Four more years of Bloomberg?

Looks that way. (New York Post)

RIP Margot Gayle

Margot Gayle, who marshaled shrewdness, gentility and spunk to save the Victorian cast-iron buildings of New York — using a little magnet as a demonstration device — in a crusade that led to the preservation of historic SoHo, died Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 100. (New York Times)

[Photo: Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times]

The 10-year-anniversary celebration of when Drew Carey met Joey Ramone

From season four of The Drew Carey Show, which aired Sept. 30, 1998.

Noted

Before today's epic 777-point meltdown, Reuters had a piece on how the economic crunch may have an impact on downtown living:

The state labor department expects Wall Street to lose 40,000 jobs, perhaps permanently, which means the city's service industry could lose another 80,000 workers, in fields ranging from retail shops to law firms.

Lower Manhattan's future could rest on residential development, which has seen its population double to about 57,000 since 2001, as a older, obsolete office buildings were converted into trendy apartments for Wall Street whiz kids, said Mitchell Moss, professor of Urban Policy and Planning and director of the Taub Urban Research Center at New York University.

"That's going to turn out to be one of the great ironies that the residential development is going to create the demand for office space," Moss said, "because people enjoy working near where they live."

But financial sector job losses could drive down prices for apartments 20 percent to 25 percent, more than the rest of the city, said Bill Staniford, chief executive of real estate data web site PropertyShark.com.

"The buildings that have gone after this young hot Wall Street crowd will be the most vulnerable," said Pamela Liebman, chief executive at The Corcoran Group, which specializes in luxury homes in the metropolitan area.

"Finance is one of the more dominant buyer profiles that you'll see, so obviously it's a concern," said Angela Ferrara, a vice president of sales for The Marketing Directors, sales agent for The Setai, a luxury building at 40 Broad Street.

The week after Lehman Brothers failed, brokerage Cooper & Cooper received several calls from clients who needed to break their lease or could not take a new apartment, according to the brokerage's Vice President Jed Cohen.

More input on what NYC buildings should be demolished

Yesterday, Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote a piece suggesting some dreadful buildings that should be torn down in NYC. This afternoon, City Room put the question out to its readers: Which New York building would you demolish?

So far, there has been a tasteless suggestion of the World Trade Center...all of Third Avenue in Manhattan...and the "astonishingly ugly Blue building on the Lower East Side. Who in their sane minds could have put up something as hideous as that."


[Photo by everystreetinmanhattan via Flickr]

25 years of yuppies

Lots to do and see in New York's 40th anniversary issue.

For instance, here's Jay McInerney in an essay he wrote titled "Yuppies in Eden"....He says he first heard the term "yuppie" in 1983 while having breakfast at Veselka. A painter he knew muttered "fucking yuppies" after seeing an Upper East Side-looking couple in chinos.

Not long after my first actual sighting, I would see the earliest DIE YUPPIE SCUM graffiti around the neighborhood, an epithet that was soon vying in popularity with that LES perennial EAT THE RICH. The vituperative tone with which the Y-word was pronounced on East Fifth Street was in part a function of rapidly escalating real-estate prices in the East Village; after decades of relative stability that had made the area a bastion of Eastern European immigrants and young bohemians, though, it’s easy to forget at this distance that it was also a war zone where muggings and rapes weren’t considered news. The Hells Angels ruled East Third Street, and after dark you went east of Second Avenue strictly at your own risk. The cops didn’t go there. East Tenth beyond Avenue A was a narcotics supermarket where preteen runners scampered in and out of bombed-out tenements. In fact, great swatches of the city were dirty and crime-ridden. Even the West Village was pretty gritty by today’s standards, and Times Square was a scene of spectacular squalor. Check out Taxi Driver or The French Connection if you want to get a sense of what this urban wasteland looked like.

And later...

My first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, came out in September 1984, although it was set a few years earlier, in a grubbier, less prosperous New York. No one was more surprised than me when The Wall Street Journal described me as a spokesman for the yuppies. The protagonist of the novel was a downwardly mobile fact-checker and aspiring novelist, and unless I’m mistaken, he didn’t eat any raw fish in the novel. His best friend, Tad Allagash, was a likelier yuppie, an adman with entrée to all the right places, an uptown boy who knew his way around downtown. And they both did a lot of coke, a.k.a. Bolivian Marching Powder, which was to become the emblematic drug of the eighties, what acid had been to the sixties.

On the Bowery Friday night

Bob Arihood, BoweryBoogie and Jeremiah have photos and words on the "Outsiders" protest Friday night on the Bowery.

[Photo via BoweryBoogie]

Noted

From Ivana Trump's Ivana-Logues column in Page Six Magazine:

Once a year, I go directly to the lingerie department at Bloomingdale's and I try on bras and panties. Then I gather each piece in four colors and buy 24 of each set. I send 24 to my home in Palm Beach, 24 to Saint-Tropez, 24 to London and 24 to New York.

No Rhyme & Reason

Rhyme & Reason, the card shop on 14th Street and Irving Place, is now officially closed. As Racked noted, the owner was facing a huge rent hike for this corner spot in the Zeckendorf Towers. What's to come? I have no idea! But it's a prime spot in NYUville. Also! There's a Duane Reade a block away on 14th and Third...and a Walgreens across the street. So this seems like a good spot for a drug store. Rite Aid?




Anyway, I figured something was up last month when the Christmas items went on sale...

"Hi, I’d like to start–"

New York Press has its annual best of Manhattan issue this week. Always a good read. Which reminded me of my all-time favorite "best of" recipient. Nothing against the Times, just this particular ad campaign. This best of is from Sept. 26, 2000. I'm not sure what to excerpt. So here's the whole damn thing. (The individual recipients do not have bylines, so I can't give props to the writer...)

Best Aggravating Media Ad Campaign
The New York Times

If you watched five minutes of tv in the New York metropolitan area over the past year, you saw this commercial twice. The New York Times must have spent the annual budgets of several Third World nations on this media buy. There has to be a term ad agencies use for a campaign like this that achieves such market oversaturation that it begins to have the opposite of the intended effect and only makes people hate the product. Relentless, remorseless, ubiquitous, inescapable–you couldn’t channel-surf fast enough to get away from it; often it is running on multiple channels at once. "Hi, I’d like to start–" Click. "–ting home delivery of–" Click. "–our financial sec–" Aaaiiieee!

Not only ubiquitous, it’s repulsive. The characters, whom we correctly identified some weeks ago a "rainbow coalition of hideous yuppies," are so carefully chosen for a p.c. spread–young, old, Asian, WASP, brown, male, female–and yet all cut an unmistakable figure of complacent upper-middle-class suburban domesticity. Notice they all seem to have big houses and sun-filled rooms, not a dim little Upper West Side rent-stabilized apartment-dweller in the lot. Clearly this is an ad pitched at the suburban LI-NJ-CT-Westchester-Rockland market. So why must the rest of us suffer through it? Don’t they have a way to narrowcast it only to those markets and leave the rest of us alone?

But back to that rainbow coalition. We got to know these people this year as intimately as our most hated neighbors. The Filipino-looking pederast who simpers, "First thing? I think about my family here–and in my homeland." Nice kneejerk liberal save-the-world touch, the way he overarticulates that word home-land, like he’s auditioning for a community theater production of The King and I. ("King is king of all people–here and in my home-land! Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.") The gender-stereotyping throughout the ad is also remarkably blatant: Man Breadwinner, interested in the business section; Woman Breeder, loves the crossword puzzle. Thus the presumably gay actor playing the empty suit droning about "our financial security" while his brainless Stepford wife literally leans on his elbow and gazes insipidly into middle distance, dreaming of Pillsbury cinnamon rolls and making babies. There’s the old WASP lady who cherishes "another day to learn something new..." ("...that I’ll forget in five minutes because I have Alzheimer’s. The paperboy has actually been delivering the same issue of the paper every day since 1996 and I haven’t noticed!") The positively scary woman with OCD who must finish the crossword puzzle. And the mocha hottie who just loves the arts and "nothing satisfies my passion like The New York Times." Nice subliminal messaging there. Very subtle.

Two or three times during the ad, one of these noids will look directly at you through the lens and repeat in their best, slow, hypnotist’s repeat-after-me voice, "I’d like...to start getting...home delivery...of...The...New York Times..." The ad ran so often, in so many places, that the message became Pavlovian through sheer, heartless repetition. Pretty soon you were shambling the streets of the city like a George Romero zombie, hollow-eyed, unkempt, muttering, "must...order...home delivery...of...The...New York Times...must...order..."

Condescending and yet browbeating, like the Times itself, this commercial was like an unwelcomed guest on our tv screen who just wouldn’t go away. People complained about the Taco Bell dog and the Pets.com sock puppet (the latter our favorite tv figure of the year, and when does he get to host his own talk show?), but both those campaigns combined didn’t add up to the sheer volume or aggravation of this single Times commercial.

I could not find the commercial on YouTube. But here's a parody of it...