After working late last night, I exited the building on Cedar Street, turned west and saw with startling clarity the lit buildings of the World Financial Center against the blue-black sky. Stark—there’s no better way to describe them there, drawing the eye past the cranes and girders of the World Trade Center site, as if someone had activated a real-world sharpen filter. Is one’s sight clearer in winter? It was harder than I guessed to Google quickly but I found a bad MSNBC article that answers the question:

One reason for the clarity of a winter’s night is that cold air cannot hold as much moisture as warm air can. Hence, on many nights in the summer, the warm moisture-laden atmosphere causes the sky to appear hazier. By day it is a milky, washed-out blue, which in winter becomes a richer, deeper and darker shade of blue. For us in northern climes, this only adds more luster to that part of the sky containing the beautiful wintertime constellations.

Boing Boing noted today (via Kottke.org) designer Richard Howe’s photographic documentation of every street corner in Manhattan, “The Manhattan Street Corners.” (Howe’s site was temporarily unavailable with an exceeded bandwidth limit when I tried checking it out.)

It reminds me of Caleb Smith’s resolution (which, like Howe’s project, took two years) to walk every street in Manhattan.

It also reminds me of conceptual artist/photographer Dylan Stone’s plan to photograph not only Manhattan's street corners but the four sides of every block, for a series he named “Drugstore Photographs, Or, A Trip Along the Yangtze River.”

For comparative purposes, Howe took 11,000 photos covering every corner in Manhattan. Stone, who reckoned he’d need “between one and three rolls of film” per block to accomplish his feat, had taken 26,000 snapshots by the year 2000—and he never finished the project, having covered only the blocks below Canal Street.

“My project, at heart, is about conservation,” Stone wrote. “It is a living, precious photographic archive of an entire city.” And this statement gained resonance after 9/11, as part of his mundane city record included photos of the World Trade Center.

Because I hadn’t ridden my bike since autumn but had planned a trek for today, I wheeled it uptown for maintenance by my friend Joe (not to be confused with my Toledo-area Joe).

Joe is a computer programmer. He sudos fearlessly and has a two-monitor setup at his home workstation, just like you see in the movies.

He’s also an avid cyclist and owner of multiple bikes, including one that literally folds in half. Joe builds these bikes from scratch, most recently for his girlfriend and friend-of-mine, Kelly. Given rims, tires and a pile of spokes, Joe has even handmade wheels, which I didn’t even know was possible. But it’s all for fun and he’s adept at it.

After raising my bike from his kitchen floor with a lower-tech version of a garage lift, he degreased then regreased my chain, realigned my brakes (the grip of the rear one was exerting less force than an arthritic grandmother petting a kitten) and balanced the off-kilter rear tire. All the while, he explained what he was doing and why so that I might do it myself and drip filthy bike grease in my own apartment.

I took notes. I learned Simple Green is the best, most cost-effective degreaser. I learned that chains should be cleaned ideally every two months of regular riding or every 60 miles. I learned a little bit of chain grease goes a long way. I learned which screws and nuts to tighten or loosen to improve braking performance. And so on. I think he may have thought I was kidding but I told Joe he should have Kelly video-record his sessions on bike building, maintenance and riding technique, then post them to the internet to educate biking beginners or provide more savvy cyclists with handy tips and tricks. I envision this miniseries as This Old House, but instead, you know, it’d be called This Old Bike and star Joe as the affable host with reassuring facial hair who can explain things like gear ratios in plain English.

During Joe’s tooling and advising, Kelly heated up a raspberry pie she’d returned with from a recent Hamptons vacation and served it with coffee for breakfast. (“You boys need your sugar!” she chided.) Alas, she couldn’t make the bike trip with Joe and I because she had auditions.

Kellyless, we made our way from Inwood down the Greenway on the West Side. Many families were capitalizing on the sunny, breezy weather by barbecuing and picnicking along the path and many of their children attempted to die early by inadvertently flinging themselves at us just as we were passing them.

Once downtown, we cut crosstown just north of the World Trade Pit at Warren Street. There, a short cyclist with a soft Southern accent noted that he’d been ticketed several times by a cop for riding his bike across the West Side Highway crosswalk. We walked our bikes across the West Side Highway crosswalk.

We boarded the Brooklyn Bridge, dodged hundreds of pedestrian tourists, including the many who were unaware a full half of the walkway is dedicated to bike traffic, and stopped near the midway point to view Olafur Eliasson’s temporary public-art project in the East River, The New York City Waterfalls, cycling cascades of water from scaffolding nearly as tall as the Statue of Liberty. From the bridge, you can see three of the waterfalls; the fourth is under the bridge.

Because our pie-energy had waned, Joe asked for a lunch recommendation, and after entering DUMBO, I found Grimaldi’s without much trouble. But even at the relatively weird dining hour (around 3 p.m.), a large, waiting crowd spilled down Old Fulton Street. We instead chose Front Street Pizza for a few slices (with one topping, $3 each) and some glimpses of a sweaty Clint Eastwood in In the Line of Fire on the TVs mounted near the ceiling.

Crossing back into Manhattan, we rode our bikes under the bridge to better view the waterfall there. We noticed a half-dozen fire trucks, lights flashing, idling nearby and moved in closer to investigate. Around the bridge’s tower foundation nearest shore paced an FDNY rescue boat, two NYPD speedboats, a motorized black rubber raft with wetsuit-clad police divers, and a police helicopter that flew under the bridge, twice, while apparently searching the site or just showing off. When the divers reached one of the speedboats, they boarded and began operating its winch. “Oh boy! They’re going to bring up the body now,” we thought. But no: the cops merely winched the raft into the speedboat, then left, as did all of the other craft.

Returning up the East Side, first on First Avenue, then back on the Greenway, we passed a Native American ceremony, complete with garb, headdresses, music and dancing. After a pause for sports drinks to replenish our electrolytes and quench our man-sized thirsts, we headed further north then cut back to the West Side through Harlem. A darting squirrel in Marcus Garvey Park ran onto Joe’s foot while he was riding, which was a neat trick that surprised Joe and squirrel in equal measure.

We eventually made it back to Inwood, so that I might tell my tale, and I’m pretty sure I sunburned myself again, plus my ass hurts; I’m walking like John Wayne and I think I may have bruised my prostate or something. What caused this? Here are some theories:

1. My bike’s frame is too small for my build. Perhaps my form is warped and causing undue ass-stress. Based on my inseam, Joe recommends a 20" frame; my current frame is 17".
2. My seat sometimes shimmies when I’m riding; also, I discovered it can rotate like a periscope. Joe was initially alarmed about this because you don’t want a seat to fly off and leave your large intestine vulnerable to perforation by your seat-post. However, he believes my particular post problem can be fixed by buying a new one for about $7 online.
3. My seat is not providing the cushioning my ass desires. But Joe doesn’t think that’s the problem; he’s a proponent of smaller seats. The wider models favored by the elderly and wide-assed can throw a rider’s form out of alignment and allow for too much stray movement.
4. I have a delicate ass. Do my pants need better padding? Should I eat more donuts to fortify my ass region?
5. I’m already a pain in the ass. I just wanted to get this one out in the open before any of you could suggest it.

Regardless of my pains, I look forward to future adventures with my biking buddies.

This is the view I see almost every weekday, walking to my apartment down West 192nd Street from the 190th Street station of the A train. I’ve always enjoyed the “stacks” of apartment buildings rising like a mountain above Broadway.

Here’s the interesting bit: a commenter for Isabel Lugo’s recent blog entry on population densities in the U.S. provided a link to a satellite view of the country’s “densest block” And guess what? That view features the same set of buildings that I see daily.

By the way, the “block” the post’s author and commenters refer to doesn’t have anything to do with a city block: it’s a “census block group,” the government’s definition for which makes me woozy.

Suffice to say, those clusters of buildings I see each day comprise part of the most densely populated area in the U.S. That’s cool.

My neighborhood 99-cent store changes its window displays infrequently.

I’m a year behind on my Will Smith-based summer blockbusters. So tonight I watched I Am Legend. I’m reading The World Without Us so it made sense to check out a cinematic view of a Manhattan populated only by Mr. Smith, his spunky German Shepherd, a few generic humans and hordes of computer-generated barefoot zombies.

According to what I’ve read in the Manhattan doomsday scenario presented early in Without Us, there likely wouldn’t be any rats around New York City after a few years without human life: the only reason they’re here now is for our garbage. (Incidentally, despite survive-a-nuclear-blast urban legends, cockroaches would die off without humans around to provide the warm habitats they need.)

I also think the roads of Manhattan wouldn’t be as smooth as they appear in the movie. One of the first things to fail in New York without electricity, according to Without Us, would be the pumps that keep the subways dry. The tunnels would fill quickly, the subways’ steel support columns would rust and collapse, and the streets above would gape and sink. In some cases, rivers would appear in their place.

The movie in five words: Cast Away set in Manhattan.

In late 1916 or January 1917 (reports vary), six residents of Greenwich Village, including painter John Sloan and Dadaist/chess expert Marcel Duchamp, managed to get inside the Washington Square Arch (there’s a door at the base of one of the piers) and make their way up a spiral staircase of masonry to the top. There, they strung up paper lanterns, fired toy pistols and declared the Village an independent state, free from the tyranny of uptown. They’d been drinking, of course, but they may have been onto something.

I’m honored! Today around 10 a.m., a dude on Eighth Avenue in midtown tried to pull the bottle-drop scheme on me. I’d never had that happen before but I knew immediately what was going on.

Here’s how it works: a slouchy bruiser “accidentally” bumps into you as you pass one another, causing him to drop the bag he’s carrying, in which is a glass vodka or gin bottle. It hits the sidewalk and shatters. Note that I wrote “glass vodka or gin bottle” not “bottle of vodka or gin” because it’s a liquor bottle filled with water. Subject then grows belligerent and demands cash for replacement alcohol. I didn’t let this guy get that far; I kept walking. “Hey!” he shouted after me. I swung around, looked him in the eye and shouted back, “I’m not falling for that shit!” His angry face resolved into a shit-eating “I didn’t realize you lived here” grin. And that was that; we went our separate ways.

Heaven help the marks that fall for tricks like these—there are nothing but tourists on Eighth Avenue in midtown on late Sunday morning and I’d wager this bottle guy had a few unbroken extras and eventually bilked someone. I’ve also heard of this stunt pulled with eyeglasses.

Now would also be an appropriate time for further revelations to the naive and gullible of New York City:

• MetroCards sold by strangers are expired.
• Beggars on the subway likely don’t need your money for medication, to help them find a place to stay because their apartment building burned down or to “get something to eat.”
• Beggars on the street likely don’t need your money for bus, subway or train fare.
• The proceeds from the candy kids sell on the subway likely don’t fund their sports team or school (although the new shtick with these urchins is to announce that the money goes into their pocket, “to keep me out of trouble”).
• You probably shouldn’t offer your camera to strangers who volunteer to take a photo of your tour group.
• Any “luxury” goods sold on Canal Street are cheap knockoffs.
• There’s a brick inside the shrink-wrapped box of that bargain-priced laptop, not a laptop.
• Most DVDs sold on the subway and from vendors that spread them on the sidewalk atop a blanket are either blank or filmed with a camcorder from a theater seat.
• Demand the fare from a gypsy-cab hack before you enter his vehicle and even then, be prepared for a bait-and-switch.

Let me know which ones I’ve missed. I’m sure fresh scams have developed since the virtual extinction of three-card monte and squeegee guys.

Rounding the corner of West 37th Street onto Eighth Avenue this morning, I overheard a short, dumpy guy in baggy jeans and a saggy backpack, speaking over-confidently on his cellphone with one of those wired earpieces: “He’s the epitome of a marshmallow. Me? I’m a stallion.”

Walking down Eighth Avenue to meet Andie for a dinner of shepherd’s pie and Guinness, I overheard some dude in a parked van direct a shout-out to a duo of young ladies passing by on the sidewalk.

I’m embarrassed for my gender to admit catcalls frequent my work neighborhood: random young men, of the slouchy jeans set, will holler after a lady. Typically it’s a highly obvious, frequently offensive and always unoriginal commentary on her walk or a specific part or region of her body, as if there’s a chance she’d stop and coo, “Take me now, you silver-tongued lothario!”

The guy I passed was directing his affection toward a young lady wearing black Chucks, jeans in the Barney-iest of purples, a jacket in a giant black-and-white houndstooth pattern and huge triangular earrings that appeared to be made of pewter formed to resemble bamboo. But I must give mild respect to this guy, for after his initial “Hey!” and a honk of his van’s horn for emphasis, he suggested that he sought a sassily dressed girl with street smarts by shouting “Bamboo earrings, at least two pair!” quoting one of my favorite rap classics of all time. The ladies paid him no mind. And yet: a refreshingly inventive holler, my good man!

I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.

Frank O’Hara, Meditations in an Emergency (1957)

In a staggered rollout beginning this month, New York City cabbies are being forced to adopt and apply newly designed decals when they renew for their annual vehicle inspection.

I echo the commentary of many when I tell you that I liked the old cab design better. It was a black or red stencil reading “NYC TAXI” above a similar stencil of the medallion number. Even people who have never been to New York City before know what a cab here looks like. It looks like this:

That label’s as simple as a shipper’s name stenciled on a crate of freight or the text label on a can of store-brand peas. It’s even in keeping with iconic New York public vehicle signage style; the garbage trucks here, for instance, are white and labeled with black Helvetica text that reads “Sanitation,” in a no-shit way that belies the high shit content of the vehicle itself.

Nothing more fancy or graphical is necessary for garbage trucks here, much less cabs. In fact, a cab logo is redundant: it’s a yellow car that’s never around when you need it; therefore, it’s a cab. Instead, we now face this hoohah:

My eyes smart. It appears to have been designed by committee in 1995 as a subpar David Carson ripoff. I guarantee the word “edgy” was used at least twice in the design firm’s proposal to the city. The leading makes me twitch and the “racing stripe” (officially known as a “checker stripe decal”) is laughable. The “circle T” dingbat strives to suggest Vignelli’s famous subway signage but instead recalls with horror Boston’s MTA logo.

I’m in San Francisco on business today and an article in yesterday’s USA Today (“Big Cities Try to Ease Way for Bicyclists” by Charisse Jones) noted that mayor Gavin Newsom wants at least 10% of all trips in the city with within three years to be made by bicycle. Other than its infamously calf-busting hills, I can’t imagine there are too many other major American cities as friendly to bicyclists as San Francisco.

Dedicated bike lanes and racks appear everywhere (city buses even have front-mounted racks for bikes) and bicyclists themselves are such a fixture that vehicular traffic actually seems to expect and respect the riders, as opposed to New York City, where cyclists are treated by motorists like large annoying insects.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors is even voting next month on a contract to create a bike-share program similar to ones popular in European cities. A bit behind the times, NYC’s most recent bike advancement is a vague pledge to add 200 miles of bike lanes by 2010 as well as the creation of a special bike lane, between the sidewalk and parked-car lane on a stretch of Ninth Avenue, that will make it much more of a challenge for cars to sideswipe cyclists but just as fun for the latter to get doored.

Eric Sanderson, a landscape ecologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, has been trying for nearly a decade to determine how Manhattan would have looked to its first European explorers, circa 1609, in an effort he’s named the Mannahatta Project¹. When it’s completed, it will include, as a recent New Yorker profile on Sanderson noted, “a virtual re-creation—a three-dimensional computer map—in which you will be able to fly, as it were, above the island, land wherever you want, and have a look around. In place of your local cell-phone shop or O.T.B. parlor, you may see a trout stream, or a black bear browsing amid blueberry patches.”

I’d read this article on my flight to Orlando this morning and was thinking about it after arriving at the hotel here that I’m staying in tonight, the Gaylord Palms Resort and Convention Center.

As its centerpiece, the hotel boasts a 4.5-acre, perhaps dozen-story-tall glass-enclosed atrium that includes “a variety of themed environments”: there are streams and ponds and actual alligators and giant lizards in the Everglades section, there’s a giant yacht floating in Key West on which businesspeople can throw parties, and throughout there are towering palm trees, flowers and other plants, pools of koi, waterfalls and rocky outcroppings.

All of it is lit by the sun through the atrium dome, like a biosphere, although the glass is thick enough and angled as such that I couldn’t even hear when it was raining, to the degree that I was startled when I walked outside to find it storming. Indeed, the atrium trumps the outdoors and its swaths of scrub grass run through by highways, new subdivisions and strip malls.

Earlier, I was checking out one of the ballrooms for a meeting my company’s staging here tomorrow and while a hotel staff member was pointing out the grand balcony accessible through a set of double doors, she noticed a ubiquitous-in-Florida small lizard skittering around at the base of the door. She cracked the door, patiently shooed out the lizard and apologized. Gotta keep the environment at a controlled level of reality.

¹ I find it interesting that Inwood, my neighborhood and Sanderson’s favorite part of Manhattan because of its largely unchanged topography and forestry, is one of the few parts of the city where one “can get around successfully with a 1782 map.” [back]

And to think once upon a time, not so long ago, I was wide-eyed about film crews in Manhattan. I’ve seen so many since, they’ve blended into the background, one more thing blocking my sidewalks.

Making my usual Friday trek to Academy Records, I had to walk down the middle of 18th Street to bypass the trucks and equipment set up to film a scene of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit at Books of Wonder, a children’s bookstore a few stores down from Academy, where the staff was equally blasé.

Random Woman: They could film in here!
Academy Guy Behind the Counter [eying sweaty, pudgy loner pawing through the 99-cent bin]: Yeah, we got our “special” victims.

Later in the evening, walking the wrong direction looking for the Upper East Side American Apparel store, I came across a building on East 64th Street off Park Avenue, floodlit and with gels in the windows. A weary man, part of a large black-shirted craft services crew lounging around and pulling down union scale, guarded the beverage and snack table on the sidewalk and told me that they were filming a scene for Sex and the City: The Movie. Again, no reaction from me. Other than, man, would Sarah Jessica Parker really miss one small bag of Fritos?

I bought a bicycle today. It’s been on my B-list of things to buy since moving to New York, a list that also includes a new suit and an air conditioner. For the long run, I decided, a bike would be best for my health and provide me with the longest-term exhilaration.

I think it was the correct decision although the purchase was an odyssey. To begin: I was convinced I could buy a bike for $100 or less and set out with confidence. The first place I checked, Recycle-A-Bicycle in DUMBO, seemed promising, but their entry-level used bikes are $175 and require repair/fine-tuning (read: more $$$) before they can be ridden. However, I must give them props for the concept of their shop: busted-up bikes are repaired for resale by New York City public schoolkids as part of a “youth training and environmental education initiative.”

Then, Megan, Katie and I tried the storied flea markets of Hell’s Kitchen/Chelsea this afternoon after our beer bash. The first we stopped at, on 17th and Sixth Avenue, had even crappier bikes—like banana-seat crappy—starting at $175. I passed.

We slunk further downtown and in a far darkened corner of the West 25st Street market (between Sixth and Fifth Avenues) we came across a sleazy flea-market dealer who called to mind a beardless Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and represented like a used car salesman who had an unnatural and highly vocal infatuation with Katie. After some quick discussion, she agreed, temporarily, to make the Yogi think it was she who was purchasing the 17" green Raleigh C30 cross/hybrid I had my eye on, a seven-speed, made-in-China entry-level model that first debuted circa 2003. We figured she could snag a foxy-lady discount, but he wouldn’t budge from his price and merely toyed with his bead necklaces and requested Katie stop back later for a date. At one point, he increased his asking price by $1, and when I asked him why, he said that I had been making him talk too much and he needed to buy a soda. Suffice to say, the bike was eventually mine for “$100 or less” in cash (no receipt) and as I walked it back uptown with Katie and Megan to buy a chain and lock, I tried not to think too hard about the embittered New Yorker the Yogi probably stole it from.

Andie spotted this sign after our dinner and drinks at Fred’s tonight and as you can see, it’s caught in a simultaneous Walk/Don’t Walk state, kind of like Schrödinger’s cat, except instead of a 50% chance of having a dead cat on your hands, there’s a 50% chance you’ll get hit by a Fresh Direct truck on Amsterdam while trying to take a flashless photo of a flashing sign in the dark.

I figure there are more, but if you can pronounce these five, you’re probably off to a good start as a valid New Yorker.

1. Fiorello
2. Gansevoort
3. Gowanus
4. Houston
5. Stuyvesant

The timing was both good and bad for my cell phone to suddenly break late Friday night. Good because I was headed out of town for some quiet and relaxation. Bad because I’m on business in California Monday through Wednesday and absolutely require a cell phone while there. I couldn’t slack off on this one; I had to get it fixed right away. Begrudgingly, I stopped at a conveniently located AT&T store up on Long Island only to learn that I could only get a replacement for the still-under-full-warranty phone from special AT&T stores. One was in Manhattan, on 42nd between Fifth and Sixth across the street from the central branch of the New York Public Library. Unfortunately, today was the Dominican Republican Day Parade and it was on Sixth from 36th to 62nd. It took me a solid 15 minutes of jostling to cross the street there. The walk back was even more difficult, as the street I’d chosen to cross Sixth, 43rd, was in the process of getting locked down because of an (apparently) bloodied and unruly reveler who had attracted the full attention of a good half-dozen cops, one of whom shouted to the mostly Dominican crowd, “Can’t you people keep the peace for one day?” (“You people.” Ha ha! Good luck, New York City cops!)

Because of the ruckus, I walked up to Rockefeller Center, took a D to 59th Street and transferred to a 1 which appropriately contained nearly all Dominicans blowing whistles and chanting slogans loudly in Spanish.

Storms this morning washed out the full function of nearly every line in the subway system and on the streets, irritated commuters fought for cabs and clustered among dozens waiting for full busses that didn’t stop.

My own 1 train made it downtown to 137th Street before going out of service due to flooding. After a pair of halfhearted attempts waiting for a bus, I decided to walk, and surprised myself when I was able to make the entire 100 blocks without sore feet or tiring. It took about an hour and 45 minutes, though I did stop for a cinnamon raisin bagel and some orange juice at H&H Bagels on the Upper West Side.

After work, after buying a plum-colored polo shirt from American Apparel to replace my sweaty work shirt, I met up with Andie, her coworker Ian and some of his friends at Therapy, a gay bar/lounge in Hell’s Kitchen. We were there to watch So You Think You Can Dance, which the bar broadcasts on a large screen on the second floor. Here are Andie and Ian, voguing during a commercial break.

The dancing was impressive but I think this is one of those shows that requires a long-term investment in the characters to vote accurately and consistently for the “best” dancing.

For dinner I had a turkey burger and fries, which were not bad, and two mojitos, that were also not bad but extremely expensive. I was most impressed by the fishbowl of free, elusive NYC Condoms at the door.

Therapy

• 348 W. 52nd St.
• (212) 397-1700
• Meal 33 of 52: turkey burger and fries ($11.07) and two mojitos ($18.45).

Well, other than the puking kind, I suppose.

Graffiti photographed on 18th Street, behind the Union Square Barnes & Noble.

An article in yesterday’s New York Times (“Where Little Is Left Outside the Camera’s Eye” by Mark Landler) asserted that since the Ring of Steel, developed in response to IRA bombings of the early ’90s, video surveillance has become widely accepted in Britain, “viewed as a fact of life rather than an Orwellian intrusion.” With an estimated 4.2 million closed-circuit TV cameras in the country, a Londoner can be caught on tape hundreds of times a day, the article claims.

Then, in the paper today, a story (“New York Plans Surveillance Veil for Downtown” by Cara Buckley) reported that by the end of this year, more than 100 cameras will have started monitoring cars moving through Lower Manhattan, “the beginning phase of a London-style surveillance system that would be the first in the United States.”

If [the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative] is fully financed, it will include not only license plate readers but also 3,000 public and private security cameras below Canal Street, as well as a center staffed by the police and private security officers, and movable roadblocks.

That staff is a key difference; there are already about 250 cameras placed in high-crime areas of New York City, but that video must be downloaded; the cameras of the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative would transmit live video instantly.

Will the city approve and follow-through on this or will it end up the meaningless bleating of politicians aroused, like (apparently) that massive subway station camera campaign (strangely mentioned by neither Landler nor Buckley) that the city announced in response to the London Tube bombings of July 7, 2005?

And even if such a system were to be approved, could there ever be enough staff to track potentially thousands of live feeds? Cameras like these are really useful only in helping sift through ashes, at least until technology gets much more adept at real-time detection of “suspicious behavior,” whatever that might constitute in New York City. The cameras of London, for instance, prevented neither the Tube bombings nor the attempted car bombings last month, though they were useful in detecting suspects in the aftermath.

The New York Public Library is exhibiting a fine selection of photos from the Midtown Y Gallery, the late, great non-profit organization that let photographers, famous or otherwise, exhibit their works in the ’70s and ’80s when there were surprisingly few options in the city. (Prior to the ’80s in New York, few galleries showed only photography.) The exhibit spans the life of the gallery, from ’72 to ’96, with a focus on street photography from the late-’70s and early-’80s, offering a time-capsule depiction in gelatin-silver prints of the storefronts, the clothing, the people and the mood during a key era of the city.

There are amazing photos of Brighton Beach swimmers and bathers from the mid-’70s, nuclear disarmament rallies of the early ’80s, and, in the exhibit’s centerpiece, a series spanning a wall the length of the room called “14th Street,” taken on that crosstown artery of Manhattan from 1979-1981 by Sy Rubin and Larry Siegel. Although some of the features remain recognizable, the May’s Department Store is now a Whole Foods Market, while Jullian’s Billiards, Lüchow’s and the Palladium at Irving Place (where the Plasmatics are shown playing) have made way for New York University buildings.

I haunted the restaurant supply district on the Bowery early this afternoon for ramekins, convinced I could pay less than the $2 Bed, Bath & Beyond asks per six-ounce model. Many restaurant supply stores are shuttered Saturday, I learned. But these are the places to go if you want napkin dispensers or red plastic squeezable ketchup dispensers or bulk boxes of those tiny paper umbrellas that adorn tropical alcoholic beverages. Ramekins are apparently more exclusive.

Mingling with the skateboarders, greengrocers and craft-sellers on the southwest corner of Union Square, some modern-day hippies held up hand-painted signs that read “Free Hugs.” They wavered expectantly, like athletes waiting for the starter’s gun, trying to make eye contact as pedestrians rushed by from every angle. A woman nearby videotaped the uneventful enterprise, whether a curious passer-by herself or a documentarian affiliated with the group. A tall man on his cell passed a bit too closely to one of the hopeful huggers, an older man wearing suspenders, who advanced with a gesture that was half “see my sign?” and half “I’m gonna hug you anyway!” The guy on the phone smiled but did not break his stride as he held up a Heisman Trophy-style hand meant to signal “no thanks” but firm enough to serve as deflection if necessary. I felt for the old guy but I must admit there is inherent creepiness in hugging a man, a strange man in New York City moreso, wearing suspenders.

Later I tooled around my neighborhood for a slice of pizza for dinner. I had trouble indicating which fruit-punch flavored beverage I desired from the cooler behind the counter. The Hawaiian Punch, the girl behind the counter asked? No, I said, stretching out my arm to point, that one. The Snapple? No, the tall bottle. Here? No, right... down a shelf... to the right. Yes, that one. Let the record show I was thirsting for a Jarritos, el sabor más Mexicano.

At the corner of Dyckman and Sherman, sidewalk entrepreneurs were hawking not only Mother’s Day bouquets of roses and assorted field flowers, but Mylar helium balloons and tiny lace-trimmed satin pillows stitched with “Love you, Mom.” Aww.

Strong and nimble men balancing on beams a story above the sidealk assembled a sidewalk shed today that will run the length of my office building’s block on Eighth Avenue. They hefted long and heavy planks and poles that wavered in their grip. Pedestrians underneath glanced upwards with concern and hastened pace. I figure these hard-hatted fellow know what they’re doing although I momentarily amused myself with this thought: sidewalk sheds protect pedestrians from falling construction debris; but during the construction of sidewalk sheds, what protects pedestrians if bits of that structure fall?

Nothing can change the character of a New York City street more quickly than a sidewalk shed. They narrow and confine the sidewalk and make it seem more crowded as fast-moving foot traffic slows and constricts. People congregate under them in inclement weather and smokers seem to clot there at any time. Sidewalk sheds block the sun, the sky, streetlights and the building they serve itself, turning familiar routes strange. At night, bare-bulb lighting beneath makes it seem as if you’re traversing a mine tunnel. Sometimes sidewalk shed structures extend into the street, around obstacles and corners. Combined with eight-foot-tall plywood construction fences, they become miniature mazes. This being New York, these semi-concealed passages soon collect illicitly pasted-up ad posters, graffiti, garbage and a pungent scent of urine. It’s always a shock when the day comes, typically months later, that the shed is disassembled, and the street reverts back to its familiar character.

This guy standing on a street corner in Chelsea asked me where Gansevoort and Greenwich Streets intersected. He looked lost, as a tourist would, and what initially lead me to believe his out-of-townness was that he pronounced Greenwich “Green Witch.” Strangely, he pronounced Gansevoort correctly, so I couldn’t correct his green gaffe, and regardless I have no idea where Gansevoort is, other than somewhere in the Wicked Witch of the West Village.

I know I’d seen The Long Goodbye before, and at the Cleveland Cinematheque, because—bless the place—but it has the most uncomfortable lecture-hall-style wooden chairs from the ’60s ever.

From my much more comfortable seat at the Film Forum, I mused I’d forgotten how funny Goodbye is, particularly film-noir gumshoe transplanted to the creamy yoga center of 1970’s Los Angeles Elliott Gould with his dopey looks and dry self-deprecating humor. Witness the strangely extended opening sequence where he learns he’s out of cat food, drives to the grocery store to buy more, discovers they’re out, reluctantly buys a different brand, returns home, opens the off-brand can and scoops it into an empty can of the cat’s usual cat food, then makes a big show in front of the cat about pretending to serve the cat its regular food. Of course, the cat knows it’s the wrong brand and refuses to eat it, which the audience has expects all along, but it’s really funny somehow anyway.

I have to imagine guys like Gould must have been a true mystery as leading men of ’70s cinema. How did these mugs become stars? To my point, see also two other not-especially handsome, alternately endearing/annoying, frequently charming guys (and also from Brooklyn!) from that era, Richard Dreyfuss and Woody Allen.

Wandering around the East Side before the movie, I regret to inform you I missed an awesome New York photo-op. On the Bowery I noticed that a League of Their Own style tour bus had just pulled up outside the Bowery Mission. A group of Amish people had just stepped off, the ladies clad in plain shapeless dresses and wearing those lace kerchiefs on their heads, while the men had on plaid long-sleeved shirts and black pants. They started photographing the various transients who were lounging around smoking and napping. One guy sitting on the stoop outside the door was all like, “Here I am. C’mon, muthafuckas, I’m right here,” with his arms raised, so they all clustered around and started taking even more photos like they were at the zoo and they’d just come across a surly emu. Meanwhile another mission resident off to the side was hastily scribbling a beggar sign on a scrap of cardboard.

I went into work this weekend but I was determined to do something fun for lunch. Let’s see: fun in Midtown. Nothing legal immediately jumped to mind. It was too early to start drinking and I didn’t feel like bowling. So I just walked around. Always a good idea in New York.

Serendipitously, I came across the Hell’s Kitchen Flea Market, which has been in the back of my head list-of-things-to-do seemingly forever. All kinds of great things kitsch, retro and vintage. The two chief items on display are funky women’s clothing (though there were a preponderance of men’s hats) and antiques (old postcards, medical dictionaries, cigarette cases, paintings). In attendance were a number of trim women wearing those gigantic oversized sunglasses that I have a strong suspicion were fashion designers trawling for ideas and boutique owners with visions of markups floating in their heads. I watched a man in sunglasses and a corduroy suit carry away a black bear’s head mounted on a wooden plaque, which included, on separate-but-attached wooden islands, its paws. Also I saw a trim woman try on a snug-fitting zebra-print dress from the 50s (60s?) over her T-shirt and jeans, checking it out in an antique mirror leaning against a card table and considering the advice of a fashionista friend of hers (“We could always take it in a little.’).

I found a ten-dollar bill on the sidewalk on 35th Street today during my brisk lunchtime constitutional. Unfortunately, adjusted for the cost of living in Manhattan, that’s like finding a one-dollar bill anywhere else in America. It was probably the high point of my day anyway.

The weather warmed slightly from the cold and snowy weekend so folks were out shoveling today. This guy was on the roof of an 18-wheeler parked on W. 37th Street, knocking large, flat chunks of solidified snow onto the sidewalk, narrowly missing pedestrians.

The guy on the right is holding a paper-wrapped bunch of flowers, which didn’t turn out as clearly as I’d hoped.

Boy, Hitch really liked stories of ordinary men in over their heads, which he never covered more realistically than in The Wrong Man. He even traded his traditional cameo for a brief introduction emphasizing his script was wholly Based on a True Story. Unfortunately that also makes it one of his least engrossing films: linear with few surprises, and, as in many Hitchcock films, dwelling on the director’s phobias and kid fears, in this case, of cops and of wrongful imprisonment. The style and cinematography, unlike most anything else Hitchcock directed, glows like a European arthouse film mixed with film noir, all downturned hats and shadows, and a vivid time capsule of a gritty New York City in 1956. Fifty years later and the bridges and the subway stations look the same.

And what better everyman to play Mr. Guilty Until Proven Innocent than Henry Fonda, a doe-eyed upstanding American with a face like a laborer in a Great Depression breadline.

Vera Miles as his wife portrays a worrisome decent into madness with a beauty you can see would have worked for Vertigo. Hitch wanted her for the role of Madeleine in that film but when she got pregnant, it went to Kim Novak.

Walking back to the subway from Greenwich Village during my lunch break, the wind whistled at and over my fresh haircut. I passed Jane Street and wouldn’t you know it, this Clark Gesner song from The Electric Company somersaulted into my conscious:

Scene: A montage of New York City street signs. Soundtrack: A group of kids sing-read each as it appears.

In. Stop. Park. Walk.
Yield. Enter. Exit. One way.

Jane Street. Jones Street. Park Avenue.
No right turn. No left turn. What can you do?

Gas. Car wash. Subway. Don’t walk.
No parking. Tow away zone.

Uptown. Downtown. First Avenue.
Home sweet home.

I never appreciated until now how much my childhood regimen of New York-based public television-viewing—not just The Electric Company but Sesame Street—would infuse my Manhattan existence with occasional bursts of barely remembered whimsy. (See also, before it gets pulled: Subway!)

It’s about time! Within the past two days or so, Google silently added New York City subway station stops to Google Maps, visible at the three most zoomed-in views of the city. Here’s an example from Lower Manhattan.

Microsoft’s MSN Maps & Directions site, also known as MapBlast, has had this feature for years and it bugged me greatly that Google would futz around with monumental eye-candy like Google Earth when they were missing such a basic, essential aspect of their NYC maps. Barring copyright issues, now they only need to add the correctly numbered/lettered and colored line logos instead of the generic white-on-blue “metro stop” icons they’re using now.

I walk funny. I’ve got this hitch in my step that I can’t shake even when I’m carrying something heavy. Short of analyzing my gait with a Muybridge sequence, I think the issue is that I roll my foot forward in a way that I spring up briefly onto my toe with each step.

A loud woman I work with told me it’s the walk of a dancer, but that’s not quite right: I’m nearly always moving quickly, without deliberation or grace. Normally I’m unaware of my walk but lately I’ve imagined it stands out in my neighborhood, where one of the two chief styles of ambulation would be described as “extremely slow.” I notice this especially when I’m running late for my subway and even if one has just pulled into the station, everyone’s plodding up the stairs to the platform like they spent the night baling hay.

The other style of walking, practiced by some young men in my neighborhood, is the equally slow but stylish pimp limp. Michael, Jimi’s adoptive brother who’s African American, demonstrated this urban strut to me one warm day on West 4th Street, which is a good of a place as any to act like an idiot. I just don’t have the relaxed stance for such moves.

I’ve tried dampening my springiness by walking more slowly. But I only start slowly; without realizing it, I accelerate and spring along like usual after a few seconds. Short of buying prescription shoes, I think I’ve done all I can to walk normally.

Today, Donald Trump forgave Miss USA 2006 Tara Conner for her alleged trespasses of underage drinking and hot girl-on-girl action. This reminds me a lot of my own New York story.

‘She left a small town in Kentucky and she was telling me that she got caught up in the whirlwind of New York,’ Trump said at a news conference. ‘It’s a story that has happened many times before to many women and many men who came to the Big Apple. They wanted their slice of the Big Apple and they found out it wasn’t so easy.’

A few weeks after the “one to two weeks” promised and I’ve received my New York State driver license, my first form of local ID since I moved here, other than that autographed David Caruso photo I’d kept in my wallet until it disintegrated recently.

My photo turned out O.K., save some glasses flash glare. Also, I appear to be thrusting my mighty chin outward in a patriotic fashion, probably a result of trying to stand up straight for once.

I’m mesmerized by the overlap of psychedelic copyproof and tamper resistant measures that are part of the November 2005 security redesign of the license, including a sinusoid hologram (you can see it streaking over one side of my face), watermarks, merging color gradients and a strange Teflon-like finish. By merely holding the card at arm’s length and tipping it two degrees left then right, I can hypnotize small mammals and halal cart vendors to do my bidding.

While Christmas shopping today in Chelsea, I saw this graffiti commentary scrawled on the signage for a condo building under construction at the corner of Eighth Avenue and 18th Street. As a real estate professional, I can confirm that the “easy formula” sums up the city’s situation well.

Andie and I headed out tonight to see an urban reinterpretation of The Nutcracker at the Abrons Arts Center on Grand Street at Pitt (a.k.a. Avenue C). It’s so far east it’s just about under the Williamsburg Bridge and neither Andie nor I felt we’d been in a section of Manhattan less Manhattan-like. It was as if we were in New Jersey or deep in Queens or somewhere with all the industrial decay, oddly inactive housing projects, shuttered storefronts and lack of pedestrians, all of which you may see in the city during odd hours, but this was around 7:00 on a Saturday night. We thought we’d find someplace quaint to eat dinner; we found nothing and bought Pringles and bottled drinks from a bodega.

The play was not bad. There was a mix of dance students with professionals, whose every leg, arm and back muscle was clearly defined, and who can contort their bodies with ease into the most unnatural yet graceful positions. The “urban reinterpretation” part of it was half-assed. Occasionally backbeats would funk up into the recorded Tchaikovsky or the cast would start clapping its hands rhythmically as someone all the sudden started breakdancing. Other than that it was a basic interpretation, from what I can remember of the original, although with added jubilance from the young kids in the cast.

In a study of 15,000 Americans, economist Jan Brueckner has found that the less crowded a neighborhood, the friendlier its residents, according to a Los Angeles Times article today (“Where to hear ‘Hi, neighbor!’: in the suburbs” by Roy Rivenburg). In other words, suburbs are better for people’s social life than cities.

For every 10% drop in population density, the likelihood of people talking to their neighbors once a week goes up 10%, regardless of race, income, education, marital status or age.

Brueckner writes that wariness of social contact in cities stems from a want of privacy in a crowded environment, fear of crime and an abundance of museums, theaters and the like that don’t require socialization. (That last one was one of the reasons I moved to a big city to begin with!)

Although not wholeheartedly, I agree more with the philosophy of playwright Eric Bogosian, who has made a cottage industry of slagging the suburbs. “I find the suburbs a difficult place to live,” he writes in a typical statement. “They’re cold and weird. I like people and in the city I get to see lots of people.”

I think I probably have just as many friends here in the city, if not more, than when I lived in the suburbs. And I’m required to bring up the true cliché that New Yorkers are friendlier than outsiders give them credit for. They really are but they’re sometimes not as immediately approachable. It takes work getting past the hard candy shell to reach the friendly nougat center.

In what it’s calling an “experimental marketing” campaign, Procter & Gamble has temporarily converted a Times Square storefront at 1540 Broadway between West 45th and 46th Streets to a bank of 20 public toilets. Dubbed the Charmin Restrooms, the stalls are staffed by attendant-janitors and include baby changing stations, stroller parking, seating areas, tourist information and aromatherapy. They’re open 8:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. daily and according to Charmin’s brand manager, guarantee “an irreplaceable bathroom experience in the heart of Times Square.”

I guess that’d be compared to the everyday bathroom experiences of bums that lend the area’s subway stations their piquancy of urine and poo. (My secret maneuver when nature calls on Times Square is to ascend a flight or two at the Marriott Marquis Hotel and use their surprisingly clean and sparsely attended “public” restrooms.) This should be an interesting experiment in attempted cleanliness and prevention of illicit activities associated with public restrooms, particularly with the city apparently still mulling options for its own banks of public pay toilets.

Last week on Times Square, the U.S. military installed a $1,000 sound system atop its recruitment center to ward off pigeons that wish to roost or shit on it, according to a Reuters story today (“Military Holds Fire in Pigeon War” by Nick Olivari).

At random intervals, the system broadcasts the sound of predatory birds, apparently loud enough to be heard over the din. The last deterrent the military tried was a plastic owl. “By the third day, I swear the pigeons wanted to mate with it,” said Robert Esposito, vice president of operations at the Times Square Alliance business group.

In other news, I didn’t know there were pigeons on Times Square. I thought all the waddling, sidewalk-blocking and grubbing was being perpetrated by tourists. Maybe the military could blast Tuvan throat singing from its sound system to annoy and thin the visiting ranks. Alternately, they could play something enticing, like an announcement for a coupon granting free hush puppies at Red Lobster, then forcibly recruit tourists into service as minesweepers or frontline infantry.

My Ohio driver’s expires next month and I never bothered to get a New York ID, so I decided to solve both issues by trading my Ohio license for a New York one.

Despite the suggestion of swiftness, I spent my lunch break today at the License X-Press on 34th Street at Eighth Avenue. I filled out my application, waited in line 20 minutes, had my vision checked and photo taken, waited another 20 minutes on a hard wooden bench, rose when my number was called, paid a glum clerk a bunch of money and...nothing. I still have to wait “one to two weeks” for the license to appear in the mail. Sorry. I thought I’d be able to write about how badly my photo turned out or some other such hilarity.

I like those second-person pronouns you can use when speaking with a friend or on friendly terms with a stranger. These you-substitutes in the Midwest tended towards “man,” as in “Hey, man; how’s it goin’?,“ or “guys“ in plural, even if the addressees weren’t male (“You guys going to the concert tonight?”).

Bodega and deli counterjoeckeys here in New York have mastered this turn of phrase. The guy at the bodega on the corner of my street calls me “sir.” The Indian guy at the snack shop in the lobby of my work building calls me “boss” and a popular alternate along these lines is “chief.”

I got my first non-English pronoun lobbed at me today while Halloween-costume thrifting at the Goodwill on 181st off Amsterdam. Approaching a blue-vested woman working the second floor, I pointed to what I thought were the changing rooms and asked if I could try on the two pairs of natty slacks I had draped over my arm. “That’s storage, papi,” she said. “Changing rooms are downstairs.”

Papi! I’d overheard that one in my neighborhood before, along with mami, but never had it applied to me, so I felt honored. It’s used by Spanish-speakers in America to refer not only to family members but as a general reference to anyone, regardless of age or familial status.

After my usual tall-man-in-a-small-dressing-room antics, the cashier downstairs rang up the pair of pants and two ties I’d selected and started, “Nueve ochenta...” before glancing up and realizing I didn’t appear to be someone who spoke Spanish.

“Sorry...Nine dollars and eighty-five cents.”

“No problem,” I said. “If I’m going to live here, maybe I should learn to speak Spanish.”

“It’s a beautiful and difficult language,” the girl admitted.

One of her colleagues standing nearby said, “It’s a backwards language. You know what I mean, right?”

The other girl stared at her.

“You know what I mean. Say something in Spanish.”

The countergirl thought for a second and said, “She is stupid. Ella es estúpido.”

The other girl narrowed her eyes and said, “No, you know: backwards.”

I slipped away from this strange argument and only after I’d left and walked five blocks did the phrase casa blanca pop into my head. I realized by “backwards” the girl probably meant how nouns in Spanish precede adjectives.

Mom and Dad, who arrived at my apartment this morning to visit for the weekend, had a crusty Jewish cabdriver drive them in from LaGuardia who told entertaining stories, like that I was smart to be living in Inwood because it’s inexpensive although there are all those Dominicans to contend with. I was happy to hear the ride was much cheaper than I originally quoted; I thought outward fares from LaGuardia were flat-rate like the $45 ones from JFK, but I was mistaken.

We got lunch at Bite, a closet-sized East Village salad and panini sandwich shop that Time Out New York rated best bet for Union Square environs in its recent and annual “Cheap Eats” cover story. I had the toasted and pressed Nutella-banana sandwich (only $3) and it was a mouth-watering mix of warm, sweet, melty and chewy tastiness. Sandwiches in tow, we walked a few blocks south and gathered at the Alamo cube on Astor Place for a Big Onion walking tour of the Bowery.

We were relieved to see our tour guide, David, at least appeared to be the real deal: he was shouldering a canvas bag from the Strand, and was dressed in jeans that kept falling down a bit and what appeared to be a thrift-store shirt. (Later I learned he’s a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Columbia.) He carried a small stack of laminated handouts he’d occasionally pass around, a pocketwatch on a chain that he’d check for time, and a beard that he would stroke not theatrically but with genuine thoughtfulness. He had a passion for facts both entertaining and enlightening, a keen knowledge of local history and a grudge for gentrification and development. He reminded us in some ways of my friend Joe.

We learned the Bowery is one of the two oldest streets in the city (Broadway’s the other) and that its name comes from the Dutch word for farm; most of the area on which we stood, including Cooper Union, two Starbucks less than a block apart and a Kmart, was once part of Peter Stuyvesant’s farm. At Cooper Union, the country’s first tuition-free institution of higher learning, we were told how the founder made his fortune collecting and disposing the horse carcasses that littered the city’s streets. (Because they’re so heavy, owners often left them where they fell.) Giving fresh meaning to the aphorism “if life gives you lemons, make lemonade,” Peter Cooper started a glue company, then obtained the first American patent for manufacturing “portable gelatine,” a treat that would eventually be known as Jell-O. His 1845 patent application even specified lemon or lime flavoring. What it didn’t recommend was gelatin made from horse hooves; Cooper called for isinglass gelatin, which is made from fish viscera, but let’s not let the facts spoil a good anecdote. As if his school-founding and dessert-inventing wasn’t enough, Cooper still found time to develop what’s perhaps the first steam locomotive prototype.

David also told of Cooper Union’s place in American history as a rallying point for mobs and more recently home to speeches by political firebrands. An interesting architectual detail: the school was built from blocks of brownstone, a mud-colored sandstone considered a shabby excuse for construction material at the time. After the school gained fame, its unconventional look sparked a short-lived brownstone fad, culminating in buildings of that name sprouting up all over Harlem and Brooklyn.

As we headed down Bowery, we looked at and learned of McSorley’s Old Ale House, at 150+ perhaps the city’s oldest pub and one that didn’t even admit women until 1970 when a court forced it to. It was a happy coincidence to hear David reference Joseph Mitchell’s excellent 1945 essay collection, McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, which is among my current stack of bedside books.

We also made stops outside flophouses (several of which are still active), the Amato Opera House, the doomed CBGB, the Bowery Savings Bank and McGuirk’s Suicide Hall, one of the most notorious drinking establishments ever, the site of which is now a colossally ugly new glass-and-steel condo complex. I wish for the yuppies who will live there to know that there used to be a bar on the spot that would combine the dregs from the glasses at closing time into a barrel, thread a long tube into the swill, then charge a nickel for one all-you-could-drink suck. Adding a contemporary spin to the seedy topics of the tour, I spotted a fat man near Rivington Street who appeared to be mating with a stove. That’s tough love, man.

The tour ended in Chinatown, so we bought bubble tea at Ten Ren’s Tea Time and took it to drink at Columbus Park, where Chinese men crowded around the game tables to watch rounds of Xiangqi. We walked up to McNally Robinson where we pursued travel guides for Italy and found on a globe Zambia, where my sister Dana may be living and working next. After drinks at Republic, we ate dinner at Craft. For post-dinner drinks and lively conversation, we attended Andie and Eric’s cocktail party. Mom advised Ali, newly a nurse, in the ancient arts of the RN. It was like Yoda and Luke at Dagobah.

Bite

• 211 E. 14th Street (between Third and Second Avenues)
• (212) 677-3123
• Meal 28 of 52: Nutella Banana Ciabatta ($3.00).

A statistic I’ve been meaning to memorize is one that New York pedestrians should know: how many blocks are in a mile. This varies because only most of Manhattan’s map is gridlike, but in general, if you’re walking “street blocks” (streets in Manhattan run east-west or “crosstown,” as we say) or the much more variable “avenue blocks” (avenues in Manhattan run north-south, otherwise known as uptown-downtown), here are the conversions, according to Michael Pollak in the “F.Y.I.” department of today’s New York Times city section:

1 street block = 264 feet
20 street blocks = 1 mile

1 avenue block = 750 feet
7 avenue blocks = 1 mile

So back when I was living on the Upper West Side and walking to work, I was knocking back about 2.5 miles one way. If I tried that from where I live now, it’d be more than eight miles one way. Yow!

The neighborhood was alternately vacant and hip-hoppin’, on account of the Comite del Desfile y Festival Dominicano (on Amsterdam Avenue between 191st and 192nd Street), not to be confused with the Dominican Republican Day Parade (on Sixth Avenue from 36th to 62nd Street), both of which were held today. The sidewalks in my neighborhood were crowded with cookouts. People leaned from passing cars shaking Dominican flags and cheering. And when I was on the A train this afternoon, someone mashed play on a jambox, launching a lively tune with Spanish lyrics. On perfect cue, random groups of strangers dressed in red, white and blue spontaneously broke into song.

Man, it’s hot. How hot is it?

Two and a half hours! Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest could have used a cutlass in the editing room for the expository blather and the too-many scenes and subplots that don’t or marginally feature our heroes three: Johnny Depp, again resplendent in Richards; Keira Knightley, who has either started eating or received cheek implants; and Orlando Bloom, handsome and bland.

There’s fun, Buster Keaton-style physical comedy in the swashbuckling of Captain Jack and the lads escaping a cannibal island and swordfighting atop a waterwheel rolling through the jungle. But too much exposition! Too many subplots! As much as the filmmakers would like it to be Pirates of the Rings, especially with their filming-multiple-sequels-at-once shenanigans, this franchise has neither the scope nor majesty of Middle Earth and Tolkien’s storyline. Give me back mindless summertime movies that don’t deaden my ass. There was a big ol’ fishstick of fun to be had here, but it was mostly breading.

The most enlightening part of my moviegoing experience was the realization that one can enter the trio of wide, barren terraces, presumably reserved for receptions, on the upper floors of the AMC Empire 25 that overlook the lights and sprawl of 42nd Street between Times Square and Eighth Avenue. It’s very windy up there, which makes it difficult to spit with accuracy on the tourists queued up for Madame Tussauds, but you can’t beat the skyscraper panorama and the clear view west to the Hudson and Jersey beyond, where a sherbet sunset hovered and eluded my attempts at a majestic photograph.

On the terrace below, a kid in a mohawk and expensive sneakers was hacking away on his laptop, presumably downloading porn or posting a blog entry about Colin Farrell’s Miami Vice moustache.

This is a streetlight in my neighborhood, on Nagle Avenue at Arden Street.

That’s a hula hoop up there with all those shoes. Impressive.

Katie invited me to tag along with her and Kelly to a party at a friend’s apartment on First Avenue in the 20s, directly across the street from Bellevue, the oldest public hospital in the U.S. and a name synonymous with psychiatric hospitals in general, although not always in a positive sense. More importantly for Independence Day purposes, the 11th floor apartment had a balcony facing east, which meant we could clearly see the fireworks launched from the East River.

And if we turned our heads to the right, we could just see the South Street Seaport fireworks, a separate holiday bombardment geared for those located south of the Brooklyn Bridge.

At times, it was a pyrotechnic simulcast, and the explosions in the sky were intense enough to rattle windows and set off choruses of car alarms. A visual trend that was new to me were the Fireworks That Explode Into Shapes Other Than Circular Bursts: there were five-pointed stars, cubes and Saturn-like ringed spheres that hovered momentarily in midair like cartoon constellations before radiating out and fading away. From our vantage point, we not only enjoyed the light and sound, we pitied the crowds of plebeians below, clogging the streets and craning their necks for a view.

The party itself was a small, fine affair, organized by a bookseller Katie used to work with. She prepared pastry-like cheese crackers, a quiche-like thing, hummus, guacamole and even homemade lemon ice cream topped with strawberries. The decor was strictly books. A wall by the door bristled with bookshelves, there were books on every available flat surface and several metal spinner racks displayed even more. A stack of books near the door consisted solely of extras or other books-for-the-taking that I regret not sifting through. On the bathroom wall were hung reprints of classic Nancy Drew covers. Most of the guests I conversed with had a book-work connection, although I talked with a laser eye surgery technician about gentrification in the city; a public defender from Brooklyn about the correlation of weather with crime; and the hostesses’ boyfriend about the ethics of World Cup diving.

New Yorkers have a tendency to abbreviate the names of sections of the city. The oldest abbreviated district is SoHo, which appears to have entered common speech in the late 1960s. A New Yorker Talk of the Town item from the summer of 1970 quotes an author living in a factory loft on Spring Street “in the section of town—bounded north and south by Houston and Canal Streets and east and west by Broadway and West Broadway—that is called the Factory District, or, alternatively, the Cast-Iron District, or, alternatively, SoHo.” The fellow is none too pleased over his part of town’s newfound popularity and commoditization. In particular, the name game galls him.

I live in the Factory District. I dislike the name SoHo, and I dislike the person who thought up the name, though I don’t know him. He must have been very pleased with himself when he thought the name up. The Factory District is south of Houston Street. Get it? South Houston. I bet he wrote a letter to the Village Voice when he thought it up.

But SoHo was only the beginning, followed necessarily at the close of the ’70s by NoHo (north of Houston). In the early ’80s, there was Tribeca (Triangle Below Canal Street) while the name-of-the-’90s was the dopey Dumbo (the District Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass).

These abbreviations are about exclusivity and real estate, of course. Former industrial spaces become luxury lofts that draw artists, actors and models, then lawyers and investment bankers. Boutiques, clubs, bars, restaurants and art galleries pop up. Rents skyrocket.

New abbreviations are constantly in the works, striving to someday evolve to SoHo popularity. I was told this weekend with apparent seriousness that WeHa (West Harlem) and SpaHa (Spanish Harlem) are two nascent names making the rounds. It got me thinking that my neighborhood of Inwood could use an abbreviation upgrade to make gentrification more buzzworthy, something stupid like NoWaHi (North of Washington Heights) or SoBro (just South of the Bronx).

The sun and rain conspired for a rainbow today, which I photographed as I walked from the subway home after work. The red, orange and yellow are clear, but my camera swallowed some of the spectrum; in reality it was a full seven-color marvel.

Lately I’ve been thinking about (and smelling) fresh colors in association with my apartment building. Perhaps emboldened by the city’s recently approved rent hikes, my superintendent has been making capital improvements, such as repaving the front steps and repainting the trim indoors. All week he’s been slopping violent red enamel-gloss over the previously brown surfaces of window frames, molding and banisters. Today, he went for the door exteriors on my floor, and as I turned the corner at the top of the stairs, I saw mine was the color of an evil candy apple and just as sticky.

It reminds me of a detail from this Guardian article about Stanley Kubrick’s quest to film the perfect red door for Eyes Wide Shut. During preproduction, he ordered scouts to canvass London and photograph cinematic red doors. The one included in the movie was simply built on a set at Pinewood Studios and only appears onscreen for a few seconds, as the character played by Tom Cruise is welcomed through it by a prostitute. And still, somewhere in Kubrick’s estate in Hertfordshire, among the storage boxes of obsessive research, correspondence and notes, are hundreds of snapshots of anonymous red doors.

Red is one of my favorite colors, so I like my door’s makeover. It’s fighting a winning battle with the walls in the building’s stairwells and hallways, which are the texture and color of sulphur. The combination may be as garish as a 1970s Fiestaware pattern or a McDonald’s in hell, but it’s better than the previous pairing with brown.

One of the reasons the view across the Hudson River from Linden Terrace at Fort Tryon Park is so unspoiled, as the story goes, is that when John D. Rockefeller, Jr. bequeathed the land to the city in 1931, he also bought hundreds of acres of the Palisades to prevent it from becoming developed. Well played, Johnny. Now you can sit, relax and look at the river, the George Washington Bridge arcing off west and a bunch of densely forested New Jersey, which is often better to look at than other kinds of New Jersey.

I was checking out the view up there late this morning for the Fort Tryon Park Trust’s “Pancakes in the Park” benefit. It was the first such benefit staged by the Friends Committee of the 25-year-old Trust and it reminded me of the “spaghetti supper” events from church basements and school cafeterias of my youth. It was a bunch of chatty Mom-types selling $10 meal tickets at the base of the terrace. Set up on the terrace under a tent was a catering service dishing out steam-tray scrambled eggs, fresh fruit, sausage, sweet rolls, orange juice and coffee, and pancakes that were being made one at a time on griddles, and could be topped with blueberries, sugar or a grilled onion-vegetable medley.

The maximum turnout while I was sitting there on a bench eating my brunch was maybe 50 folks, seemingly a solid half of them young children. I’m bad at guessing ages, but these were in the range of stroller-bound up to that age where they’re running all over the place, and even when you shout, “Cody, stop it! Get over here!” they ignore you and keep darting about.

A yard sale was part of the breakfast although the intermittent rains made it a challenge to sift through the macramé owls and World’s Best Dad coffee mugs that had been carefully arranged atop card tables. It was an actual yard sale, and paired with the pancakes, it made me momentarily nostalgic for the suburbs.

Later in the afternoon, sitting out the drizzly weather in my apartment, I came across a tidbit in a New Yorker article from 1926 mentioning that the Morris-Jumel Mansion, at Edgecombe Avenue and 160th Street in Washington Heights, had on exhibit the only mastodon bones ever found in New York City, unearthed on Dyckman Street very near where live. I certainly had to check this out, but the problem with not having home internet access (yes, it’s down again) is an inability to fact-check. I should have figured an 80-year-old article might not have contained the most up-to-date information available. When I showed up at the mansion, there were no bones in sight, other than the sour old woman who admitted me, seized my $4 admission and told me she’d be closing the house promptly at 4 p.m. Then she retreated to the gift shop to read her romance novel.

Sitting atop a rise on a neatly landscaped plot, the house contains period furniture, drapery and other old-time decor. At just over 240, it’s the oldest house in Manhattan and has really creaky wooden floors and probably a few ghosts. George Washington, when he was commander-in-chief of the American Army, made the house his headquarters for the Battle of Harlem Heights during the American Revolution.

Still recovering from my trip to San Francisco, I attempted to take the 7 train out to Queens for a party thrown by the Manhattan news-blog Gothamist, only to find that the 7 wasn’t running at all between the two boroughs. I ended up taking the E and walking to the Long Island City Water Taxi Beach, many blocks through industrial parks and run-down housing, arriving two hours late.

Not like I made a stellar effort to talk to anyone, but it seemed as if most of the partygoers had arrived in groups or already knew other people there. I have no problem talking to strangers on the phone; in fact most of my meetings in San Francisco were secured with people who I’d never dealt with before and many of whom who hadn’t even heard of the publishing company I work for. And at our networking events, I don’t have much trouble mingling. I don’t know why social events like this party tonight would be any different, other than there’s not a commonality of background. I mean, I could approach someone at random and start talking about real estate, but that could come off as just weird.

Remember nearly two years ago when I was down in the World Trade Pit for the unveiling of the Freedom Tower cornerstone?

Traditionally, the laying of a cornerstone signals the start of development. Not this time. Yesterday around 6:30 in the morning, it was loaded onto a truck and returned to Long Island where it will be kept in a Plexiglas case, viewable by appointment.

The New York Times explains today in an article by David W. Dunlap, “With Tower Yet to Rise, Cornerstone Leaves Town”:

When the Freedom Tower was redesigned last year because of security concerns, the cornerstone’s location was rendered obsolete. The architects shifted the building’s edge about 40 feet to the west, leaving the cornerstone standing outside the bounds of the reconfigured tower.

Although the stone’s absence is “an acknowledgment that much of what passed for progress at ground zero to date has been longer on symbolism than on substance,” it will also allow the tower’s foundation subcontractor to begin excavating the east side of the tower site. “As it turned out,” concludes Dunlap, “the building could not start until the cornerstone was removed.”

As I’ve noticed in other big American cities I travel to, it’s much quieter here in San Francisco than in New York. The looser density of buildings and the wider spaces of the streets and sidewalks diffuse sound. There’s not as much traffic, so there’s less engine noise and honking, and the streets are thick with bicycles, trolleys, zero-emissions buses and hybrid buses fueled by diesel-powered electric generators. The quietude made me think of New York’s most traditional summertime form of noise pollution, the lilting music-box tune of the Mister Softee ice cream trucks.

About 250 of these refreshment repositories roam the five boroughs but their siren song makes it seem like more. The jingle, which has been around since Mister Softee was founded in 1956, is recalled fondly by old-timers and is as much a city institution as the year-round strains of tripped car alarms, street musicians and the bing-bong signaling the closing subway doors.

Infamously, Mayor Bloomberg tried to silence Mister Softee in 2004 as part of a proposed anti-noise package, inspiring a wave of love-hate backlash. “Resistance is futile” from the “cacophonous creature of confection lurking about the city,” wrote Dan Barry in The New York Times that summer.

So far as I know, the proposal failed, because the trucks are out in full force this summer, the jingle tinnier than ever. At McCarren Park on Sunday, there were Mister Softee trucks planted at two of the four corners, dishing out cone after cone of soft serve in the 90-degree heat. Standing at the halfway point between the vehicles, I could hear their simultaneous jingles overlap in a hellish round that was nonetheless like Pavlov’s bell to children and the obese.

The problem with the jingle isn’t so much that it’s annoying in itself but that it’s repeated ad nauseam. Most complaints about it originate from city-dwellers whose buildings the trucks will choose to park in front of, loathe to move on if they’re attracting a steady stream of customers.

Compounding the annoyance factor, it’s been alleged in the eGullet forums that the jingle has lyrics, although the tune seems too nimble for these clumsy phrases.

Here comes Mister Softee, the ice cream man.
The creamiest, dreamiest ice cream you get from Mister Softee.
For a refreshing delight supreme, look for Mister Softee.
My milkshakes and my sundaes and my cones are such a treat.
Listen for my store on wheels, ding-a-ling down the street.
S-O-F-T-double-E...Mister Softee.

Have a listen to the jingle for yourself, recorded lo-fi by my PowerShot S30 camera, and before you consider it charming, imagine it playing on infinite repeat.

Have you ever seen a man kicked to the ground? I’m talking real life, and in one swift movement, a foot to the head of a chump that’s going to stay down for a while. I’d only previously seen a kick this exacting and powerful in The Way of the Exploding Fist, a video game for the Commodore 64, but I saw it in the flesh tonight with a few hundred rowdies at Friday Night Fights, an occasional event held in the low, vaulted basement of the Church of St. Paul the Apostle.

Conversing at work earlier in the day about my weekend plans, one guy in the production department asked, “You’re going to Fight Club, aren’t you?” a question that prompted my obvious reply, “Even if I were, I wouldn’t be able to talk about it.”

I arrived an hour late because of an Amazing Race-style rush to find the venue that’s only of heartbreaking comprehension to a New Yorker¹. By arriving when I did I learned the hundred or so folding chairs flanking three sides of the ring go quickly and one is wise to arrive early. It was still fun to walk around the ring and view it from different angles, as one would a sculpture, and to mingle with the overflow crowd, a surprisingly even mix of men and women, munching hot dogs and drinking canned Sapporo, which was the sole available alcohol.

The fights are a grand mix of amateurs and semi-pros, weight classes, fighting styles (muay Thai and amateur boxing), male and female, and all the fights I saw only went three rounds, or until an opponent was floored or disqualified, which kept it fast-paced and interesting.

Real fighting has escaped me. I suppose when our foreheads were sloped and we lived in caves, the instinct was necessary. But my perception now has been diluted by movies, where every thrown fist connects with the sound of a wet clap. I don’t even know what I’d do if I had to fight someone. Probably hire a man from New Jersey with questionable morals to do it for me.

The tension in the real fights I saw was heightened by anticipation; there are fewer direct hits, those that serve as the punctuation for the scrapping and defensive movements that run out most of the clock. The boxing was cool, but better was the more violent Thai-style rumbling. The larger classes of these guys looked to be roughly my weight and height, except 98% muscle, clad only in gloves and shiny shorts. Bareheaded and barefoot, they punch and kick. Too close and you get a glove or a knee jackknifed to your torso. Farther apart still isn’t far enough for the reach of these guys, arms and legs cabled with muscle.

The atmosphere was equal parts sweat and adrenaline, and the crowd cheered favorites, booed rogue maneuvers, thrust fists into the air and howled. At one point, some guys in the back chanted for blood, or maybe it was for a fighter whose name sounded like “blood.” It made the hair on my arms stand on end.

Fighting aside, even the typical elements of boxing are a delight to the senses: the bell; snatches of jock rock blasting between bouts to jazz the crowd, everything from “Beat It” by Michael Jackson to “Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley; improbably proportioned girls in heels hoisting posters to herald the number of the round; and the trainers with their hurried, animated advice for their man in the corner. The announcer, who was also the event’s promoter, came equipped with that sonorous, drawn-out voice, where each syllable is stretched thrice its normal length: “Aaaaaaand in this cornerrrrrrr...”

I stayed for about two hours, and it didn’t look as if the mayhem would conclude soon, so I headed out into the muggy night. I had a primal urge to bring down a gazelle for dinner, but I imagined the nearest was grazing in the wild at least a continent away, so I settled for a gorgonzola burger at Big Nick’s. Medium. I’m not a total savage.

¹My internet source for the Fight Night informed me that it was going down at 450 Columbus Avenue, between 81st and 82nd, which turned out to be an art gallery, and a nonviolent one at that. Phoning the number for the gym that puts on the event, I got a recorded message for the Church Street Boxing Gym, so I took the C down to Chambers and walked over to 25 Park Place between Church and Broadway. There a sign taped to the door noted that the gym was closed because of the boxing matches at 59th and 9th so I took the A all the way back up to 59th Street, my final, correct destination. [back]

West 35th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.

If it’s true that this city is a leader in fashion, dads and aging male porn stars will be happy to hear that “moustaches are enjoying something of a renaissance among young New Yorkers,” at least according to an Agence France Presse article published today.

This is one of those stories that defines or perhaps forms a trend via a time-honored cart-before-the-ass journalistic formula, which I will reveal to you here.

1. Interview three people who exhibit the trend, in this case including “a tall man with blonde highlights in his hair to match his silver jacket” who confides that moustaches are “cool, right?”
2. Quote a fellow media source backing up the trend. James Bassil of AskMen.com offers the fascinating generalization that women either love moustaches or are “absolutely repulsed” by them.
3. Patch together a trend timeline. This article’s author forms a history of the moustache in American pop culture, from Clark Gable, to the Brawny Man, through actors Tom Selleck to Nicholas Cage (a “hip role model”?), and brings it home with a reference to the New York City Beard and Moustache Championships last month, where the ’stache was “taken for granted.”

There you have it: a trend is grown as easily as facial hair. Impressionable young gentlemen throughout the five boroughs should spend an appropriate amount of time primping and contemplating their new cookie dusters in the mirror, first taking care to adjust their trucker caps so as so provide the clearest view.

Like Mick, I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes. Also like Mick, I turn my head. The rest of the song I can’t really relate to.

Transit Warbler. Entranced by the shininess of “spare” change, this lesser warbler can be found making its discordant song on street corners, in the deepest recesses of subway stations, and sometimes within the harsh environs of the subway itself. Thrives on attention and aforementioned coinage.

Jaywalk. This common but surefooted specimen is known for taking the fastest route to its destination in disregard of cross-migrating traffic. Often unaware of its own surroundings, it is neither flappable nor easily approached due to its speedy resolve.

Hawker. Known to proffer all manner of shoddy objects in exchange for the paper money it uses to build its nest. Feeds on the gullible. Rife on Canal Street and Times Square year-round, but generally prevalent wherever tourists may flock. Responsive to a clear-throated haggle-call or police raid.

Prix Fixe. This French native makes its home in the cafés and bistros below 14th street. Usually spotted during brunch and early dinner, its appearance in balmy weather is heralded by cheerful notices chalked on slate-boards brought out to the sidewalks.

Slim-Bodied Hipster. Congregates in flocks throughout Brooklyn, the Lower East Side and the L train. Known for its distinctive plumage and air of superiority. Feeds on a steady diet of cheap beer and irony. Mating song reminiscent of the music of David Byrne. Known for its distinctively repetitive “blogsong.”

Mock Actor. Despite the etymology of its surname, this master of disguise can be found throughout the city’s restaurants, clothiers and coffeehouses in a holding pattern from its true destination: the bright lights of Broadway and movie productions. Weary and frequently bitter, even watchers of the steeliest resolve can be staggered by its song of woe.

I read with interest the obituary of Allan Kaprow in the April 27th Wall Street Journal. Kaprow, who died April 5th at the age of 78, is credited as the father of Happenings, which are like living public art, and which the article’s author Barbara Rose describes as “theater pieces that fused John Cage’s aesthetics of chance with Jackson Pollock’s physical, gestural manner of painting.”

Kaprow launched the first Happening in 1959 in an artists’ cooperative downtown. Clear plastic walls divided the space into three rooms where performers acted out choreographed movements: a girl squeezing oranges, an artist lighting matches and painting, an orchestra playing toy instruments. Rauschenberg and Johns were among the performers.

Hundreds more traditional-style art-gallery Happenings happened in Manhattan through the ’60; there was some good footage of them in the documentary I saw in February, Who Gets to Call it Art?. But soon after that first one in 1959, Kaprow moved Happenings into the streets to make them even more unexpected, being literally outside of an artistic setting. Here’s one I would have liked to have seen:

In one performance he instructed participants to wait in Times Square and look for a signal from a window. When it came, they were to fall down on the sidewalk. Once that happened, a truck picked them up and cleared the streets of bodies.

I was surprised that the Journal’s obituary closed with Rose stating that Happenings faded away completely starting in the ’70s. Ever since that time, “the boisterous improvisations of the Happenings,” Rose writes, have been replaced by “carefully choreographed, elaborately costumed and phenomenally expensive productions.” She concludes, “[W]hat was born as a Dada gesture has ended as extravagant entertainment.”

I disagree and that’s not how I would have framed the article. I concede the word Happening is as dusty today as beatnik or hippie. But it’s doing Kaprow disservice to not even mention that the spirit of his organized on-the-street performances lives today in the form of the flash mob, defined by this fellow as a “Happening for Internetters,” and in groups like the locally based Improv Everywhere. Read about their shenanigans with blue shirts and Best Buy or an infinite time loop and tell me they’re not something Kaprow would recognize and be proud of.

Time Out New York magazine released its annual apartments issue this week, and as soon as I saw that the lead article contained featurettes about neighborhoods “On the Verge,” I got a tingly Selsun Blue sensation that I knew what one of those locales would be.

The article never specifies what these neighborhoods are on the verge of, but the implication is gentrification and/or popularity, at least among us fools that want to and can barely afford to live in New York City. I paged through the excited callouts for East Harlem (where my pal Kelly lives), Hunter’s Point, Sunset Park and Bushwick (um, that one’s “Over the Verge”). Last and least, was—that’s right—my very own Inwood.

The brief summary gives a typical crack about how far uptown it is and the length of the ride (“30-minute commute to 59th Street on the A train”). I’ve noticed no one ever mentions that the 1 and A trains that stop in Inwood are supremely reliable and that if you factor in delays and related shenanigans associated with, say, the L to Brooklyn, commutes like that one end up as long as my “way north” trip.

The Inwood blurb also describes the fancy area west of Broadway as mostly “prewar apartment buildings, some with Art Deco touches.” My neighborhood east of Broadway is summed up as “a bit more run-down,” which is code for “not a lot of whitey” and “there isn’t a Starbucks there yet.”

A strangely matter-of-fact comment closes the piece: “Another gentrification indicator: the emergence of a visible gay population.” Not in my part of the neighborhood, apparently, unless gay people are now letting their small dogs shit on the sidewalk without cleanup. Although I swear that after I read this article, I was suddenly seeing gay people everywhere, including the guy sashaying down the sidewalk with his laundry basket and another fellow who resembled a tall version of George Michael.

On the weekends, no self-respecting New Yorker wants to mingle with the sidewalk-clogging Canal Street tourists, with their maps, bootleg designer handbags and body fat, but I made an exception today for Taste of Chinatown.

Mmm-mmm! Can you taste the excitement? The fourth since October 2004, Taste of Chinatown is a giant neighborhood street fair with crowds, entertainments and, most importantly, 50+ restaurants, bakeries and shops peddling sample plates of their food and drink for the flat fee of $1 or $2.

A map and menu are provided online and one is wise to consult both beforehand because all street food looks tempting when you’re standing there, on the street. After practically leaping from the congestion on Canal, I arrived on Mott, the street featuring the most food choices. I quickly located the famous Peking Duck House because it was the only food station with a 30-minute-wait line, even though it was 1 p.m. and the festival had only just begun. There was a smaller line I briefly queued into until a fellow in chef garb announced that everyone who thought he was standing in the Peking Duck Line was actually standing in the Duck Bones Line. That line remained short.

Back in the correct line, I entertained questions from passers by, mainly “What’s this line for?”, followed by “Is it worth it?” or a derisive snort. The best part of my wait, other than watching small flocks of people cutting into the front of the line, was when some tourist lady passing by stopped an elderly local man with a flower-laden pushcart and asked him if she could take his picture. Then she did so, without waiting for an answer and after physically maneuvering him into the frame so her photo would look more symmetrical. Offhandedly she asked what the flowers were for. “Funeral,” the man said. “Oh, I’m so sorry!” the woman gushed, grasping the confused man’s arm, who was likely only a deliveryman.

Eventually I reached the serving table with its bustle of service and hungry people pressing foward while waving greenbacks. The namesake dish from Peking Duck House was worth the wait and I’d be willing to entertain an entrée portion. The samples today were small and wrapped in a sort of tortilla along with some crisp julienne cucumber. It was tender and just sweet enough, with crackly tasty skin. Wish I would have gotten two.

I followed this up with another respected Chinatown classic, Big Wong King, which offered a selection of roast pork, roast pig (which is apparently something different than roast pork), roast duck and BBQ spare ribs. I opted for the ribs and it was a moist, plentiful portion, tasty and dyed that mysterious Chinese Meat Red.

Lung Moon Bakery on Mulberry Street displayed a marvelous spread of goods and after I selected the angel food cake, craftily baked into squares of wax paper to resemble a tiny bouquet for ease of eating on-the-go.

To help wash this down, I walked over to buy some Black Bubble Tea from Ten Ren’s Tea Time, passing along the way several roving segments of Chinese Dragon, which reminded me of the arcade game Centipede.

Bubble tea, which I understand to be a tired novelty at this point in its lifespan, is milky iced tea in which is floating large caviar-like beads of flavored tapioca. You get a triple-wide straw to suck up these bubbles along with your tea. If you’re lucky, you inhale them directly into your respiratory system.

Other than arriving on-time, hungry and ideally with someone else to talk with in line, the best recommendation I can offer for Taste of Chinatown is to take your meal to eat over in nearby Columbus Park. It’s cliché to call one landscaped parcel or another in Manhattan “a gem,” but I’d call it that anyway and overextend the metaphor by adding “recently polished.”

Although it was designed by celebrated Central Park co-architect Calvert Vaux, Columbus Park opened in 1897 adjacent the unsavory Five Points neighborhood, which features into Herbert Asbury’s book The Gangs of New York and Scorsese’s film of the same name. The park was so filthy at the time, it was dissed in print by no less than Jacob Riis and Charles Dickens.

Well after the turn of the century, improvements arrived in slow order: a limestone rec center in the mid-’30s, a playground and basketball courts in the ’80s and ’90s. Then, last year, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation injected the north end of the park with improvement funding. It now features a plaza with benches, chess and picnic tables, new landscaping, fencing and lighting, and the final element under construction, a handsome stone pavilion. There’s also a soccer field, open to the public but not dogs, with the greenest, most evenly cropped grass I’ve yet seen in Manhattan; I had to touch it to convince myself it was real. You will trust me when I say this is grass to make a hard-boiled golfer jealous. I am clearly an idiot; the grass is fake.

Despite these agreeable surroundings, there were few people from the festival eating in the park. It was mostly Asian guys at the picnic and game tables, playing what may have been Go Xiangqi with small, illustrated discs. These old guys’ discs were wooden and their game drew only three onlookers, including myself. (That’s the pavilion in the background.)

Meanwhile, groups of young turks playing at other tables boasted professional engraved disc sets, as well as small entourages that would call out suggestions, praise strategies and heckle failures, like a Greek chorus, only in Chinese.

I blew out of the Town just as the bitterly cold rain blew in around 3:00 p.m. I read later in The New York Times that by 3:30, the intensified rain caused many restaurants to pull in their tables, effectively closing down the festival early. But there will be another one in October. I’ll be back, Taste of Chinatown. I’ll be back.

Taste of Chinatown

• Meal 16 of 52:
• Peking Duck from Peking Duck House, 28 Mott St. ($2)
• BBQ spareribs from Big Wong King, 67 Mott St. ($2)
• angel food cake from Lung Moon Bakery, 83 Mulberry St. ($1)
• Black Bubble Tea from Ten Ren’s Tea Time, 79 Mott St. ($2)

I know when it’s Springtime in Midtown because the city lovingly plants strong-scented purple hyacinths and vibrant yellow tulips in the giant concrete planters lining the segment of Eighth Avenue on which I work.

If you pay close enough attention to their beauty, they’re enough to take your mind away from the scabby beggars, methadone-addled smacksters and Boschload of humanity surrounding you on the sidewalk.

And then, just like last Spring, and likely many before that one, by later the same day, cretins will have dug up and stolen most of the hyacinths. They’ll be completely wiped out within 48 hours, divots in the dirt where they were recently planted. The tulips are left untouched by human hands, and by the sun, too, apparently, because they will brown, wilt and die within the week from the lack of light penetrating the densely skyscraper-lined avenue.

Here’s another way you can tell it’s Spring in New York: not only is Spring in the air, but so are thrusting pug rumps.

What’s this también I hear so many people in my neighborhood talking about? And where can I get one?

In the mid-’90s, Philip-Lorca diCorcia toured the largest cities of the world, concealing his lights on the pavement and surreptitiously photographing crowds of people on the streets and sidewalks.

From 1999 to 2001, he took a bolder step for his series, Heads. Over a sidewalk on Times Square, he set up an arc of scaffolding affixed with remote-controlled strobe lights. As pedestrians passed under the rig, diCorcia, who was positioned across the street with a long lens, would focus on individuals and snap photos.

A retired diamond merchant from Union City, New Jersey was surprised to find his photo in an exhibition catalog last year and wasn’t happy, suing diCorcia and his gallery for taking his photo, exhibiting it and profiting from its sale, all without his permission. The suit was dismissed last month by a New York State Supreme Court judge who ruled in favor of artistic expression over individual privacy rights.

What’s significant about the case, according to New York Times photo editor Philip Gefter in his March 17 article “Street photography: A right or invasion?,” is that it’s the first to directly challenge the freedom to photograph in public. (Right-to-privacy laws vary by state; in New York, they prohibit the unauthorized use of a person’s likeness for advertising or other trades, but privacy rights are waived if the image is considered art.) Disturbingly, had this case succeeded, it could have frozen the sale and publishing of everything from Walker Evans’ late-1930s Many are Called series to Travis Ruse’s ongoing photoblog, both of which feature candid photos of New York City subway commuters.

It’s interesting that as one art form has (for the time being) received the legal nod to continue without permissions, another is being further ground out by the requirement of permissions: sampling.

Earlier this week, a federal judge ordered a sales freeze of the Notorious B.I.G. album Ready to Die. Although it’s from 1994 and the rapper was shot dead in 1997, the judge ruled that B.I.G. had used an “unauthorized sample” of the Ohio Players’ song “Singing in the Morning.” The suit was brought by the companies that control the Ohio Players’ recordings (as well as those of the often-sampled Funkadelic), companies that have been busy over the past five years filing hundreds of lawsuits to collect royalties over samples.

Of course sampling resides in a commercial domain and not the public domain of street photography. But as Lawrence Lessig has written, you’re allowed to quote from a published work and you’re allowed to take a few musical notes from a commercial composition for your own without permission—you just can’t take those same notes from a recording. In other words, Lessig notes, “life in the analog world is freer than life in the digital world.”

It wasn’t always this way. Sampling had its heyday in the late ’80s and early ’90s with the albums of pioneers like Public Enemy and the Beastie Boys. The latter’s 1989 album, Paul’s Boutique, boasted more than 125 uncredited samples from other commercial recordings, including those of two infamously protective groups, The Beatles and Led Zeppelin.

But lawsuits and out-of-court settlements quickly cut down the popularity and extensiveness of sampling. In one high-profile case of 1991, Gilbert O’Sullivan sued rapper Biz Markie over an unauthorized sample of “Alone Again (Naturally)” that a judge ruled amounted not to copyright infringement but criminal theft. The album was withdrawn and the Biz bitterly titled his follow-up All Samples Cleared. The prohibitive costs of “clearing” samples have created an environment where an album with as many high-profile samples as Paul’s Boutique would likely be impossible to release today, not that people haven’t tried.

How would I feel if I learned someone had photographed me in public, was exhibiting the photo and profiting from its sale? How would I feel if I was a musician and part of my song turned up in someone else’s? I don’t know. But surely potential limitations on street photography and further legal pressures on sampling have in themselves a chilling effect on art and our potential witness of beautiful images and sounds.

Since I’ve read Eats, Shoots & Leaves, I’ve been on the lookout for anguished English in Gotham. I’m just like Batman, except I’m seeking bad punctuation, grammar and spelling instead of crime, and I’m not so much fighting these errors as I am taking pictures of them for my own amusement and maybe yours.

Anyway, it comes as no surprise to me that much of the trouble is caused by ladies. Here we have a large incorrect sign overlooking West 34th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues.

Of course, the Tannery House could mean what it has written, but stocking shoes exclusively for one lady, even if she’s Imelda Marcos, is a waste of precious shelf space in the high rents of this city.

I hate to bring attention to this next one because it’s in the Village outside my favorite barber shop, staffed by friendly Russian guys who ask in a thick accent if I want my usual “business-style haircut.”

But it’s even worse than the Tannery House boo-boo and not just because the Russians recently raised their prices from $9.99. It starts out fine with Men’s Haircut, then your eye drops to the fanciful Ladie’s. Unlike Lady’s, Ladie’s isn’t even a word, and it’s at this point that an English teacher would drop to the sidewalk and writhe in pain.

Combining elements of a cafeteria with a vending machine, entrepreneurs Joe Horn and Frank Hardart opened the first Automat in 1902 in Phiadelphia, following it with New York City’s first such restaurant ten years later on Times Square.

The concept was simple. Small, glass-doored comparments lining the walls were chilled, heated or neither, depending on the single serving of food nestled inside. Each compartment had a corresponding coin slot, and patrons shuffled down the line with a tray, inserting nickels to unlock the doors and remove the food of their choice. Unseen staff working on the other side of the walls refilled empty compartments. Coffee, tea and other beverages were dispensed by placing a cup under a spigot, then inserting a coin. Customers with laden trays then gathered silverware and seated themselves. Automats were fine places for quick, cheap meals and to overhear snatches of only-in-New-York coversation among the establishment’s thrifty patrons.

Automats hit paydirt during the Great Depression, by which time there were more than 42 in the city, collectively serving hundreds of thousands of meals to cash-strapped patrons daily. Irving Berlin wrote two odes to the Automat in 1932: “Let’s Have Another Cup of Coffee,” which became a jingle for Horn & Hardart, the chain name now synonymous with Automat, and “Lunching at the Automat,” which imagined New York’s social elite reduced to rubbing elbows with commonfolk at mealtime:

Times are not so sweet,
But the bluebloods have to eat,
So the best of families meet
At the Automat.

. . . .

The Morgans and the Whitneys
And the other big shots
Change dollars into jitneys
And drop them in the slots.

Although meals could be had for nickels, grifters paid even less with substitutes ranging from slugs, purchased 15 for a dime, to foreign currency valued at far less than five cents but equal in shape. Five-pfennig and two-sou coins worked well.

In 1936, Berenice Abbott photographed the dessert section of the Automat at 977 Eighth Avenue just south of Columbus Circle, popular among area musicians, cabaret-goers and other nighthawks.

This Otto Soglow cartoon published in The New Yorker a few months later suggests how the Automat had worked itself into the popular imagination.

For World War II rationing efforts, Horn & Hardart hired “Sugar Girls” who doled out the sweetener that used to be kept in bowls at every table. Customers purchasing coffee or tea had to tell the Sugar Girl how much they wanted, limited to a maximum of two teaspoonfuls per cup.

Automats began to disappear during the following decades as fast food chains rose in popularity and inflation made nickel-only purchases obsolete. By the early ’60s, there were only six items at the Automat that still cost five cents: three varieties of buttered roll, servings of buttered bread or toast, and a doughnut.

While campaigning for Nixon’s 1960 presidential bid, multimillionaire New York governor Nelson Rockefeller showed he was a man of the people by lunching on a cruller and coffee at the Automat on Union Square. I like to think Irving Berlin got a kick out of that, just as he would have been saddened to hear that the city’s last Automat, located on Third Avenue and 42nd Street, closed in 1991.

So New York residential brokers really are jerks, and hard up for money and attention, too, which I wouldn’t have thought possible. An item in the New York Daily News today noted 28-year-old Coldwell Banker broker Jason Lewis is selling snow from the Blizzard of 2006 in a Ziploc freezer bag.

“I got the idea when someone sold a hot dog from an NFC championship game for $4,000 or $5,000. ... If it sells, I’ll find some dry ice and pack it up, or if it’s close, I’ll hand-deliver it.“

Lewis wants a minimum of $9.99 for the frozen precipitation collected in front of his apartment building at the corner of Fulton and Gold Sts.

Last I checked, Jason hadn’t received any bids. Maybe he would have had more success with the type of cheaper, more direct approach I saw on Union Square a few winters ago: some guy sitting on the sidewalk, selling snowballs for a dollar.

After getting off easy in December and January, Old Man Winter made up for lost time by throwing down on the East Coast today. New York City got its deepest snowfall ever, according to various news reports, at least 26.9 inches in Central Park. I stayed inside nearly all day listening to music, reading the paper from cover to cover, drinking a lot of coffee and trying to assemble one of my new chairs but giving up after about an hour. I finally ventured outside for the first time all today around midnight to take out the garbage. I thought I’d take some blizzard aftermath photos, but it looked just like the blizzard last year, so I couldn’t get too worked up about it.

The Complete New Yorker: this thing is great. Every issue of the magazine—literally reproductions of every page, covers and ads included—on eight DVDs, accessible on Windows or Mac computers. I’ve read plenty of reports that the interface could be more intuitive, that you can’t copy and paste article text, that it’s slow and that the need to swap DVDs frequently makes nerds reminisce unfondly of the mid-80s when they would play King’s Quest and have to swap 5 1/4" floppies every five minutes.

Pshaw! Although The Complete New Yorker lists for $100, you can get it for a shade more than $60 with free shipping from Amazon.com. I daresay you get what you pay for. Yes, the interface is clunky with a completely unintuitive search screen that frequently turns up strange or incomplete results. Disc swapping is slow only when you’re tracking the “complete works” of an author or a topic over time: “television” or “the Yankees,” say. But enterprising individuals have released a hack that shows you how to copy every issue to an external hard drive and access the content from there, drastically improving article retrieval speed. (I intend to do this as soon as UPS delivers my 250GB external LaCie drive.) And, yeah, you can’t copy and paste text, but if you could, it’d be a probable copyright law violation. But the pages print crisply-I don’t want to squint-and-scroll on my PowerBook’s 12" screen to read a 15-page feature anyway.

But the bottom line is that $60 figure. That’s a lot of hits for little cash. For me, highlights includes every Pauline Kael movie review and essay. Every James Thurber and Roz Chast cartoon. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which was first serialized in the magazine, and a 1957 interview he conducted with Marlon Brando.

Susan Orlean, whose piece on orchid-hunter John Laroche appeared here before it became the book that became Adaptation, has turned out other profiles on diverse people and topics, including the Shaggs, Corcoran Group broker Jill Meilus and the World Taxidermy Championships. Calvin Tompkins, meanwhile, has profiled the most original artistic and cultural minds of the twentieth century: Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Buckminster Fuller, Georgia O’ Keeffe, Paul Strand, Julia Child, Claes Oldenburg.

Certain content is indispensable for New York history aficionados. You get E.B. White and James Thurber’s original “Talk of the Town” pieces, an early one of which, from 1928, encapsulates an anecdote of Thurber sitting a few rows behind Rachmaninoff as the great pianist first hears the theremin played.

A lengthy 1950 profile of Hemingway catches him during a New York stopover en route to Italy. “This ain’t my town,” he grumbles. “It’s a town you come to for a short time. It’s murder.” The reporter tags along as the author drinks constantly, shares Perrier-Jouët and caviar with old friend Marlene Dietrich (“the Kraut”), begrudgingly purchases a new coat and belt at Abercrombie & Fitch, appreciates art at the Met and, throughout, speaks in the clipped, precise tones of one of his own characters.

You also get the ads, humorous curiosities that should prove invaluable to pop culture fanatics and graphic designers. In the mid-’50s alone, we learn that the BarcaLounger “can work relaxing wonders for a tired man...or a frazzled housewife” and that a full, “legation blue” men’s suit retails for about $69.50 at Saks on 34th Street and “stretches from the conference table to the cocktail hour to an evening of entertainment.”

My previous boss at my real estate job takes a slightly different footpath from Penn Station each morning to our office building, and as we entered the elevator together this morning, she told me about a guy either passed out or sleeping on the sidewalk in front of the methadone clinic a block away on Eighth Avenue. Have New Yorkers become so jaded that we’ll literally walk over someone, she wondered.

Having not lived in New York longer than I have, I can tell you that there are two prevailing views of the city:

1. It’s chock full of heartless, illiterate jerks and people sleeping on the sidewalk, so why’d you want to live there anyway.
2. It’s the world’s capital, home of the best art, culture and tradition, and why’d you want to live there anyway ’cause it’s really expensive.

Some blocks away, at a nearby midtown hotel off Sixth Avenue, during a sweltering summer day in 1948, E.B. White wrote an essay, Here is New York, that encompasses both of these categories.

At the time, White hadn’t lived in the city in years, and hadn’t in fact traveled much at all. But he’d been a fixture in Manhattan for a full decade earlier, writing for The New Yorker and holding court with friends like James Thurber and Dorothy Parker. After that, he’d retired to a farmhouse in Maine to write children’s books about the spiders and mice that lived in his barn, and to live out his life. But that day, he was in town to write about the city, which he first noted, “can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.”

Reading Here is New York now is to realize that nothing and everything have changed in the more than 50 years since. There are bums on the sidewalks now, there were bums on the sidewalks then. White writes of the “cold guilt” walking the Bowery late at night, drunks sleeping on the “free bed” of the sidewalk. “Pedestrians step along and over and around the still forms as though walking on a battlefield among the dead.“

In a city that’s always been in motion, White focuses a deal on changes startling to him then, that remain ongoing today: gentrification, crowding, growth skyward, a change of “tempo and in temper.”

He touches on the resilience of New York, and this quality of his essay has caused any number of people to trot it out post 9/11, particularly in his conclusion, which foreshadows that event:

The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.

But what Here is New York mostly is, is a homage to its neighborhoods, camaraderie, celebrity and multicultural character.

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry; it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without a doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive.

Crime numbers are dropping throughout New York City, with homicide in particular at 1963 levels, according to the NYPD in a front-page New York Times article today.

As of yesterday, there had been 537 killings in the city. (The record high was set in 1990, when 2,245 people were killed.) Not too bad for a city of eight million people.

The real story, of course, is why crime rates are dropping. Aside from a predictable quote from Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly about the improvements in the city and its quality of life, as well as his cops’ “great job,” the only analysis afforded to this point is saved for the article’s end. A criminologist, Andrew Karmen, points to an improved economy and job opportunities, smarter police work and tougher sentencing. This last point is backed up by a statistic that 97% of murderers this year had a prior arrest record—and more than half of the victims had been previously arrested, as well.

Analyzing the NYPD’s homicide stats further, the Times reveals the most common murder scenario in 2005: a black male, age 25 to 40, shoots a black male friend or acquaintance of the same age. The motive is drugs, and the murder goes down between 4 p.m. and midnight in Brooklyn.

Today was the city’s first substantial snow, though it wasn’t more than an inch at most of wet accumulation that allowed the kids in my neighborhood to joyfully pelt one another from across the street with hard-packed snowballs. I walked to Fort Tryon Park and took in the views of my neighborhood from Linden Terrace, the park’s apex, one of the highest points in Manhattan, and the site of a picnic lunch this summer. A couple up there was whipping snowballs at New Jersey, which I think we’ve all wanted to do at one time or another.

I had dinner with Jimi, Mike and The Man at Kiran, the Indian restaurant next door to their apartment building. Jimi has his place all decked out with colorful holiday ornaments and nine personalized stockings, one for each of the three humans, cats and dogs living there.

According to Quinnipiac University, which polled 895 registered New York City voters and released the results today:

New York City voters love their city more than ever, with 61 percent who say they “love” New York, 22 percent who say they “like” New York, 15 percent with mixed feelings and 1 percent who say they “hate” the city, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today.

Prior polls by the independent Quinnipiac University show the love factor ranging from a low of 46 percent June 3, 1999, to a high of 59 percent November 25, 2002.

“It’s a metropolitan love affair—not just casual affection,” said Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. “Why doesn’t that 1 percent of haters move back to Boston?”

Walking to our lawyer media overlords on Park Avenue at E. 25th Street this morning for a work meeting, I nearly passed by a guy with grizzliness levels approaching those of Santa Claus who I thought was begging but merely wanted to know where he could catch the IRT. Oldschool! I’m not so unhistoried that I didn’t know New York’s subway lines were once independently owned and named, but I had to ask which line he was referring to. After determining it was the 1 he was after, I directed him west toward Seventh Avenue, and we went our separate ways.

Needless to say, the street on which I live looked different 82 years ago.

I’ve read that some cities, Los Angeles among them, have succeeded in pressuring Paramount to remove billboards for Get Rich or Die Tryin’, the semi-biographical film starring rapper Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson. They depict his well-muscled bullet-scarred back with arms outstretched, gun in one hand and microphone in the other. Compounding the self-aggrandizing nature of such imagery, I saw that one of the billboards still existed a block away from my apartment and was topped with more fine messaging for urban youth: a Dewar’s whisky billboard.

Serendipitously, a day later, Fitty had been replaced by a Spanish-language billboard for Chase.

My friend Joe and his special ladyfriend Andrea are visiting me next weekend. She’s never been to the city before, while Joe’s been here a few times, so in addition to the usual circuit of favorite and new restaurants, I’m trying to cook up activities for us that are New York-stle fun but not too sterotypically touristy. Any ideas? Here are a few I have so far:

• I’m not familiar enough yet with my new neighborhood to recommend stuff there, other than the live poultry shop I noticed near W. 207th Street the other day, but I think a visit is in order to The Cloisters, which is within walking distance of my apartment.
• A stroll through Central Park, of course, perhaps on our way to the exhibition of Van Gogh drawings at the Met.
• Views from the Top of the Rock, the 70th floor observation deck at Rockefeller Center that just reopened on November 1 after extensive renovations.
• A Circle Line boat tour of Manhattan. Although I’m strongly considering a bus tour of Manhattan instead, per Jimi’s advice, because you get a lot closer to the hustle, bustle and historic buildings
• I’m told the ladies like shopping, so perhaps we could stop by some of the finer shops on Fifth Avenue.
• And I suppose just seeing (or shopping on) Times Square is a must if you’ve never been here, although we may be able to sightsee while we’re waiting in line at TKTS for our Broadway show tickets.
• I know we’ll be going to the Museum of Modern Art because Joe wants to buy Christmas cards at the MoMA Design and Book Store.
• As a history buff, Joe mentioned Ellis Island could be fun.

Because I know you were still wondering about that smell...

Good Smell Vanishes, But It Leaves Air of Mystery

By Anthony DePalma

The New York Times, October 29, 2005

The night air all over Manhattan was brisk, with a hint of winter and a dash of something sweetly out of the ordinary. Some thought it smelled like maple syrup. Some said caramel, or a freshly baked pie, or Bit-O-Honey candy bars.

From downtown Manhattan to the Upper East Side, Prospect Heights in Brooklyn and parts of Staten Island, the question was the same on Thursday night and into early yesterday: What was that smell?

The aroma not only revived memories of childhood, but in a city scared by terrorism, it raised vague worries about an attack deviously cloaked in the smell of grandma’s kitchen.

It was so seductive that many New Yorkers found themselves behaving strangely, succumbing to urges usually kept under wraps. One woman who never touches the stuff said she was inspired to eat ice cream.

Late yesterday, nearly 24 hours after the smell had spread through the city, sparking hundreds of bewildered calls to the city’s 311 emergency hot line, officials said that they had determined that the smell had not been hazardous and that it had dissipated as quickly, and mysteriously, as it had appeared.

Even after chasing down anonymous tips and chasing up several blind alleys, however, they did not know where it had come from.

The odor was first detected around 8 p.m. on Thursday in Lower Manhattan. It seemed to spread quickly uptown and into parts of the other boroughs—so quickly that officials expressed concern. The city’s Office of Emergency Management sent out feelers to the Police and Fire Departments, state emergency response agencies in New York and New Jersey, and the United States Coast Guard, which communicated with tugboats and container ships at sea to determine whether the odor was being detected there.

Raymond W. Kelly, the New York City police commissioner, coolly told reporters yesterday that tests and air monitoring had revealed “nothing of a hazardous nature.”

“It’s believed to be some sort of food substance, but we can’t substantiate that at this time,” Mr. Kelly said. He confirmed that the source of the smell seemed to be in Lower Manhattan.

The chase led the city’s environmental bloodhounds to some interesting places. Investigators working on a tip checked the Jacques Torres Chocolate Haven in SoHo, but the owner insisted he had not been the culprit. His staff had spent the afternoon roasting almonds, he said. And anyway, chocolate, for those who really know, smells bitter, not sweet.

“Perhaps if it was a chocolate smell, people would be running here today,” Mr. Torres said from his shop, which he said was no busier than normal for a Friday in autumn. His chef, Susana Garcia, 31, who was on duty Thursday, said the mysterious odor was definitely more like maple syrup than like chocolate. It was, Mr. Torres said, a kind of warm-your-heart holiday smell appropriate for this time of year.

If there was anyone in New York who could recognize the aroma of maple syrup, it would be a Canadian like Jeff Breithaupt, 42, cultural affairs officer at the Canadian Consulate in New York. He said he was out running on the Upper East Side last night when the smell came to him. Right away, he thought it was caramel candy.

A labor organizer, Rekha Eanni, said she could not characterize the exact smell, but after getting out of a night class at New York University she was overcome with a craving for pumpkin pie. When she got home there was no pie, so she did something she never does.

“I made myself a pretty big bowl of vanilla ice cream with honey and cornflakes,” she said.

Experts say that no human sense is more directly connected to the emotions than the sense of smell. “Before we know we are even in contact with a smell we have already received it and reacted to it,” a professional perfumer, Mandy Aftel, said. “Smells come in without language and go directly to the emotional center of the brain. That’s why they are so connected to memory.”

As soon as he smelled the mystery smell, Greg Nickson, 45, a freelance cameraman, was transported, like Marcel Proust, to things past, things like the chocolate factory that flooded his childhood neighborhood in Chicago with sweet aromas.

When he poked his head out of his 10th-floor apartment window to look for his wife, Mr. Nickson got a good whiff of it, and it puzzled him.

“I thought,” he said. “‘How could the smell be so pervasive?’”

With the cold nighttime air trapped under a lid of warm air over the city, and only a 3-mile-an-hour wind, any odor would have been kept low to the ground, where it could have slipped between buildings to work its way uptown and to the other boroughs, said Patrick Kinney, an associate professor of environmental science at Columbia University.

When Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was asked at City Hall about the smell, he repeated that tests showed it was not dangerous.

With the mayor enjoying a sizable lead in polls about the upcoming election, someone asked whether it struck him as, perhaps, the sweet smell of success.

He gave an enigmatic answer. “Nature,” the mayor said, “should be allowed to take care of its own.”

Kareem Fahim and Colin Moynihan contributed reporting for this article.

Admit it; if you didn’t know better, you’d think this article (or at least its headline) was from The Onion.

Good Smell Perplexes New Yorkers

By Kareem Fahim

The New York Times, October 28, 2005

An unseen, sweet-smelling cloud drifted through parts of Manhattan last night. Arturo Padilla walked through it and declared that it was awesome.

“It’s like maple syrup. With Eggos. Or pancakes,” he said. “It’s pleasant.”

The odor had followed Mr. Padilla and his friend along their walk in Lower Manhattan, from a dormitory on Fulton Street, to Pace University on Spruce Street, and back down again, to where they stood now, near a Dunkin’ Donuts. Maybe it was from there, he said. But it wasn’t.

Mr. Padilla was not alone. Reports of the syrupy cloud poured in from across Manhattan after 9 p.m. Some feared that it was something sinister.

There were so many calls that the city’s Office of Emergency Management coordinated efforts with the Police and Fire Departments, the Coast Guard and the City Department of Environmental Protection to look into it.

By 11 p.m., the search had turned up nothing harmful, according to tests of the air. Reports continued to come in from as far north as 112th Street shortly before midnight. In Lower Manhattan, where the smell had begun to fade, it was back, stronger than before, by 1 a.m.

“We are continuing to sample the air throughout the affected area to make sure there’s nothing hazardous,” said Jarrod Bernstein, an emergency management spokesman. “What the actual cause of the smell is, we really don’t know.”

There were conflicting accounts as to its nature. A police officer who had thrown out her French vanilla coffee earlier compared it to that. Two diplomats from the Netherlands disagreed, politely. Rieneke Buisman said it smelled like roasted peanuts. Her friend Joris Geeven said it reminded him of a Dutch cake called peperkoek, though he could not describe that smell.

New York City found the Census Bureau’s most recent headcount last year to be suspiciously lacking, so it had the Department of City Planning challenge the figure using an alternate counting method that shows the link between the city’s booming housing market and increased population.

Looking at more than births, deaths and migration, the city researched telephone and utility records, property tax bills and building permits to “find” an additional 64,259 New Yorkers, brining the city’s total population to 8,168,338, the highest it’s ever been. The Bureau agreed to accept the new total, which also represents a 2% population growth in the city since the 2000 Census.

Naturally, it’s more of a money issue than a civic pride issue, as the New York Times points out in an article today:

As a result of the higher official population figures, the Bloomberg administration estimates that between 2004 and 2010 an additional $36 million in federal housing assistance will flow to New York State, with most of that going to the city.

Incidentally, in 2010, if the current figures continue on track, the city’s population will hit 8.4 million. Talk about your huddled masses.

On W. 35th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues.

A decade after promises, political bickering, lawsuits and inaction, New York City officials announced that freestanding, permanent public toilets will be placed on the city streets, according to the New York Times today.

The firm selected for the job, Cemusa Inc., has also been tapped to revamp the city’s bus shelters and newsstands, but the real excitement are those toilets. Heaven help the heavy drinker stranded in a business district of the city after the bars have closed. There’s nowhere to go, at least not legally; I’d wager many a New Yorker has an entertaining anecdote involving an alleyway or park involving the expulsion of bodily waste products. Savvy citydwellers know that, aside from bars and restaurants, which often crack down on non-patrons using their facilities, Manhattan’s top free-and-ubiquitous bathroom break locations are Starbucks and Barnes & Noble, but after midnight or so, those options no longer exist.

Barring potential legal skirmishes and a completed contract, which is scheduled to be signed by year-end, the new toilets are expected to appear on the streets as early as 2007, and they’ll be the pay models, apparently of the sort commonly found in European countries. Only 20 will be placed initially, but neither Cemusa nor the city are saying where. The usual questions will arise about the potential abuse of these things by homeless people, vandals and assorted miscreants, but I think this is a smart idea, particularly for those of us with small bladders.

This guy printed 50,000 speech-bubble stickers and has been smacking them on ads across New York City for the public to fill in.

It’s a fine idea. Folks here are forever scribbling their own speech bubbles on public ads, using a pen or permanent marker, particularly on the paste-up posters in the subway stations because there’s nothing better to do while waiting for a train and they’re much easier to write on than, say, bus stop ads, which are encased behind a plastic window. But these stickers let you deface any public ad! It’s like New Yorkers’ very own New Yorker caption contest, but everyone wins.

Walking to work today, I noticed that a bodega at the corner of West 37^th Street and Ninth Avenue had been tagged by some not-so-thrilling graffiti: didyouseethelights.com, spray painted in neat lowercase black letters at eye-level.

I immediately smelled a guerilla marketing campaign and when I got to work, I went to the site. It’s a promotion for the new series, Invasion, and it’s really lame. ABC half-assed what could have been an awesome ramp-up to their show.

First, if you’re gonna go though the trouble of tagging a building, at least give that shit some style.

Second, why couldn’t the web site resemble, say, the “low-tech” personal site or blog of some alleged graffiti artist who had been abducted by aliens (or whatever the premise of this show is). They could have posted shaky lo-res video clips or designed it to mimic a conspiracy theorist’s site, chock full of rants and 1995-style animated GIFs and flashing text. But instead, you’re merely directed to what’s like ABC’s “generic new show template” page, complete with embedded Windows Media format commercial and “Premieres Wednesday, September 21^st 10/9c” tag right up top.

A quick Google search shows there’s a separate isawthelights.com site that sort of fits the bill of a conspiracy site, but not really. It still has a prominent banner ad for the show, some obviously Photoshopped “sighting” photos, and no particular flair of the real.

This could’ve been something really cool, particularly if you’re going to go through the trouble of spray-painting buildings in New York City and, according to one blogger’s report, Los Angeles. But the sites don’t live up to the thrill. ABC should take some viral marketing notes from two of last year’s most amazing examples: Burger King’s much-loved Subservient Chicken and the I Love Bees site, which is presently “dead” but last fall was a constantly warping Pattern Recognition-like scavenger hunt that ultimately tied-into Microsoft’s Halo 2 videogame launch.

Man, I did next to nothing today. Like yesterday. So tired from Ireland. Tired from the time difference, not the trip itself. Slept in. Conquered a really nasty sinus headache with Sudafed and aspirin. Sat around, read the paper. Ate some Cream of Wheat. Walked around outside. Updated the blog with all those fine Ireland entries, some of which have photos now. Walked around outside some more, but sat on a bench just off the Hudson and watched the sailboats floating there, and the occasional Circle Line ship passing by, casting waves that caused the anchored boats to sway. Hypnotically relaxing, even with the constant swish of traffic on the Henry Hudson Parkway above and behind me.

I was surprised to see today that kids actually do play in the spray of water from open fire hydrants here in New York. I thought that only happened in the movies.

The fire department allows you to open hydrants here for cooling-off purposes, but only if they’re equipped with a city-issued “spray cap,” which you can pick up for free at your local firehouse. The hydrant depicted in my photos, located on W. 87th Street just off Columbus Avenue, is fitted with such a cap and therefore, according to the FDNY, “only” wasting 25 gallons of water per minute. Illegally opened hydrants waste up to 1,000 gallons per minute as well as $500 of your money, if you happen to get caught and fined.

This afternoon, Veronica Williams, a 49-year-old homeless woman, stepped out onto W. 36th street between two parked cars, was struck by a large truck and killed. It happened at 2 p.m., right off Eighth Avenue, across the street from my office building. People jaywalk all the time in New York and I work within blocks of two of Manhattan’s most dangerous locations for pedestrians, but it’s not often that someone is killed.

Soon after it happened, everyone in my office rushed to the windows on the west face of the building to look down at the carnage. By that point, the body had been covered by a white sheet. A coworker took a photo of the scene from our 17th-story view.

When I left work at 5:00, W. 36th was still blocked off and choked with emergency vehicles, yellow police tape and gawkers. I was in a grim and contemplative mindset.

Then, as I passed the accident scene, my mood changed. In front of me, there was a guy walking down the sidewalk on Eighth, a smiling young boy perched on his shoulders. The kid was turned around and happily rapid-firing one of those plastic guns that emits a flurry of soap bubbles. Most everyone in the kid’s wake, a hot and weary crowd of rush-hour pedestrians, was getting nailed by bubbles. Some seemed amused, while others scowled and tried to dodge the bubbles, which only made the scene more joyous to behold.

July 19th Update: I was just reading David Byrne’s blog and he wrote about Veronica Williams on July 16th, noting that the incident happened “in my neighborhood.” Byrne lives in Midtown? I would have guessed SoHo or the Village. But Midtown? That’s just weird. But then, so is Byrne.

My mom called this weekend to let me know that she had just watched The Royal Tenenbaums on DVD and thought that the movie’s running-joke references to gypsy cabs were funny, since she had first learned of their existence from reading about them in the blog.

I believe director Wes Anderson was referencing the ’70s brand of New York gypsy cabs, which were seedy unlicensed characters driving their own beater cars around the city, trawling for passengers. These days, gypsy cabs are more often livery vehicles that trawl for passengers when they’re legally only supposed to respond to calls.

But whatever; the “gypsy” in “gypsy cab” refers to wandering, which applies to both cases. Other than the cabs, I think Mom thought the movie “weird.”
In its defense, I pointed out that a lot of it was filmed in New York, even though Anderson took pains to not represent any particular skylines or landmarks. Also, the interiors and exteriors of the Tenenbaums’ quirky house were the interiors and exteriors of an actual house, renovated and dressed for the movie and located in the Hamilton Heights section of Harlem.

On the left, Takeru Kobayashi, who won the Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest by scarfing down 49 hot dogs in 12 minutes.

On the right, a poster that I saw walking home today, located outside of Lincoln Center and promoting actor Tatsuya Fujiwara in Yukio Mishima’s Modern Noh Plays.

Coincidence?

Yeah, probably. I didn’t have anything better to write about.

Last month, the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation began counting and logging data on every tree in the five boroughs. Surprisingly, this survey has been conducted only once before, in 1995, so this second round will allow the city to examine citywide trends and changes in its forestry for the first time.

Each of a thousand or so volunteers participating in the survey will be given a training manual, a diameter measuring tape, a clipboard, data collection forms, survey zone maps and a tree identification form, with which the size and condition of each tree will be recorded, including “infrastructure conflicts,” such as birdhouses. They’ll have a lot of ground to cover. The first census tallied about half a million trees lining the city’s streets alone. When you add the trees in parks and yards, the number grows to five million.

The census won’t be finished until October, but in an article in the May 23rd issue of The New Yorker, Bram Gunther, the city’s deputy director of forestry, predicted Manhattan’s “favorite” tree would be the Callery pear, the most popular variety of which is the Bradford pear. Although they’re structurally weak and easily damaged by wind, they grow easily, hold up well against street pollution and have white blossoms in the Spring, which likely accounts for at least some of their popularity.

A runner-up most popular tree in Manhattan, according to Gunther, will be the ginkgo, another species that’s pretty, hardy, and resistant to pollution. I’m partial to the beautiful fan-shaped leaves of this tree, which is unique in that it has no living relatives. I’m happy that on my block, there’s 14 of them on my side of the street alone.

The only downside is that when the seeds from the female trees fall in the autumn, they smell like vomit, particularly as they are ground into the sidewalk by passers-by. I’ve been informed that the Callery pear stinks something nasty when it’s in bloom, too.

Isn’t that just like New York to embrace trees that encapsulate its own character—occasionally smelly, uniquely beautiful, thriving and tough.

Someone asked me last week what New York City’s chances are of getting the 2012 Summer Games. The popular consensus ’round these parts seems to be “who cares,” closely followed by “not very likely,” and both an International Olympic Committee report and a NY1/Newsday poll issued today back that up.

In the poll of 841 New Yorkers, only 36% think the city has a “good chance” of getting the Olympics—and only then if the hotly contested West Side Stadium is built. 53% think it’s a long shot. Meanwhile, bookies, as well as today’s IOC analysis, favor Paris and London as first- and second-place bets over New York, with Madrid and Moscow falling into fourth and fifth place, respectively.

Bloomberg still thinks NYC is a contender, but he’s also a fan of the West Side Stadium, which has a $2.2 billion pricetag and plenty of naysayers. I myself would rather the Olympics and the crowds it’d bring just stay away. It was enough trouble with the Republican National Convention last summer.

6/7/2005 Update: The state’s Public Authorities Control Board refused to approve the West Side Stadium project late yesterday. That’s a big strike against New York’s Olympic hopes.

Exiting the B/C subway stop at W. 88th St. and Central Park West after work today (I like to walk home from the park in nice weather), I overheard the following only-in-New York comment: “My dog seems to like Kevin Bacon’s dog.”

On what’s apparently a slow news day, the New York Times ran an article today on the front page (but below the fold) titled “With Irreverence and an iPod, Recreating the Museum Tour.” Written by Randy Kennedy, it reports on a fascinating idea: DIY mp3 audio guides for art museums¹.

Generating such guides locally are Art Mobs (a project assembled by students and teachers at Marymount Manhattan College), which has issued several downloadable guides for individual paintings at the Museum of Modern Art, and the Wooster Collective, which issued one for the Basquiat exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

The tone of most of the recordings is personal, sassy and direct. One of the Art Mobs’ commentaries on Pollock’s Echo: Number 25 claims: “The process of creation for Jackson Pollock was one big drunken orgasm.”² Hey, that’s great. I may not agree but it’s certainly more entertaining than most of the “official” prerecorded tour guides you can purchase at an art museum. The last time I listened to one of those, it was so stifling, I mashed a bunch of the buttons simultaneously in my anguish. The thing started tossing out commentary for an exhibit that was apparently closed or on another floor of the museum, yet it was somehow more revelatory when paired with the art I was looking at just then.

I think mp3-based commentary would also be useful for audio tours of, say, large outdoorsy tourist areas, such as Central Park. (“...and that’s all you need to know about Belvedere Castle. OK, now hit pause until you get to the bronze statue of the characters from Alice in Wonderland.”) The audio track could combine directions with descriptions and history of what you’re looking at! I would have given a kidney for something like this last year when I was lost in the sprawl of Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, tromping over the dead in search of Julio Cortazar’s tombstone; when I found it, I wished I knew more about his life. (The free maps they give you at the cemetery are blisteringly concise in these matters: the complete biographical description for Julio is “author.”)

July 19 Update: The July 2005 issue of Playlist contains an article about mp3-based audio walking tours. Companies such as locally based Soundwalk even specialize in New York City audio tours.

¹ This reminds me of an idea Roger Ebert offered early in 2002 in a column for the now-defunct Yahoo! Internet Life magazine, called “You, Too, Can Be a DVD Movie Critic.” It encouraged people to record alternate audio commentary tracks for DVD movies. Of course, the core of this idea has been around since at least 1988, when Mystery Science Theater 3000 debuted. [back]

² As a pre-emptive strike, my audio commentary on that painting will begin with a quote by author Amy Krouse Rosenthal: “I hate it when people say, ‘Oh, a Jackson Pollock painting—I could have done that.’ Bullshit. The point is, you didn’t. Someone thought of it and did it first. Hey, you could build a house if you really wanted to. But the thing is, will you do it or will you just sit there on the couch?” [back]

Dana asked me today why New York City is also known as “The Big Apple” I have no idea. Neither does anyone else. There’s a variety of explanations.

According to the Society for New York City History, Education Committee, Mlle. Evelyn Claudine de Saint-Évremond, a French refugee, arrived in the city in 1803 or 1804 and started an “elegantly furnished” bordello at 142 Bond St. New York gentlemen of a certain repute shortened her name to Eve and referred to their adventures in her house as “having a taste of Eve’s Apples.” Because New York had more houses of ill repute per capita than any other U.S. municipality at the time, various apple catchphrases were used for the city itself, including “The Apple Tree,” “The Real Apple” and “The Big Apple.”

The Society adds that “the sexual connotation of the word ‘apple’ was well known in New York and throughout the country until around World War I.” But “apple” had other non-fruit meanings around that time. About.com points out:

In the early 1920s, ‘apple’ was used in reference to the many racing courses in and around New York City. Apple referred to the prizes being awarded for the races—as these were important races, the rewards were substantial.

Based on the research of Barry Popik, the use of ‘Big Apple’ to refer to New York City became clearer. Popik found that a writer for the New York Morning Telegraph, John Fitzgerald, referred to New York City’s races ‘Around the Big Apple.’ It is rumored that Fitzgerald got the term from jockeys and trainers in New Orleans who aspired to race on New York City tracks, referring to the ‘Big Apple.’

There was yet another, somewhat similar meaning:

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, New York City’s jazz musicians began referring to New York City as the ‘Big Apple.’ An old saying in show business was ‘There are many apples on the tree, but only one Big Apple.’ New York City being the premier place to perform was referred to as the Big Apple.

So the Big Apple is about sex, money or success. Sounds about right to me.

Eric, Andie and I met up this afternoon at a street fair that had overtaken the east lane of Broadway for a few blocks in our neighborhood. Typical street fair stuff.

Buch of kids wearing balloon hats. Various street merchants peddling everything from leather couches to sweaters. Food, Folks and Fun. Andie bought a bunch of handmade magnets shaped like various food items, such as cheese and peas. Eric picked up a snazzy black nylon messenger bag for $16 after consulting with Andie and I as to whether it was cool or not. I bought was a $7 sausage sandwich, dripping with grease and topped with grilled onions. It was very good.

Jimi’s new Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood is fairly non-descript, at least compared with his previous West Village location, but while conducting a bit of exploring after feeding his cats, I realized there was a lot more business going down than I thought. A few blocks away are the studios where Montel and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart are taped. Also nearby are several recording studios, the most famous of which is the Hit Factory, where John Lennon, Paul Simon, Stevie Wonder, the Rolling Stones and Madonna all laid down tracks. Most of that excitement, however, happened during the studio’s heyday at its original location on W. 48th Street. In the early ’90s, the Hit Factory moved to its current W. 54th Street location, but according to a February article in Rolling Stone, it is now closed and will soon be converted to condos.

A coworker poked fun at me today for mispronouncing Filene’s, a brand-name, off-price clothing chain located chiefly in New York and Massachusetts. I pronounced it FAY-leens and I think it’s actually something like fie-LEENS, which makes sense when you actually look at the word. But it got me thinking about how you can use pronunciations to separate the visitors from the locals in New York.

I always though the pronunciation of Gristedes, New York’s ubiquitous grocery chain, wasn’t obvious (you tell me—it’s gris-TEE-dees). But then, a few locations have an animatronic version of the chain’s mascot, an overalls-clad cow standing upright, placed near the entrance that literally welcomes you to the store with a cheesy recording. The cow at our local Gristedes, for example, says “Hello! And welcome to Gristedes. We hope your shopping today is a mooooooving experience.” It’s made funnier by the fact that the guy who recorded the voice sounds really bored and doesn’t even have a New Yawk accent.

The prime pronunciation example that’s given by all the tourist guidebooks is Houston Street, which you’ve probably already guessed isn’t pronounced like that city in Texas. No, it’s HOW-ston, named after some rich lawyer from Georgia who built one of the first houses on the street.

But my favorite obscure New York pronunciation example is the Arthur Ross Pinetum in Central Park: pie-NEE-tum. It features pine trees (hence the name, which means “pine grove” in Latin), swingsets, grills and picnic tables, all conveniently situated across from the public baseball diamonds in the northwest corner of the Great Lawn. The Pinetum is great for picnics and, in fact, my company had its picnic there last summer.

I think it has been confirmed: Spring is indeed finally here. The temperature has been hovering in the 60s and 70s the past few days and with Daylight Savings Time, it’s still enjoyably sunny and warm after work. Yesterday, I even experienced my first air-conditioned subway car of the year.

The Shake Shack, a celebrated warm-weather-only burger joint in Madison Square Park, just reopened for business. I think it’s a shoo-in for my 52 Meals Project.

New Yorkers seem cheerier, not as cranky and slightly less menacing now that they have shed their bulky winter coats. Even the yellow daffodils and purple hyacinths that city workers put in the large concrete planters lining part of Eighth Avenue were lovely and fragrant enough that many had been uprooted and stolen by the end of the day.

Ah, Spring.

October 5, 2005 Update: Here’s my review of the Shake Shack.

The Pulitzer Prize winners for this year were announced today and I don’t know a single one of the honored books. Man, am I behind. Strangely, though, I tend to read more when the weather’s nicer, as opposed to the way the weather has been, so maybe I can get caught up now that Spring seems to have finally sprung. The weather got up to the mid-50s today (60s tomorrow!) and there were a bunch of those giant, puffy white clouds milling around the sky this afternoon. Glorious!

On a related note, enjoy these two Late Show with David Letterman Top Ten lists, both from 1996 and with dated references intact. They’re funny because they’re true.

Top Ten Signs It’s Spring in New York

10. Street vendors change hot dog water
9. Air is filled with 9MM “NYC Hummingbirds”
8. Cab drivers yell “it’s a lovely spring day, now get out of the road you stupid bastard!”
7. Crews begin cleaning up litter in Times Square from New Year’s Eve
6. Madonna switches from basketball to baseball players
5. More than usual, people are mating in the streets
4. Al Sharpton switches from basketball to baseball players
3. The coffee in stage manager Biff Henderson’s head thaws
2. Squirrels in Central Park are no longer storing crack
1. Everywhere you look—adorable baby rats

Top Ten Signs of Spring in New York City

10. New York City cab drivers go from wool to cotton turbans
9. Streets are filled with the intoxicating aroma of thawing garbage
8. Drug arrests soar as the Yankees return to town
7. Street vendors start selling robin-kebabs
6. Ed Sullivan Theater warms up to a balmy 38 degrees
5. Number of murders committed with snow shovels drops way off
4. All of the rats go down to Florida for spring break
3. Rudy Giuliani has a spring tune-up done to his comb-over
2. New York City cops start wearing nothing but a holster
1. The Mets are mathematically eliminated from the pennant race

The temperature hit the high 30s today which made the snow momentarily great for kids. Walking through Riverside Park, watching the kids sledding and building snowmen, I thought of that great Bill Cosby routine, “Revenge,” where Coz gets nailed with a slushball thrown by Junior Barnes, then exacts revenge by crafting his own perfect slushball, made with “little bits of gravel.”

At the W. 87th Street dog run in the park, there was a Bassett hound, draped with a tiny red plaid afghan and lumpily settled in a Red Rider wagon. The other dogs were scampering around, as dogs do in dog runs, and why the Bassett hound was in a wagon, I’m unsure. As bad luck would have it, I was cameraless, so you’ll just have to use your imagination when picturing it.

Walking back, I passed several people finally attempting to move their cars out of the snowed-in spaces they’d been stuck in since the big ol’ snowfall last weekend. Fortunately for carowners, the City occasionally has a heart, and had suspended alternate-side-of-the-street parking rules all week. Of course, you could successfully argue it’s the City’s fault the cars couldn’t move to begin with, since City snowplows were responsible for thoughtfully covering them with five-foot-tall hills of snow.

Other than lots of walking around, it was another lazy day lounging about the homestead. Andie and I busted out the Big Boggle for the first time in awhile, and she beat me by 34 points in 10 games, 225 to 191. My best effort was playing the word “hoagies,” but it just wasn’t enough.

The snow stopped falling before midnight last night, but it’s still in the low 20s, with gusty 15 to 20 mph winds. There were icicles on W. 4th Street...

...and a snowplow movin’ down Minetta Street.

Meanwhile, back in the neighborhood, I saw the havoc the weather and the plows were wreaking on carowners.

Most of the cars were completely blocked both by drifted snow and by huge piles of plowed snow. The hardy and the prepared keep a shovel in their trunk to help free their car when this happens; the other folks, meanwhile...

There’s a fine line between public art and vandalism. A mysterious guerilla public artist from Paris who goes by the name Space Invader is more of the former, I think. He assembles mosaics out of neat little squares of tile and mirror that resemble the pixilated characters from early-’80s outer space-based video games, then “invades” a city, caulking up the art in public locations, as well as hard-to-find spots. Later, he’ll issue a map showing all the target sites, then move on to another city. He’s hit Paris, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, Berlin—more than two dozen cities.

And of course he’s done New York City, once in 2000, then again in 2003. It's unlikey all of the mosaics from then are still around. Some probably get stolen, while others are covered up or demolished when buildings are. There used to be a Space Invader mosaic somewhere on the World Trade Center, for example. But many of them still exist and in the back of my mind, I’ve seen several of them, as if from a dream. Walking to work, I spotted this one from that original invasion five years ago. Placed on February 25, 2000, it’s the only one in Midtown, located (if I remember correctly) out on W. 38th between 10th and 11th Avenues. (The yellow arrow sticker visible near the mosaic is an unrelated, not-as-interesting project.)

It’d be tempting to try and track down all of ’em, particularly since you can download a PDF map from the Flux Factory gallery in Long Island City. It’s a tantalizingly vague map that doesn’t name streets, but depicts a rough-scale grid of the city with the water, some of the parks and the subway lines colored in. That doesn’t deter some people, like these folks in LA, who have made a passion out of hunting down as many of the mosaics there as possible.

I like walking in New York. Caleb Smith really likes walking in New York.

I know I can’t complain too much about the weather because a lot of you guys were socked with heavy snowfall recently, while NYC has gotten off so far with but a light dusting. But it is really, really cold here. I may even have to shut my bedroom window for the first time since moving here. A blustery nor’wester, bringing gusts as high as 23 mph, is depressing wind chill temperatures as low as -5. It’s painfully cold and New Yorkers are openly cursing slightly more than normal as they hustle down the street, bundled up tightly with so many layers, they could safely fall down a flight of stairs.

The only other excitement today was when I noticed in the restroom mirror at work that I had neglected to shave a small area of my left jawline, so there was a silver-dollar sized area of facial hair that was blaring out of my otherwise clean-shaven mug, like a horribly misplaced soul patch. What would probably help would be if I bothered to be fully awake while shaving. That would save a lot of mishaps like this, and blood, too. Note to self: Check face in the bathroom mirror after shaving but before leaving for work. Better yet, keep one of those Bic disposable razors in the desk drawer in case of emergencies.

Walking to the subway after work, waiting for the light to change at a crosswalk on Eighth Ave. near W. 36th, some Asian guy said “excuse me” to me. Figuring he was after some “spare” change, I pretended not to hear him. After he said “excuse me” again, I acknowledged him and saw that he looked lost. He was with his girl and didn’t seem to be a tremendous threat, only asking me how to get to the Empire State Building.

As you know, I’m terrible with directions, so it’s a fine opportunity for me to feel smug when someone throws me a softball question as he did. “Just go up to 34th,” I said confidently, gesturing up the street, “and turn left. Can’t miss it.” I hung back on my usual brisk walking pace for the next block, so I knew the Asian couple was right behind me. When they turned the corner onto 34th and saw the Empire State Building, tall, impressive and lit up in red and green, I actually heard the guy say “Whoah!” like he really hadn’t ever seen such a sight before. I checked it out myself, with a clear eye, and it really is pretty impressive.

Obliquely, it made me think back to a passage about New York-style directions in Andie’s copy of the Time Out Guide to New York. It’s battered and from 1996, but I think we keep it around for two reasons. First, it’s as eerie to read the cheery references to the World Trade Center as it is strangely engrossing to read about long-since obsolete restaurants, clubs, policies and advice. Second, it’s the UK edition of the book, which lends it a cheekier, wider-eyed, and ultimately more useful outsider look at the city than a U.S. publication would ever afford it. It’s just very comfortable and very British, as if Douglas Adams had a hand in its creation. Anyway, here’s my favorite passage:

The trick to asking directions in New York is to deliver your question within earshot of at least two people. One of them will be completely wrong, but the inevitable debate (sometimes involving the entire bus, subway carriage or street-corner) will ensure that the issue is hammered out sufficiently for you to know where to head. The arguments sparked by your innocent enquiry may well continue long after you have left.

When I initially read this, very soon after I moved here, I thought it was quaint and didn’t give it much thought. But it really does work that way. In fact, I witnessed it on the subway last week, when a group of middle-aged ladies, who were obviously tourists, with their overstuffed shopping bags and wild-eyed don’t-know-where-we-are looks. Also, they almost got smushed in the closing doors of the 1/9 train, and from their combined laughter and “somebody should really do something about those doors” chatter, it was clear it had happened before and recently.

They started wondering aloud amongst themselves how to get to Macy’s. A guy standing near them told them they needed to get off at the next stop and switch over to a downtown train, then a woman sitting near them told them where exactly to get off and which direction to walk to get to the store itself, and another guy quickly chimed in with an somewhat confusingly alternate way to get there on the ACE. The tourist ladies were quite impressed by this display, but they abused it a bit, asking follow-up questions about how late the store was open, potential sales and other good area places to shop. The discussion among the three wisepeople did indeed continue after the ladies got off at the W. 59th stop, although it wasn’t very congratulatory toward them and their ungrateful attitude. I think they would have been considered more grateful by New York standards if they would have simply gone off in silent adoration at their newfound directional knowledge.

I had wondered where folks in the city go to buy Christmas trees, and like a lot of things in New York, they’re sold right from the sidewalk, every 10 blocks or so on the major thoroughfares. Enterprising individuals erect these long, eight-foot-tall A-frame lumber structures to which they lash a bunch of trees. A portable generator powers a string of bare bulbs strung across the top of the frame so they can sell into the evening. To differentiate themselves, some vendors trick out their structure with Christmas lights and, if they’re feeling saucy, one of those jackass giant inflatable Santas that people in the suburbs perch on their lawn. Some of the vendors sell the trees already bound in mesh netting, for easy post-sale transport. The smart ones display the trees in their full-sized glory, then, after a sale, run them through the baler, bundling them down to a quarter of their volume.

Andie and I took advantage of a big-time sale at her Barnes & Noble store and some unseasonably warm weather (nearly 60!) to load up on our holiday gift purchases. All told, we each spent a couple hundred bucks, slowly working our way from the top of the store, where the books and miscellaneous gifts items are merchandised, down to the basement, where DVDs and CDs are sold and the register lines are appreciably shorter than on the main floor. I’d say I was able to get 85% of my shopping done in this one trip, so it was worthwhile. I need now only a virtual trip to Amazon.com and a dreaded physical trip to a few more brick-and-mortar stores before I’m done, and then it’s on to the blasted wrapping. Christmas is in the air!

Walking to work this morning, I passed a flatbed tow truck loading up a white Lamborghini Countach on the corner of W. 58th St. and 11th Ave., which is the middle of nowhere, Manhattan-wise, but a good place for hotroddin’, considering the unusually smooth roads, relative lack of traffic and favorable stoplights. I hadn’t realized how small those cars are, nor was I aware anyone still drove them. But I was pleased to see, judging by the leather-jacketed man scowling at the tow truck from the sidewalk, that the drivers of Lamborghinis still seem to be insufferable jerks.

Anyway, the car reminded me of one of my favorite toys as a lad: Sideswipe, which was one of the good-guy Transformers. It was a fire-engine red Lamborghini Countach that transformed into a good guy Autobot robot. As a “warrior class” ‘bot, he came with a trusty clip-on rocket-launcher accessory that fired a missile with the push of a tiny button, good for both robot mode (smacking down evil Deceptacons) and car mode (rush-hour road rage). That whole line of toys was awesome, not just because they transformed from motor vehicles and other objects into robots, but they were very well made. (The Transformers TV cartoon, which served nicely as a half-hour ad for the toys, was a whole other story.)

Sideswipe was mostly plastic (like the real Lamborghini), but had real rubber tires that you could remove from the rims. You could roll and race these toys on flat surfaces, just like Matchbox cars, only with better traction. Another Transformer I owned around the same time, Hound, which was a military-grade Jeep, was made mostly of die-cast metal. Sturdy stuff, except after repeated “transformings,” at which point they would develop poor posture in robot form. Good attention to detail, too. You could fold the tiny little seats in the Jeep up and down, and open and close the doors.

It’s also interesting, at least according to several internet fan sites, that these toys were never reissued in the U.S. Sideswipe and Hound in particular were only made during 1984 and 1985 and never again. I suppose these toys are my generation’s baseball cards, except instead of horror stories involving Mickey Mantle rookie cards whisked into the garbage by an unwitting parent, our stories involve a grab bag of extra-loose Transformers, a jumble of He-Men and G.I. Joe guys, 101 mismatched “action accessories,” and, for good measure, a Rubik’s cube, some random Happy Meal toys and a few stray Lego bricks that someone spilled orange Faygo on, all bagged up and sold at a garage sale for $5 (or best offer).

Went tonight to the New York Village Halloween Parade, a New York institution in its 31st year. Staked out a nice spot to stand at the corner of 6th Avenue and 17th Street. Tons of people. And just crazy, man. It’s a heady mix of professional floats and bands interspersed with hundreds of folks parading by, dressed in every imaginable costume, professional and not-so-professional. Plenty of predictable Bush/Kerry crap, loads of traditional ghouls and goblins, about a dozen chicks dressed up as Uma from Kill Bill and assorted people on cell phones that looked like they got lost (“I’m trapped in some sort of mob! Tell my wife I love her!”). But here are 20 of the more clever costumes; plenty of ideas and inspiration for next year!

• an MTA subway car (frequent stops and bursts of unintelligible speech droned through a megaphone)
• zombie JFK and Marilyn
• milk carton (with costume-wearer’s face poking through as the “Have You Seen Me?” photo)
• Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes (complete with Ed McMahon, housewife in curlers and people cheering and throwing confetti when the giant novelty check is presented)
• a table (with a nice lace tablecloth and full tea setting perched on top)
• snails (moving. very. slowly.)
• Pac-Man (yellow foam-based costume with vigorous chomping action)
• Strong Bad
• PB&J (two people clad as giant slices of bread, one spread with peanut butter, the other jelly)
• Mary Poppins (on roller skates; complete with umbrella)
• Seymour from Little Shop Of Horrors
• iPod
• a three-pack of Peeps
• the full Mystery Inc. crew (Scooby, Shaggy, Daphne, Velma and Fred)
• bowling (10 people dressed as pins and an 11th as the ball; the pins line-up and the ball rolls a strike)
• electrical outlet and fork
• Mr. Clean
• Lion-O from ThunderCats
• a bunch of not-so-hot guys in full Hooters outfits
• pregnant nun (clutching bottle of beer; pausing occasionly to face the crowd and shrug sheepishly)

The cold, drizzling nastiness today reminded me of this list, which someone anonymously posted to craigslist way back on February 17. Oh so funny, oh so true.

NYC’s Official Rules Of Inclement Weather Umbrella Etiquette

1. Please leave your patio umbrellas in storage or attached to said patio table. You egomaniacs do not need to take up a 10 ft radius of dry space.
2. If you choose to ignore Rule #1, please have the common courtesy to raise your patio umbrella when sharing sidewalk space with other umbrella-carriers. Not doing so will result in umbrella fender benders and will block traffic behind you, causing both coffee and people to spill.
3. If wearing a rain parka, hat, and a hood, please leave your umbrella at home. Once again, dry space is limited and you have already established your necessary space.
4. If it is determined that you need an umbrella, please do not then hog overhangs or awnings. Once again, you have a fucking umbrella, so please reserve limited dry space for the poor schleps who do not.
5. Please, for the love of god, if you have spiky metal points shooting out of your umbrella, use extra caution when cutting people off, etc. or just fucking buy a new $3 umbrella—they are everywhere.

If these rules are not followed, then any fellow New Yorker has the right to take your umbrella, patio or otherwise, and beat you with it.

Hey, it’s me. Just thought you might find it amusing that I just totally full-on collided with a guy. And I took like six steps and then a pigeon hit me in the head.

Voicemail from Andie, 4:09 p.m.

On warm-weather days like today, I like to take my lunch outside and three blocks down to 1 Penn Plaza, an office skyscraper directly across the street from the north face of Madison Square Garden, and one of the few privately owned public spaces in Midtown South — in other words, one of the few outdoor spots within walking distance from work where I can sit down and enjoy my hourlong lunch break. They got shade, raised concrete planter walls to sit on, and quiet relative to the rowdy surroundings.

From this vantage point, I’ve been able to check up on the status of the Republican National Convention, which will be held at the Garden from August 30 through September 2.

Disappointingly, last week they replaced the huge Alien Vs. Predator banners hanging on the Garden’s exterior with official banners for the convention.

A week or so before that, each of the major news networks parked their trailers right outside the Garden. Man, they get there early. But I saw why during one of my lunch breaks when I watched about three surly, chain-smoking union men setting up a small tent to shield one of the trailer’s entrances. This tent would have taken you or I 30 minutes at best to erect, but, being union men, these guys were taking the utmost care and deliberateness, occasionally pausing to rest and have some more coffee. I overheard a woman who worked in 1 Penn Plaza note that these same guys had been erecting this same tent now for several days. I think they’re still working on it.

Today’s issue of Time Out New York, the city’s weekly event-calendar magazine, had some mind-jellying stats on the convention, which it also noted is the first Republican presidential convention ever to be held in NYC:

• Anticipated number of people, excluding protesters, coming to NYC for the convention: 50,000
• Number of those who are delegates: 2,509
• Alternate delegates: 2,344
• Accredited members of the media: 15,000
• Anticipated number of protesters: 250,000 to 500,000
• Ratio of Democrats to Republicans in New York City: 5 to 1

250,000 to 500,000! Of course, they won’t all be right in the area of the convention, but I imagine most will. One of the larger protest groups, United for Peace and Justice, already has the New York Civil Liberties Union suing the city for disallowing a permit application that would have invited 250,000 people to rally in Central Park. (Citing security and safety issues, Bloomberg is allowing “only” 50,000 protesters in the Park.) So instead of shifting the number of protesters throughout the city, the city is effectively concentrating even more folks directly outside the convention. Good job, city, and good luck with those crowds.

Seeing the writing on the wall, my employers officially announced yesterday that we’ll be working from home during the convention because of our building’s proximity to it. However, I’m one of the few people at work who actually lives in Manhattan, so my boss has already indicated that, should any paperwork need to be checked or routed at the office (we’re in production on an issue this week and next, so we’re dealing with a lot of paperwork — edits and color proofs and such), I’ll be the guy who has to c’mon down. Part of me almost wants to, so I can check out the convention madness. We’ll see.

Despite the rain, I made a half-assed attempt to get some groceries, and it only got worse the further I walked. By W. 88th, it was pissing down that especially nasty variety of summer rain, perfectly cold and vertical. Currents of water were rushing down the street gutters and collecting in pools at crosswalk intersections where you can’t help but step and get your shoes and socks completely sodden. I had reached the point where my undersized umbrella was useless and I couldn’t get any wetter, so I cut down 88th as a scenic route back home and came across that uniquely New York phenomenon that I’m still adjusting to — film crews.

There, between Riverside and West End Ave., was the ubiquitous orange Panavision tractor trailer, vans from the NYPD and ConEd, and, on the sidewalk, a hastily erected tent, the kind they have at outdoor weddings, under which huddled a bunch of glum guys in rain ponchos. Further over, between West End and Broadway, were the catering truck and several production equipment trucks from Haddad’s, “the ‘can-do people’.” It’s amazing how many setups like this you see here daily. It makes me think of all the work, expense and tribulations (like bad weather) that these productions must constantly face, even if they only result in a few fleeting exterior shots or just flat-out shitty product like Maid In Manhattan or You’ve Got Mail. But there’s no doubt it’s a big industry that keeps New Yorkers employed and out of trouble. There’s, for instance, a very tight degree of separation here involving shows like Law & Order — either you’ve been an extra, you know someone who has, or someone you know knows someone who has.

Coincidentally, this morning was my first experience with another quintessential New York experience — an unscheduled subway line closing. My smugness at having left nice and early was quickly smacked down by the crowd at the W. 87th entrance to the 1-9, squinting to hear the MTA employee in the Plexiglas ticket booth explain for probably the hundredth time that the line was not running between there and Times Square because of a police investigation at W. 79th.

Trudging back aboveground revealed clots of disgruntled suits on cell phones explaining why they’d be late, frantic cab-hailers, and extra-large crowds at the bus stops. Keeping my cool, I walked several blocks east to the C train at Central Park West. It was probably more crowded than usual, but it stopped at Penn Station, which was all I cared about. I ended up only 15 minutes late but made the mistake of explaining my delay, which only opened up the “every New Yorker has had it worse than you” truism. So I got to hear grimly entertaining anecdotes about walking through dark underground tunnels when trains had unexpectedly broken down and the usual slew of transportation-related woes from 9/11 and the Blackout of ‘03.

But that’s really the best bit and most essential part about being a New Yorker: your arsenal of tales. Mine needs work, but I’ll give it some time.

Overheard this morning on West End Avenue:

Little girl [awkwardly riding one of those self-propelled scooters]: When the world’s upside-down, how do I stay down?
Mother [grimly]: It’s called gravity.

Just got back from a night out with Katie. We had watched Smarty Jones get his ass kicked in the Belmont while we enjoyed some salsa and margaritas I made, then went down to St. Mark’s Place to watch her friend Kelsey’s band, Pillow Theory, play at The Continental. We met up with Sam, a co-worker of Katie’s from the children’s books department at Barnes & Noble. I spent some time chatting with some Asian chick at our table who was all geeked-out with a mic, PowerMac, LaCie hard drive and recording equipment to capture some of the sets for burning to CD. She reminded me of that Asian kid from The Goonies with all his wacky inventions, but that might have been just because she was wearing a baseball cap.

Kelsey’s band was rockin’. They’re kinda 90’s alternarock-sounding; the last song in their set reminded me of “Black Coffee” by Black Flag. It was a tough gig because they were the first of six bands playing, and the group following them had a small, fawning crowd containing some jackass moshers. And this band had a “look”: all the guys wore polo shirts with the collars turned up; plus, one of their guitarists was the spitting image of a young John Cusack. They’re going places, I’m sure.

It got too loud and annoying, so we joined up with Kelsey’s bandmates and switched to another bar. Sam talked about her experience working as an author of kids’ picture books. It was interesting to hear from her about the submission process and the market for such a commodity; she talked about a recent submission of hers involving a seed unsure that it wants to grow up to be a tree.

I talked briefly with Kelsey about his experience recording his band’s most recent album in Chicago with Steve Albini. Steve sounds a lot like I expected him to be: technically proficient, working at the behest of the band and not his own interests, and a real nerd. Apparently he has a little dance he does when a take goes well, known as the Albini Dance, but I declined to get details. Kelsey and Katie decided to move on to yet another bar and I bowed-out.

I got home around midnight, then decided to step out again to buy some more chips in case Andie wanted some of my leftover salsa when she got home. On the way to the store, I overheard a bit of conversation from some guy talking to his woman: “I don’t care if we have no money. If we can have a baby, then we have a baby.” Then, at the store, in line with my chips, the chick in front of me is not only wearing a belt made out of a chain heavy enough to secure a prison gate, she’s buying $7.38 worth of portabella mushrooms. The scruffy old guy in line behind me says to no one in particular, “You can’t live on mushrooms alone,” and I look down at the checkout conveyor belt to see what he’s buying — two packs of hotdogs and two small plastic deli containers of something called “seafood spread.”

I love this dirty town.

I overheard a sentence each from two different sets of people I passed on my way to Starbucks to drink tea and study-up for my interview Monday:

1. [guy on cell, excitedly] “We were ready to start making out in the middle of the entire restaurant!”
2. [hipster guy to hipster girl] “I find it utterly depressing.”

An astronomer figured out that because Manhattan is aligned about 30 degrees east of north, the sun will set precisely down the middle of every street on the island’s road grid two days each year: May 28 and July 12. (Normally, the sunset’s not fully visible, obscured by the buildings.)

So I headed out down my street, West 85th, around 8 p.m. (sunset was at 8:17) to take some pictures.

It turns out there’s more nerds around here than I thought.

As soon as I hit Amsterdam, there was some dude in the western crosswalk taking a photo. I kept heading east and at the next avenue, Columbus, on the northwest corner, some chick was doing the same thing.

I ended up taking mine in the middle of the western crosswalk at Central Park West, quickly realizing, as the others likely did, that I’d have been better off choosing a sexy downtown location, since the tree-lined streets here tend to obscure the view.

I like to think I’m a pessimist, but I’m actually a closet optimist.

Don’t tell anyone.

Realistically, my first job interview next week will very well lead nowhere, but merely because I have an interview, I’ve noticed I’m happier about life in general. I have an extra spring in my step and I’m walking more upright than my usual sad-sack self.

I tooled around a lot outside tonight and even the light drizzle didn’t faze me. I went over to Hollywood Video and rented The Triplets Of Bellville but when I got back, I was too keyed-up to watch it, so I sat around, happily drinking Heineken and surfing the web.

I got an email from Teresa, one of my previous job’s bosses, that was a forward of an amusing sort of message we’d get from time-to-time: a disgruntled customer mistaking the candy magazine for a candy retailer or distributor. This woman had strong feelings about the availability of something called Neon Laser Candy Straws.

Apparently the Durham, N. C. stores are not getting your candy stocked in the stores and therefore I have to go to Cary, N.C. or to Raleigh, N.C. I don’t think it’s fair when there are several Dollar Tree stores in the Durham, N. C. area so I hope that you could send your candy more often to the Durham Dollar Tree stores.

She had other beefs, too:

Also I find that some of your candy is not grind up finely in some of the candy packages, why is that so?

An excellent question; we’ll get right on that, Durham.

Then I read on The Smoking Gun about Seinfeld’s newly completed five-car garage, which I noted is in my neighborhood, so I decided to check it out. It’s about as exciting as the exterior of a garage can be, much less the exterior of a celebrity’s garage. (It’s on West 83rd between Amsterdam and Columbus, if you’d like to judge for yourself. Look for a dark gray garage door to the left of a small hanging sign for a yoga place.)

Walking back, stoping briefly for some ice cream at Gristedes, I gave some more thought to the List Of Things I Should Buy/Would Like To Buy Once I Have A Job. It’s stuff deemed to frivilous and/or expensive to purchase at this point. In no particular order so far:

• New glasses frames. A few weeks ago, I noticed a partial (and potentially havoc-wreaking) crack on the frame above the right lens. I have no spare glasses and it would be very, very bad if I had no glasses.
• A cell phone.
• Some friends to talk to on my cell phone (ha ha!).
• High-speed internet access. I have “temporary” high-speed access now. Ahem. But we really need to get an AirPort, cable modem and service.
• New work clothes. I still have some credit on the J. Crew gift card I received as a handsome parting gift from my previous employers, but I really have my eye on some sassy fitted dress shirts at Banana Republic.
• New shoes. My Adidases are my only “everyday” pair of shoes and every day the soles are becoming more hobo-like.
• Take Jimi and Michael out to a nice lunch or dinner and pay for it. This would be in recompense for all the meals Jimi graciously buys for me, and for all the lunchmeat and hot pepper slices I filch from his fridge like I live there or something.

In all this giddiness, I need to remember to remain focused and continue looking for a job. Until then, I will enjoy my ice cream.

Yay! I ordered the air conditioner this morning and it’s scheduled to arrive via UPS on Wednesday or Thursday.

Some NYC moments from this morning:

1. a small, sun-faded poster of Sade taped inside the back window of a Verizon truck on W. 86th Street
2. some guy flossing vigorously on the 1 train (he stepped briefly out the back train door to dispose the spent floss on the tracks)