Hogs and hoboes, gloom and doom

Catching up on this week's New York.

There's James Cramer's column:

What will New York look like a year from now? The answer: bad and probably worse, and perhaps downright catastrophic. Three degrees of awful.

And an interview with financial historian Niall Ferguson:

I’m in Venice now, which used to be a financial center and is now a tourist center. And the nightmare is that a crisis of this magnitude will turn New York from a financial center into a tourist center. The good news is that London seems to be handling this crisis slightly worse than New York. My sense is that the great financial crisis we’re living through will fundamentally tilt the balance of the world from West to East. Sovereign-wealth funds will matter much, much more because they’ve got the money and we haven’t. New York isn’t quite Venice yet, but I certainly am quite relieved that I don’t own a large block of real estate in Manhattan right now.

And there's a piece on that newish place on 7th Street between Avenue A and First Avenue that sells fancy sliced hog:

It fills the shop with a lovely aroma that wafts its way down the block, causing startled passersby to lift their noses and sniff the air like cartoon hoboes on the trail of a windowsill pie. Resistance is futile.

Unless you're a vegetarian.

NYC's boutique baseball teams

Pablo S. Torre on SI.com:

If you're a typical sports fan -- you know, the kind who worries about gas prices, tuition and the trade deadline -- New York's new stadiums might look as if they belong behind a boutique window.

In the Bronx looms the skeleton of Yankee Stadium 2.0, a coliseum with half as many bleacher seats as its predecessor but more than three times the luxury boxes. In Queens, the Mets traded Shea's 20,420-seat hull of an upper deck for Citi Field and its 54 suites, burnished by leases priced firmly in the six figures.

The fro-yo wars will be getting ugly (and pricy!)

AdAge.com delves into the competitive world of marketing frozen yogurt.

Red Mango is throwing down the gauntlet in the "authentic frozen yogurt" wars. The chain has hired the Richards Group, Dallas, in a seven-figure deal to create online, in-store, public relations and event marketing. Print and outdoor work will likely be added in 2009.

The chain's announcement comes just weeks after news that archrival Pinkberry hired branding firm Bulldog Drummond, San Diego.

EV Grieve's complete Fro-Yo library.

An end to the bank branch glut?

Some passages from a Times article today:

[I]t seems highly likely there will be some branch closings and that the dynamics of the market for retail space in Manhattan could be altered, although not immediately.

Brokers say that eventually Chase will almost certainly want to shut some branches once Washington Mutual has been absorbed.

Chase has 121 full-service branches in Manhattan, and WaMu has opened about 45.

But shedding excess branches may prove problematic. For one thing, WaMu signed most of its New York leases in the last four years. Banks tend to favor 15-year leases, so a lot of these leases may have 11 to 14 years left before they expire.

Window shopping at the Build-a-Bear Workshop store

On Fifth Avenue and 46th Street.






Oh, and I found this user review on Yelp:

Yahoo!'s new e-mail interface remains optimistic about the stock market

Noted

Forbes released their annual list of most expensive zip codes.

How a prolonged decline in the finance sector will affect next year's list is unknown, but there's already been slowing in prime areas around New York that depend on Wall Street cash. Amagansett (11930), on Long Island, home to mansions, sailboats and big cars, fell $375,000 this year to $1.675 million. Great Neck, N.Y., (11024)--the model for F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby--on the landed North Shore, dropped $310,000 last year to $1.03 million.

Crain's broke it down for us.

[Long Island] claimed five of the Top 25 wealthiest ZIP codes in the country . . . Two of the Top 25 were in Manhattan, and one was in Westchester. The rankings were based on 2007 median home prices.

Taking the cake for New York state was Mill Neck, ZIP code 11765, in Nassau County, which ranked third overall with a median sales price of $3 million. Water Mill, ZIP code 11976, in Suffolk County ranked fifth with a median sales price of $2.7 million, and Wainscott, ZIP code 11975, in Suffolk County ranked eighth with a median home price of $2.6 million.

Manhattan joined the list at No. 14 with TriBeCa, ZIP code 10013, which had a median sale price of $2.2 million in 2007. ZIP code 10007, also in TriBeCa, came in 17th with a median sales price of nearly $2 million. Bridgehampton in Suffolk County, Purchase in Westchester County and Old Westbury in Nassau County came in 19th, 20th and 22nd, respectively.

Bars and quality of life

Time Out tackles community boards and liquor licenses:

It was only a decade or so ago that the presence of restaurants and bars in neighborhoods like the East Village and Lower East Side defined a new quality of life there. Now . . . those same establishments are degrading neighborhood conditions. The fears usually amount to sidewalks littered with noisy smokers, loitering cabs and loud cell-phone conversations at 4am.

Maybe this will seem funny in a few years

National Debt Too Big for National Debt Clock to Handle (Gothamist)

Today's Post fails to instill confidence in the economy

The Dow's Damage: 13 percent in Five Days (WSJ)