Meet the Wagonistas
There was a time when the fashion and media industries were known for their bacchanalian ways. Not anymore: The truly ambitious are giving up booze to boost their careers.
But while tastemakers often justify getting loaded as a way to grease the networking wheels, a growing number of ambitious New Yorkers in creative fields like fashion, media and entertainment say they are passing on the cocktails this year. It's not to lose weight and it's not a post-rehab regime. Instead, the impetus is much more mercenary: They're hoping that not nursing a hangover at work will give them a competitive edge in a tight job market.
According to the city's health department, about 16.8 percent of New Yorkers drink excessively, which is defined as imbibing more than two drinks a day for men and more than one drink a day for women, or consuming more than five drinks on any one occasion. Manhattan is the booziest borough of all, with about 23 percent of the population drinking excessively.
"These people are probably giving themselves an unfair advantage by not drinking," says Bright Lights, Big City author Jay McInerney. "My friends still drink happily and copiously—except for the ones who went to rehab. These [ambitious teetotalers] are probably missing out on a certain amount of fun."
The Swiss architects of the iconic Bird's Nest stadium at the Beijing Olympics are bringing their innovative style to New York City with a translucent glass skyscraper designed to look like houses stacked in the sky.
Architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron's $650 million, 57-story condominium featuring dramatic, cantilevered terraces is slated to begin going up in mid-October in the trendy Tribeca district in lower Manhattan.
One press-shy squeegee guy, apparently still thinking it was Rudy's reign, asked The Post not to write about him.
"Giuliani will lock my ass up," he said. "There will be 30 cops up and down this street."
Unlike many New Yorkers who inhabited the East Village of the 1980s, Mr. Nersesian seemed to remember every aspect of that gritty and often dangerous time with fondness. Even as he described the endless parade of prostitutes down East 12th Street or the bonfires set by the homeless in Tompkins Square Park, there was a palpable tenderness to his voice.
“There was a sense of community there,” Mr. Nersesian said. “I couldn’t walk down the street without saying hello to someone. You’d see Allen Ginsberg all over the place, and you’d see the other Beats.
“I wasn’t the biggest fan of the Beats, but there was an exemplary quality to the artist as citizen. You think about artists today in our society, and they’re kind of removed. You don’t really know them. When Ginsberg died, a definitive quality from the East Village — at least from my East Village — was gone.”
Perhaps inevitably, the East Village of today, with its fashionable bars and restaurants and its gleaming glass towers, fills him with despair. “Oh, God, we’re living in a hell that I can’t even begin to describe!” Mr.
Nersesian said mournfully that day at the diner. “It’s amazing how memory really does become a kind of curse. If I was just coming to the city today, I’d probably think, ‘Oh, this is a really interesting place,’ but it’s trying to tell people, ‘You know, there was a war fought here, a strange economic, cultural battle that went on, and I saw so many wonderful people lost among the casualties.’ ”
In his 1992 play “Rent Control,” Mr. Nersesian incorporated an experience he had when he returned to the office tower that had replaced his childhood apartment.
“I tried to go to the exact same space,” he recalled, “and it turned out to be the romance division of Random House or something. I walked in and the secretary said, ‘Can I help you?’ And I think I tried to convey to her that this was where I lived for the first 10 years of my life; this space here was where I was bathed in the sink. And she looked at me like I was a nut.”
[Image: Andrew Henderson/The New York Times]
A look at the data shows that bank robbers seem to prefer some of the inviting environments of the newer banks on the city scene. Sovereign, Wachovia and Commerce — with plants arrayed on marble floors, jars of lollipops set on low-slung counters and no bullet-resistant barriers between tellers and customers — have some the highest ratios of robberies to branches.
