This is always prime ad space too. A short history of the wall from 2008...
Previously on EV Grieve:
Where are all the ads?
As season two of Bravo's guilty pleasure launches [tonight], housewife Jill Zarin warns, "You're gonna see some [expensive] toys come out, unfortunately. We filmed the show before the recession happened."
The recession that has put millions of New Yorkers out of work threatens to make New York's real housewives appear even more self-indulgent and childishly pampered than last season. Back then, they were merely cougars of conspicuous consumption, spending perversely amusing bundles on themselves. This season, when housewife Alex McCord and husband (some say honorary housewife) Simon van Kampen drop $8,000 on clothing at a Hamptons boutique, their extravagance will likely strike viewers as prodigal in the extreme.
Van Kampen, manager of Murray Hill's Hotel Chandler, hopes the economy doesn't turn off viewers to the cast's wasteful spending habits. "This is escapist television for a lot of people," he says. "I don't think there'll be much negative reaction. Honestly, I think there is less conspicuous consumption in season two."
Mr. Oliver is a poet, playwright, performance artist and actor. But above all, he is a Personality, with a capital P, a type celebrated in England as an Eccentric and in middle America as a Character. It’s not easy being a Personality in the East Village, where the willfully weird abound (or did once, anyway) and where Mr. Oliver has lived since the late 1970s. It requires an exaggerated consistency of character and style, which should seep from every pore.
In “East 10th Street,” which runs through Feb. 28 in a judiciously austere production directed by Randy Sharp, Mr. Oliver uses this sensibility to evoke his years as a tenant in an S.R.O. boarding house on Tompkins Square Park, into which he moved, fresh from Paris, in 1977, when he was 21, paying $16 a week for rent.
“East 10th Street,” which was staged in November, has developed a cult following. It’s easy to see why. Mr. Oliver depicts and embodies a bohemian, low-rent New York that scarcely exists anymore. It’s hard to imagine anyone like him, with a similar set of stories, coming out of the gentrified East Village of the early 21st century.
After giving petty criminals a break, the NYPD summoned a dozen precinct commanders to Headquarters Friday to help focus efforts against aggressive beggars, squeegee men, hookers and illegal peddlers, The Post has learned.
Station-house bosses from Manhattan and The Bronx met with top brass and gave them reports on quality-of-life problems each is facing, according to sources familiar with the gathering.
The summit was called by Chief of Department Joseph Esposito after cops issued 7.1 percent fewer summonses for minor offenses in 2008 than in 2007, as The Post reported last month.
Early in the week, a unit from headquarters scouted the city looking for problem areas and taking photos. Then brass called the sitdown with precinct heads to hear from them.
They talked about petty crimes and misdemeanors that can drive the average New Yorker nuts -- street walkers, panhandlers who get in your face and homeless people who hang out at ATMs or fast-food joints.
For his largest Manhattan property — the Bowery Hotel, in the East Village — Mr. MacPherson turned to an even more surprising source: Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” (1980), a horror film that takes place in the Overlook, a fictional hotel in the Rocky Mountains. At the Bowery, “There’s a bit of the feeling of the Overlook — hopefully without the creepiness,” he said. “The idea is to create something that is old and grand and hopefully slightly bigger and more storied than its guests and owners.”
Mr. MacPherson relied on another Kubrick film, “A Clockwork Orange” (1971), when he chose elements for the Bowery’s bellman uniforms, which evoke the film’s violent hooligans.
Though the literal associations with the film might elude visitors, they will probably know that they are someplace visually distinctive, Mr. MacPherson said. “It’s very much as if you’re building a set and everyone becomes a character in the film you’re making there,” he said.
So, is the Hotel Carter the dirtiest hotel in the United States? Not from what I could see. It's unkempt. It needs major renovations including new paint, carpeting, and lighting in both the rooms and the hallways. The bathroom tiles need to be completely replaced along with the vents. But overall, it's just not that disgusting.
However, it is the single most depressing hotel I have ever been in. In fact, it may be the bleakest place I have ever been. Period. The whole environment is joyless. The wan lighting wears on you after a while. It just makes you sad. The uninterrupted white walls offer no stimuli to keep your mind focused on anything other than the sadness of the room. If there was a sequel to The Shining about a hotel that made you despondent instead of insane, it would be filmed at the Hotel Carter.
First, I can’t believe you reported this story about this absolutely absurd space cadet who cost the city, literally, several thousands of dollars because she couldn’t get it together, after several years of having a too-large ring, to have it resized.
Second, and then you report the entire ridicu-blog. She sounds more like a high school kid.
Third, I find it hard to believe she graduated from Penn. Just doesn’t fit the known facts as we see them here.
Heartwarming this story was not. She needs to be reprimanded by a grown-up.
No kidding. How hard is it for this ditz to have her ring re-sized?
Maybe she should go back to Pennsylvania. I hope someone in the Con Edison accounts billing department sends her an invoice for her stupidity.
As a New Yorker, an Asian American and an Ivy Leaguer (Columbia University), my opinion is that Jean Hsu is definitely a pain in the butt. Unfortunately, NYC does continue to attract absolutely clueless individuals like her.
But how is my uplifting story TWISTED by the cynical and narrow-minded people of the heinous Internet!!?! I am some stupid moron ditz who was practically asking for my ring to fall in a grate just so I could see how many people would be willing to come running to my beck and call. Wasting both time and money. WRONG, FOLKS.
Can I just first mention that for a reporter and editor of the New York Times, he wrote a completely disappointing and pointless blog. I know that my own blog is pretty pointless at times, but I also don't often think my writing or opinion is worthy of being published in the New York Times. And I write it to humor my friends who GET ME. And my pointlessness. But Mr. Roberts could DEFINITELY have done a better job in getting the ACTUAL POINT ACROSS about my story. Or at least formulating his own opinion about the situation.
Before I depart, I wanted to take a moment to thank all my friends for being supportive, enjoying the story like they were supposed to, and ensuring me that all aforementioned haters have no lives and will be probably be really busy calling into WCBS tomorrow while listening to my radio interview. HI HATERS.
The survey found that small businesses are constantly facing the possibility of rent increases or eviction. Almost half of small business owners reported that their overhead costs were rising. Nearly one-third identified rising commercial property rents as their “greatest challenge,” and three-fourths said that their profits are not growing at a sustainable rate compared to the substantial increase in the cost of doing business on the Lower East Side.
Ninety-five percent of small business owners surveyed rent their store space, and nearly half of them hold leases of five years or less.
Redevelopment and gentrification of the Lower East Side were cited by 46 percent of business owners as directly affecting their businesses.