Is this something to worry about?

The Citibank branch on 120 Broadway in the Financial District is selling bowls of fruit salad in the lobby for $2.50.

Ridge? Pitt? Attorney?

An explanation of "off-off-Bowery." As Grub Street notes, "Yes, folks, this is what it has come to."

Setting the record straight on Lou Reed

I picked up an item yesterday on Lou Reed from the City Room, which cited a Daily Star blurb about Lou Reed wanting a street named after him and all that. Anyway! What wasn't mentioned in any of this!: That item came from this week's action-packed 40th anniversary issue of New York. (Way to source it, Daily Star!)

I realized that last night when I continued my journey through the issue. The Reed stuff was part of the magazine's "New York Questionnaire."

Checking in (so to speak) at the Wyndham Garden Hotel

Workers unveiled the entrance to the 20-story Wyndham Garden Hotel at 20 Maiden Lane yesterday in the Financial District. Still, from the look of things inside, plenty of work remains at this L-shaped hotel that wraps around three low-rise buildings on the corner of Maiden and Nassau.




Regardless, the hotel has its Web site up and running. So I thought I'd check out a room for this week.



Oh. According to the site, they are now accepting reservations for stays after March 15, 2009. Anyway sounds nice, based on the description:

The Wyndham Garden Hotel - Manhattan Financial District is a new, modern, 20 story high rise located in the heart of the New York City Financial District and Wall Street, bordering the historic South Street Seaport and the trendy neighborhoods of Tribeca & The Lower East Side.

Whether you're traveling to New York City for business or pleasure you will find that this magnificent downtown New York City hotel offers easy access to the World Trade Center site, Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, South Street Seaport, Battery Park, The Brooklyn Bridge and hundreds of Fortune 500 companies.

Let's add: "Come and see the end of Wall Street firsthand!"

Previously on EV Grieve:
A Win Won Situation

Though photos with Maria Bartiromo cost $10

CNBC was camped out all day yesterday across from the NYSE on Wall Street covering the continued economic collapse of the free world. Well, it was a long day. And there sure were many pesky -- no, we love you! -- tourists milling about. So the tourists asked if they could have their photo taken inside the CNBC van.

Tree muggers at the La Plaza Cultural

This past Saturday morning, city workers swooped in and cut down a beautiful willow tree on the corner of Avenue C and Ninth Street in La Plaza Cultural. I happened by minutes after the workers left. I spoke with someone who lives nearby. A branch had fallen earlier that morning in the high winds. So the whole tree was cut down "just in case." This resident didn't think that was necessary.

Decision 2008

Who will I go as this Halloween? And where the hell are the Sarah Palin masks? I asked a nice woman working at Duane Reade. She said "Who?" When I said she is the Republican vice presidential candidate, the worker threw up and her hands and said "all the masks that we have are out."

An end to the real estate boom

Excerpts from a Times piece titled "Failed Deals Replace Real Estate Boom:"

After seven years of nonstop construction, skyrocketing rents and sales prices, and a seemingly endless appetite for luxury housing that transformed gritty and glamorous neighborhoods alike, the credit crisis and the turmoil on Wall Street are bringing New York’s real estate boom to an end.

It is hard to say exactly what the long-term impact will be, but real estate experts, economists and city and state officials say it is likely there will be far fewer new construction projects in the future, as well as tens of thousands of layoffs on Wall Street, fewer construction jobs and a huge loss of tax revenue for both the state and the city.

After imposing double-digit rent increases in recent years, landlords say rents are falling somewhat, which could hurt highly leveraged projects, but also slow gentrification in what real estate brokers like to call “emerging neighborhoods” like Harlem, the Lower East Side and Fort Greene.

“Any continued impediment to the credit markets is awful for the national economy, but it’s more awful for New York,” said Richard Lefrak, patriarch of a fourth-generation real estate family that owns office buildings and apartment houses in New York and New Jersey.

“This is the company town for money,” he said. “If there’s no liquidity in the system, it exacerbates the problems. It’s going to have a serious effect on the local economy and real estate values.”

What we can learn from Meyer Mishkin...or not

David Leonhardt writing in the Times today:

In 1929, Meyer Mishkin owned a shop in New York that sold silk shirts to workingmen. When the stock market crashed that October, he turned to his son, then a student at City College, and offered a version of this sentiment: It serves those rich scoundrels right.

A year later, as Wall Street’s problems were starting to spill into the broader economy, Mr. Mishkin’s store went out of business. He no longer had enough customers. His son had to go to work to support the family, and Mr. Mishkin never held a steady job again.

Frederic Mishkin — Meyer’s grandson and, until he stepped down a month ago, an ally of Ben Bernanke’s on the Federal Reserve Board — told me this story the other day, and its moral is obvious enough. Many people in Washington fear that the country is starting to spiral into a terrible downturn. And to their horror, they see the public, and many members of Congress, turning into modern-day Meyer Mishkins, more interested in punishing Wall Street than saving the economy.

Revisiting "Riding out the Credit Collapse"

At BoingBoing today, Douglas Rushkoff passes along the link to an article he did this past spring for Arthur magazine titled "Riding out the Credit Collapse." As he writes on BoingBoing, this is "a way to review the steps that led to our current fiasco, explain it in the greater context of centralized currency, and help people not feel so very terrible about it all."

Here is an excerpt of the Arthur magazine piece:

...Bush’s tax cuts and other measures favoring the rich led to the biggest redistribution of wealth from poor to rich in American history. The result was that the wealthy—the investment class—had more money to invest, or lend, than there were people and businesses looking to borrow.
The easiest way to bring more borrowers into the system—and to create more of a market for money—was to promote homeownership in America. This is precisely what the Bush administration did, touting home ownership as an American right. Of course, they weren’t talking about home ownership at all, but rather pushing people to borrow money tied to the value of a house. If people could be persuaded to take mortgages on homes, real estate values would go up for those already invested (like land trusts and real estate funds) and banks would have a market for the excess money they had accumulated.
In short, there was a surplus of credit in the system. Americans were encouraged to borrow in the form of mortgages, which created demand for the credit banks wanted to sell. In many cases the credit itself wasn’t even real, but leveraged off some other inflated commodity that the bank or investor may have owned.

When headlines go terribly wrong

From today's Page Six:



Wow. A few angry readers have chimed in on the "fear of frying" headline.

Lou Reed wants us to remember him

The Daily Star has this Lou Reed item today:

The 66-year-old rocker was born in Brooklyn and has spent all of his life living in Manhattan, where he was once nicknamed the Bard of the East Village. Reed is fiercely proud of the city, and hopes a future mayor will recognise him - in the same way punk star Joey Ramone was honoured when the 2nd Street East Village block where he once lived was officially renamed Joey Ramone Place. Reed says, "Lou Reed Way would be nice. Any little street would do."

(Via City Room)

Bonus! Please watch Lou Reed in a Honda Scooters ad from the 1980s...