Is technology making the city more boring to discover?

From the Times today:

The only way to learn the city is to get lost a few times, people tell you. Learning your way around a space happens negatively. It is when you take a wrong turn that you really begin interacting with the world around you. You discover the city when you stumble.

Cellphone tracking services like Loopt and Buddy Beacon are increasingly popular, making us all more “connected” with the hundred “friends” in our digital phonebook.

This network of satellites and screens quickly becomes part of our sensory apparatus, replacing eyes, ears, nose and feet, as if these devices are natural extensions of our bodies. We tell ourselves that they will maximize efficiency and minimize the unknown. There’s no time to get lost.

In the back seat of a newly equipped taxi, we watch the two-dimensional map as the three-dimensional world zooms by outside: “Wow! Look at this wonderful touch screen! I can see exactly where I’m at and where I want to go! Latest updates on sports and real estate included!”

The Marble Cemetery is open today

The Marble Cemetery on Second Street between First Avenue and Second Avenue will be open to the public today....just one of two days a year that this happens, I'm told...In fact, there's a whole block party going on (a good kind of block party thrown by local residents, not professional sausage-on-a-stick types)...The cemetery opened in 1832...and it's one of the loveliest spots in the East Village...this Times piece has much more on the history...

And here are some shots I took from inside the cemetery when it (cough) may not have been open to the public...

The networks are taking the presidential debates a little too far

Obama/Luke Skywalker vs. McCain/Darth Vader in front of the NYSE today on Wall Street.

Oh, this about sums it up

"Straight to Hell."



Or if you prefer it to be a little more dancey...

An appreciation: Gramercy Typewriter

Great piece in BusinessWeek on Gramercy Typewriter at 175 Fifth Ave., which was established in 1932.

Every business day, as he has done for the past 49 years, Paul Schweitzer, 69, travels the streets and skyscrapers of Manhattan making "house" calls, carrying his black leather tool bag by his side. Schweitzer, who insists on wearing a suit and tie while on his rounds, is one of the last of his kind: the typewriter repairman.

Here's a piece on the shop from NPR.

[BusinessWeek photo by Stacy Perman]

If the Dow does plunge again today, you have THIS to look forward to...

This e-mail is apparently making the rounds now from FiDi bar and restaurant Pound and Pence on Liberty Street:

If the Dow Jones Closes 100 Points Lower...

HALF PRICE DRINKS AT THE BAR ALL EVENING

Receive Instant Savings When You Show This Message to the Bartender on Your Phone or on a Printed Copy.

Valid Only On Beverage Purchases at the Bar.

East River Park is ready to slide into the river while everyone putters around

From Downtown Express this week:

New Yorkers will be waiting another year for East River Park to be complete — and maybe more if a state agency succeeds in halting the project.

The Department of Environmental Conservation is worried that workers repairing the East River bulkhead are allowing the shoreline to erode into the water, so D.E.C. tried to revoke the construction permit, D.E.C. spokesperson Arturo Garcia-Costas said.

Also in Downtown Express this week: More on the ongoing East Village/Lower East Side rezoning.

[The accompanying photo seems appropriate for some reason...]

Wall Street Week in Review

As our nation's economy gasped and wheezed through another traumatic week, enterprising reporters, tourists, news networks, protestors and, uh, bloggers, braved a chaotic Wall Street to be a witness to history. Or something equally dramatic.

Here are some snapshots from the week that was Wall Street.

St. Brigid's gets prepped for something ugly

Curbed reported Sept 25 that the back wall will be coming down at St. Brigid's on Eighth Street and Avenue B. There has definitely been some activity out back the last few days, but nothing major...yet.

From a gilded age to a great emptiness...

An excerpt from Judith Warner's "Waiting for Schadenfreude" column in the Times today:

For those of us who have hated this period — the wealth worship, the wealth gap, the elevation of everything suspiciously shiny and irrationally bubbly and stupidly ebullient, there should be some feeling of vindication. But it just isn’t coming. A great emptiness — and a gnawing kind of fear — has taken its place.

Schadenfreude is impossible because the fat cats — the ones who bent the rules, the ones who pushed the envelopes, the ones who paid lower taxes because capital gains were most of their income, the ones who opposed regulations on the banking and mortgage industries — are taking us down with them.

"In the East Village they’re destroying all the beautiful old buildings"

From an article on exploring Brooklyn Heights in the Times today:

Today Montague Street is home to Joe Coleman, an artist who moved there in 1994 after 20 years in the East Village. A painter known for his meticulously detailed portraits of serial killers and other nightmarish imagery, Mr. Coleman and his wife, Whitney Ward, live in an apartment that he calls the Odditorium. Wax figures of Charles Manson and the serial killer Richard Speck, John Dillinger’s death mask, a bullet from Jack Ruby’s pistol and a letter from the cannibal Albert Fish share the Ripleyesque space with some of Mr. Coleman’s paintings.
“The East Village that I came to know and love doesn’t exist anymore,” Mr. Coleman said. “I like it much better here. In the East Village they’re destroying all the beautiful old buildings. So escaping here seemed comforting.”

[Photo of the former Gaseteria on Avenue B and Houston Street via GammaBlog. Not that the Gaseteria was a beautiful old building...]

Flier of the week

On First Avenue near Fifth Street. Is this some kind of joke?