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did you get one lol
British Store Sells Old New York ‘Don’t Walk’ Signs. Only £975.
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
Jesse Carrington/Trainspotters, Ltd. Animation by The New York Times
One culture’s trash is another’s treasure: A British antique store is selling old (though rewired) New York City “Don’t Walk” signs for about $1,600.Consider the “Don’t Walk” sign, that lost classic of the New York streetscape. It is a yin-yang traffic signal, a functional poem — “Don’t Walk/Walk” — inside an iconic yellow box. It is to Martin Scorsese’s midcentury Manhattan what the gas lamp is to Edith Wharton’s gilded age.
And it can now be yours to keep — for £975. That’s about $1,600, plus shipping and taxes.
How a banal decommissioned street sign morphed into a sought-after collector’s item is a tale of design trends and changing tastes. But it is also a testament to the nostalgic power of even the most ordinary bric-a-brac of New York.
Hundreds of these signs are being offered for sale through Trainspotters Ltd., an upscale English antiques outlet that transforms yesterday’s cultural detritus into today’s chic décor.
“It’s probably the only traffic signal that we would be interested in the world,” Jesse Carrington, the company’s director, said in a telephone interview from the Trainspotters warehouse in Gloucestershire. “They are such a classic. It’s our first entrance into traffic signals, and I think it will be our only venture, because you can’t get any better than it.”
It is not uncommon for city agencies to sell off surplus items at marked-up prices. Subway enthusiasts, for instance, can buy used train doors, poles and benches from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
No city agencies, however, routinely charge four-figure mark-ups on their items, opening the door to private dealers who see treasure in the trash.
An East Village antiques dealer, Billy LeRoy, recently completed a lengthy legal ordeal with the transportation authority, which accused him of selling old, stolen subway signs, though the charges were dropped.
In 2004, the city parks department sold off seats taken from Yankee Stadium, at $1,500 a set. Today, Bronx Bombers enthusiasts might have to shell out more than $2,000 for a single seat from the same era, based on the pricing on YankeeStadiumSeats.com, which bills itself as a direct-order stadium seat reseller.
Despite the high price of the “Don’t Walk/Walk” signs, they are selling well. A few days into the sale, Trainspotters had already shipped to buyers in New Zealand and Switzerland.
The mark-up is justified in part by the inclusion of a new custom electrical circuit, installed by Trainspotters, which allows the buyer to program a unique flash pattern.
The light, which can be suspended or mounted on a wall, comes in the original yellow cast-aluminum and vandalproof tempered glass.
The city’s Department of Transportation phased out “Don’t Walk” signs in the early 2000s in favor of the pictographic hand-and-man signals in use today, in an effort to better serve the entirety of the city’s pedestrian population.
According to Mr. Carrington, a chance encounter with a city employee led to the discovery of a cache of unused signs, manufactured before the changeover.
But a spokesman for the Transportation Department, told of the signs’ lucrative afterlife, seemed flummoxed as to their provenance.
The city, it turns out, already sells some of the signs through its official store — for $35 apiece. They do not light up, however.
“You can let the sun shine through it in your house,” suggested a saleswoman at the store.
The cheaper signs also do not include the signature yellow casing, because the city retained those for use with its current hand-and-man signs.
“The housings used then are the same ones used now, so we would not have removed them from our inventory,” the spokesman, Scott Gastel, wrote in an e-mail.
Mr. Carrington, of Trainspotters, said the yellow housings on his wares were original. The city speculated that Mr. Carrington’s signs might have come from the manufacturer.
Mr. Carrington did think it odd that New Yorkers would allow a fixture of their city to fall by the wayside.
“I don’t think that would happen in London,” he said. “Over here, everybody would be all over stuff like that — big competition.” He added: “People are stranger in New York.”
Regardless of how they came to be in England, many of the signs are likely to live out their remaining years back in their native land.
“I’ve bought things from downtown New York before, shipped them back here, and sold them back to the Upper East Side,” Mr. Carrington said with a laugh.
“We’ll see quite a bit of them going back over the Atlantic into people’s apartments in New York.”
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Our transit reporter, Michael M. Grynbaum, advises you on the latest chatter from the city’s roads and rails. Check back every Monday. Got a tip? He can be reached at OffTheRails@nytimes.com.
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nice looking building
A World Trade Center Progress ReportBy BILL MARSH
After Sept. 11, it took nearly a decade to locate and kill Osama bin Laden, perhaps giving the nation, and especially the families of those lost in the attacks, some sense of closure.
It will take much longer than that to heal the gaping wound in the Lower Manhattan cityscape. Blame politics, finances, legalities and the challenge of making the many compromises necessary for such an enormous reconstruction effort. But after spending much time on cleanup and foundation work, progress is ever more visible: The soaring 1 World Trade Center and another skyscraper are rising by about one floor per week; a spacious memorial is to open on the 10th anniversary of the attack this fall.
A full rebuilding of the site is still several years away, when (and if) demand for office space improves. Here is a progress report on the main features of the new center.
fish, lol....thank God for people like him......
Walt Frazier — Always in Style
By RICHARD SANDOMIR
In Walt Frazier’s closet hangs a polyester cow-print suit with brown-and-black splotches. However absurd, it fits in a menagerie of 100 or so suits that hang on five racks and with patterns of tiger stripes and leopard spots; designs of bold plaids and checks; and colors of yellow, red, salmon and orange.
The closet is actually a small, disorganized bedroom in Frazier’s Upper East Side apartment where he mixes and matches his dozens of ties, shirts and handkerchiefs to his suits. He spends hours inside thinking about what to wear to announce a Knicks game for the MSG Network; he will work and rework his suits and accessories (“Sometimes, I’ll let the tie dictate the colors I’ll mix with it”) to gratify himself and stun others, something he has done since soon after he became a Knick in the 1960s.
“I like unusual combinations,” he said Thursday afternoon, dressed in a white pullover and sweatpants as he eagerly prepared to broadcast the first Knicks playoff series in seven years. “I have to entertain myself. I like combinations that people wouldn’t think would go normally together.”
Frazier exhibits a delicate touch as he moves among two hangers jammed with a riot of colorful ties to an armoire packed with pocket handkerchiefs, the suit racks and a floor littered with boots made of alligator, ostrich, eel and stingray skins. This is where he seeks an alchemy befitting the Clyde persona that was summoned to brash life more than 40 years ago, when he starred for the Knicks and often battled the Celtics. Here, a wild plaid suit is tempered by a pink shirt and a pink tie. Here, the leopard-spotted suit is tamed with a black silk shirt and black-patterned tie.
“If your suit is popping,” he said, “your tie can’t.”
As he considered his choices, he sometimes said, “Now, where is that hankie?”
He had returned from Boston that morning from the Knicks’ last game of the regular season. On Sunday, he will be back in Boston for Game 1 of the Knicks-Celtics playoff series. He eyed a bright green suit — not Celtic green — that he was tempted to pack for the trip to TD Garden.
“For years, he wouldn’t wear green in Boston,” said Mike Breen, his partner at the MSG Network. “Now he’s going for the reverse jinx.”
The green suit shares space with the cow print that Frazier first assessed as sofa fabric for rental property in St. Croix. He was in Zarin Fabrics, on the Lower East Side, when he spotted the cow print, along with the leopard and tiger designs, on rolls. These could be suits, he said, offering the sort of idiosyncratic style judgment usually reserved for Las Vegas extravaganzas.
“I asked the guy and he said, ‘Yeah, it could be a suit,’ ” Frazier said. “But he might have told me just to sell it.”
He toted the fabrics to Mohan’s Custom Tailors, near Grand Central Terminal, which makes nearly all his suits and has a celebrity clientele.
Frazier occasionally spends hours studying swatches for future suits and shirts on a scholarly hunt for what he calls jazzy, and what others might call gaudy.
“He thinks and thinks and tries to match things,” said Mohan Ramchandani, the proprietor of Mohan’s.
Ramchandani trusts Frazier’s vision, yet still had a question about the cow print. “Are you really going to wear this?” he asked. “Because it might be too heavy?” Frazier assured him he was, and Ramchandani turned the cow and wildcat prints into suits for $700 to $800 each.
In the months before Frazier picked them up, they were ogled by other customers.
“Sometimes, we show people the Clyde suits,” he said. No one else asked for a cow suit.
A funny thing happened in January when Frazier broke out the cow ensemble for a game at Madison Square Garden. He left the pants hanging at home. “I wasn’t brave enough to wear the cow pants,” he said. He wore black trousers instead. “Man,” he added, “I thought it was going to be too much.”
Breen remembered the night in January when Frazier wore the leopard suit in Los Angeles.
“When the camera came on,” Breen said, “he said, ‘This might be one and done.’ ” That night, Breen added, Frazier hinted at the cow suit that was to come. “He said, ‘Mike, you ain’t seen nothing yet.’ ”
The leopard print might go into seclusion, but it will be replaced by something provocative. Frazier challenges the tailors at Mohan’s: “Show me something that nobody else would wear.”
Frazier has so many suits in his closet that he said he did not have to spring for any dry cleaning in the 2009-10 season. “I said, ‘Man, I’m saving money by having all these suits.’ ”
There is a touch of frugality to him; he enjoys ironing, and said he was appalled recently when it cost him $34 to dry-clean four silk shirts.
Frazier plans his next season’s outfits during the current one. On a table in his kitchen are swatches (one that looks like cheetah) for 10 or 12 suits that Mohan’s will make for him. He has a bagful of buttons that will be sewn onto his jacket sleeves. And inside a folder are pages clipped from women’s magazines and catalogs to help him visualize his future designs. He stopped reading GQ long ago.
“I look through these for different patterns for shirts,” he said, flipping the pages of a Bloomingdale’s catalog. “I like these open collars for summer. You can see what you’re getting more than in men’s magazines. Here’s a suit. See how that lapel looks? And here’s a sort of Nehru suit.”
The closet will soon close its run after about 30 years and move to Harlem next week, where Frazier acquired three penthouse apartments last year. There is more closet space there, and he vows to be better organized and to ruthlessly color-coordinate his wardrobe. He is also planning to open a sports bar and restaurant on 10th Avenue between 37th and 38th Streets in December. The ceiling has a design that is based, in part, on Frazier’s shoes. A Frazier-themed mural will span a blocklong stretch.
“It will be,” he said, “a shrine to Clyde.”
Piece of the Empire State Building Could Be Yours
By CHARLES V. BAGLI and PETER LATTMAN
The Empire State Building is at the center of a plan to create a publicly traded company.
People who have always wondered what it might be like to dabble in a little New York real estate may soon be able to dabble in a lot of it — by buying a piece of its most famous skyscraper, the Empire State Building.
The Malkin family, which controls the 102-story Art Deco tower at Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, is planning to create a publicly traded real estate company featuring the building, according to three executives who had been briefed on the plans but spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.
The skyscraper draws tens of thousands of tourists from across the globe every year to its 86th-floor observatory, 1,050 feet above the city streets. If the Malkin plan is successful, New Yorkers, and anyone else for that matter, will be able to buy stock in the company that owns the Empire State Building, much as Wisconsin residents bought stock in the Green Bay Packers.
The new company, the executives said, may include a number of other office buildings controlled by Anthony E. Malkin and his father, Peter L. Malkin, including 1 Grand Central, a 55-story, 1.3-million-square-foot building across 42nd Street from Grand Central Terminal, and a 26-story building at 250 West 57th Street, as well as six buildings in Westchester County and Connecticut.
Anthony Malkin declined to comment, but he, his father and their partners are hoping to cash in on the Empire State Building’s international cachet and a commercial real estate market in New York that is once again attracting buyers from around the world.
“Investors the world over are clamoring to invest in Manhattan office properties, both debt and equity,” said Michael Knott, a managing director of Green Street Advisors.
Still, the Malkins must clear a number of hurdles, not the least of which is gaining the support of their principal partner, the estate of Leona Helmsley, which has hired advisers to evaluate the proposal, and the 3,400 limited partners in the existing company that owns the Empire State Building.
A public sale would come amid a sharp rebound in the number of initial public offerings, which roughly tripled in the first quarter of 2011 compared with the same period a year ago. Stock offerings for real estate investment trusts have also surged, with a total volume of $1 billion, more than double the output during the same period last year. But Mr. Knott said that many of those recent offerings had not performed very well after selling in the public markets.
The Empire State Building did not get off to an auspicious start when it opened in 1931, during the Depression. Critics derided it as the “Empty State Building,” and it was not profitable until 1950.
Mr. Malkin’s grandfather Lawrence A. Wien, his father and Harry B. Helmsley created what became a model for real estate syndication when they bought control of the building in 1961 from Henry Crown and leased it to a group of investors, including themselves. Those investors then sold an operating sublease for the tower to another entity now controlled by the Malkins and the estate of Leona Helmsley, while Mr. Helmsley and Mr. Wien sold the title to the property to the Prudential Insurance Company.
After years of fighting among the owners and feuds with Donald J. Trump, the Malkins gained full control of the building about five years ago and embarked on what has become a $560 million effort to burnish the 2.9-million-square-foot landmark and more than double the rents.
They have renovated the lobby — restoring original Art Deco murals — refurbished the observatory and replaced the 6,514 windows as part of an effort to make it one of the city’s most energy-efficient buildings.
The Malkins and their brokers at Newmark Knight Frank have attracted a series of corporate tenants, including a division of Li & Fung, the giant trading firm, which signed a lease for 483,000 square feet in January. There are now about 200 tenants, down from 950 in 2002, though today’s tenants occupy far larger spaces. The building may never command rents as high as those at trophies like the General Motors Building, but real estate brokers say the tower now shines.
“They’ve moved the building, in my mind, to a Class A property,” said Peter Riguardi, president of Jones Lang LaSalle in New York. “It needed those upgrades. It’s now one of the top buildings in that area.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/13/nyregion/13empire.html?ref=business&pagewanted=print
After 40 Years, Still at Home in the Trenches
By AL BAKER
Detective John C. Roe with his colleagues in the 26th Precinct, in Upper Manhattan. Some of them lovingly call him "grandpa."
There are dead giveaways, some right out there in the open. Like that pistol on his hip, a Smith & Wesson Model 10: four-inch barrel, wood grip, nothing automatic, semi- or otherwise, about it. A more compact five-shot revolver is less visible, strapped to his ankle. It seems borrowed from the New York City Police Museum.
That gold ring on his finger, from 1957, which his mother’s brother wore. The stories he tells about working a far bloodier set of streets, or his memories of the night the lights went out in the city during the Summer of Sam.
Then there is that photo, upstairs in the detectives bureau at his station house in Harlem. It was taken back in his training days: a black-and-white snapshot of himself that he keeps tucked away in a drawer.
There is no disguising the fact that John C. Roe, first-grade detective in the 26th Precinct — the highest investigative rank — has been around the block many a time. As a 40-year veteran, Detective Roe is the most senior among those still assigned to day-to-day, street-level police work.
Some of his colleagues lovingly call him “grandpa.” Some have taken to calling him “Fish,” after the old detective played by Abe Vigoda on “Barney Miller.” In fact, Detective Roe, 61, joined the city’s police force nearly a decade before that television series was shown.
He was a police trainee in 1968, a sworn officer two years later on foot patrol in the South Bronx. There was no counterterrorism division. There were no overseas postings, no female officers on patrol. The job’s iconic shoulder patch was nonexistent. The patrol cars were green and white. A rookie earned $9,500 a year.
“Times change,” Detective Roe said as he steered his unmarked Chevrolet Impala up Convent Avenue.
He is currently 10th on the Police Department’s longevity list; by the time he reaches the mandatory retirement age of 63 on Halloween 2012, he will be first. Historically, about 80 percent of police officers leave after 20 years, when they become eligible for a pension, though that amount has decreased to about 60 percent in recent years, a police spokesman said.
Detective Roe has been on the force for double that time. He dreads the thought of leaving. Like the last living soldier of a war long ago, his personal history is one of the last of a department transformed. His is a family history, too; his father, uncle, brother and nephew all retired from the Police Department.
“John is still viewing the job from the trenches,” said Robert E. Mladinich, a retired detective who arrested drug dealers in northern Manhattan with Detective Roe in the crack-cocaine scourge of the 1980s. Mr. Mladinich said that upon Detective Roe’s retirement, the department would lose the street experience and institutional knowledge he had brought to his position.
To those who know him, Detective Roe, who specializes in domestic-violence cases, is calm in a crisis. He almost functions like a priest to criminals and colleagues, caring for them and carrying the kind of demeanor that makes people unload their secrets — and the truth — to him. He has been down nearly every investigatory road at least once. He knows how to talk suspects into surrendering, but can wield discretion without arresting.
“His interview skills, his experience, and all the contacts he has,” said Sergeant Peter A. Lavin, a six-year supervisor in the 26th Precinct detective squad, where Detective Roe has been for the last two decades.
The sergeant paused.
“All around,” Sergeant Lavin continued, “the whole gamut.”
The sergeant said it was a comfort to glance around at a crime scene and find the unsmiling countenance of Detective Roe, who stands 6-foot-3, behind him.
Counting Detective Roe’s arrests is impossible, because the department began tracking such things only in 1983. Since then, he has logged more than 600. It would be about 1,000 if you could count back to 1970, and more than 2,000 if you considered the ones he helped in. His latest arrest was the other day: of a man who violated an order of protection issued to a Columbia University student he had assaulted.
His more sensational capers fill yesterday’s newspapers. “The Drag Queen Had a Mummy in Her Closet” was how New York magazine titled its cover story about an inquiry Detective Roe led in 1993. A man’s mummified body, with a bullet wound to the head, was found wrapped in imitation leather and stuffed in a trunk in the apartment of Dorian Corey, a famous drag queen, after he died. Detective Roe worked to identify the remains.
In 1992, he tracked whoever sent candies laced with thallium to students at Columbia University’s International House, making four ill. The clues led to Belgium, where a suspect was captured. But smaller cases jump out, too: the knife fights, sex assaults, drug deals and double homicides.
As Detective Roe steered his unmarked sedan on Morningside Drive one recent day, he pulled over off of West 119th Street. A cabby was stabbed here, he said, pointing. The victim’s car rolled down an incline as his killer walked away, gliding across some steps, into a park, past some basketball courts, then gone. Five years later, Detective Roe caught him.
Each story leads into another.
Seeing the basketball courts reminded him of a shooting there in which a man, fouled during a game, directed a cohort to open fire on the opponents with an automatic rifle. The gun came from under some clothes on a bench. A famous actor was there.
Detective Roe dug deeper into his memory, as if on an archaeological dig. Turning a corner, he stopped again: This is where his partner of the last 18 years, Detective Gisele M. Moyano, took on a double homicide, on the first floor. A lot of blood, he recalled. The man they later arrested had unleashed his fury in a “cocaine rage,” Detective Roe said.
The detective, standing in a finely tailored suit, squinted at the building, as if trying to see back to the past. But the streets are more sanitized now, and certainly safer. Yet he misses how busy it was.
There were 1,117 homicides and 74,102 robberies in New York in 1970. Last year, there were 536 homicides and 19,484 robberies. In 1971, it was more dangerous for police officers and suspects alike, with 93 people fatally shot by the police that year, compared with eight last year, “the fewest in 40 years,” as Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly has said. Twelve officers were shot and killed in 1971, and 47 were wounded by gunfire. Last year, for the second consecutive year, no officers were killed by suspects' bullets. And officers have shown more restraint: They fired their guns in 810 incidents in 1971, compared with 93 last year.
In 1971, the job was all male and mostly white. This year, for the first time, minorities make up a majority of those in the rank of police officer, though whites still account for 52.8 percent of police personnel.
In 1973, the same year that Billie Jean King defeated Bobby Riggs on a tennis court inside the Astrodome in Houston, the Police Department got its first female officers. Women had had a presence in the department since before the turn of the century, but first joined their male counterparts on patrol that year. This year, women represent 19.7 percent of police officers, and 17.3 percent of all ranks.
Detective Moyano remembered when she was assigned to the 26th Precinct detective squad in 1993, a rookie joining a unit of veterans. She said that everyone told her how fortunate she was to have Detective Roe as a partner, because he had a reputation for making arrests.
“I am picturing this young guy,” she said. “I was like 30-something, maybe 31. I was expecting this stud coming in, and when he walked in, I said, ‘That’s John Roe? He’s old.’ ”
She laughed a little, but then stressed how helpful he had been throughout their partnership. “The one thing I am grateful to,” she said, “is he always made it a point to introduce me: ‘Have you met my partner, Detective Gisele Moyano?’
“He made me feel like I was part of the whole process of work,” she said. “He taught me a lot.”
Detective Roe has never had to fire his weapon. (He is one of only 98 detectives who still carry a six-shot revolver.) He says he is far more likely to use his instincts and power of persuasion to solve crimes and shake loose confessions from suspects.
“I can talk,” he said.
He steered his sedan past a park on the precinct’s eastern boundary, named for St. Nicholas. It was a killing zone through the early 1990s, Detective Roe said, describing the bullets that flew and the bodies that fell. Then he saw a middle-age man loping up from West 129th Street. The detective yelled his nickname out the window. The man approached.
On another corner, off Amsterdam Avenue, he saw another man.
“My local informant,” Detective Roe said.
That man, too, came straight to his window. They talked quietly, and the man departed.
“O.K., babe,” the man said, moving away from Detective Roe. “Stay safe.”
Gaining goodwill with street people is a core tool, Detective Roe said. He abhors any policy of unequivocally enforcing rules policing quality-of-life offenses, and repeatedly raises the suffering of the impoverished, recalling days when men playing dominoes on bridge tables and sipping beer from small cups would be cultivated, not handed a summons.
“The job is great, but there are some things I disagree with, that I have to voice my opinion on,” Detective Roe said. “I don’t like change, how’s that?”
Among his complaints: too much micromanaging on the job today, too many checklists. While he understands that computers help track crimes and catch suspects — and admits that he is “computer illiterate” — he predicts that technology will never supplant a good officer’s instincts. He recalls the times when neighbors pointed quietly in hallways toward the apartments of criminals.
He says it disgusts him how much abuse today’s rookies take from civilians. Newly minted detectives can be too timid in bending the truth to bluff suspects into confessing in interrogation rooms. Criminals, on the other hand, are savvier, with repeat offenders seeming to benefit from a prison education. Not enough detectives show uniformed officers respect, he said.
And sadly, there is less camaraderie and socializing among the ranks.
He realizes that retirement means that he will travel more and see more of his daughters, Danielle and Jillian. But he will miss his pals and his partner; they each say they are like family to one another.
“He is the last one on,” said his brother, William Kenny Roe, 72, who retired as a captain in 1998. “He is the last one of a long line of police officers, and it’s kind of sad. Most of us wish we were back on.”
Detective Roe says he understands how his brother feels and dreads the approach of Halloween 2012, when he will have to hand in his badge, No. 1679.
Sitting in the cinder-block interview room of the station house in Harlem, across from St. Mary’s Church, he adds: “I’d be here until I’m 70, if I could. I’d be here forever.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 8, 2011
An article on Monday about the most senior New York City police detective still assigned to day-to-day, street-level police work misstated a statistic about police casualties in 2009 and 2010. In that period, no officers were killed by suspects’ bullets; it is not the case that no officers were killed or injured by bullets.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/04/nyregion/04police.html?sq=detective&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print
W. Side 'Smells' Kitchen
Laundries vanish
By ANNIE KARNI
Last Updated: 1:18 PM, January 2, 2011
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/side_smells_kitchen_ZUNozASPjc94IEAD29mStI#ixzz19v7KHtty
A tide of rankled residents on Manhattan's West Side can kiss their clean underwear goodbye.
One of the last Laundromats in Hell's Kitchen shuttered last week, forcing residents between 51st and 67th Streets to take cabs to clean their clothes, throw "champagne and laundry parties" in apartments with washing machines, and scrub their knickers in the sink.
The loss of the Laundromat on 53rd Street and Ninth Avenue has created a mile-long, laundry-less desert between Eighth and Tenth Avenues.
"The Laundromats are fleeing our area," said Christine Gorman, president of the West 55th Block Association. "The services in our neighborhood are disappearing. There's rumors that the Laundromat is going to become a Citibank. We have to go farther and farther away, and we're worried about our quality of life."
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/side_smells_kitchen_ZUNozASPjc94IEAD29mStI#ixzz19v7TcTuG
Carl Bevelhymer, 31, said there was one upside to getting stranded in the Midwest during last week's blizzard: it was easier for him to wash his clothes there.
"I brought my laundry home to Michigan because it was easier than washing it in my neighborhood," said Bevelhymer, who has resorted to paying double to use a dry cleaner's drop-off service. "A Laundromat is like a privately owned public utility. It's like having running water or a grocery store. This is a deal-breaker for me with the neighborhood."
Last September, Second Wave Laundry, the largest Laundromat in the neighborhood on 55th Street and Ninth Avenue, had its last spin cycle when the landlord threatened to raise the rent from $14,000 to $20,000 a month and demanded an $80,000 security deposit.
"These people are almost in tears," said Councilwoman Gale Brewer, who has introduced a resolution to give tax breaks to owner-operated city businesses. "This is the most basic challenge to the crisis of the lack of mom-and-pop stores in the city. It's beyond frustrating."
"I dragged my laundry through the snow, slush and backed-up traffic over to 51st and Tenth Avenue," said stylist Kathy Kalafut, who lives on 55th Street and Eighth Avenue. "Our neighborhood's lost half a dozen grocery stores and delis over the past few years, and gotten a bank on every corner. I'd just like a place to do laundry!"
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/side_smells_kitchen_ZUNozASPjc94IEAD29mStI#ixzz19v7YZFoh
What a great story. Just goes to show you how much heart NYers have!
Bright lights and big hearts fill World Trade Center workers' holiday gift to city
Michael Daly
Thursday, December 9th 2010, 4:00 AM
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2010/12/09/2010-12-09_bright_lights_big_hearts_fill_wtc_workers_holiday_gift_to_us_all.html#ixzz17f3tDfg8
Joe Russo was in his Staten Island home two weekends ago when he made a pronouncement that would result in the most beautiful sight in the city.
"I don't think I'm going to put up the tree this year," the 49-year-old electrician would recall saying. "I got a better idea."
"What's that?" asked his wife, Kathleen Russo.
"I'm going to light up the whole tower and see what it looks like," Joe Russo said.
He was speaking of the Freedom Tower, where he is a journeyman with Local 3, part of the Five Star Electric team. He arrived there the following Monday with various hues of cellophane purchased at a Michael's crafts store.
"Red, green, yellow, purple, whatever I could grab," he recalled.
Russo broached his idea to Gary Timm, the 59-year-old light and power foreman.
"Give it a shot," Timm said. "See what it looks like."
Russo needed only two minutes to wrap cellophane around a 250-watt construction light and secure it with cellophane tape. He did the south and east sides of three floors in an hour.
The idea had yet to be approved by Frank Leonard, the 45-year-old general foreman. He saw the lights the next morning before Russo arrived for work.
"Who did that?" Leonard asked.
"Why do you want to know?" Timm replied.
Leonard made his judgment known.
"Outstanding."
Leonard had been talking with other electricians about doing something special for the holidays. Nobody had to tell any of them they are laboring at a sacred place.
"Everybody really takes it to heart what we're doing here," Leonard later noted. "It's a special place. You think about who was here and what happened."
Leonard, Timm and Russo were also following an impulse that goes back at least to 1931, when construction workers put up the first Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center.
"It's in the genes," Russo said.
Russo started as an apprentice at the World Trade Center in 1981. He now ended the day with seven more floors of multicolored Christmas lights. These were topped by three floors of blue signifying Chanukah. Two above those were lit a symbolic yellow.
"Candles," Leonard said.
The overall effect was all the more wonderful for looking like exactly what it was: something workers with rough hands and gentle hearts had taken it upon themselves to do.
"No one directed us to do it," Leonard said. "It definitely came from within.
"Just bring a smile to people's faces, you know what I mean?"
The smile was joined by a welling in the eyes of retired Firefighter Lee Ielpi, who lost his firefighter son on 9/11 and is now the guiding force behind the Tribute WTC Visitor Center.
"Powerful," he said as he gazed across The Pit at the lights of purest holiday spirit. "Beautiful. It comes from the heart."
On Saturday night, Russo took his wife to the site to show her the lights. She celebrates her birthday on Christmas Day.
"That's for your birthday," he said.
On Tuesday night, Russo came home from work to discover she had gone ahead and put up the tree.
"The tree was beautiful," he said yesterday
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2010/12/09/2010-12-09_bright_lights_big_hearts_fill_wtc_workers_holiday_gift_to_us_all.html#ixzz17f47VHLq
No kidding. I had forgotten about that bridge.
Safe travels.
i'll probably go bear mtn, depending.....it will take me 3-4 hours to get to the crossing...8 ish
From NC to MA we only got tied up 3 times. One for construction and the other two for wrecks late at night. The wrecks from what I saw were due to people falling asleep at the wheel considering thew hour. That is one of the reasons I'm still awake. I drank enough coffee to float the Titanic.
If I were you I'd forget heading over the GWB at that hour and take the Tappen Zee instead. You'll probably still get screwed in traffic.
i glad you made it safely, how was traffic? we're leaving about 3:30 pm........... funny you thawed the bird in the car, HARR!
Made it to my dads after a 13 hour drive. Bought the turkey before we left so it would thaw on the way.
Line up for Thursday is watch the parade and cook the bird.
Macy’s parade includes some new and familiar faces
did i ever mention i marched in this in 1975
NEW YORK — The 84th annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade adds two new arrivals to its helium balloon lineup this year — Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Kung Fu Panda.
Along with a star-studded cast of singing celebrities, ranging from Kanye West to India.Arie, this year’s parade will also feature some longtime collaborators, like Les Kule, 51, of Wantagh, who has been clowning around legitimately for 16 years as a trained Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade clown.
"Those who know me say I’m a funny guy — clowning all my life," said Kule, who owns his own software computer company and is the clown captain of the billiard ball crew this year.
"New York is made out to be this tough town, but on Thanksgiving Day, at the parade, there is this great change and people can see us welcoming them," said Kule, who says getting children to smile is what makes it worthwhile.
Kule became a parade volunteer when a friend at Macy’s asked him if he wanted his daughters to ride in Santa’s sleigh. "Who could refuse?" he said.
This year, organizers say more than 3 million people are expected to line Manhattan streets for a close-up look at the Diary of a Wimpy Kid, a 60-foot-long and 56-foot-tall balloon, and the parade’s 14 other giant balloons, which include "Toy Story" character Buzz Lightyear, Dr. Seuss’ Horton, Shrek and classic favorites such as Smurf, Snoopy and Spider-Man.
New floats include Dora’s Christmas Carol and the Elves Raise the Roof. Broadway show casts include "American Idiot" and "Elf," plus the Big Apple Circus. In all, 8,000 performers, including 1,600 cheerleaders, 800 clowns and 2,000 volunteers, will be handling and navigating the parade’s floats down the two-mile stretch.
Other entertainers include Jessica Simpson, Arlo Guthrie, Big Time Rush and Gladys Knight.
The best views are along Central Park West on the west side of the street and eager parade fans can watch the balloons being inflated Wednesday between 3 and 10 p.m. from 77th to 81st streets between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue.
The New York Police Department will provide its usual coverage for the parade. Overtime effect on the city will be minimal because Thursday is a day in which police strength is at its highest during the week, said spokesman Paul Browne.
Some showers and temperatures in the low 50s are forecast for Thursday, but high winds, which have plagued past parades, seriously injuring an onlooker on one occasion — are not expected.
Rain or not, the parade launches at 9 a.m. from its traditional 77th Street and Central Park West corner and proceeds south along Central Park West before turning east onto Central Park South to Seventh Avenue. From there, it continues south to 42nd Street, where it will march east to Sixth Avenue and to its historic home base at 34th Street and Herald Square
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/national/northeast/view/20101124macys_parade_includes_some_new_and_familiar_faces/srvc=home&position=recent
NYC Rolls Out Welcome Wagon For Notre Dame
November 19, 2010 1:18 PM
NEW YORK (AP) — Lincoln Center was picked as the site of Notre Dame’s pep rally, featuring the marching band and the leprechaun. A goal post now stands where Alex Rodriguez usually takes his hacks and another is planted in front of the outfield wall.
Notre Dame is playing in the Big Apple for the first time since 1969 and even though the only thing the Irish will be fighting for against Army on Saturday night in Yankee Stadium is bowl eligibility, it’s an event.
New York has always been a sort of home away from home for the Fighting Irish. There are more than 8,200 Notre Dame alumni in the metropolitan area and that’s not counting the so-called subway alumni, those New Yorkers who grew up rooting for the Irish without ever setting foot on the campus in South Bend, Ind.
So it makes perfect sense Notre Dame would play the first game at the Yankees’ two-year-old, $1.5 billion ballpark. It’s such a special occasion, the Irish will be wearing kelly green jerseys for the first time under coach Brian Kelly.
“I just think being in New York and having Notre Dame there is going to be a great thrill for everybody,” Kelly said. “I’ll be a little preoccupied.”
It’s the 50th game between Notre Dame and Army, and the 23rd time they have met in the Bronx, the last coming in 1969.
“It’s one of those iconic things — Notre Dame football, Army football, Yankee Stadium — that’s American sport,” Army coach Rich Ellerson said. “All three of those things on the same day? Wow, what a neat opportunity.”
The old Yankee Stadium was the site of some of the greatest Army-Notre Dame games, including the 1946 0-0 tie, dubbed the Game of the Century between the top-ranked Black Knights and No. 2 Fighting Irish.
The rivalry was a college football staple in the first half of the 20th century, but Army and Notre Dame have played sporadically since — with the Irish winning 13 straight since Army’s last win in 1958.
The current Black Knights (6-4) are having the program’s best season in years and are looking forward to stealing the spotlight from the Irish.
“It’s perfect timing,” senior slotback Patrick Mealy said. “We’re on the up, and it’s an opportunity to show everyone on a national stage that we can play with anybody.”
Army is already assured of its first non-losing season and bowl appearance since 1996. Ellerson has turned around the Black Knights in two seasons by bringing the triple-option back to West Point.
Triple-option! Uh-oh. The last time the Fighting Irish faced it was last month against Navy across the Hudson River at the new Meadowlands Stadium — and the Notre Dame defense was helpless to stop it.
The Midshipmen ran for 347 yards, including 210 by fullback Alexander Teich. Navy tweaked its blocking schemes and the Irish weren’t prepared for some of what they got.
They insist the second time around will be different.
“You get to know the speed of the game, the pace,” nose guard Sean Cwynar said. “How fast the fullback will hit the hole and how the linemen will move.”
Army is eighth in the nation in rushing at 272 yards per game and its leading rusher is fullback Jared Hassin, who averages 5.7 yards per carry.
The Irish should be aided by the return of linebacker Carlo Calabrese, out last week with a hamstring injury.
Notre Dame is coming off its best game of the season, a 28-3 victory against Utah that was about as surprising as the Irish’s two previous games — losses to Navy and Tulsa.
Freshman Tommy Rees makes his second start at quarterback for the Irish since taking over for the injured Dayne Crist (knee) against Tulsa.
Rees threw a critical interception in the end zone during the final minute of that game, but bounced back nicely against Utah with three touchdown passes.
“He’s got to get into the flow of the game and once he gets into the flow of the game he’s a young man who relaxes and gets into it,” Kelly said. “I think it will probably be the same way at Yankee Stadium.”
This will be the first of two football games this year at The House that Jeter Built. The first Pinstripe Bowl will be held Dec. 30.
Army has already scheduled three more games at Yankee Stadium, about an hour’s drive south from West Point, over the next four seasons.
A football field fits snugly on the playing surface at the stadium. Ball carriers heading out of bounds near the end zone around home plate best keep an eye out for the dugouts, they come up fast. In the opposite end zone, there’s only a few feet between the back line and outfield wall.
“That will be an important walkthrough for us,” Kelly said.
And an important game. Notre Dame needs one more victory to become bowl eligible and would be best served to get that out of the way before the season finale against No. 20 Southern California in Los Angeles next week.
“We have to do the same things we did against Utah,” Kelly said, “and we have to do it against an offense and a defense we don’t see very much.”
Damn I wish I could. Damn tickets are probably sold out already and the game isn't until next year. I may try since it is right around Thanksgiving and I plan on spending it in MA with my dad who will be 100 next year.
The owner of the Giants, Wellington Mara went to my HS. Every year he would have the senior class come to a Giants game. Tickets were on him.
Army-Notre Dame Stirs Yankee Stadium Ghosts
By BILL PENNINGTON
Top-ranked Army routed No. 5 Notre Dame, 59-0 in a famous game at Yankee Stadium in 1944
More Photos
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/11/16/sports/SPTSARMY1116.html
To understand how universally significant the Yankee Stadium football games between Army and Notre Dame once were, it is worth revisiting World War II’s Battle of the Bulge. During the winter of 1944-45 in Belgium, American troops were surrounded and being infiltrated by English-speaking German spies dressed as American soldiers.
How did the Americans tell friend from foe?
They asked any unfamiliar face to tell them the score of Army’s 1944 game with Notre Dame.
Because every G.I. knew that at sold-out Yankee Stadium on Nov. 11 — then a holiday called Armistice Day — top-ranked Army had routed No. 5 Notre Dame, 59-0.
“Those games were the Super Bowl of today,” said Joe Steffy, an Army team captain and lineman in the 1940s. “There was no more famous place to perform any sport than Yankee Stadium, and there was no rivalry bigger than Army and Notre Dame. Many years, it was the national championship game.”
Terry Brennan, a fleet back for Notre Dame in the same era who went on to coach Notre Dame, remembered a pregame buildup unmatched by any other week in the schedule.
“For Army week, it was like the whole sports world stopped,” Brennan said. “We got off the train to New York and couldn’t walk across the platform, there was such a crowd. We didn’t even stay in Manhattan; we went 50 miles north to the Bear Mountain Inn, where it was quieter.”
Army and Notre Dame will resume their historic rivalry Saturday at the new Yankee Stadium under different circumstances. Neither team is ranked, though Army (6-4) is bowl-eligible for the first time in 14 years and Notre Dame (5-5) is coming off a 25-point upset of Utah.
But the first college football game at the new Yankee Stadium is also the first Yankee Stadium game between Army and Notre Dame since 1969, and it has stirred ghosts from Knute Rockne to Doc Blanchard.
It is also a time to remember that Notre Dame’s famed “subway alumni” were spawned by the Yankee Stadium games from the 1920s to the 1940s. The term originally referred to first-generation Americans of European descent who flocked to Yankee Stadium from the five New York City boroughs to cheer Notre Dame players with names like O’Donnell, Carideo and Mieszkowski. In the succeeding decades, Notre Dame’s subway alumni represented the next emerging power in America — the sons and daughters of immigrants — and they spread Notre Dame’s popularity nationwide.
Cheering for the other side were hundreds of thousands of Army veterans from two world wars — and their families — who treated the footballers from West Point as if they were a national college team.
This unique rivalry began in 1913 because Yale unexpectedly dropped Army from its schedule. Army, eager to fill the open date, accepted an invitation to host little-known Notre Dame at West Point. Notre Dame was so obscure that The New York Times previewed the game with an article that listed Notre Dame as hailing from South Bend, Illinois, not Indiana.
A daring passing attack, however, led Notre Dame to a shocking 35-13 upset. Army won the rematch the next year, and the annual competition was on.
By 1923, West Point’s on-campus field was too small for the crowds congregating to see the Notre Dame games. The game was moved to Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field, then the Polo Grounds and, finally, in 1925, to Yankee Stadium, which had opened two years earlier. Army won two of the first three games at Yankee Stadium and was heavily favored to win the 1928 game as well. At the half, the score was 0-0.
It was at this moment that Rockne supposedly gave his “Win One for the Gipper” speech, an emotional oration about a deathbed conversation with the Notre Dame great George Gipp, who died of pneumonia eight years earlier.
There is considerable doubt whether Gipp ever uttered such a sentiment to Rockne. Some researchers also dispute when the speech was made. A recent biography, “The Gipper,” by Jack Cavanaugh, quotes Rockne players and assistants who insist the speech was given before the game started.
What is unquestioned is that Notre Dame took a 12-6 second-half lead and held on — even with Army at the 1 as the game ended — before 78,188 roaring fans.
When the tale of Rockne’s motivational speech made it into the New York newspapers, Army-Notre Dame’s intense competition had an immortal hero — and soon, a cinematic champion played by Ronald Reagan — to go with the football drama.
The teams played at Yankee Stadium every year thereafter except in 1930, when the game was played at Chicago’s Soldier Field. The game was occasionally played in snow, sleet and rain and always before crowds of about 75,000. And although Notre Dame won most of the time in the 1930s, the games remained close, with one of the teams usually ranked high enough to be competing for the national title.
A Notre Dame lineman in the room listening to Rockne’s 1928 Gipper speech was Frank Leahy, a son of Irish immigrants who became Notre Dame’s coach in 1941 after stops at Georgetown, Boston College and Fordham, where he coached Vince Lombardi. His familiarity with the Eastern Seaboard made Leahy a seasoned recruiter, and he began stealing players from all the Eastern powers, including Army.
One such player was Johnny Lujack of Connellsville, Pa., who turned down Army’s offer to play instead at Notre Dame.
“A lot of people in town called my dad to tell him what a terrible mistake I was making,” said Lujack, who as an 18-year-old quarterback led Notre Dame to a 26-0 victory over Army in 1943.
World War II depleted the rosters of hundreds of college football teams. At the same time, the soon-to-be legendary duo of Blanchard and Glenn Davis was beginning a three-year run at West Point. They were the unstoppable forces in the 59-0 whitewash heard round the world in 1944 and a 48-0 Army victory at Yankee Stadium in 1945. Davis and Blanchard won back-to-back Heisman Trophies.
By 1946, war veterans were back on campus setting up what sportswriters that year called the Game of the Century at Yankee Stadium between No. 1-ranked and undefeated Army and No. 2 and undefeated Notre Dame. Like many a Super Bowl to come, the hype seemed to overwhelm the participants and coaches, and a boring, tactical game ensued. With neither team taking many chances, the result was a 0-0 tie.
“I had lunch years later with Red Blaik,” Brennan said of the Army coach. “When we talked about the 1946 game, he said: ‘I choked. We should have been more aggressive. But Leahy choked, too. He did the same thing.’ ”
The game hinged on two moments — Army’s stopping Notre Dame at its 4 in the second quarter (Notre Dame did not try a field goal), and Lujack’s open-field third-quarter tackle of Blanchard, who had torn the anterior cruciate ligament in his knee in the season-opening game (surgery for that injury was decades away).
“John did a good job chasing me to the sideline and grabbed my legs,” Blanchard, who died last year, said in a 2003 interview. He then cackled: “But before my knee injury, I wouldn’t have been running toward the sideline. I would have just run him over.”
Lujack called the tackle routine at the time. Since then, he has amended that thought.
“For more than 60 years, people have been telling me it saved the game of the century, so I guess it was a pretty big tackle,” said Lujack, one of four Heisman Trophy winners to play in the game. Lujack won the trophy in 1947; his teammate, end Leon Hart, won it in 1949.
After the 1946 game, Army and Notre Dame did not play at Yankee Stadium for 23 years. In 1969, Notre Dame was heavily favored with a top-five ranking, but midway through the first quarter, there was no score.
“I remember being on the field, kind of looking around and thinking that this is where Mantle and Berra had played and Johnny Unitas and Y. A. Tittle, too,” said Tom Gatewood, then a sophomore wide receiver for Notre Dame. “I looked at the huge crowd and stadium and thought, ‘Wow, this is a big deal.’ ”
Soon Gatewood was streaking downfield chasing a long pass from quarterback Joe Theismann.
“As the ball was in the air, the entire crowd was silent,” Gatewood said in a telephone interview last week. “Every eye in the place was watching the flight of the ball, but nobody was making any noise. Then, at the very second the ball touched my hands, there was an explosion of sound.
“I caught the ball and ran toward the end zone.”
It was a 55-yard scoring pass, the first touchdown in a 45-0 Notre Dame victory.
“I remember standing there knowing that I was now a part of the history of this place and this unbelievable rivalry,” Gatewood said. “The crowd was just going crazy. I have to say I’m so glad they’re going back to Yankee Stadium. That game belongs there.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/sports/ncaafootball/17army.html?_r=1&ref=sports
The NY Times posted an outstanding pic a while back of the the Twin towers poking through the clouds. Of course now I'm going to have to find the damn pic for you.
Trump Hopping Mad Over Bid to Build at Jones Beach
October 18, 2010, 7:06 am After promising in typical Trumpian modesty to replace a restaurant at a landmark New York beach with “the finest dining and banquet facility anywhere in the world,” Donald Trump is seething four years later that visitors still must pass what he calls “a rat-infested dump.”
When he announced plans in 2006 for “Trump on the Ocean” at Jones Beach, designed by legendary urban planner Robert Moses, the real estate tycoon envisioned a facility with sweeping views of the Atlantic and beachfront dining for as many as 1,400. What he didn’t anticipate was persistent civic opposition, or skeins of bureaucratic red tape, The Associated Press reports.
“The word I’d use is incomprehensible,” Mr. Trump told The Associated Press in a recent telephone interview. “I was going to build a magnificent building on the boardwalk that would have made Robert Moses envious and proud. It would have been the best building in the entire state parks system.”
Trump won his latest legal battle with the state last month when an appeals court granted permission for a basement, despite the facility’s location in a flood zone a few hundred yards from the Atlantic Ocean’s pounding tides. But Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s office is considering an appeal, and there’s also a court fight over whether Trump owes back rent. In another lawsuit, Mr. Trump is seeking $500 million in damages for delays.
The Associated Press continued:
Some critics also questioned the wisdom of attracting $500-a-plate weddings to a beach developed for working-class visitors. Others worried about the traffic impact.
“This was our state historical park, the people’s park, being given to a private developer,” said Pat Friedman, a Garden City Park civic leader, who became the primary leader of the opposition to the Trump project. “Since when do we give our property away? Maybe he’ll give us one of his hotels?”
Wait and someone will top him. Oops they already do. They paint the center stripe on 5th Avenue green for St Patty's Day.
An Artist’s Alfresco John Hancock
By COLIN MOYNIHAN
This mysterious trail of paint on Avenue B along Tompkins Square Park in the East Village is part of an eight-mile-long graffiti tag by an artist called Momo.
The thin orange line of paint traces a winding path though downtown Manhattan neighborhoods like SoHo, Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side. Uneven and wandering, the stripe runs up major avenues and across narrow streets, sometimes prominent, at other times so faint and worn that it is barely visible.
Although it has existed for four years, the paint line has escaped most people’s notice. And among those who have paused to register its presence, few have probably spent much time contemplating its origin. It is, after all, just a simple bit of paint: one more arcane marking in an urban landscape filled with street art and random splashings; a small-caliber mystery in a big city rich with secrets.
“The orange drip that flows through the East Village,” Sharon Jane Smith, 57, mused on Sunday as she gazed at the section of the line that meandered past her East Village shop, A Repeat Performance, on First Avenue near East 10th Street. “I have no idea where that orange drip came from.”
In August a young blogger named Nick Divers posted an essay online revealing that there is more to the paint than immediately meets the eye. He was not the first to figure out what the line signifies, but his posting was circulated through the blogosphere, bringing new recognition to what began as an intentionally quiet statement.
Over the last four years hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who have walked by or on top of the orange lines have unwittingly passed what is possibly the biggest graffiti tag in the world. The tag, which is so vast that all parts of it cannot be viewed simultaneously, was created in 2006 by an artist known as Momo and consists of a paint line that he said runs about eight miles long and spells out his name.
It runs from the East River to the Hudson River and extends north to 14th Street and south to Grand Street. The line runs over curbstones and subway grates and zigzags around lampposts and manhole covers. Its route begins at the edge of a West Side pier and ends after crossing a footbridge over the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive.
“I wanted to make a trail that people could follow,” Momo said recently by telephone. “And I realized that I could write something if I planned it out with the street grid.”
Momo, a 35-year-old artist from the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, agreed to talk about the project only on the condition that his actual name not be revealed; it is unlawful in New York to place paint messages or symbols on the streets and sidewalks.
The project was inspired by a series of purple footprints that were painted on Manhattan sidewalks in 1986, stretching from the Upper East Side to Foley Square. Those mysterious markings led to a spot on Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side, where the city had bulldozed an elaborate community garden called the Garden of Eden that was created by a squatter named Adam Purple. Momo said he glimpsed the footprints as a child and was captivated.
“It was a really ephemeral, strange sight,” he said. “And it felt like those footprints created a path that was all mine.”
Years later he experimented for months with a way to make his own paint trail and eventually lashed a homemade funnel-shaped bucket to the back of a bicycle. He fitted the bucket with a hose that was controlled by a ball valve of the sort used in swimming pool plumbing systems. The line was created with 15 gallons of paint dispensed over the course of two covert sorties, Momo said, carried out between 3 and 6 in the morning.
“Everyone was oblivious except for one guy who chased me,” he said. “But I think he was trying to be helpful, believing I was heading to a job site and had a legitimate leak.”
In many neighborhoods the paint is still easy to see. Sometimes the line runs on concrete sidewalks, as it does along Stanton Street or Broadway. At other times it runs on macadam roadways, as it does on Seventh Avenue South, where the tires of countless cars have nearly erased it. In certain areas — along Prince Street, for instance — the line can no longer be seen at all, scrubbed away, maybe, or lost when sections of sidewalk were replaced.
After finishing the tag, Momo made a short, impressionistic film about its creation. He told friends about the project but decided not to publicize it widely. Although street-art and graffiti insiders noted the tag, few others did.
That began to change somewhat last month when Mr. Divers posted a description of Momo’s project on his blog, Best Roof Talk Ever. Mr. Divers said that he first became aware of the tag in 2007, when one of his friends, Aaron Cahan, figured out that the paint line spelled the name Momo, then got in touch with the artist, who confirmed that he had created the markings.
In a short essay, which was reposted about 1,500 times, Mr. Divers wrote that he was intrigued by the fact that Momo had created a tag so large that it was, in effect, hidden, because it could not be viewed in its entirety.
“It’s simultaneously the biggest and smallest artistic statement I have seen,” he wrote.
Despite the new attention generated by Mr. Divers, people who recognize the tag are still in the minority. A recent trip along the paint line’s path found that nobody among more than a dozen asked knew the story of Momo’s creation. But the trip did reveal, perhaps, that the paint line had found a place in the city’s collective subconscious, with people who said they had barely noticed it before quickly proposing a range of purposes.
Some thought that it marked the site of future excavations by utility workers. Others suggested that it was part of a code between drug sellers and users. On Avenue B, near Tompkins Square Park, three young men, including one carrying a knapsack and a sleeping bag speculated that the paint marking might reflect public policy toward the homeless.
One, Antoine Fisher, 23, said, “Maybe this line tells you where you can sleep on the sidewalk, since you aren’t allowed to sleep inside the park at night.”
Informed of the true purpose of the line, the three paused to look again at the ground.
“Oh, that’s pretty cool,” said Ryan Sowulski, 22. “You know how hard-core that is?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/18/arts/design/18momo.html?ref=general&src=me&pagewanted=print
Thousands of Trees Killed by New York Tornadoes
By N. R. KLEINFIELD and ELISSA GOOTMAN
As National Weather Service officials declared Friday that two tornadoes had indeed swept into New York City on Thursday, some tree-lined streets in Brooklyn and Queens looked - at least from the air - like Lego masterpieces that angry children had done their best to sweep aside.
Some were more than a century old but still sturdy and doing their jobs. Many others were young and willowy, just getting going. Some of them were inscrutable; no one truly knew them or how they got there. But others felt like old friends. They were wonderful for their blissful shade, to climb, to simply stare at and admire.
They were the most visible evidence of the fleeting but brutal storm that barged through New York City on Thursday evening: the ravaged trees.
There was a beloved scarlet oak that had stood forever in a farm family’s cemetery in Queens. There was a Callery pear that parrots preferred on a street in Brooklyn. Trees that had stories to them that were now prematurely finished.
The tragedy of the storm, which meteorologists said Friday included two tornadoes, was Aline Levakis, 30, from Mechanicsburg, Pa., the sole person to die, when a tree, as it happened, hit her car on the Grand Central Parkway in Queens.
Buildings and houses were severely damaged, thousands of customers lost electricity and many commuters were inconvenienced.
But destroyed were thousands of trees — trees torn out of sidewalks, others flung 30 or 40 feet through the air, still others shorn of branches, cracked in two.
On Friday, as the city plowed ahead in the painstaking process of cleaning up the wreckage and repairing damage, it was still too early to tabulate a reliable tree death count.
The city has over 100 species and more than five million trees, some as old as 250. Clearly the loss was great.
Adrian Benepe, the city’s parks commissioner, estimated that as many as 2,000 of the 650,000 street trees had been killed or else so crippled that they would have to be cut down.
Mr. Benepe said hundreds of the two million trees in the parks were killed or damaged beyond hope. Hundreds more lost limbs.
Storms periodically batter the city’s trees. A freak storm in August of last year toppled about 500 trees in Central Park.
The storm on Thursday left Manhattan and the Bronx virtually unscathed but was merciless in the other boroughs.
“It’s hard to compare to previous storms,” Mr. Benepe said, “but given the brevity of the storm, the extent of the damage seems unparalleled.”
As workers began carving up the trees and trucking them away, they found decimated oaks, Norway maples, catalpas, and more and more.
Mr. Benepe said the older, larger trees, like the maples, oaks and London planes that were planted along city streets, suffered worst. They have a lot of leaf surface that catches the wind, and they are inflexible.
Many Callery pears, with their showy white blossoms, also went. Although smaller, they are weak-wooded.
The storm wiped out a dozen or so willow trees lining Willow Lake and Meadow Lake in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens. Some of them fell into the lakes.
On the blocks around Juniper Valley Park in Middle Village, Queens, hundreds of elderly elms, oaks and maples succumbed. Youngsters — 7 to 10 years old — were yanked out like matchsticks and whipped through the area.
Robert Holden, president of the Juniper Park Civic Association, walked around the bruised neighborhood on Friday snapping pictures of fallen timber.
One majestic tree, regarded as the neighborhood’s treasure, was an immense scarlet oak in the Pullis Farm Cemetery, an early American farm family burial ground. It was believed to be more than 110 years old. It was a beauty, just about perfectly symmetrical.
“When you touched the tree, you felt like you were touching a part of the 19th century,” Mr. Holden said.
The storm tore it down, ending its long life in a blink.
“This hit me the hardest,” Mr. Holden said. “Some people said can we pick it up and put it back? But you can’t.”
In All Faiths Cemetery in Middle Village stood another cherished tree, a towering live oak thought to be 180 years old. It was about 90 feet tall. After the storm, all that remained was the bottom 12 feet.
“It was a cool-looking tree,” said Daniel C. Austin Jr., the cemetery’s vice president. “It had these beautiful arms. Every time we drove by it, we used to talk about it.”
Grief was palpable in Forest Hills Gardens, a private nest of Tudor and Georgian homes in Queens that is one of the city’s greenest neighborhoods, home to hundreds of trees.
It was only recently that the residents’ association planted 70 more — maples, oaks and London planes. These newcomers, so much life left in them, bore the brunt of the storm.
Edward and Vera Ward, who live just outside the enclave, stroll through the neighborhood every day, drawn by the serenity and welcoming shade of the tall trees.
On Friday, Mr. Ward, 58, was snapping pictures of men sawing a supine tree into bits.
“It’s like a part of me is gone,” he said, and his eyes welled up.
An elderly man was mourning a maple tree that he had planted outside his house on Dartmouth Street when he was a teenager. It grew as he grew. It was one more that the storm took.
In Park Slope, Brooklyn, a Callery pear tree stands across the street from the house of Nick Lerman, 27, a Brooklyn College student. Almost two-thirds of its canopy had been ripped off.
“I’m looking at maybe 37 percent of a tree,” Mr. Lerman said. “Now it kind of looks like a bald guy with half a tonsure.”
He said parrots shuttled back and forth from the tree to the one across from it. He said he hoped that the tree would live, that the parrots would still have it.
Reuben Slater had his own tree-loss story. He is 13 and lives in Park Slope. When he walks to school, he passes a massive ash tree with a trunk that gives way to branches that form a V. When he was younger, he thought of it as the tree of life.
The storm carved off half the V. The tree is expected to survive, but to no longer resemble its old self. That saddens Reuben. He sees a tree “with a broken arm.”
He snatched a small branch off the ground. He said he would keep it in his room. “I’m going to name it Pablo,” he said. “I’ve always loved that name.”
Fernanda Santos and Rebecca White contributed reporting.
Reader photos of damage to NYC from yesterday's storm.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/09/17/nyregion/storm-readerphotos.html?hp
1 Dead as Tornado-Like Storm Rips Through the Region
27,000 NYC households without power; 40,000 in New Jersey
By MICHAEL CLANCY
Updated 8:57 PM EDT, Thu, Sep 16, 2010
A short but violent tornado-like storm swept through New York City and parts of New Jersey on Thursday, uprooting trees and damaging cars and causing at least one fatality and widespread property damage and power outages.
The evening storm walloped Brooklyn and Queens knocking down trees and sending residents scrambling. The storm hit just after 5 p.m., when the National Weather Service issued a tornado warning for Staten Island. Shortly afterward, warnings were issued for Brooklyn and Queens. As of 8 pm:
Con Edison is reporting 30,000 households without power in the five boroughs including 25,000 in Queens and 6,000 in Staten Island. As of 7:30 pm, power lines were still on fire in Queens.
40,000 New Jersey households were without power. Jersey Central Power and Light said about 12,000 customers had no service, with areas of western Monmouth County and northern Ocean county among the hardest hit. 10,000 PSE&G customers in north Jersey had no service, while about 17,300 Atlantic City Electric customers were in the dark.
One person is reported dead after a tree fell down and crushed a parked car on the Grand Central Parkway near Jewel Avenue. The driver, an unidentified woman, pulled over on the side of the road to escape the rain. A tractor trailer overturned on the Gowanus Expressway, according to eyewitness accounts.
the FDNY reported 500 emergency calls in the two hours following the storm
Long Island Rail Road service has suspended from Penn Station to Jamaica and Penn Station and Port Washington. Limited eastbound service is available from Jamaica. Penn Station was mobbed and police were directing riders to trains and buses.
Service for departures and arrivals at LaGuardia, Newark and JFK airports was delayed two to three hours.
The National Weather Service has not yet confirmed the massive storm as a tornado yet although many witnesses have reported spotting funnel clouds. And winds of up to 80 miles-per-hour were reported.
Sideways rain, black clouds and fierce howling winds caused major damage to Staten Island, Brooklyn, Queens and parts of Long Island. Park Slope, Prospect Heights, Crown Heights and Bushwick in Brooklyn, and Flushing and Ridgewood in Queens seemed to be hit particularly hard.
A Tornado Grows in Brooklyn?
LOOK
A Tornado Grows in Brooklyn?
In the Park Slope, witnesses say the streets went pitch black at about 5:30 p.m. Trees started waving around like leaves of grass. Large branches snapped and hit cars, smashing windshields.
A huge tree limb, like 25 feet long, flew right up the street, up the hill and stopped in the middle of the air 50 feet up in this intersection and started spinning," said Steve Carlisle, 54. "It was like a poltergeist."
"Then all the garbage cans went up in the air and this spinning tree hits one of them like it was a bat on a ball. The can was launched way, way over there," he said, pointing at a building about 120 feet away where a metal garbage can lay flattened.
Townsend Davis, 47, stood outside of his home on Sterling Place in Brooklyn. A 40-foot tree that was uprooted from the sidewalk and crushed two cars still had a sign in the soil around its roots that read "Respect the trees."
"Someone up there wasn't listening," Davis said. "I'm just glad it fell that way, as bad as I feel for the owners of that car, because if it fell this way, my house wouldn't be here."
Davis' children and wife were in the home when the storm hit.
"All of a sudden, we saw this dark cloud, and it was moving. I said 'Let's go in!'" said Stephen Wylie, who was working in a backyard on Quincy Street, in Brooklyn.
Within seconds, the front door started lashing back and forth. Trees branches were falling and trees came flying from other yards, Wylie said.
http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local-beat/Tornado-Warning-Issued-for-Eastern-New-York-City-103086814.html
Reviving Ground Zero
Reporter David W. Dunlap describes how the new World Trade Center complex is taking shape.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/09/10/nyregion/2010-wtc.html?hp
Cool site showing the rebuilding process.
World Trade Center Complex Is Rising Rapidly
By DAVID W. DUNLAP
The tower at 1 World Trade Center, expected to be completed in 2013, rises behind one of 16 swamp white oak trees specially cultivated for the site.
The pace of construction is so swift that any status report these days gets overtaken rapidly by the arrival of new beams and columns, rebar and concrete, pipes and conduit. About 2,000 construction workers are on the job, weekends included, officials said, and that number will just keep rising. Visiting the site brings to mind the tumultuous first impressions of arrival in New York City: people, vehicles and objects are headed toward you from every direction at startling velocity, and the only prudent thing to do is to keep moving.
Two years ago, it was difficult to imagine how the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the site of the trade center and is building most of it, could ever finish the eight-acre memorial in time for the 10th anniversary of the attack, on Sept. 11, 2011. Today, it is difficult to imagine what would stop them (though, given the site’s tortured history, the possibility shouldn’t be completely dismissed).
The great square voids in the plaza marking where the twin towers stood are fully formed and almost entirely clad in charcoal-gray granite. Enormous pumps are standing by to send thousands of gallons of water cascading into the voids, creating what memorial officials say will be the largest human-engineered waterfalls in the United States. A metal fabricator in New Jersey is incising bronze panels with the names of all 2,982 victims of 9/11 and of the trade center bombing in 1993. And last weekend, 16 swamp white oaks began to take root on the plaza. Four hundred more will follow.
But in the public’s mind, it is still “ground zero” — as in, “When are they ever going to build something at ground zero?” Or as in, “ground zero mosque,” the shorthand reference for the Islamic community center planned two blocks to the north. While much of the nation has been debating who should be allowed to build what on that site, a former Burlington Coat Factory store, little attention has been paid to the fact that things really are being built on the spot where something actually happened.
A recent editorial cartoon in The San Diego Union-Tribune depicted the Islamic center as a giant salt shaker on the “wound” of ground zero, drawn as an empty expanse of earth. Apart from the issue of the Islamic center, the cartoon stoked frustration among those working at the site. Just at the moment they have something to show for nine years’ effort — 300,000 square feet of underground space, the shell of New York’s third-largest train station and two skyscrapers on the rise — the image has been resurrected of a barren, silent pit.
There was some truth to that image as recently as 2008. The trade center site was a dust bowl in summer and mud pit in winter. The only visible sign of progress was the silvery 7 World Trade Center tower across Vesey Street.
So many conflicting demands were imposed on the site — it was to be a solemn memorial, a soaring commercial complex, a vital transportation hub, a vibrant retail destination and the keystone in Lower Manhattan’s revival — that none could advance. And the many competing players seemed unable to break the logjam for long. They addressed one another as “stakeholders” in public, but the stakes they wielded usually seemed destined for someone else’s back.
What seems, in retrospect, to have been a key turning point was the politically unpalatable prospect that the 10th anniversary would come and go without a permanent memorial. In 2008, prodded in part by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who heads the memorial foundation, the Port Authority adopted new schedules, approaches and construction techniques. Dozens of firms, including many of the city’s leading developers, architects and engineers, are involved.
The progress since then has been visible, tangible and audible. You no longer have to be inside the sidewalk barriers to get that. Just stand on Church Street and take in the sight of two giant steel towers-to-be, framing a crazily angled forest of crane booms. Or you could try to cross Church Street against the frenzied, never-ending convoys of construction vehicles entering and exiting. Good luck.
Perhaps the most surprising phenomenon occurs at bedrock level, seven stories beneath the street, in the great chamber of what will someday be the National September 11 Memorial Museum. Here, the ceremonial “last column” from the twin towers already stands in a climate-controlled cocoon. At certain moments, the room echoes. Dull and distant noise is transformed into profound, inchoate reverberation.
As the ninth anniversary approaches, it has begun to sound like a memorial.
Clams befouling Tahoe invade Adirondack lake in NY
By MARY ESCH
Associated Press Writer
BOLTON LANDING, N.Y. (AP) — A thumbnail-sized clam blamed for clouding the azure bays of Lake Tahoe high in the Sierra Nevada has now turned up in a mountain-ringed Adirondack lake renowned for its limpid, spring-fed waters.
The invasive Asian clam, Corbicula fluminea, is known as the "golden clam" in the aquarium trade and the "good luck clam" in its native southeast Asia. But in Lake George, scientists call it an unwelcome invader that could cause ecological and economic harm.
An intensive search launched after a few tiny clams were found at a sandy beach in August turned up no additional infestations, suggesting the invasion was discovered before it had a chance to spread across the 32-mile-long lake, a popular vacation spot.
"The next step is to determine their age and concentration by taking sediment core samples," said Sandra Nierzwicki-Bauer, director of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Darrin Fresh Water Institute. "Then we'll decide what to do about them."
Since scattered numbers of Asian clams were discovered in Lake Tahoe in 2002, the population there has exploded, thanks to the mollusk's ability to self-fertilize and release up to 2,000 juveniles per day. Their waste has helped trigger algae blooms that turned the cobalt blue water into bright green.
Besides promoting algae overgrowth, Asian clams can also clog water intake pipes and other structures, and their sharp shells can befoul swimming beaches. The fast-growing clams, which mature in months, also compete for food with slow-growing native freshwater mussels, which can live 60 years.
As part of a $1.4 million clam-eradication effort at Lake Tahoe, scuba-diving scientists unrolled long plastic mats on the bottom of coves this summer to smother clam populations that can reach concentrations of 5,000 per square yard.
"A lot of comparisons are made between Lake Tahoe and Lake George," Nierzwicki-Bauer said. "Both are known for gorgeous scenery, excellent water quality and high biodiversity. Both are very important economically as well as ecologically."
Asian clams were long believed to be unable to reproduce in cold Northeastern waters.
The Darrin Freshwater Institute is on a section of Lake George once known as "Millionaire's Row" for the mansions of wealthy industrialists that once graced the shore. Jeremy Farrell, a graduate student there, happened upon the invasive clams a couple of weeks ago when he was playing at a nearby beach with his toddlers.
Further investigation by researchers dumping sand through brass sifters revealed thousands of clams ranging in size from a sesame seed to a peach pit. The institute and other Lake George environmental organizations contracted with Dan Marelli, a mollusk specialist based in Tallahassee, Fla., to lead a group of scientific divers in a survey of the invasion's extent.
The divers found no clams beyond the 2 1/2-acre area they first were found. The next step, Nierzwicki-Bauer said, is to develop a management plan. Most likely, that will involve placing the mats, called benthic barriers, on the sandy lake bottom to smother the clams.
Organizations on Lake George have had success battling other invasive species. Eurasian watermilfoil, a fast-growing aquatic plant that crowds out native species and snarls motorboat propellers, has been held at bay with benthic barriers. And an infestation of zebra mussels has been virtually eradicated by volunteer scuba divers who hand-picked 25,000 of them from rocks.
"Public awareness is a key element in early detection of invasive species and prevention of their spread," Nierzwicki-Bauer said. "Lots of times, new locations are found when an individual sees something that doesn't belong and sends us a picture."
Asian clams don't spread quite as readily as zebra mussels, which swim in the water as larvae and fasten themselves tightly to surfaces such as boats. The clams, which are sometimes used by fishermen as bait, are transported in bait pails and in water remaining inside of boats. They also may be dumped into a waterway by someone cleaning out an aquarium.
Asian clams were first documented in the U.S. on the West Coast in 1938 and have spread to more than 40 states. While the cold Northeast was long considered inhospitable to the clam, German scientists on the Rhine River reported last year that moderate winter warming had a strong positive effect on the species.
"It's just like what happened with zebra mussels but reversed," Nierzwicki-Bauer said. "People said zebra mussels would never get established in the Mississippi River because it was too warm. The next year, they were there. These species are adaptable."
http://webcenters.netscape.compuserve.com/tech/story.jsp?floc=DC-headline&sc=1501&idq=/ff/story/0001/20100903/5830.htm
Now that one is upsetting to me. I grew up in NYC and the Empire State Building has always stood out on the skyline of midtown Manhattan. When we travel north my son always looks for it when we are on the NJ Pike as we pass the city. I have some issues about that view getting blocked from him.
I really don't give a dman where someone wants to build a mosque or a church, but don't screw with the Empire State Building.
The irony is that it was the tallest building when I was my son's age and it's the tallest building at his age.
When we pass the City he always looks for that building and the Chrysler Building. That defines NY.
thanks for the post. i had no clue....
Not in my neighborhood you don't. No not about the mosque,
A Fight on New York’s Skyline
By CHARLES V. BAGLI
The developer's rendering of 15 Penn Plaza, as seen from the north, shows it and the Empire State building in unimpeded spots on the skyline at sunset.
A rendering provided by the owners of the Empire State Building shows how the 15 Penn Plaza tower, as seen from the west, would obstruct the view.
To hear the two sides in the skyscraper war tell it, never has so much been at stake.
The owners of the Empire State Building and their supporters say their tower’s international status and New York City’s skyline are in mortal danger of an assault from a “monstrosity.”
Their rival: a proposed tower on 34th Street two avenues to the west that, according to its developers, will help the city grow and prosper, provide thousands of jobs and improve the quality of life for tens of thousands of New Yorkers.
What irks the former is that the latter would rise to be 1,216 feet, almost as tall as the Empire State Building, and would be just 900 feet away, a little too close for a building that has stood apart in the skyline for its entire 79-year life.
“The question here is: How close is too close to one of New York’s iconic landmarks,” Councilman Daniel R. Garodnick said Monday, after a hearing in which the owners of both properties made their cases, in advance of a City Council vote on Wednesday.
“Is this going to swallow up the Empire State Building,” Mr. Garodnick asked, “or are we just talking about another big building a couple of avenues away?”
The owners of the Empire State Building, Anthony E. and Peter L. Malkin, even want a 17-block no-go zone surrounding their 1,250-foot tall tower. This would prevent Vornado Realty Trust, which wants to erect the new building on Seventh Avenue, or any other developer, from putting up a similarly oversize building in the zone.
The City Planning Commission has already approved Vornado’s plan for a tower, called 15 Penn Plaza, opposite Pennsylvania Station. It would be 56 percent larger than what would ordinarily be allowed, in keeping with the city’s desire to promote high-density development close to transit hubs. But Community Board 5, whose district includes the area, did not approve. A committee at the board said the developer had not provided a rationale for such a large zoning bonus, especially since it did not have a tenant and might not build for years.
The vote on Wednesday by the Council would be the project’s final regulatory hurdle.
Vornado has long wanted to demolish the building that stands there now, the Hotel Pennsylvania, and build a major office tower. In addition to the hotel, a sagging presence across Seventh Avenue from Madison Square Garden, the company owns 10 other buildings in the area, with a total of 11 million square feet.
“The fact is that New York’s skyline has never stopped changing, and one hopes it never will,” said David R. Greenbaum, president of the New York office division of Vornado Realty Trust.
Vornado would undertake a package of transit improvements for Penn Station, the busiest rail hub in North America and a confusing maze for many commuters, worth more than $100 million, he added.
Each side has produced renderings that it says put the new building in perspective. Vornado prefers a view from the north, which shows 15 Penn Plaza and the Empire State Building carving out their own unimpeded spots on the skyline at sunset.
In a full page advertisement in The New York Times on Monday, the Malkins showed a view of Midtown from New Jersey in which a bulky 15 Penn Plaza nearly muscles the sleeker Empire State Building out of view.
At the hearing on Monday, the Malkins produced a poll they had commissioned showing that two-thirds of the respondents felt that 15 Penn Plaza should be rejected as proposed.
“It’s all about the iconography of the New York skyline and whether it matters to people or not,” said Anthony Malkin, president of Malkin Properties. He suggested that 15 Penn Plaza be reduced to 825 feet and that developers should be prohibited from building anything comparable nearby.
George Kaufman, another real estate owner and a friend of the Malkins, submitted a letter saying that 15 Penn Plaza “would be an assault on the Empire State Building and the New York City skyline.” Henry Stern, a former parks commissioner, testified that the proposed tower “could do irreparable harm” to the city.
But various construction union officials spoke in favor of Vornado’s tower, as did Daniel A. Biederman, president of the 34th Street Partnership, a business group that includes his longtime mentor, Peter Malkin, and the biggest property owner, Vornado Realty.
“If there’s anywhere a building of this size and bulk should be built, it’s at Penn Station,” said Mr. Biederman, who also went out of this way to praise “people the quality” of the Malkins.
Completed in 1931, the 102-story Empire State Building was the winner of a fierce three-way race to be the tallest skyscraper in the city. The 927-foot tall tower at 40 Wall Street briefly held the title when it opened in 1930. But it quickly fell to No. 2 when workers raised a spire atop the 1,047-foot tall Chrysler Building. Months later, the Empire State Building topped it at 1,250 feet. It was overtaken by the first World Trade Center, and will again be relegated to No. 2 when the new, 1,776-foot 1 World Trade Center is finished.
Councilman Leroy Comrie posed a final question at the meeting on Monday that seemed to foretell how he would vote: “Is New York City a snapshot taken in 2010 to be held in perpetuity, or is New York City an evolving, dynamic entity?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/nyregion/24empire.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print
Crisis! New York style vs the real thing
By Paul Driessen Sunday, August 15, 2010
“Don’t let the bedbugs bite” is no longer a fashionable good-night wish for Big Apple kids, even in the city’s high-rent districts and posh hotels. Growing infestations of the ravenous bloodsuckers have New Yorkers annoyed, anguished, angry about officialdom’s inadequate responses, and “itching” for answers.
Instead, their Bedbug Advisory Board recommends a bedbug team and educational website. Residents, it advises, should monitor and report infestations. Use blowdryers to flush out (maybe 5% of) the bugs, then sweep them into a plastic bag and dispose properly. Throw away (thousands of dollars worth of) infested clothing, bedding, carpeting and furniture.
Hire (expensive) professionals who (may) have insecticides that (may) eradicate the pests – and hope you don’t get scammed. Don’t use “risky” pesticides yourself. Follow guideline for donating potentially infested furnishings, and be wary of bedbug risks from donated furniture and mattresses.
New Yorkers want real solutions, including affordable insecticides that work. Fear and loathing, from decades of chemophobic indoctrination, are slowly giving way to a healthy renewed recognition that the risk of not using chemicals can be greater than the risk of using them (carefully). Eco-myths are being replaced with more informed discussions about alleged effects of DDT and other pesticides on humans and wildlife.
Thankfully, bedbugs have not been linked to disease – except sometimes severe emotional distress associated with obstinate infestations, incessant itching, and pathetic “proactive” advice, rules and “solutions” right out of Saturday Night Live.
It is hellish for people who must live with bedbugs, and can’t afford professional eradication like what Hilton Hotels or Mayor Bloomberg might hire. But imagine what it’s like for two billion people who live 24/7/365 with insects that definitely are responsible for disease: malarial mosquitoes.
Malaria infects over 300 million people annually. For weeks or months on end, it renders them unable to work, attend school or care for their families – and far more susceptible to death from tuberculosis, dysentery, HIV/AIDS, malnutrition and other diseases that still stalk their impoverished lands.
This vicious disease causes low birth weights in babies and leaves millions permanently brain-damaged. It kills over a million annually, most of them children and mothers, the vast majority of them in Africa. It drains families’ meager savings, and magnifies and perpetuates the region’s endemic poverty.
Emotional distress? Imagine the stress that comes from having no escape from destitution and disease; having to support a child with a perpetual ten-year-old’s mental functions; burying your baby, wife or sibling; or wondering whether you can walk twenty miles to a clinic, before the child you are carrying dies, and whether the clinic will have (non-counterfeit) medicine to cure her.
Frustration over absurd bedbug “solutions”? Imagine the reaction Africans must have to “malaria no more” campaigns that claim they will (eventually) eradicate the disease solely with insecticide-treated bed nets, drugs, “capacity building,” education and (maybe someday) mosquitoes genetically engineered not to carry malaria parasites. As to insecticide spraying, and especially DDT – fuggetaboutit.
DDT is the most powerful, effective, long-lasting mosquito repellant ever invented. Spraying the eaves and inside walls of mud huts and cinderblock homes every six months keeps 80% of the flying killers from entering. It irritates most that do enter, so they leave without biting, and kills any that land. However, many aid agencies refuse to encourage, endorse or fund spraying.
Many don’t even want to monitor mosquito and malaria outbreaks, or determine actual success in reducing disease and death rates. That would be more difficult and expensive than counting the number of bed nets distributed, and underscore the embarrassing reality that their “comprehensive” (and politically correct) insecticide-free programs achieve only 20-40% reductions in morbidity and mortality. By contrast, as South Africa and other countries have demonstrated, adding insecticides and DDT can bring 95% success.
We would never consider 20-40% fewer deaths a “success” for American children. Why should Africa?
Since EPA banned DDT in 1972 – after the United States and Europe had eradicated malaria – billions have been stricken by the vicious diseases, and tens of millions have died. That is intolerable.
We need adult supervision and informed debate on pesticide policies, laws and regulations. We can no longer leave those decisions to unaccountable anti-chemical activists in pressure groups and government agencies. These zealots are making decisions that determine the quality of life for millions of Americans, especially poor families – and life itself for billions of malaria-threatened people worldwide.
If not for the economic and mental health of Americans afflicted by bedbugs – support responsible, ethical policies for Africa’s sick, brain-damaged, and dying parents and children.
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/26588
The Chrysler Building had one of the best views in the city from their outdoor terrace.
A Lunch Club for the Higher-Ups
By CHARLES McGRATH
IT used to be a rule in New York that the higher up you were in the world, the higher up in the sky you ate your lunch. Tycoons and executives dined in aeries. While everyone else ate at ground-level restaurants and coffee shops, or brown-bagged a few floors up in the stockroom, the captains of industry, whisked through the streets in their limos, ascended by elevators to private redoubts at the tops of skyscrapers. There, looking down on the city spread out below them, they drank their tycoon-size martinis, smoked cigars and ordered executive comfort food: Dover sole, say, and a slice of melon trucked in from upstate.
These lofty retreats are mostly gone now, but in the heyday of skyscraper lunching they included the Rockefeller Center Club, on the 65th floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza; the Hemisphere Club and Tower Suite, on the 48th floor of the Time-Life Building; the Pinnacle Club, near the top of the 45-story Socony-Mobil Building; and the Sky Club, on the 56th floor of the Pan Am Building. The oldest of them, and the inspiration for many of the others, was the romantically named Cloud Club, which occupied the 66th, 67th and 68th floors of the Chrysler Building and opened its padded leather doors in July 1930 to a membership of 300 movers and shakers, including E. F. Hutton, Condé Nast and the boxer Gene Tunney.
The Cloud Club was created partly at the behest of Texaco, or the Texas Company as it was called then, which before leasing 14 pricey floors in the new building, insisted that there be a suitable restaurant for its executives. The Cloud Club was the solution, and its design reflected a somewhat uneasy compromise between William Van Alen, who gave the rest of the Chrysler its trademark modernist look, and Walter Chrysler, whose own taste ran to the baronial and faux medieval. In keeping with the unspoken philosophy then that businessmen were sort of like squires, there was a Tudor-style lounge on the 66th floor, with mortise-and-tenon oak paneling, and a Grill Room in the classic Olde English style, with pegged plank floors, wood beams, wrought-iron chandeliers and leaded glass doors.
The main dining room, one floor up and connected by a bronze and marble Renaissance-style staircase, had a futuristic, Fritz Lang sort of look, with polished granite columns and etched glass sconces. There was a cloud mural on the vaulted ceiling, and a mural of Manhattan on the north wall. On the same floor Walter Chrysler had a private dining room with an etched-glass frieze of automobile workers. There was also a private Texaco dining room, with a giant mural of a refinery, and what was reputed to be the grandest men's room in all of New York.
All this was crammed, along with kitchens, a stock-ticker room, a humidor, a barber shop and a locker room with cabinets for stashing one's booze during Prohibition, into a space that, because of the way the Chrysler Building is set back on its higher floors, seems almost preposterously small by today's standards. Backstage, the Cloud Club must have felt like a submarine - or, rather, like a very cramped airship.
Its smallness, along with the fact that it didn't admit women for decades and wasn't open in the evenings, may have detracted a little from the glamour of the Cloud Club. It never took on the aura of the Rainbow Room (dreamed up by John D. Rockefeller, who was a Cloud Club regular) or of nightspots like "21," the Stork Club or El Morocco, which derived some of their energy precisely from being a little more earthbound.
Roger Angell, the New Yorker writer and editor, who lunched at the Cloud Club once or twice with Raoul Fleischmann, the magazine's co-founder, remembers it as a place populated by businessmen and "old gents." They were mostly executives in the automobile, aviation and oil industries, along with a few well-heeled publishing types, like Fleischmann and Henry Luce, whose Time Inc. briefly had headquarters in the Chrysler Building before moving into a skyscraper of its own. In fact, it was at a meeting in the Cloud Club in 1936, just after a Cuban honeymoon with Clare Boothe, that Luce dreamed up what became Life magazine. Luce's son, Henry Luce III, recalls visiting the Cloud Club once with his father when he was 12 or 13. "I remember the wind whistling through very noisily," he said. "You could hear it inside."
The fortunes of the Cloud Club began to decline a little in the 50's and 60's, with the defection of some members to the nearby Sky and Pinnacle clubs, which were both newer and bigger. The whole Chrysler Building fell on hard times in the mid-70's, and in 1977, Texaco, whose executives were then a mainstay of the Cloud Club membership, moved to Westchester. The Cloud Club closed for good in 1979, and various schemes to rehab and reopen it never came to much.
Tishman Speyer, which took over the Chrysler Building in 1998 and painstakingly refurbished it, has leased the top two floors of the Cloud Club space to tenants, while the first is still awaiting an occupant. The grand staircase has been yanked out, and the rest of the space has been pretty well expunged of ghosts and memories. Except for a marble floor and 54-inch-wide windows - which on a clear day offer a view so expansive it's like looking at New York on HDTV - it offers not a clue to its former incarnation.
For some reason, airy views no longer seem much in vogue - at least in public spaces. The Rainbow Room is closed except for parties; the Top of the Sixes, for so many years an obligatory post-prom stop, has been turned into a private cigar club; and Windows on the World, at the World Trade Center, was in decline even before 9/11. The only place where you can pretend to be a tycoon and sip a martini while looking down on the city is the View, the cocktail lounge at the top of the Marriott Marquis, a space so unglamorous that it makes you understand the current fashion for hanging out not at the tops of buildings but in their atriums.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/26/garden/26cloud.html?_r=5&pagewanted=print
I have been to them all, The Rainbow Room is closed except for parties; the Top of the Sixes, for so many years an obligatory post-prom stop, has been turned into a private cigar club; and Windows on the World, at the World Trade Center
The Chrysler was the best.
Manhattan’s Rooftop Bars: Heaven’s Gates
By FRANK BRUNI
Top of the Strand has a view of the Empire State Building.
Shaken or stirred? Red or white? Draft or bottled? For most of the year these are the biggest questions confronting the thirsty New Yorker. And no answer is wrong.
But when the sun is strong and the days are long, an additional, equally important pair of options crops up, and the choice between them can make or break a good night.
Stay down or go up?
I speak of the rooftop bar, an institution with special relevance to New York City, where the roofs are higher, the views longer, the promise grander. In this vertical wonderland it seems only right to ascend.
But doing so is dicey, as recent skyward excursions reminded me. On a rooftop bar you indeed inch closer to heaven. But you can also wind up a whole lot closer to hell.
So a primer is in order: a set of instructions on what to hope for, what to brace for, and when, how, why and where a rooftop can be most pleasurable or insufferable. Icarus headed toward the sun in a heedless fashion — and more or less got burned. Don’t make the same mistake.
Know for starters that many of the city’s most vaunted rooftop bars don’t merely have velvet ropes, they have velvet barricades — sometimes in the form of oddly restrictive admission policies, sometimes in the form of random, inexplicable hours.
With altitude comes attitude. My attempts Saturday to locate a suitable rooftop destination for three friends and me illustrated the point. I called 60 Thompson, a hotel in SoHo, to make sure its rooftop bar wasn’t closed for a private party. Experience had taught me that rooftop bars often are.
“It’s open,” the woman on the other end of the line said. “But it’s for members and hotel guests only.”
I asked, “What’s a member?” I wasn’t aware that you could join or pay dues to a hotel.
“A member,” she said, “is chosen by the hosts only.” Before I could ask who these mystical hosts were and by what mysterious criteria they made their selections, she was gone.
My next conversation, with someone at the Hotel on Rivington, on the Lower East Side, was even more confusing. “We do have a rooftop bar,” she confirmed, “but I don’t believe it’s open tonight.”
“A private party?” I asked.
“We do have private parties there sometimes,” she answered, “and sometimes we have public parties.”
And on this night?
They had neither, she said.
So why was it closed?
“I don’t know,” she said, her bored tone suggesting that she was as untroubled by her ignorance as I was exasperated with it.
Even when a rooftop bar is open, it’s rarely easily accessible. You have to find a special entrance, take a special elevator, follow a trail of bread crumbs left by the last pathetic saps who dared to dream of drinks under the stars.
Take mad46, the bar on top of the Roosevelt Hotel, in Midtown.
The main bank of elevators won’t get you there. Instead you must go to a specific northeast corner of the hotel. On the sidewalk there I spotted an official-looking sentry dressed all in black, with a very conspicuous, secret service-style walkie-talkie. The walkie-talkie and its cousin, the headset-and-earpiece combo, allow crowd managers not just to communicate with one another but also to create an air of extreme exclusivity. Needless to say these accessories are ubiquitous among the staff at rooftop bars.
The mad46 sidewalk sentry directed my friend and me to an identically outfitted sentry guarding a rope line in front of a nearby elevator. Grimly and wordlessly this second sentry admitted us to the elevator and escorted us to the top floor, where we were handed off to a hostess, who looked us up and down before permitting us past her station, through a long, dark passageway and onto the roof. Pan’s labyrinth was less tortuous.
More rewarding too. While there are beautifully manicured hedges at mad46 and some inviting daybeds with white canopies, the cocktails are too sweet, the wines by the glass are pedestrian, the plastic cups in which drinks are served are flimsy, and the food is unforgivable. Sometimes a rooftop drinker gets hungry; he or she should have the possibility of an edible snack. The duck quesadilla at mad46 did not qualify. I could make a better treat out of emery boards and dental floss, and I’m not a particularly gifted cook (or cosmetician).
The clincher at mad46 was this: The view isn’t so spectacular, in part because the way the furniture is positioned in relation to the high perimeter wall means that you have to stand, not sit, if you want a real survey of the vast cityscape at your feet. And even then you don’t have an optimal vantage point.
That’s the case with many more rooftop bars than you would expect, and it’s an argument for hopping online, accessing some photographs and getting an idea of what you’re in for before you angle, grovel and prostrate yourself for admission to one of these haughty aeries.
While the recently renovated rooftop bar at the Gramercy Park Hotel, for example, has an appealing, lush greenhouse aesthetic and some (overpriced) snacks that are actually satisfying, you may have to crane your neck to see the nearby buildings, which don’t rise as high as their brethren. And that’s assuming that the glass upper halves of the surrounding walls are retracted. When I was there they weren’t. Combined with a temporary semi-opaque glass ceiling above, they succeeded in creating the impression of an indoor space, and negated the whole point of being up on the roof.
The bar atop the Peninsula Hotel, in contrast, conveys the heady sense that you’re hovering in the clouds. It too is no cinch to reach. If you take the wrong elevator, you step out to find yourself amid dim lighting, botanical aromas and soothing music: the hotel spa. An attendant will shrug and sigh: she is accustomed to such intrusions. And she will send you back where you came from, so that you can meander through the confusing, multitiered lobby until you trip across the elevator designated for the rooftop bar, which reopened a few years ago, after a splashy redo, as the Salon de Ning.
But once you’re in the Salon de Ning: wow. The Peninsula’s Midtown location affords you, to the north, a sweeping view of the Trump Tower to the right, a sliver of Central Park going all the way up to the Metropolitan Museum of Art dead ahead; the sleek towers of the Time Warner Center far to the left. You can set your elbows and your drink on a ledge that’s not obstructively high and take it all in while the sun sets, the city’s night lights come up, the traffic below lightens, the sound of it grows fainter, and a breeze ruffles your collar. This is what rooftop drinking is all about.
For a view in the opposite direction, the Top of the Strand, a relatively new bar on the rooftop of the Strand Hotel, is hard to beat. It faces south and perfectly frames the Empire State Building, just a few blocks away. It is also among the least self-infatuated rooftop bars I encountered, the path to it obvious, the crowd managers relatively few. Perhaps because of that it seems to draw one of the most frumpily dressed, unglamorous crowds.
Rooftop drinking has its curiosities, like odd plastic receptacles on the tables that hark back to some little-remembered past. What could they possibly be? Ashtrays! Many outdoor bars still let you light up, so smoking is prevalent on rooftops that aren’t partially enclosed.
The dress code is different. Because some rooftop bars, like the Gansevoort Hotel’s in the meatpacking district, abut pools, your view may involve as much flesh as steel. This can be thrilling or galling, depending on the convention in town.
And you are likely to hear a particularly striking variety of languages and accents on rooftop bars, where the ratio of tourists to locals can easily reach 25 to 1. You are also likely to get awful service, in accordance with some managerial theory that open air obviates courtesy and efficiency.
A bartender at the Hudson Terrace on the West Side gave two friends and me the wrong drinks when we ordered our first round and the wrong check after we ordered our second. More proudly than apologetically, she explained, “I’m so hung over.” It was after 7 p.m.
The Hudson Terrace has all sorts of beams and woodwork that hinder glimpses of the river nearby. Not so a few blocks north at Press, the rooftop bar of the new Ink48 hotel. Press has loads of space, understated furniture, a decorative pool into which you can dip your toes, and a completely transparent glass perimeter that makes you feel almost as if you’re on a platform floating over the Hudson. The view goes far up the river in one direction, over to New Jersey in another, and Midtown looms spectacularly to your side. This is without question one of the city’s most attractive rooftop bars.
But the ultimate rooftop experience — one that simultaneously demonstrates the highs and lows of it all — is found at 230 Fifth, both the address for, and name of, a jarringly sprawling deck near Madison Square Park with room for 600 people, easy.
It’s not coy. The path to the elevator is so prominently marked and frequently mobbed that it calls to mind a ride at Disney World. The elevator glows pink on the inside, like one of the planes in Virgin America’s fleet.
At the top, on the deck itself: a pink elephant statue; topiary in the shape of a giant cat; dozens of palm trees; giant yellow-and-white-striped umbrellas; small misting fans on the tables; and a menu of drinks with cutesy-poo names like Pair of Pears, Absolut-ly Peachy and Berry Berry Good. It’s a little bit beach club, a little bit country club, a little bit Vegas. And like Vegas it’s such a thorough, unabashed accretion of tacky and ridiculous effects that it achieves a florid poetry all its own, the kind that makes you groan and giggle simultaneously.
I giggled a lot, because I got lucky with the soundtrack on the night I was there, a trip back to the 1980s and their most gloriously cheesy: Missing Persons, Berlin, Duran Duran. I felt briefly disoriented. And isn’t that really the point of the rooftop bar, at least in New York?
It’s an exercise in dislocation, in cognitive dissonance. Although you’re in a city of tight quarters and constant confinement, seemingly removed from the natural world, the rooftop bar gives you a blast of the great outdoors, a reprieve from your usual tethers and an outlook that’s suddenly expansive. The sky’s the limit.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/23/dining/23bruni.html?hp=&pagewanted=print
great story bnb.....i used to do stunts like that, not there though......geez that was years ago....
A Long Jump to Manhood
By SAM DOLNICK
HIGH above the Hudson River, at the tip of the New York mainland, a few teenage boys stood expectantly on the cliffs. Looking like tall, reedy sprouts amid the jumping spots they call Jungle and Capone’s Chair, the shirtless boys scanned the horizon, searching for someone to impress.
“Circle Line! Circle Line! Let’s go, come on!” the youngest among them cried as a boat carrying tourists slipped into view. Four shivering boys scampered to the edge, found their footing and leapt, one by one, down 30 feet that felt like 100, landing with a splash in the sun-speckled strip of water that separates the Bronx from Manhattan.
Jumping into the water from these rocky cliffs is a rite of passage for boys in the northwest Bronx, a tradition that mixes adolescent swagger, apocryphal lore and just enough danger to keep things interesting.
“It’s like a bar mitzvah,” Matt Afon, 17, said as river water dripped from his mesh shorts after a recent jump. “Now you’re a man.”
But for generations of police officers with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the rocks, which lie beyond a stretch of Metro-North tracks, have offered a summer ritual of a different sort. “We chase kids all summer long,” said Sgt. Daniel Pepi, an authority officer. “Sometimes we get three or four calls a day.” Like the jumping itself, the cat-and-mouse games with the police go back decades.
Aaron Donovan, an authority spokesman, said the jumping was “extremely dangerous” and ticked off the hazards: “Jumping off a 30-foot-high cliff into the Harlem River, crossing busy railroad tracks sandwiched between two blind curves, venturing near third rails electrified with 700 volts of direct current.”
For the teenagers, the appeal lies less in the river, which periodically brings flotillas of trash to the swimming hole, than in the very danger of the jump and the bare-chested freedom of the adventure. On the rock, there are no Regents tests, no college applications, no summer jobs handing out fliers for a pizzeria (Charlie Suozzo’s gig) or stocking food at a Yankee Stadium hot dog stand (Georgie Purce’s.)
“There’s no safety net here,” Matt said. “It’s your own decision. You’re taking your own risk.”
On the afternoon of the Circle Line performance, Liam McGinn, a 17-year-old with an orange and black bathing suit, was the most reluctant jumper, and thus the target of barbs from many of the other four boys. But there were plenty of jokes to go around — there were mothers to discuss, as well as Matt’s Mickey Mouse T-shirt and his scraped ankle, and their friend nicknamed Faceplant.
There were also the jumping spots to ponder and analyze. There are at least 10 spots, each higher than the last and each with its own immutable name handed down by the gods, or at least by previous generations of boys. Jungle is the beginner level, where this group spent most of its time and from which most of the boys jumped when the Circle Line boat passed; it is a roughly 30-foot drop, and named for the overgrown bushes crowding the rock’s edge.
Next is Wheel, named for the spray-painted circle there. Then there is the vaguely seat-shaped rock called Capone’s Chair. And then, because this tradition was invented by teenage boys, there are several jumping spots named for delicate parts of the male anatomy.
But ask the boys about their goals for the summer, and they will say in unison, and with a trace of awe, “B-Ball.” They are referring to a jump from the high rock — 85 feet, they estimate — that was immortalized by Mark Wahlberg and a boyish Leonardo DiCaprio in the film “The Basketball Diaries.” A few among them have scaled its heights, and the others say that by the end of the summer, they, too, will be ready for it.
As they jump, the boys conform to an unspoken etiquette and style. They wear shorts to their knees, with boxers sticking out the top. They jump in pairs or as a group — jumping alone is no fun — and they maintain a stoic, or perhaps shocked, silence all the way down.
Georgie, 16, likes to jump only if he can go first. He said that he had grown up hearing stories of his father jumping from these rocks, and that he had made the leap for the first time last year.
“I’ve always known about it,” he said. “But last summer I just worked up the courage to come.”
“It’s a feeling of accomplishment,” Liam added, “because everyone around here does it.”
As they rested between jumps this day, the boys dried off, the blue metal of the Henry Hudson Bridge glinting in the sunlight. Georgie broke out the Cap’n Crunch peanut butter cereal. A white bird flew past and — Walker Stevens swore he saw it — defecated with gusto, sparking peals of laughter. The group calls the cliffs C Rock for the giant blue Columbia University logo painted on the rock face. The C, maintained by Columbia’s crew team, faces the university’s football field in Inwood, across the river in Manhattan.
When a couple zipped past on jet skis, the boys shouted, watching the wake disturb the rhythm of their swimming hole. They debated when the next Circle Line boat would swing by, and then were quiet for a moment as a Metro-North train hurtled past behind them. Then Walker, the youngest and most outspoken of the bunch, cried out, “Yo, look! I found seaweed in my underwear!”
As the day wore on, the boys jumped several more times, everyone except Liam, who chose the teasing over the cold water. One time, Georgie and Charlie slapped five in midair, but Matt, who had a cellphone camera, missed the shot — a lost Facebook winner, they lamented. Georgie and Charlie held hands for their next jump, but Matt missed that picture, too.
Many of the boys’ parents know they jump from the rocks — some used to hang out there themselves. “It’s a coming-of-age thing in this neighborhood,” said Cordelia Stevens, Walker’s mother. She said she hung out on the rocks as a teenager but never mustered the courage to jump.
When Walker brought it up, Ms. Stevens said, she thought about forbidding him, out of safety concerns. But she didn’t. “I felt like kind of a hypocrite, because we were talking about things that I had done before,” she said.
The boys returned two days later. Lounging in the sun, their shirts and baseball caps draped over their skateboards, they told stories of a man who supposedly burst his eardrum during a jump and permanently damaged his brain. They successfully egged on David Gessler, 15, to jump naked.
But just as they were trying to muster their courage for an even higher jump, someone spotted a police officer climbing the hill. Whispered curses accompanied a rush to pull on soiled T-shirts. A few of the boys had been caught before, but most had not.
Officer Ronald Castro of the transportation authority reached the boys, making threats about court summonses and warning about the dangers of the train tracks. The boys hung their heads, shaken if not fully alarmed, and trudged down to a road across the tracks. They expected to be let off with a warning, as they were an hour later.
As the afternoon heat began to break and the boys’ mothers began to arrive to pick them up, Sergeant Pepi, who was also on the scene, shook his head. “Believe me,” he said, “we’re going to be back.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/nyregion/18ritual.html?ref=nyregion
In the Hamptons, Going Against the TideBy FERNANDA SANTOS
SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. — In the exclusive world of the Hamptons, the playground of the rich and famous like the billionaire George Soros and the fashion designer Calvin Klein, Evelyn Konrad is far from being a boldface name.
But in some circles in this opulent seaside retreat, Ms. Konrad has achieved a level of notoriety for her relentless and unapologetic campaign against a sacred cow in these parts: luxury real estate.
She has been called irritating, meddlesome, even crazy. To Ms. Konrad, though, the houses built by Wall Street’s titans are destroying life as she has known it for the half century she has been coming here.
She is perfectly at ease in her role.
“I seem like a very good target, a little old lady in white tennis sneakers, but they’re making a very grim mistake if that’s who they think I am,” Ms. Konrad, who is 81, said on a recent afternoon, savoring an ice cream cone and wearing a miniskirt over a brown bathing suit. “I’m contentious. I’m obstinate. I’m not going to give this up.”
Wagging her sharp tongue and applying the law degree she earned just five years ago, Ms. Konrad has accused village officials, builders and home buyers of corruption, profiteering and bad taste in court papers and in letters to The Southampton Press.
(A sample of her acerbic style: She has described some homes here as “multimillion-dollar penis extensions” that will make a buyer feel as if “he has never left northern New Jersey.”)
Her opponents are equally uninhibited about attacking her.
The mayor of Southampton, Mark Epley, said Ms. Konrad was “throwing stuff on the wall to see what sticks.” A village trustee, Paul L. Robinson, said he had wondered whether Ms. Konrad was just “an obnoxious, mean-spirited individual wasting taxpayer funds with her frivolous lawsuits.”
So far, the village has had the upper hand. Ms. Konrad’s legal challenges, arguing that the size of many of the new homes violated Southampton’s laws, have been dismissed. Not surprisingly, she is filing appeals.
Despite her setbacks, Ms. Konrad has stirred a provocative conversation. Now that Wall Street’s newest multimillionaires have pushed their way into parts of the village that had remained largely untouched by development, some people wonder what will become of the slice of Southampton that is removed from the oceanfront estates, a place where nobility of pedigree or size of investment portfolio has never really mattered.
“A lot of us are starting to realize that it’s not about greed and real estate and development and profit,” said Sally Spanburgh, 42, an architect who writes a local blog on preservation and lives in a turn-of-the-20th-century home near the village center. “It’s about community and connectedness, and I think Evelyn has shown us that we could lose all that.”
To Ms. Konrad, Southampton has been a refuge from a busy life in Manhattan. She raised four children who went to private schools (Chapin, Spence and St. Bernard’s); she was vice president of the Parents League of New York, an organization of private school parents; and she was a regular at black-tie affairs (her first husband was a real estate developer). She had her own career, too — business reporter for NBC, public relations consultant and chief executive of two Internet-based companies that fizzled.
After visiting Southampton regularly for nearly 50 years, she bought a home in the village’s oldest subdivision, Rosko Place, a collection of unassuming ranch and colonial-style houses built on half-acre lots in a former potato farm. She spends the rest of her time in Manhattan, where she owns a condominium on East 84th Street. For years, her house was among the largest — 2,100 square feet of living space and a pool out back, as well as a 1988 Mercedes-Benz in the garage.
The subdivision’s residents have included a retired milkman, a school guidance counselor and the village’s sole optometrist. Its roads offer no access to the beach, and the neighborhood became a highly desirable location only in recent years, as waterfront properties become too expensive and too hard to come by.
Homes that had been bought for $30,000 in the 1960s suddenly were selling for $1 million or more, a fortune for families for whom the properties were at once savings, investment and retirement account. Developers bought them, demolished them and replaced them with houses that dwarfed the ones around them.
“My daughters look at this house and say, ‘How come ours is not like that?’ ” said Dr. Elaine Fox, 59, an internist who has lived in Rosko Place for 25 years and whose modest ranch house now abuts a newly built home almost three times its size. “This is not what life used to be about around here.”
Ms. Konrad was 73 when she heeded a suggestion from one of her sons, Robert Jereski, that she go to law school. (“What am I going to do if I retire?” she said recently. “Play bridge all day with the girls?”) Law, Mr. Jereski said, seemed like “a natural fit” for his mother, who is “supersmart, and loves to fight if there’s a fight to be had.”
Peter Lushing, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, still remembers the day he saw Ms. Konrad sitting in the front row of his class on criminal procedure among a group of students in their 20s.
She had an opinion about everything, and “I thought she was going to drive me nuts,” Mr. Lushing said. “Then I realized I really liked having her there.” She had, he noted, “the litigator’s attitude,” accepting nothing at face value, criticizing everything and leaving it to her opponents to prove their point. “Litigators don’t make nice,” he said.
She graduated in 2005 and was admitted to the bar on Oct. 22, 2007. A month later, she filed a motion in State Supreme Court in Riverhead against Southampton and the builder of a big house near her home, accusing them of failing to notify neighbors of a public hearing on the construction plans. As it turned out, a notice had been published in the local newspaper; she said the case was pending.
Then she challenged the approval of the house next to Ms. Fox’s, saying it violated the village’s restrictions over the size of houses in old and new developments. Again, a judge dismissed the complaint, finding that the house did comply with village law.
Still, Ms. Konrad is persisting. She asked the court to allow her to reargue her first case, focusing this time on a zoning law change approved by Mayor Epley and two of the four village trustees. One of them was Mr. Robinson, who owns several investment properties in Southampton, which Ms. Konrad argued posed a conflict of interest that should have barred him from voting.
Ms. Konrad argues that the passage of the zoning law, relaxing restrictions on the size of houses on certain lots, would benefit Mr. Robinson because he would be able to split the properties he owns and build more homes.
Mr. Robinson has two subdivision requests pending before the Planning Board.
“Last I looked, this is America and nothing forbids no one from subdividing their property if it’s within the law,” Mr. Robinson’s lawyer, Gilbert G. Flanagan, said in an interview. “If you have a beef with the law, change it. I haven’t seen her file a lawsuit that seeks to do that.”
As she awaits a decision on her latest appeal, Ms. Konrad, who has been personally financing her legal battles, has started asking some of her wealthy friends to help pay for a federal lawsuit against the village.
While she would love nothing more than to see the new houses torn down, she knows that is far-fetched. She says she just wants a fair shot to prove that she has been right all along, that the new zoning law is illegal, that the trustees’ vote was illegal and that all the homes built under the law are illegal, too.
And that in a place where money rules, Ms. Konrad said, “there might be a limit to money’s influence after all.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: July 9, 2010
An earlier version of this article erroneously stated that Ms. Konrad earned a law degree four years ago.
Police arrest Kobayashi for hot dog contest outburst
A former eating champion illegally stage rushes the famous Coney Island competition's award ceremony
By VERENA DOBNIK, Associated Press Hot dog!
Competitive eater Joey Chestnut has held on to his title at the annual July Fourth hot dog eating contest at New York's Coney Island, but one of his biggest rivals tried to crash the celebration and has been taken into custody.
Chestnut chomped down on 54 hot dogs in 10 minutes on Sunday to win the annual Nathan's International Hot Dog Eating Contest for the fourth year in a row.
Watching from the crowd was six-time champion Takeru Kobayashi (tah-KEH'-roo koh-bah-YAH'-shee), who has not signed a contract with Major League Eating to be free to compete in contests sanctioned by other groups.
But Kobayashi went on stage after the competition. Police officers grabbed him, and he tried to hold onto police barricades as they took him into custody.
Get your hot dogs here,
Coney Island prepares for annual hot dog eating contest
George Shea, right, chairman of Major League Eating, gives 68 hot dogs to World Champion hot dog-eater Joey Chestnut to symbolize his world record, during the official weigh-in ceremony.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-07-04-hotdog-competition_N.htm?csp=34news&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+usatoday-NewsTopStories+%28News+-+Top+Stories%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo
What's great about being a New Yorker in Exile?
4th of July
Cookouts
Fireworks
And Yankee baseball on TBS NOW!
2 board marks, just you and me bud!!
looking for a getaway?
The Hamptons for ProcrastinatorsBy SARAH MASLIN NIR
SUMMER is in full swing in the Hamptons. On the beaches, surfers and piping plovers vie for sand space, and at the Bridgehampton Polo Club the games have begun. In East Hampton, the fresh lobster salad at Claws on Wheels is selling briskly at $60 a pound. Every weekend, the parade of cars from the city snags horribly in Watermill. And renters have returned in large numbers to snap up houses from Southampton to Montauk.
For those who wish to join this sun-bleached and sandy set, it is not too late to rent a place: options are still available in every price range. And this year they are down from prerecession heights, and owners are being more flexible on the lengths of rentals.
Brokers said they were relieved to see a return to a “normal” market just one year after the post-Lehman summer of 2009, which some referred to as “catastrophic.” Some houses stood empty of renters all season long.
“What a difference a year makes,” says Judi Desiderio, the president of Town and Country Real Estate. She described 2009 as the worst Hamptons rental season she had experienced in 28 years in the business. And she says her company has done three times the number of rentals it did last summer.
Prices have also rebounded, which is undoubtedly a disappointment for the people who last year were renting at half price from desperate homeowners.
Rentals are up between 10 and 20 percent this year compared with the dismal market of last year, said Rick Hoffman, the regional senior vice president of the Corcoran Group for the East End. But these prices are still lower than those that homeowners could command in the high-flying years before the recession. Many rentals are also for sale.
“From the banner year — being 2007 for rentals — the market is still down around 20 percent,” Mr. Hoffman said. And “2010 is shaping up to be much better than last year, and even 2008.”
Alan Wiener, 63, a real estate agent in Manhattan, has rented a summer place for his family in the Hamptons for several years. This year, on the advice of his broker at Town and Country, Mr. Wiener waited until just before Memorial Day to bid on three rentals in East Hampton, each offer representing a significant discount.
“Ten days before Memorial Day, they hadn’t rented — forget for the summer, not even for the month,” he said. “We made an offer that was in the area of 20 to 25 percent below the asking price.”
Two of the homeowners said no and one said yes. The Wieners ended up with a four-bedroom house on two and a half acres in the Northwest Woods, with a pool and room for their two grown daughters and their families. Mr. Wiener would not say how much he was paying for the house, but he secured it for the entire season.
“Compared to last summer we paid a little bit more,” he said, “but for a lot more house.”
As for availability, brokers say the old rules still apply on top properties — like those directly on the ocean or those south of the Montauk Highway, which traverses the Hamptons from east to west. Such places were rented long ago.
What’s left tends to be far from the beach, to lack an amenity like a pool, or to be a bit snug for a gang of friends who want to share. These are also the places that cost less.
Perhaps the biggest change in the market this year is in the willingness of owners to rent their houses for shorter periods.
Stuart Epstein, an owner of Devlin McNiff Real Estate in East Hampton, says that in the past, most owners were determined to rent their houses for the entire season — Memorial Day to Labor Day — and not by the week or the month. But last year many homeowners, fearful of being left with an empty house, agreed to abbreviated stays.
That trend seems to be persisting this summer.
“People are just optimizing,” says Amadeus Ehrhardt, an associate broker at the Engel & Völkers agency in Southampton. “Before, it was always, ‘Got to get that best house before somebody else does.’ ” Now, he says, renters are focused on finding the right house for the time that best fits their schedule.
Mr. Hoffman of Corcoran agreed. “In the good old days,” he said, “we did nothing less than a full summer rental.”
Gary DePersia, an associate broker and senior vice president of the Corcoran Group Real Estate in East Hampton, said that although he had done fewer partial-season rentals this year than last, the number was still higher than in prerecession days.
“Now even if they have that money,” he said, “they want to be a little more frugal, but they don’t want to necessarily rent a lesser house. So if you don’t want to rent an inferior house, you rent the same house for a lesser period of time.”
“A lot of the marginal houses have still not rented,” Mr. DePersia said. He defines marginal as “a house that’s not in a sexy location,” adding, “It could be in the woods; it doesn’t have the latest amenities; it doesn’t have the latest furniture.”
In an area of hot spots, the towns that make up the Hamptons fluctuate in popularity. Time was when Montauk might as well have been in Montana, but not anymore.
“There’s virtually nothing left in Montauk,” Ms. Desiderio says. That’s because of a paucity of housing stock in and around the outlying surfer village, which has become shabby chic.
The central towns of Watermill and Wainscott, Mr. DePersia said, do better with rentals than the “the bookends” of Amagansett to the east and Southampton to the west. The Shinnecock Canal separates Southampton from communities like Westhampton and Hampton Bays, which brokers say constitute a somewhat separate market because of their distance from the favored and more easterly Hamptons.
But for renters who don’t require the latest in décor and amenities, or the most with-it address, there are many properties that are fine for stringing up a hammock.
Houses without pools, says Maryanne Horwath, an agent at Prudential Douglas Elliman, linger longer on the market. Of the 30 or so rentals she has done this season, she said, only one did not have a pool.
Prudential Douglas Elliman has a three-bedroom house without a pool in a part of Southampton north of the Montauk Highway listed for the relatively low price of $9,000 a month. It is surrounded by trees, in a development with communal tennis courts.
In the Springs section of East Hampton, Victoria Van Vlaanderen, an agent with Town and Country, is listing an Adirondack-style three-bedroom house with a heated pool and views of Hog Creek.
The house has a double-height peaked ceiling over the living room, which is paneled entirely in rough cedar. But two of the bedrooms are in the partially sunken lower level that opens onto the backyard. The pool, set away from the house, is surrounded by woods. The remainder of the season at the house will cost $25,000.
In Southampton, Mr. Ehrhardt is showing a four-bedroom two-and-a-half-bath house with two fireplaces on Heady Creek Lane. Several of the bedrooms have extra beds to accommodate weekend guests. It has a screened-in porch and a small pool.
The house is near Hill Street, a main thoroughfare of Southampton, which can bring some street noise, but shade trees and hedges block out any unsightly views. The rent is $25,000 for this month and $35,000 for August.
Mr. DePersia is seeking a renter for one of the more upscale houses still available: a six-bedroom seven-bath shingle-style mansion on Fithian Lane within walking distance of East Hampton’s main street. It is not on the water, a deal-breaker for some high-rolling renters, but it does have a pool and a pool house. The rental price for this month and August combined is $225,000, and Mr. DePersia said the owners might consider shorter-term rentals.
Almost right, but not quite? Although at this point most of the ultra-high-end places are gone, there are still opportunities to indulge in the ultimate Hamptons dream house.
In Watermill, Mr. DePersia has a place fit for a professional athlete (or those with the income of one). It has 7 bedrooms, 10 bathrooms, 4 fireplaces and a vast wine cellar. There’s an elevator, which is uncommon in the Hamptons but useful if you sprain your ankle on the sunken tennis court.
The two gated acres are also home to a pool and pool house, complete with a hot tub, as well as a large guesthouse with a separate hot tub for when the guests are your in-laws. There’s a basketball court and, for the Tiger Woods in you, a putting green. The place is available for select weeks in July and August, at $75,000 a week.
I have a couple of the 1973-1986 editions.
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