do to this day — wanting to book the choir at events. Church members stacked the choir’s materials on an unused stage upstairs and then, finally, in the basement.
“When Mr. Turnbull died, everyone said, ‘We are not going to let this die,’ and no one did anything,” said George Reyes, who arranged concerts and concessions for the choir. A few months passed. Then, he said, a decision was made by some of the alumni.
“We finally got together to say, O.K., we are going to continue what Mr. Turnbull started,” Mr. Reyes said.
With that, about 30 former singers in the choir began practicing, this time men and women together, to make up for the lack of soprano and alto male voices. (The Girls Choir of Harlem was founded, also by Dr. Turnbull, in 1988.) Mr. Wright, who joined the choir at 16 and later became Dr. Turnbull’s assistant, took the lead.
With little support except for what they earn at occasional performances, like a recent Christmas show at a Brooks Brothers store, the alumni began singing their old classical, Broadway and gospel arrangements, and adding some R & B and soul.
They made their first international appearance in October, traveling to Shanghai for an international arts festival. Financing came from unlikely sources: The country music duo Brooks & Dunn helped out, and a Texas businessman paid their airfare. “The standard politicians around the city didn’t even return our phone calls,” Mr. Reyes said.
To listen to the alumni choir, which performed its Christmas concert at the Metropolitan Church on Dec. 13, is to realize what, besides the dusty boxes in the basement, the choir has left behind. Tyneshia Hill, 24, sang a haunting, lyrical soprano solo in “Mary Was the Queen of Galilee” that raised gasps from the audience. She works as a school aide in the Bronx and lives with her mother in Co-op City.
But the choir was not just about building musicians. “It was understanding how to balance everything in our lives, about how you become a global citizen,” said Matthew Gadsen, 25, a former singer in the choir who went to Georgetown University on a full scholarship and now works at an investment bank. The hardest thing, he said, “is that I had that opportunity, and now there’s another kid in a public school in Harlem who doesn’t.”
The alumni say they want to revive the original goal of the Boys Choir — the development of boys and girls through music — if not the actual organization, which may be doomed by its debts and the lawsuit. Their mission, they said, took on an additional note of urgency this month, after education officials proposed closing the high school grades of the Choir Academy, which the city had run on its own after 2006, for poor performance.
But starting over, Mr. Wright said, might require first that people know the original choir is dead.
“Though there’s no Boys and Girls Choir of Harlem,” Mr. Wright told the crowd before launching his red-and-black-clad singers into their final gospel song, “there is still life. It just means God has something else planned.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/23/nyregion/23choir.html?pagewanted=print
Judge declares mistrial in John A. (Junior) Gotti case over deadlocked jury; 4th mistrial in 5 years
BY Alison Gendar and Larry Mcshane
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
Originally Published:Tuesday, December 1st 2009, 3:13 PM
Updated: Tuesday, December 1st 2009, 3:47 PM
Sabo/News/New York Daily NewsJohn Gotti, Jr. notched a fourth mistrial in five years after the jury in his latest racketeering trial was hopelessly deadlocked.
Jurors in Junior Gotti trial declare deadlock on ninth day of deliberationsGotti jury back to work after holiday vacation snafuGotti's 4th jury divided from start
Faced with a hopelessly deadlocked jury, a federal judge declared a mistrial Tuesday in John A. (Junior) Gotti's fourth racketeering trial.
The jury, in its 11th fruitless day of deliberations, sent out its second note in three days announcing it was at a stalemate on all three charges against the now-Teflon Son.
Judge Kevin Castel then declared a mistrial in the 11-week old case, yet another stinging defeat for the government in its relentless pursuit of the second-generation mob boss.
Gotti inhaled deeply, his face flushed, and his family applauded as the decision was announced. Defense lawyer Charles Carnesi put his hand on Gotti's back.
Gotti was expected to walk out of court following a bail hearing - his first taste of freedom since August 2008,
when he was arrested on the latest indictment.
The former Gambino boss faced life in prison if convicted - and could still face a fifth trial.
"Damn it, let it go," said his sister, Victoria, as the family celebrated its latest courtroom triumph. "It's the
same thing over and over and over again.
"We're no organized crime family. We're just a family."
The family was planning a belated Thanksgiving celebration for Gotti, his wife and their six kids, said his brother-in-law, Louis Albano.
The panel announced it was hung after returning from a five-day Thanksgiving weekend vacation.
It marked the fourth failed prosecution of Gotti in five years, all ending with hung juries and mistrials.
This jury deliberated longer than the first three, but ultimately reached the same conclusion.
The mistrial boosted Junior Gotti - who spent six years in prison on an earlier conviction - past his dad in
courtroom successes.
John (Dapper Don) Gotti beat three cases before he was convicted and jailed for life on murder and racketeering charges.
The one-time Gambino family boss was charged with racketeering and a pair of drug murders.
The divided jury sent out its first deadlock note Nov. 19, prompting the judge to give them a three-day weekend.
They returned Nov. 23, but found itself split again a day later.
Castel read the jury an "Allen charge," a last-ditch legal effort to urge a jury verdict before a mistrial.
Gotti, 45, used the same defense that worked in three prior cases: He quit the mob in 1999. The retirement defense split the three prior panels, and the fourth time proved a charm, too.
Gotti's fourth racketeering trial in five years began Sept. 21, with the anonymous jurors listening to a pair of familiar refrains.
Prosecutors described him as a ruthless mob boss responsible for murders, mayhem and drug dealing.
The defense, as it did successfully three previous times, insisted Gotti retired from "The Life" a decade ago.
Emotions ran high through the trial, which made as much news through courtroom theatrics as testimony. There were angry outbursts by Gotti and his mother, along with ugly backbiting among the jurors.
Junior exploded at his former buddy John Alite, a drug dealer turned mob informer who spent more than a week testifying against Gotti.
"You got something to say to me?" the star government witness barked at Gotti as he left the witness stand last month.
"You fag!" Gotti shouted back. "Did I kill little girls? You're a punk. You're a dog. You're a dog. You always were a dog your whole life, you punk dog."
Alite described his former best man as hot-tempered, violent and responsible for eight murders - including one where he gutted the victim with a knife inside a Queens bar.
He also infuriated the Gottis by repeating his claim of a romance with Junior's sister Victoria, claiming she turned to him after beatings inflicted by her ex-husband.
As the defense wrapped up its case, mob matriarch Victoria Gotti unleashed a vulgar tirade at Federal Judge Kevin
Castel over his decision to cut loose a pair of feuding jurors.
One of the two, Juror 7, was widely seen as favoring the defense.
"F----- animals!" the seething mother screamed. " ... "The f------ gangsters! You son of a bitches! Put your own sons in there. You bastards!"
Gotti's mother was not in court Tuesday.
The jury's infighting - including an anonymous letter of complaint sent by one juror to the judge - became a recurring theme during the trial.
Castel, trying to calm the divided panel, at one point offered the jury a sweet treat: A plastic jar filled with 105 individually-wrapped pieces of strawberry licorice.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2009/12/01/2009-12-01_judge_declares_.html
New Macy's Parade route means no cutting corners
By DEEPTI HAJELA (AP) – 3 days ago
NEW YORK — It won't be just the balloons, marching bands and floats on display in the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. The laws of physics will also be on parade.
For the first time in its more than 80-year history, the parade route is bypassing Broadway, which cuts a diagonal slice through Manhattan, as it makes its way south from the Upper West Side to the finish at Macy's flagship store in Herald Square.
Instead, participants will use a new route — one that traverses the grid of the city's streets and avenues, includes turns around five corners, and is slightly longer than in previous years.
The demands of the new route will challenge the marching bands and handlers of the parade's signature balloons, for whom precision is key, said Brian Schwartz, physics professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
"There really is a lot of science" to it, he said.
"If they're taking a new route, they're going to have to be really careful in the turning of the corners," he said.
The new 2.65-mile route came about because parts of Broadway have been closed to vehicular traffic, making it off limits to floats this year.
Macy's giant balloons, featuring Buzz Lightyear, Spider-Man, and Ronald McDonald this year, among others, measure several stories tall and wide and are filled with thousands of cubic feet of helium. Each balloon is tethered to several human handlers — the number depends on the size and shape of the balloon — who are responsible for guiding it down the route on foot.
The physics involved with moving a balloon down a straight path are different from what's needed for a corner, Schwartz said.
"If you're doing a turn, then the people on the inside of the turn have to walk slower than the people on the outside of the turn," he said. "It has to be very well-coordinated."
The handlers also have to know when to start their turning motion and how wide a turn to take, he said, likening it to trying to turn a car into a narrow parking space. If the driver turns too sharply or too widely, the car won't fit into the space properly.
Wind could also be an issue, Schwartz said, with changes in the direction of the route meaning changes in how the wind hits the balloons and what handlers have to do to compensate.
"The tension on the ropes will be changing, and people have to adjust for that in real time," he said.
The effect of the wind on the balloons is something that Macy's is mindful of, and city guidelines are in place to ground the balloons if the winds are too high.
The protocols were established after 45-mph winds drove a Cat in the Hat balloon into a metal pole during the 1997 parade and left a woman in a coma for almost a month before she recovered. The balloons were lowered to a maximum of 17 feet on a stormy Thanksgiving Day 2006.
A route with corners in it is not for the faint of heart, said Judith Matt, president of a Massachusetts nonprofit called Spirit of Springfield, which holds a big balloon parade the weekend after Thanksgiving.
"All they have to do is have some wind when you go around one of those corners," she said.
The Springfield parade changed its route more than a decade ago to one that is almost perfectly straight to avoid issues like hills, turns or trees.
It's not just the balloons. The Macy's marching bands, 10 from around the country, will have to make the turns while maintaining the precision of their marching lines.
"When you're in an event, you kind of live for it, you want to execute those turns so they are precise and crisp," said Robert Jacobs, executive director of the Jersey Surf, a drum and bugle corps based in Mount Holly, N.J.
Marchers will have to closely follow the path of the person in front of them to avoid having their band lines disrupted, and will have to time their steps carefully, since the person on the inside of the turn is taking smaller steps than the person on the outside.
"If you have to run to keep up, you're doing something wrong," said Jacobs, whose group has marched in its share of parades but is not taking part in the Macy's event.
"Corners can be the enemy of a marching band but also a source of inspiration," he said.
Orlando Veras, a spokesman for the Macy's parade, said organizers are confident the additional corners will not pose problems. Parade officials walk the route every year to assess potential problems.
Veras also pointed out that previous routes included one turn at the end, and that marchers and balloon handlers had to make a turn at the beginning to get from staging areas on side streets onto the main parade route.
If anything, the concern is timing, he said. The nationally televised event has a three-hour window, which now has to cover a longer parade route.
"The parade is such a perfectly timed machine; we like to know at 9:07 you should be at this block," he said. "It's really not about the turns, it's about the length of the route."
Observers were confident that Macy's would make it work.
"They're the epitome of what a parade does," said Toni McKay, CEO of Starbound Entertainment, which produces giant balloon parades. "They're going to be able to handle that quite well."
Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Thanksgiving Day kicks off with slew of parades
By DEEPTI HAJELA
The Associated Press
Thursday, November 26, 2009 10:47 AM
NEW YORK -- Giant balloons, floats, marching bands and clowns with confetti brought smiles to thousands of revelers Thursday eager to catch a glimpse of a parade as steeped in Thanksgiving Day tradition as turkey and pumpkin pie.
Thousands lined the streets of Manhattan for the 83rd annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, while crowds gathered nationwide for parades in cities such as Detroit and Philadelphia.
Katie Stam, Miss America 2009, waved to crowds from a Statue of Liberty float she shared with Meb Keflezighi, the first American in 11 years to win the New York City Marathon.
Shailesh Dighe and his family came to the fabled New York City parade to snap pictures of celebrities including rapper Jay Sean and singer-actress Keke Palmer. Despite the crowds, Dighe said the parade is "totally worth it."
"When you watch it on TV, you don't get that feeling," said Dighe, who splits his time between Manhattan and Princeton, N.J.
For the first time, the parade route bypassed Broadway, which cuts a diagonal slice through Manhattan, as it made its way south from the Upper West Side to the finish at Macy's flagship store in Herald Square.
The new route traverses the grid of the city's streets and avenues, includes turns around five corners, and is slightly longer than in previous years.
Johanna Castillo, 38, of Guttenberg, N.J., said the new route seemed to better accommodate the crowds.
"I was very blessed to get here at the time I did and find a spot" a half-hour before parade time, said Castillo, who arrived with her two children.
Elsewhere, thousands gathered in Detroit for the 83rd annual America's Thanksgiving Parade. The country's longest-run Thanksgiving Day parade is being held in Philadelphia for its 90th year.
Dense fog delayed some flights Thursday for Thanksgiving travelers headed to the Washington and Baltimore areas.
The Federal Aviation Administration says the fog prompted a ground stop for flights arriving Thursday morning at all three Washington-area airports. Departing flights were apparently not affected. The FAA lifted its ground stop by 10:30 a.m.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/26/AR2009112601387.html?hpid%3Dartslot&sub=AR
that must have been a blast!
NYU downtown.
In my wayward college days we'd cut out of class on Friday afternoons and head to the Big A.
as bad as the state needs $$$ no excuses for this....thanks for the story bull
8 Years After Gambling Agreement, Aqueduct Still Awaits Decision in Albany
By CHARLES V. BAGLI and DANNY HAKIM
Amid a battered economy and falling tax revenue, Gov. George E. Pataki agreed in October 2001 to a budget deal that authorized electronic slot machines at the Aqueduct racetrack in Queens.
But eight years and one recession later, state officials still cannot agree on an operator for the aging track, despite the obvious financial incentive: a refurbished operation with video gambling machines would generate more than $1 million a day, many experts say.
The latest round of talks has been stalled for months, and despite a series of meetings among Gov. David A. Paterson and legislative leaders to try to resolve the matter, they remain deadlocked. But the pressure on state lawmakers for a solution is considerable: a $200 million upfront payment from the winning bidder is key to the state’s current plan to reduce a multibillion-dollar budget deficit.
The problem is that the governor and the leaders of the Assembly and the Senate must agree on the winning bid.
The governor’s office appears to favor a group led by SL Green Realty, Manhattan’s largest commercial landlord, and Hard Rock International, or maybe Delaware North.
The Senate, which would have to approve the selection, has expressed enthusiasm for Aqueduct Entertainment Group, even though some advisers say it is one of the weaker of the six bidders. The Assembly, in turn, has not shown a preference, although Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver is thought to favor Delaware North or SL Green.
But given the history of the tortuous and interminable negotiations over selecting an operator — symbolizing the worst of Albany dysfunction and backroom political horse trading — no one is expecting a quick compromise.
“It is a mystery why this is taking so long, since it is costing over a million dollars a day not to have it open,” said Jeff Gural, a minority partner in the SL Green group who owns two small racetracks upstate that have electronic slot machines. “The original decision was promised for Aug. 1.”
Some legislators and many of the bidders say the chaotic situation has been compounded by the failure of the governor’s chief counsel, Peter J. Kiernan, to establish set criteria and a formal selection process. As a result, some bidders have been allowed to change their offers midstream to be more competitive, while the state has twice asked for their final and best offers.
“There are no parameters,” said Assemblyman J. Gary Pretlow, a Westchester Democrat who is chairman of the Assembly’s Committee on Racing and Wagering. “The problem is that the process was flawed from its inception. Everyone should have been operating with common guidelines.”
Most recently, the Paterson administration surprised the six competing bidders when he asked them to submit their new final offers by Nov. 6 and demanded that all must guarantee an upfront licensing fee of $200 million or more payable within 30 days of signing an operating agreement. Weeks earlier, Governor Paterson inserted the $200 million into his deficit reduction plan.
One of the bidders, Stephen A. Wynn, the Las Vegas impresario, promptly pulled out.
Joseph M. Kelly, a professor of business law at the College of Buffalo and an associate of the Catania Consulting Group, which specializes in gambling, said that the peculiar process could easily lead to a lawsuit once someone was selected. “I have a lot of problems with the process,” Mr. Kelly said. “Whoever is selected, I think you can argue that the decision was arbitrary and capricious.”
The State Legislature first authorized the use of electronic slot machines, or video lottery terminals, at Aqueduct and either other racetracks in the state, as well as six American Indian casinos, during another period of fiscal distress — immediately after the attack on the World Trade Center. The other racetracks quickly installed the machines.
On a recent Friday afternoon, the parking lots at Aqueduct were largely vacant. A good portion of the grandstand, which once accommodated 30,000 people, was closed. Still, the handful of bettors in the stands had hundreds of empty seats to choose from. Most sat inside, staring at the television screens that broadcast races from Aqueduct and elsewhere. The cavernous hall resembles a large bus station without all the passengers.
“This isn’t a pretty place,” said Donald Rosen, whose horse, Boxitup, finished second in the eighth race that day. “Hopefully, when they get the slots, they’ll fix it up and get people to come here.”
“I saw it work with slots at Saratoga,” he added, referring to a harness track upstate. “That place is now like a palace. It’s clean; everyone’s jumping around.”
Yet selecting an operator for Aqueduct, potentially the most lucrative location for New York because of the population density surrounding it, has turned into a long-running drama.
After two attempts to pick an operator fizzled, Gov. Eliot Spitzer decided to start over in 2008. His successor, Governor Paterson, and the Legislature ultimately picked Delaware North, a Buffalo company, over two rivals. But that deal collapse in March after Delaware North failed to raise a $370 million payment for the exclusive rights to build the gambling hall.
In June, six groups submitted new offers to build a gambling hall for 4,500 machines and to refurbish the track; they included Delaware North, SL Green, Mr. Wynn and R. Donahue Peebles in partnership with MGM Mirage, the casino operator.
SL Green vowed to open at least 1,500 electronic slot machines within eight months of signing a preliminary operating deal with the state, or pay up to $25 million in penalties. Another bidder, Aqueduct Entertainment Group, said it would open 1,200 machines within six months, although there was no mention of any self-imposed penalties.
Penn National Gaming, which operates 15 casinos in Florida, New Jersey, Maine and other states, signed a deal with the hip-hop entrepreneur Russell Simmons to handle the project’s community outreach. It also offered the highest — at least until recently — licensing fee, $250 million.
And in a nod to the political power of the hotel union in Albany, all of the contenders eventually worked out some form of an agreement with the New York Hotel and Motels Trades Council.
Mr. Silver said last week that he had no favorite candidate to run Aqueduct. “I have no horse in the race,” he said, adding that he favored “the one that makes the most sense.”
Mr. Silver said the Legislature was now focused on the dealing with the budget and a $4 billion deficit. “We have five months to collect that $200 million,” he said, adding that he hoped to resolve the issue once negotiations on the budget were concluded.
The Senate, and particularly Senator Malcolm A. Smith, the Senate president, have been pushing Aqueduct Entertainment Group, even though that group’s ties to the Rev. Floyd H. Flake, a spiritual and political mentor of Mr. Smith’s, have been questioned by the Assembly and the governor’s office.
Senator Eric Adams, a Brooklyn Democrat who chairs the Senate’s Racing, Gaming and Wagering Committee, said last week, “We’re looking at both SL Green and A.E.G., and it’s a tossup between the two of them, and probably within the next day or so we’ll know 100 percent where we are.”
Mr. Smith, for his part, said in an interview that he has limited his involvement in the negotiations and had no interest in a job with Aqueduct Entertainment Group should it win the contract.
“I have no interest in working in that business,” Mr. Smith said, adding that because of his relationship with Mr. Flake, he had purposely “not gotten involved even at the recommendation level.”
Soupy Sales, Flinger of Pies and Punch Lines, Dies at 83
By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
October 24, 2009
Soupy Sales, whose zany television routines turned a pie in the face into a madcap art form, died on Thursday in the Bronx. He was 83.
Hisformer manager, David Usher, said Mr. Sales had died in a hospice after suffering from multiple health problems.
Cavorting with his puppet sidekicks White Fang, Black Tooth and Pookie the Lion, transforming himself into the private detective Philo Kvetch, and playing host to the ever-present “nut at the door,” Soupy Sales became a television favorite of youngsters and an anarchic comedy hero for teenagers, college students and many adults as well.
Clad in a top hat, sweater and bow tie and shuffling through his Mouse dance, he reached his slapstick heyday in the mid-1960s on “The Soupy Sales Show,” a widely syndicated program based at WNEW-TV in New York.
Beyond the pie-throwing, Mr. Sales was especially remembered for one infamous moment. It came on New Year’s Day 1965, when he asked youngsters to go through their parents’ clothing and send him little green pieces of paper with pictures of men with beards.
Mr. Sales reported receiving only a few dollar bills, and he said he had donated them to charity, but Metromedia, the station’s owner, suspended him briefly after a viewer complained to the Federal Communications Commission that he was encouraging children to steal.
That stunt only heightened Mr. Sales’s appeal as a tweaker of authority. When he headlined a rock ’n’ roll show at the Paramount Theater the following Easter, as many as 3,000 teenagers were snaking through Times Square hoping for seats at the morning performance. “He’s great, he’s a nut like us,” a 13-year-old boy told The New York Times.
Mr. Sales was rumored to have told off-color jokes to his young listeners, but he denied that. As he put it in his memoir, “Soupy Sez!” (M. Evans, 2001), written with Charles Salzberg: “Kids would come home and they’d tell a dirty joke — you know, grade school humor — and the parents would say, ‘Where’d you hear that?’ And they’d say, ‘The Soupy Sales Show,’ because I happened to have the biggest show in town.”
By his own count, some 20,000 pies were hurled at him or visitors to his TV shows in the 1950s and 60s. The victims included Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis and Jerry Lewis, all of whom turned up just for the honor of being creamed.
Mr. Sales had precise requirements on the ingredients for successful pie-throwing: “You can use whipped cream, egg whites or shaving cream, but shaving cream is much better because it doesn’t spoil. And no tin plates. The secret is you just can’t push it and shove it in somebody’s face. It has to be done with a pie that has a lot of crust so that it breaks up into a thousand pieces when it hits you.”
But the key to his comedy went beyond pie.
“Our shows were not actually written, but they were precisely thought out,” he explained in his memoir. “But the greatest thing about the show, and I think the reason for its success, was that it seemed undisciplined. The more you can make a performance seem spontaneous, the better an entertainer you are.”
Mr. Sales felt that his shows appealed to adults as well as the children who laughed at his antics. “Once I found out that adults were watching, too, I never consciously changed anything to play to them,” he recalled.
Soupy Sales was born Milton Supman in Franklinton, N.C., where his parents, Irving and Sadie Supman, owned a dry goods store. Neighbors pronounced his last name “Soupman,” so he called himself Soupy as a youngster.
Drawing on the physical comedy of the Marx Brothers and Harry Ritz, he entered show business after graduating from Marshall College in Huntington, W.Va. Working as a teenage dance-show host and D. J. on television and radio, he appeared on stations in Cincinnati and Cleveland, then began “Lunch With Soupy” in 1953 on WXYZ-TV in Detroit.
Mr. Sales, who had a large collection of jazz and big-band music at the time, invited leading figures in the jazz world, including Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker to perform live on his evening program in Detroit, “Soupy’s On.” He made Charlie Parker’s “Yardbird Suite” his theme song.
He took the name Soupy Sales in part from the old-time comic actor Chic Sale. After appearing on local TV in Los Angeles and on the ABC-TV network, he made his debut on WNEW in the fall of 1964. Mr. Sales was later a longtime panelist on TV’s “What’s My Line,” appeared on many other game shows and was a host for a variety talk show on WNBC Radio in the 1980s.
His survivors include his wife, Trudy, and his sons Tony and Hunt.
For all the staged mayhem on his shows, the truly unpredictable did occur. “I remember one time we were working with Pookie at the window,” Mr. Sales recalled. “He was doing a bit where he was breaking eggs and one of the eggs turned out to be rotten. My God, the smell was terrible! And I’m sure, watching us at home, everyone knew there was something wrong from the look on our faces.”
One episode remained etched in the Soupy Sales pie-throwing hall of fame. “One of my younger fans made the mistake of heaving a frozen pie at me before it defrosted,” he once wrote in The New York Journal-American. “It caught me in the neck and I dropped like a pile of bricks.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/arts/television/24sales.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries&pagewanted=print
Newsday.com moves to subscriber model
October 22, 2009 by KEIKO MORRIS / keiko.morris@newsday.com
Beginning Wednesday, most of Newsday.com content will only be available to subscribers of Optimum Online, Newsday, or those willing to pay for it.
Those who are not customers of Optimum Online or the newspaper - both owned by Bethpage-based Cablevision Systems Corp. - will have to pay a $5 weekly fee. However, nonpaying customers will have access to some of newsday.com's information, including the home page, school closings, weather, obituaries, classified and entertainment listings. There also will be some limited access to Newsday stories.
Newsday described the move as one that would create a "pioneering Web model," combining the newspaper's newsgathering services with Cablevision's electronic distribution capabilities. About 75 percent of Long Island households are Newsday home delivery or Cablevision online customers or both, according to Newsday. Optimum Online customers total 2.5 million in the New York area, the paper said.
"We are excited about this model because in addition to a unique ability to immediately reach about 75 percent of Long Island households, we believe the hyper-local approach is right for Long Island," said Debby Krenek, Newsday managing editor and senior vice president/digital.
The new strategy comes as newspapers have been scrambling to replace the advertising-based model after years of steep revenue decline. Charging viewers for online content has been debated in the newspaper industry in the past few years.
Jack Myers of Jack Myers Media Business Report, a Manhattan-based economic research firm, said, "In the long term, it's a zero-sum game. Basically what you are doing is you are shutting off younger audiences from getting access and becoming fans of your content, so it strikes me as a pretty short-term protective measure that will be a great case study for the industry."
However, John Morton, head of the Morton Research Inc., a Silver Spring, Md.-based media consulting firm, said the current model of free online content is not a "rational model."
"Despite the false premise that has been floating around for the last 19 years, that information on the Internet wants to be free, [it] is just not true," Morton said. "People have always been willing to pay for information they have felt was useful to them."
>>A letter from Newsday publisher Terry Jimenez about newsday.com's new format
http://www.newsday.com/long-island/nassau/newsday-com-moves-to-subscriber-model-1.1539582
Mayor Mike, 8 years later
By STEVE CUOZZO
Last Updated: 4:53 AM, October 18, 2009
Posted: 12:52 AM, October 18, 2009
Not in my lifetime has New York City seen the prosperity and serenity it does today, and I am nearly 60 years old. If you’re of the delusional, “But something has been lost” crowd, move to another page. Nor is this to whine that City Hall is spending too much and that fiscal doom lies around the corner. Maybe it does — but when a city adds 293,000 people, nearly the population of Pittsburgh, from 2001 to mid-2008, as New York did, something seriously good has been going on. This although the place is widely regarded as frightfully expensive and the world’s No. 1 likely repeat terror target — to say nothing of its citizens bearing the highest tax burden in America.
Whatever bad news might lie ahead, how much better a place the city is to live and work in astounds me every time I step out the door. Better not just than in the hellish era that did not decisively end until Rudy Giuliani’s second term, but better than on the bitter morning of Jan. 1, 2002, when the mayoralty changed hands. The streets are safer than ever, most parks resplendent. The simmering racial edginess once present in every subway car — a reality long impolite to mention — seems a ghost of eras past.
I ride the trains at all hours, and I’ve never known blacks and whites, Hispanics and Asians, to treat each other so respectfully and even warmly. The tolerance is contagious. Never has the town been more cosmopolitan, with more hard-working immigrants revitalizing one neighborhood after another.
Then there are the baby bellies. A habitual walker, I spend many hours every week observing people, streets and buildings. I ride subway lines to unfamiliar stops and stroll around. Everywhere, I see children on the way — in privileged Manhattan precincts; on the M train platform at Metropolitan Avenue; in Bedford-Stuyvesant bodegas under the Broadway el; and along Guyanese-dominated Liberty Avenue in Ozone Park.
That women want to have babies here is a glorious fact. Annual live births are up by nearly 5,000 from 2001, when there were 124,023 births’. People enjoy raising families here, and they’re not fleeing.
But so much remarkable fortune in a city some idiots gave up for dead after 9/11 raises a very large question. We who appreciate the stirring recovery after the terrorist attack, miraculously low crime, and the manifest improvements in the physical state and quality of life in most neighborhoods can only marvel, and wonder:
For how much, if any, of the good news can we thank Michael Bloomberg?
He’s been mayor for eight years. His tenure has been marked by alternating interludes of high purpose and petty obsessions, by impressive victories over systemic rigor mortis but also by crushing defeats.
For a self-made, multi-billionaire who should know better, his most inexcusable blunder has been not only a failure to reduce municipal spending, but to actually spend more — even as the recession has caused tax revenue to plummet. As the Manhattan Institute’s Steven Malanga noted in these pages recently, Bloomberg has been more profligate even than David Dinkins was in swelling the payroll. He’s given unionized city workers unconscionable pay hikes without putting up a fight.
As a result, the city, which by law must have a balanced budget, faces its gravest fiscal crisis in decades. Without rebounds of far-fetched magnitudes both on Wall Street and in the shattered real estate market, we are in for reduced services that could, in theory, rival those of the 1970s.
But that has yet to happen. The question remains: how much credit does Bloomberg deserve for the city’s splendid condition until the shoe falls? Is it largely due to him? Or to Bloomberg in spite of himself?
Or has he — and have we — just been lucky?
*
How responsible any elected official is for events that occur on his or her watch is a constant riddle. Would the Soviet Union have fallen if Ronald Reagan hadn’t put thesqueeze on for eight years? Would the city have had a record 2,245 murders in 1991 even if Dinkins had been the toughest law-and-order guy around?
The question is especially murky for “pragmatic” Bloomberg, a “Republican” given to promoting big business and large-scale real estate development but also to Democratic-style spending and social tinkering. Plus, filling in the scorecard on any New York City mayor is inherently problematic. The job comes with surprisingly limited legal clout. Albany has sway over most taxes and controls a fat chunk of the municipality’s treasury. Albany dominates the MTA and the Port Authority. It plays an imposing role in city land use through eminent domain.
Even so, Bloomberg has managed to assert himself despite the statutory straitjacket more than any mayor before him. His record speaks for itself — but it’s not a record instantly interpreted. That’s because just about anything positive or negative one might say of him immediately brings to mind an equally weighty, countervailing argument. Think of Charlie Chan’s “Contradiction, please,” uttered over and over.
For example: There’s something uplifting that a man with a $20 billion fortune took on the enervating daily grind of “the second hardest job in America.” And, despite his power, he can be a comforting leader for the city, particularly in moments of tragedy. Reading from the Koran might not be what he had in mind when he took the job, but doing that at the prayer service for members of two Muslim families killed in a 2007 Bronx house fire was appropriate and admirable.
But — contradiction, please! — Bloomberg can be annoying enough to overwhelm one’s appreciation. It isn’t only his notorious “nanny” meddling in the lives of citizens and businesses — like madcap traffic rerouting and the bans on trans-fats in restaurants and cupcakes in schools. He can be as mean-spirited in public as Rudy Giuliani ever was; Bloomberg’s unforgiving rebuke of a wheelchair-bound reporter who dropped his recorder at a press conference was more cruel than Giuliani’s radio tirade at a ferret owner.
Beyond personality quirks, his vaunted political and managerial gifts have often deserted him. He was all thumbs trying to circumvent Albany over a West Side stadium/convention center and congestion pricing. Both initiatives fell as humiliatingly short as President Obama’s bid to bring the Olympics to Chicago on sheer charisma (not that Bloomberg has Obama’s charisma).
The entrepreneurial genius that made him one of America’s wealthiest people in the private sector often seem absent on the job. True, $23 billion of the city’s current, $59.5 billion budget is beyond his control, as it’s obligated for Medicaid, pension obligations and debt service.
But Bloomberg can blame himself for swelling the budget from $44.6 billion in his first year in office. He gave DC 37 and the police sergeants union plum contracts, which threaten to set the pattern for teachers as well. Meanwhile, the city is saddled with a 6 year-high unemployment rate of 10.3%, and battered by the loss of 100,000 private-sector jobs since August 2008. Tax hikes and service reductions seem inevitable.
Their impact won’t come home until next year. Bloomberg could have gone out on top. Instead, his over-generosity has set him up for a miserable third term if he wins. In that light, his zeal to keep the job can be viewed, not as unbridled power-mongering, but as grasping an obligation to fix the mess he made — or take his lumps if he can’t.
*
Yet — contradiction, please! — Bloomberg’s defeats at Sheldon Silver’s hands must be weighed against a feat that will long outlive the stadium dispute: mayoral school control, for which he somehow secured Silver’s approval. Bloomberg’s belief that, contrary to decades of wisdom to the contrary, public education can be managed for pupils’ good surely ranks with Giuliani’s conviction that streets could be safe again.
His supporters and detractors can quibble over test scores. But the system is at last accountable. The legacy will survive his mayoralty. His successors will be held to improving upon the results.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg rezoned nearly one-fifth of the entire city — another momentous accomplishment with long-term implications. The word “rezoning” can make eyes glaze over. It’s a subject out of step with the daily drumbeat of round-the-clock news coverage. It tends to make the news only when it involves a high-profile Manhattan district, or when activists mount a noisy protest.
But New Yorkers were so long accustomed to certain precincts going under-utilized, they regarded them with misplaced nostalgia — like Manhattan’s far-west side jumble of warehouses and tire-repair shops and stretches of Brooklyn’s once derelict Williamsburg and Greenpoint waterfront. Bloomberg has made residential and commercial development possible in those backwaters and others previously zoned for manufacturing use, even though there was no manufacturing left.
“It’s amazing how Bloomberg has modernized land use,” says NYU urban affairs guru Mitchell L. Moss. “I’ve studied mayors around the country for 35 years, and most of them know nothing about land use.”
The railroad trestle along 10th Avenue was for decades an industrial-era relic that Giuliani wanted to demolish. My friend Steven Greenberg, owner of the 230 Fifth Rooftop lounge, once ran the Roxy Roller Disco beneath the tracks. He recalls a night when vandals used the trestle as a platform to lob Molotov cocktails onto his roof just for fun.
To ascend the stairs to what’s now the High Line Park — a dream Bloomberg made real when he put the city’s money and clout behind it — is to be transported. On the streets astride it, rezoning made possible the rise of handsome apartment buildings, restaurants and stores that blossomed in anticipation of the park.
But most of the impact is in the outer boroughs. It allowed Ikea to open a huge store in Red Hook — which in turn generated creation of a popular waterfront park. “They made neighborhoods outside Manhattan very attractive,” says Moss.
Rezoning re-invented Park Slope’s Fourth Avenue, where chop shops and gas stations gave way to, “not beautiful, but very livable and affordable apartment buildings,” Moss said. It has brought big, new stores to Bronx residents long deprived of shopping options.
In other areas — Willets Point and parts of Jamaica in Queens, Coney Island, the lower Grand Concourse in the Bronx — the full impact won’t come for years. But come it will.
*
All that, and yet — big contradiction, please! — Bloomberg let down the most important neighborhood of all since 9/11 — Downtown. Despite a commitment to a quixotic, “green,” “24/7” downtown of the future, he’s been less interested in fixing the rotting streets, sidewalks and security obstacles that are of the city’s own making.
He “abdicated responsibility” for the World Trade Center site, as Joyce Purnick writes in her new biography, “Mike Bloomberg — Money. Power. Politics.” The fact that the state held most of the cards at Ground Zero hardly absolved Bloomberg of the need to stick his neck out. He’s rarely raised a peep about the disgrace of Ground Zero or about the hulks of 130 Liberty St. or Fiterman Hall — all mainly the state’s responsibility, but on city ground, for God’s sake!
When Bloomberg has gotten involved, it’s rarely been constructive. (An exception is the once-stalled 9/11 memorial, which he rescued with some of his own money and by arm-twisting companies to pony up.) In 2005, NYPD security concerns over the Freedom Tower design sent it back to the drawing board, delaying the stalled project further. The cops had known of the problem for a year. While there was blame to share with then-Gov. George Pataki, it’s unfathomable that Bloomberg didn’t pick up the phone right off the bat to say, “George, my cops won’t let it get built that way.”
For years after 9/ll, Bloomberg opposed rebuilding the lost office space in favor of such inappropriate uses as “affordable” housing. He recently changed his tune and now supports commercial reconstruction. He even backs Silverstein in his financing dispute with the PA. But it’s too little, too late.
While Bloomberg dithered, city bureaucrats were busy working over the neighborhood with hammer and claw when it needed tender loving care. Barricades and endless, uncoordinated street excavations — look at Fulton Street — make life hell for residents and workers and continue to do so.
The nightmarish Wall Street Area Water Main Project is the product of three city agencies — among them, the out-of-control Department of Transportation, which Bloomberg gave rein to install little-used bicycle lanes and hideous “pedestrian plazas” of schoolyard asphalt all over town — even in Times Square.
But indispensable, routine street maintenance takes a back seat. The recent Mayor’s Management Report boasts that the city fixed twice as many potholes this year than it did in 2001. It doesn’t say, though, how many new potholes have been created — a question that will occur to anyone driving up Madison Avenue or innumerable other stretches.
*
And yet, and yet — biggest contradiction, please! — there’s the department whose performance matters more than all the rest combined — naturally, the NYPD.
Too many newly arrived and young New Yorkers have no idea what things were like not long ago. They think lyrics of the Rolling Stones’ “Miss You” — “I’ve been walking in Central Park/singing after dark/people think I’m crazy” — were about how strange it is to sing in public.
They don’t get it — because they can’t. That Times Square, Washington Square Park and most waterfront areas were dangerous mugging grounds seems remote. That poorer neighborhoods were free-fire zones and that menace lurked behind every parked car even on Fifth Avenue seems absurd. Yet, for decades, the most influential man in town was the one presumed waiting in the shadows with a knife or gun.
Giuliani tamed the lawless streets, but it wasn’t necessarily bound to last. Maybe because Bloomberg doesn’t bluster on the subject, the media and too many citizens take his accomplishment for granted — as if he’s done nothing more than scrub and oil the crime-control engine Giuliani built.
Of course, all it takes to undercut law enforcement is a wrong signal from the top, as when Dinkins took too long to enforce a court order to end the illegal Korean deli boycott in Brooklyn.
Bloomberg sent the right signals to top cop Ray Kelly. And the city is not only safer, but much safer, than the one he inherited. The drop in crime is the envy of the nation — with murder down 25.5% compared to 2001 and most other categories down over 30%. Murders this year (363 to date) might well be fewer by year’s end than the all-time recorded low, 496 in 2007.
All this despite a uniformed force nearly 4,000 short of its 39,297 strength in 2001 — and with a considerable share of its resources now devoted to terrorism-related duties.
Business Council of New York state president Kenneth Adams told Crain’s, “The first priority for the economy is public safety, and Mayor Bloomberg has been relentless on that front.”
Public safety is also first priority for everything — for coming home late from work; for raising kids; for shopping in an unfamiliar neighborhood; or visiting an elevated park where trains once ran, that few believed would ever be completed.
Moss again: “Public spaces are everything in New York. Most people are living boxes of 1,200 square feet, and eventually they must leave the box. The streets, schools and parks are safe and welcoming.”
*
We can bicker over Times Square’s plazas. We can weigh Bronx shopping malls against Downtown’s empty hole. We can fight over test scores and the budget.
But there can be no arguing that every corner of town is largely cleansed of the dread that long inhibited life and commerce. A city safer than it was is a better, happier city. Maybe it isn’t all due to Bloomberg — but if crime had gone up, he’d surely have taken the rap.
A different mayor might have done things differently. But if Bloomberg could have done it better, there are a million ways he could have done it worse.
A mayor who lets us get through the day without sweating over threats to life and limb is to be allowed the occasional tantrum. Because of that, and because of all those baby bellies reflecting confidence that New York won’t be over any time soon, I’m willing to give him all the credit — without contradiction.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/mayor_mike_years_later_KSpegrvFlPhIuPziakFxAI
NYC Ready For Another Giant Skyscraper?
Despite Critical Praise For Design, Residents Upset Over Proposed Empire State Building-Sized Structure In Midtown Reporting
Lou Young NEW YORK (CBS)
It's big city skyscraper scrap.
There's a fight over a proposed new structure near the Museum of Modern Art that would as be as tall as anything in New York City.
The tower would be the size of the Empire State Building if approved.
The real estate developer and the architect weren't very happy Tuesday. They saw their plans for a soaring Midtown skyscraper crumbling.
A dramatic sliver of a structure on a narrow lot between 53rd and 54th street near the Museum of Modern Art had the neighbors begging the City Council planning committee Tuesday: "Don't let 'em do it."
"This is the time to call a halt to this. This is the time to stop," opponent Albert Butzel told CBS 2 HD.
Imagine a building as tall as the Empire State Building on a lot that size. That's what the developers want to do. It would twice as tall as the landmarked (and quite beautiful) CBS corporate headquarters across the street and the neighbors said that's quite tall enough.
"It's a postage stamp. They say they can get it to stand up but it's a postage stamp. It's an abomination," opponent Justin Peyser said.
Opponents complain about the height and the shadow it will cast, but the design has received critical praise and the designer, architect Jean Nouvel, said that seen from the real Empire State Building his equally tall structure will blend into the cityscape.
"When you are at the Empire State you see the building in front like this, so you cannot see the full of the fins," Nouvel said.
The developer – the Gerald Hines Organization -- said to build the tower it will purchase air rights from the museum, the nearby University Club and St. Thomas Episcopal Church and stack 'em up over the site. Leaving the hearing Tuesday, they didn't seem to want to talk about why: "We have no comment," was the response.
The museum said "no." It wants the money from those air rights.
"This is vital because the Museum of Modern of Art does not receive direct support from either the city or the state. We depend entirely on our endowment, admissions and fundraising," Museum of Modern Art director Glenn Lowrey said.
What's at stake are the financial interests of the Museum, two powerful non-profits, the developer and the real estate company versus the people who live on this block. It's a classic New York struggle over power and influence that'll go before the City Council in a matter of weeks.
If approved, developers said it would take four years to build the tower.
http://wcbstv.com/topstories/moma.skyscraper.building.2.1231719.html
From distilleries to backwoods bowling alleys, NYC provides loans to rural small businesses
BY Douglas Feiden
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Sunday, September 20th 2009, 4:00 AM
The Zadock Pratt Museum will use a $10,000 city grant to build a replica of a tannery on the banks of the Schoharie Creek.
ROXBURY, N.Y. - The city has laid off teachers, trimmed the housing authority payroll, chopped cultural grants and scrambled to close a looming $1.1 billion budget gap.
Yet millions of tax dollars flow upstate to hundreds of rural businesses that peddle everything from booze to bowling.
Documents show companies closer to
Binghamton
than the
Bronx
have snared low-interest loans funded with city cash - from an absinthe distillery to a refurbished hotel in this remote hamlet featuring suites based on retro TV shows like "
I Dream of Jeannie
."
City cash has gone to schools, museums and libraries across the Catskills, including a Prattsville museum exhibit on leather tanning and a mask-and-puppet theater in Saugerties. Another grant pays to teach fourth-graders in Sullivan County bee-keeping and organic dairy farming.
All this as the city cut museum and cultural grants by 3% and school budgets by 5%.
The reason for the upstate cash flow? Water.
The city gets 90% of its drinking water - 1 billion gallons a day - from six reservoirs in the Catskills. It protects the purity of the supply by buying and regulating enormous blocks of land in the five-county watershed, sparing the city the expense of building another multibillion-dollar filtration plant.
In the late 1940s, the city uprooted four villages, five schools, eight churches, 13 cemeteries, 24 cauliflower farms and 974 people to build the Pepacton Reservoir in Delaware County.
Since the city holds the tracts in perpetuity, they can never be developed.
"That doesn't exactly engender good feelings about New York City," said Jeffrey Graf, the DEP's chief of watershed lands and community planning.
In 1997, to make amends, the city signed an agreement with 31 communities that let it keep buying vast parcels of land.
In return, the city pledged payments to boost local businesses, provide tax consulting, replace septic systems, fund wastewater plants and educate upstate students about the environment.
The city has plowed $200 million into the Catskill Watershed Corp. (CWC), which manages the "partnership programs" with city input.
"The city has imposed the nation's most onerous watershed regulations on our businesses," says Watershed Corp. Executive Director Alan Rosa. "They need these funds to compensate for losing out on economic development."
Critics counter that city cash should address city needs.
"The plight of small businesses in the city is so severe, we simply can't afford to have another dime of city money go to businesses outside the city," said Richard Lipsky, a lobbyist for the Neighborhood Retail Alliance.
Critics also fault the city for providing grants and low-interest loans, typically at 4%, to unusual businesses like a bowling alley in Walton, a golf course in Margaretville and a historical society in Haines Falls.
"Government is making a series of eccentric investments in an odd assortment of companies that may or may not pay off," said Steve Malanga, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, an influential think tank. "It's never been very good at cherry-picking winners and losers ...and it's an inefficient use of taxpayer money."
Some $1.5 million of $24 million in outstanding loans is delinquent for 60 days or more, and 3.7% of all loans are in default, the Watershed Corp. reports. It says "bad-loan" numbers are "less than projected."
Watershed documents show how it spends city tax dollars.
The man who loved Jeannie
Gregory Henderson used a $140,000 loan to create The Roxbury, a retro hotel 146 miles from the city. Budget Travel magazine named it one of the "eight grooviest inns in America."
Henderson transformed an old Delaware River motel into a trendy place with a whimsical suite that pays homage to "I Dream of Jeannie" - right down to the pink cheetah sofa.
He and partner Joseph Massa furnished a dozen popular culture-themed rooms inspired by everything from "Breakfast at Tiffany's" to "The Jetsons," "The Flintstones" and "Bewitched."
"In many ways, this is the city - without the skyscrapers," said Henderson, who in July was approved for an additional $1.1 million to develop nine new themed rooms inspired by films, cartoons and old TV shows.
"The city owns the land, takes the water, regulates your land, even tells you what streams you're allowed to fish," he said. "It makes sense for the city to spend its money here to pay back what was robbed of the area's economic vitality."
The absinthe maker
Cheryl Lins got a $40,000 loan to create a once-forbidden herbal liqueur - absinthe - that drove poets and Parisians insane. Her Delaware Phoenix Distillery in Walton makes Meadow of Love, a hypnotic green brew that can make a drinker feel like Picasso.
The cash paid for a still named Gonzo that produces 1,500 bottles a year of the 136-proof drink. It sells for $89.99 at Union Square Wine & Spirits.
Should the city be funding a distillery?
"We have no reason to think this will lead to moral turpitude," said Graf of the DEP.
The tanner of hides
The Zadock Pratt Museum in Prattsville celebrates the owner of the world's largest leather tannery in the 1800s. A $10,000 city grant will help pay for an exhibit on the industry that once dominated the Catskills.
"It's a godsend," said Betty O'Hara, president of the museum, which will build a replica of an early tannery on the banks of the Schoharie Creek.
Officials say it will teach kids about the wonders of water.
"Even more important than moving rivers and mountains to get the water flowing is moving minds to do the right thing and educating people to keep the water clean," Graf said
http://www.nydailynews.com/real_estate/2009/09/20/2009-09-20_from_distilleries_to_backwoods_bowling_alleys_new_york_city_provides_millions_in.html
New York Eyes ‘No Smoking’ Outdoors, Too By SEWELL CHAN
New York City’s workplace smoking ban six years ago drove cigarette and cigar puffers outdoors. But soon some of the outdoors may be off limits, too: The city’s health commissioner, Dr. Thomas A. Farley, said Monday that he would seek to ban smoking at city parks and beaches.
Dr. Farley said the ban — which officials said may require the approval of the City Council, but could possibly be done through administrative rule-making by the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation — was part of a broader strategy to further curb smoking rates, which have fallen in recent years. The proposal, however, seemed to catch Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg off guard.
On Monday night, the mayor, who has championed antismoking programs but also is running for re-election, issued a statement that did not disavow the proposal but appeared to qualify it, saying he wanted “to see if smoking in parks has a negative impact on people’s health.”
He added, “It may not be logistically possible to enforce a ban across thousands of acres, but there may be areas within parks where restricting smoking can protect health.”
The City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, whose support could be crucial, said she would want the Council to hold hearings on the matter. She said that fines should be modest and not intended primarily to punish, and that any ban should make clear whether areas like boardwalks are affected.
“Conceptually, that’s an idea I’m very, very interested in and open to,” she said of Dr. Farley’s proposal.
Such bans are still rare, though growing in number. A number of municipalities — particularly in California — have banned smoking at outdoor parks, playgrounds and beaches. In 2007, Los Angeles extended its smoking ban, which already covered beaches and playgrounds, to include municipal parks. Later that year, Chicago banned smoking at its beaches and playgrounds, though smoking is still allowed in many parks. This year, California lawmakers took up a measure to prohibit smoking in all state parks and parts of state beaches.
The proposal was contained on Page 10 of a 41-page document, “Take Care New York 2012,” that put forth health policy goals for the next three years including cutting obesity, H.I.V. transmission and drug and alcohol abuse. The antismoking strategy would also include pressing for higher local, state and federal taxes on tobacco and urging organizations and businesses in the city to reject financing and sponsorship from the tobacco industry.
Mr. Bloomberg, who smoked as a young man, faced furious criticism from restaurant and bar owners in 2002 when, in his first year in office, he reached a deal with the City Council on legislation banning smoking in virtually every indoor public or commercial area, including most bars. (Smoking had been banned in most restaurants in 1995.)
But the ban, which took effect in 2003, has since gained widespread acceptance and has been credited with helping drive down the percentage of adults in the city who smoke to 15.8 in 2008, from 21.5 percent in 2002.
The New York City proposal would affect more than 1,700 parks, playgrounds and recreational facilities, as well as the city’s seven beaches, which span 14 miles of shoreline. The proposal drew praise from public health advocates and criticism from one of the nation’s biggest tobacco manufacturers.
“The issues with secondhand smoke are very real, and the majority of the population today doesn’t want to be breathing in tobacco smoke, whether indoors or outdoors,” said Dr. David A. Kessler, who was commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration from 1990 to 1997. “While undoubtedly some will think this is going too far, 10 years from now, we’ll look back and ask how could it have been otherwise.”
Cheryl G. Healton, president and chief executive of the American Legacy Foundation, the smoking prevention group that was created as part of the 1998 master settlement between the tobacco industry and 46 state governments, also applauded the proposal.
“There is no redeeming value in smoking at beaches or parks,” she said in a statement. “Anyone who has sat behind someone smoking a stogie can tell you that. The health risks are real. Secondhand smoke is deadly.”
David Sutton, a spokesman for the cigarette maker Philip Morris USA, which is part of the Altria Group, said the company supported a ban on smoking in public buildings, public transportation and many areas of the workplace, as well as areas like elevators where smoking would be a fire hazard.
“We maintain, however, that complete bans go too far,” Mr. Sutton said in a statement. “We believe that smoking should be permitted outdoors except in very particular circumstances, such as outdoor areas primarily designed for children.”
Interviews on Monday suggested that smokers were, unsurprisingly, cool to the idea, while nonsmokers seemed to favor it.
“In this world, the people who have the power always try and make rules for the other people,” said Ismael Bah, 37, a salesman at J & R Music World, who was smoking Marlboros on a park bench near City Hall. “It makes sense to ban smoking inside, but smoking outside? Come on.”
Peter Prince, 55, an account executive at J & R who lives in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, said the city could at least designate smoking areas within parks. “I try to be considerate if I’m sitting next to somebody not to bother them when I smoke,” he said. “Occasionally it does happen that I light up and somebody moves away and I feel bad.”
Adele Jeune, 47, a home health aide from East New York, Brooklyn, does not smoke and had no objection to a ban. “I love clean air,” said Ms. Jeune, who was sitting on a bench in Union Square. “And if I go somewhere like this, I want to smell clean air.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/nyregion/15smoking.html?_r=1&hpw=&pagewanted=print
Tavern on the Green files for bankruptcy protection
Carrie Coolidge
Sep 10th 2009 at 3:30PM
Another iconic New York City restaurant has hit tough times.
Less than two years after it announced grand plans for a national expansion, Tavern on the Green, a New York landmark, filed for voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Wednesday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of New York.
Tavern on the Green, which has appeared in such films as "Arthur", "Wall Street" and "New York Stories", and where generations have celebrated weddings, anniversaries, graduations, was taken over by Warner LeRoy more than 25 years ago. It was once one of the most successful restaurants in the country. A $40 million dollar operation with a staff of 525 and nearly 500,000 patrons annually, the restaurant is known for its prime location in Central Park in addition to its beautiful garden and its elaborate decor of crystal, mirrors and Tiffany ceilings. Its eclectic menu consisted of contemporary American and seasonal fare.
Before the bankruptcy filing was made, the restaurant was already scheduled to close on December 31st, as a new 20-year license was sold to another operator, which also runs the Central Park Boathouse restaurant. In the meantime, Tavern on the Green will continue to operate and take reservations for the rest of this year.
This isn't the first time the LeRoy family's restaurant empire has been negatively impacted by tough economic times. In 1998, LeRoy took over and reopened the Russian Tea Room, another iconic restaurant in midtown Manhattan. In July 2002, his family was forced to make the decision to close the Russian Tea Room. According to its website, the closing was "yet another casualty of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the dramatic resulting downturn in the New York economy." The Russian Tea Room eventually reopened under new owners and management.
Only one block away from Tavern on the Green, another fabled restaurant, Cafe des Artistes, has also shuttered its doors. It also filed for voluntary bankruptcy protection on September 9th.
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/09/10/tavern-on-the-green-files-for-bankruptcy-protection/
Massive Shark Washes Up on Long Island
(July 14) — Surfers off Long Island, N.Y.,
caught more than waves Tuesday morning,
as they watched a 20-foot-long shark circle
the waves and then wash ashore.
The basking shark was dead on the beach at
Gilgo State Park by the time officials arrived,
Newsday reported.
A crowd of about 40 people gathered on the
beach, some taking pictures with cell phone
cameras, according to the New York
Post.
There were no visible wounds or injuries on
the shark. Tracy Marcus of Cornell Cooperative
Extension told The Associated Press
the shark likely had some kind of illness.
New York State Parks official George Gorman
said researchers would examine the
shark to determine the cause of death. After
that, the animal will be buried in sand
dunes on the beach.
Basking sharks eat plankton and are not
considered dangerous.
http://news.aol.com/article/shark-washes-up-on-long-island/571825?icid=main|compaq-laptop|dl1|link3|http%3A%2F%2Fnews.aol.com%2Farticle%2Fshark-washes-up-on-long-island%2F571825
Sidewalk Hero, on the Horns of a Revival
By JOHN STRAUSBAUGH
Plenty of chamber music festivals have featured works by Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. Or Charles Ives, Elliott Carter and Leon Kirchner.
But a festival that includes music by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Ives, Carter and Kirchner, all playing second fiddle to the classical works of Moondog?
“Moondog Rising,” which takes place on Friday and Saturday at Advent Lutheran Church in Manhattan, is surely the first. The Viking of Sixth Avenue, as he was known, would be proud.
From the late 1940s to the early ’70s Moondog was as recognizable in the New York City landscape as the Empire State Building, and nearly as striking. A tall blind man with long hair and beard, wearing a handmade Viking helmet and primitive cloak, he regularly stationed himself at Sixth Avenue and 54th Street, which cops and cabbies knew as Moondog’s Corner. Dispensing his poetry, politics, sheet music and recordings (some on boutique labels, some on majors), he was sought out over the years by beats, hippies and foreign tourists, but also by the media and celebrities, from Walter Winchell and “Today” to Marlon Brando, Muhammad Ali and Martin Scorsese.
“Everybody who was anybody met Moondog,” Robert Scotto, author of “Moondog,” a biography published this month by Process Books, said recently. “And everybody had his own Moondog.”
Even after he moved to Germany in 1974, where he remained until his death in 1999 at 83, he was remembered in New York as an emblematic street character, though not as a serious classical composer. As the British music critic Kenneth Ansell observed in the mid-’90s, while jazz greats like Count Basie and Charlie Parker admired Moondog’s idiosyncratic forays into their world, “the classical orthodoxy has not rushed to embrace him.”
Robin Boomer, a cellist and the organizer of Moondog Rising, said: “Most of the people I know from the classical music world don’t know Moondog at all. He hasn’t made it into the canon.”
Part of the problem is that Moondog was so prolific and eclectic. Working in Braille, often composing under his cloak on the sidewalk, he wrote in an impressively wide range of styles: percussion-driven exotica (he made his own triangular drum-and-cymbal instrument, the trimba), avant-garde jazz, folkish madrigals, Bach-like neo-Baroque rounds and canons for chamber orchestra, symphonies for full orchestra, and a layered minimalism that influenced his young collaborators Steve Reich and Philip Glass. (They can be heard playing with Moondog in the 1960s on a sampler CD included in Mr. Scotto’s book, for which Mr. Glass wrote the preface.)
He released more than a dozen recordings, and his music was used in films and television commercials. His songs were sung by Janis Joplin (on “Big Brother & the Holding Company”) and Julie Andrews (a children’s album); he once shared a bill in a Greenwich Village club with Tiny Tim and Lenny Bruce, and much later performed on a festival stage in London at the invitation of Elvis Costello.
Still, acceptance as a modern classical composer has eluded him. The atavistic streak symbolized by the Viking helmet can be heard in the work, which was melodic and tuneful at a time when atonality and dissonance often ruled. Mostly it sounds more like Bach, Beethoven and Mozart than Ives, Carter or Kirchner. Ms. Boomer said that was why music by those composers would be played along with Moondog’s at the two-night festival, so audiences can compare and contrast.
Born Louis Hardin Jr., in Kansas, the son of an Episcopal minister, Moondog was raised in various Plains states. At 16, he was blinded while tinkering with a blasting cap. He became a voracious autodidact of music, literature, history and philosophy. He renamed himself Moondog for a howling bulldog he had loved as a boy, and developed a worldview that embraced Norse mythology and Viking culture as the pinnacles of European civilization.
He was 27 when he came to New York in 1943 and quickly established his eccentric status. Although often mistaken for homeless, he always had a room somewhere (he lived for a year in the ’60s with Mr. Glass and JoAnne Akalaitis), and was married for a period and raised a daughter. His many hours on the street were his way of connecting with the sounds, voices and rhythms of the city.
That’s where Mr. Scotto, a professor of English at Baruch College of the City University of New York, first met him as a college student in the mid-’60s. “He was the avant-garde figure par excellence, the ultimate hippie,” Mr. Scotto recalled. “He was a pilgrimage that all college students made.”
Mr. Scotto sought out Moondog again in Europe in the mid-1980s. Moondog’s German friends had convinced him by then to set aside the Viking helmet and cloak, which they scoffingly referred to as his “amateur Odin” costume, referring to the figure from Norse mythology.
Ms. Boomer first heard of Moondog in the ’80s from a jazz musician who “was aghast that I didn’t know him.” Pursuing a master’s degree in arts administration at Columbia University last year, she began to research Moondog’s life and works. What she originally planned as a small lecture and performance grew into “what I refer to as the Exploding Moondog Festival,” she said. “It just got bigger and bigger,” with her own 20-piece Eupraxia Players joined by musicians from around the country and Europe.
In his preface to “Moondog” Mr. Glass writes that he and Mr. Reich “took his work very seriously and understood and appreciated it much more than what we were exposed to at Julliard.”
Ms. Boomer said she hoped to spread that appreciation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/arts/music/28stra.html?_r=3&scp=1&sq=Moondog&st=cse
Hurricane barriers floated to keep sea out of NYC
By JENNIFER PELTZ Associated Press Writer
Updated: 05/30/2009 02:26:07 PM EDT
Click photo to enlargeMap shows proposed... (Map shows proposed barriers to protect New York City from storm surges)«1»NEW YORK—When experts sketch out nightmare hurricane scenarios, a New York strike tends to be high on the list.
Besides shaking skyscrapers, a major hurricane could send the Atlantic Ocean surging into the nation's largest city, flooding Wall Street, subways and densely packed neighborhoods.
As a new hurricane season starts Monday, some scientists and engineers are floating an ambitious solution: Barriers to choke off the surging sea and protect flood-prone areas.
The plan involves deploying giant barriers and gates that would move into place—in some cases rising out of the water—for storms. One proposal calls for a 5-mile-long barrier between New Jersey and Queens.
No one has formally proposed the structures, which would require extensive government reviews and billions of dollars.
But a first-ever conference on the subject this spring drew 100 researchers and engineers, who provided various conceptual designs. City emergency management officials say they're interested in hearing more if details develop.
Some scientists have questioned whether the barriers would be environmentally sound and socially equitable. But proponents say the structures could offer the best chance of preventing catastrophe in a city with hundreds of miles of shoreline, nearly 8.3 million residents and a vast web of crucial underground infrastructure.
New Yorkers are "living under the volcano, and people haven't thought about it," says
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Douglas Hill, an engineer who began discussing the idea several years ago with Stony Brook University oceanography professor Malcolm J. Bowman.
Warnings that New Orleans faced disaster from a major hurricane proved devastatingly true, they note, when Katrina struck in August 2005. The storm breached levees, flooded most of the city and killed more than 1,500 people in New Orleans and elsewhere.
The next year, former National Hurricane Center director Max Mayfield told a congressional committee that "it is not a question of if a major hurricane will strike the New York area, but when."
The city has been hit before, including by a September 1821 hurricane that raised tides by 13 feet in an hour and flooded all of Manhattan south of Canal Street—an area that now includes the nation's financial capital.
Depending on its track, a Category 3 storm—with sustained winds of 111 to 130 mph, akin to an infamous 1938 hurricane that swept through nearby Long Island—could produce a storm surge as high as 25 feet in some parts of the city. Officials estimate as many as 600,000 people's homes could be flooded, and 3 million would have to evacuate because of flooding and other perils; economic loss estimates top $100 billion.
Forecasters expect a fairly average hurricane season this year. But the year's first tropical depression, a potential precursor to a tropical storm or hurricane, formed Thursday, before the season even officially began. It wasn't expected to threaten land.
Hurricanes aren't the only flood threat. Nor'easters also have caused storm-surge problems in the city, and scientists have projected that the waters around the city could rise by 2 feet or more in the coming decades because of global warming, making coastal flooding more frequent.
The idea of barricading against storm-tossed seas is centuries old, with examples standing in places from London to Providence, R.I.
In New York, a set of barriers a mile long or less at three critical points could protect 50 square miles of the city and New Jersey, according to Hill. The locations: the Narrows, the gateway to New York Harbor near the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge; the northern end of the East River, where it meets Long Island Sound; and the southern end of the Arthur Kill, a waterway between Staten Island and New Jersey.
Barriers there would shield Manhattan and parts of the four outer boroughs but still leave large, low-lying areas exposed, especially in Brooklyn and Queens.
Some would gain protection under an alternative idea for a single, 5-mile-long barrier between Sandy Hook, N.J., and the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens—an idea devised by London-based infrastructure consulting firm Halcrow Group Ltd.
Halcrow described the estimated $5.9 billion project at a March conference at New York University's Polytechnic Institute; three other firms aired conceptual designs for pieces of the estimated $9.1 billion three-barrier network.
All would have gates, navigation locks or other mechanisms to let water and boat traffic flow under normal conditions—but block a 25-foot storm surge when needed. Some would have substantial walls or berms visible all the time, but one concept, from New York-based Parsons Brinckerhoff, is a wall that would lie flat and virtually invisible on the bed of the East River, pivoting up when needed. The wall would jut out of the water at an angle to block storm surges.
Deputy emergency management commissioner Kelly McKinney said the barriers were as yet too theoretical for the city to analyze but "an intriguing idea."
"If (experts) came back with more concrete details and costs and things like that, we'd be interested" in exploring it further, he said. Meanwhile, the city is taking smaller steps to prepare for potential flooding, such as moving critical pumps to higher spots in wastewater treatment plants.
While engineers say the barriers are technically feasible, questions remain about their environmental and political viability.
Structures that constrict the flow of water could alter fish migration, shellfishing beds and the salinity in the harbor, said Robert "Larry" Swanson, a Stony Brook University oceanographer.
Bigger problems could lie outside the barriers. No one has suggested yet how to pay for them, but a sizable public investment could be hard to sell to a city that would be only partly protected—let alone to a federal government that might then face similar requests from other vulnerable communities.
At least one scientist questions whether the barriers would be the best choice even for those inside.
Given the unknowns of climate change, any system designed now could prove inadequate in the future, said Klaus H. Jacob, a Columbia University climate-risk researcher. Some scientists say London's Thames Barrier, finished 26 years ago, may not be able to keep up with rising tides.
If New Yorkers relied on a barrier system, they might be forced to raise it indefinitely—or, worse, unable to do so, Jacob fears.
New Yorkers could instead prepare to "live with the water, rather than fight it," he said, by taking such steps as making tunnel entrances sealable and moving buildings' electrical and other vital equipment from basements to higher floors.
Hill and Bowman are skeptical that such measures can do enough. But for now, their goal is a full-fledged study of the barriers and possible alternatives—work they say can't afford to wait.
"We're going to have to do something," Bowman said. "Or else you retreat, and that's inconceivable. How are you going to retreat from New York City?"
http://ydr.inyork.com/ci_12485054
that would be cool.
Notre Dame Begins Talks to Play Football at Yankee Stadium
By PETE THAMEL
May 21, 2009
Notre Dame’s Emil Sitko grabbing a fourth-quarter pass intended for Army’s Bill West at Yankee Stadium on Nov. 9, 1946. The teams played to a scoreless tie.
The tradition of college football at Yankee Stadium could be in the embryonic stages of being revived at the new Yankee Stadium.
Jack Swarbrick, Notre Dame’s athletic director, said the Yankees were open to having college football at the new Stadium, and he would like the Fighting Irish to be the first team to play there. Swarbrick stressed that no dates had been discussed.
“We’ve been in contact with Yankee Stadium and asked and inquired,” Swarbrick said. “We will be discussing games with them, but we haven’t entered into any substantive discussions.”
Some significant college football games were played at Yankee Stadium, many involving Notre Dame. Swarbrick said the rich history of Notre Dame and Army playing at the Stadium would make the Black Knights a preferred opponent.
“It would be of great historical significance for us if it would be Army,” Swarbrick said. He added: “We would love that. Some of the most significant games in the history of college football involve those two schools and Yankee Stadium.”
Swarbrick, who is finishing his first year as Notre Dame’s athletic director, said the notion of playing at Yankee Stadium came from “two independent tracks.”
He said he understood the Yankees are going to try to maximize revenue from the new Stadium, and college football could be an option. He also cited the historical aspect.
Swarbrick said Notre Dame’s 35-13 victory against Army at West Point in 1913 is considered the most important in the program’s history. He said he was trying to plan significant anniversary games and would love to have the 100th anniversary of that game played at Yankee Stadium. But Swarbrick said the Yankees may want college football at the Stadium before 2013, and if that is the case, he would like the Irish to be part of the debut.
“On a personal level, the anniversary date aspect of it, with the 1913 game, would be great,” he said. “But if there’s going to be college football in Yankee Stadium, I’d like to be the first one.”
The Yankees and Army did not immediately return calls seeking comment.
Richard Sandomir contributed reporting.
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