
Let me be honest here. Just for a moment. I found this shot on my camera awhile ago. I don't remember taking the picture. I don't remember who the arm belongs to. I just know that I really like the tattoo. That is all.
First, I can’t believe you reported this story about this absolutely absurd space cadet who cost the city, literally, several thousands of dollars because she couldn’t get it together, after several years of having a too-large ring, to have it resized.
Second, and then you report the entire ridicu-blog. She sounds more like a high school kid.
Third, I find it hard to believe she graduated from Penn. Just doesn’t fit the known facts as we see them here.
Heartwarming this story was not. She needs to be reprimanded by a grown-up.
No kidding. How hard is it for this ditz to have her ring re-sized?
Maybe she should go back to Pennsylvania. I hope someone in the Con Edison accounts billing department sends her an invoice for her stupidity.
As a New Yorker, an Asian American and an Ivy Leaguer (Columbia University), my opinion is that Jean Hsu is definitely a pain in the butt. Unfortunately, NYC does continue to attract absolutely clueless individuals like her.
But how is my uplifting story TWISTED by the cynical and narrow-minded people of the heinous Internet!!?! I am some stupid moron ditz who was practically asking for my ring to fall in a grate just so I could see how many people would be willing to come running to my beck and call. Wasting both time and money. WRONG, FOLKS.
Can I just first mention that for a reporter and editor of the New York Times, he wrote a completely disappointing and pointless blog. I know that my own blog is pretty pointless at times, but I also don't often think my writing or opinion is worthy of being published in the New York Times. And I write it to humor my friends who GET ME. And my pointlessness. But Mr. Roberts could DEFINITELY have done a better job in getting the ACTUAL POINT ACROSS about my story. Or at least formulating his own opinion about the situation.
Before I depart, I wanted to take a moment to thank all my friends for being supportive, enjoying the story like they were supposed to, and ensuring me that all aforementioned haters have no lives and will be probably be really busy calling into WCBS tomorrow while listening to my radio interview. HI HATERS.
The survey found that small businesses are constantly facing the possibility of rent increases or eviction. Almost half of small business owners reported that their overhead costs were rising. Nearly one-third identified rising commercial property rents as their “greatest challenge,” and three-fourths said that their profits are not growing at a sustainable rate compared to the substantial increase in the cost of doing business on the Lower East Side.
Ninety-five percent of small business owners surveyed rent their store space, and nearly half of them hold leases of five years or less.
Redevelopment and gentrification of the Lower East Side were cited by 46 percent of business owners as directly affecting their businesses.
Supposedly, all of New York City is suffering from a mass collective malaise, a dark cloud of shared pessimism. But the truth is very different. In reality, many of us are feeling giddily optimistic about this city for the first time in a decade.
Who are these crazy optimists? Head-in-the-sand deniers of the economic calamity? No, just people who welcome the possibility that the unique character of New York, sanitized in the Giuliani and Bloomberg years, may finally return.
As the writer of the blog Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, where I catalogue the city that's being lost to hypergentrification, I have heard hope rising from many vocal readers -- hope that we'll at last have our beloved, wild, creative, eclectic city back.
Since the boom began approximately 10 years ago, many New Yorkers have watched with grief and anger while the city we love was crushed by overzealous development, the all-encompassing renovation plan of Mayor Bloomberg. This plan has gutted countless mom-and-pop businesses and landmarks like Coney Island and Yankee Stadium. It has extended to the use of eminent domain to seize private property from its owners. What we have received in return has been a city of glass, cold and calculated, built for only the superrich seekers of safety to enjoy.
Penley made a name for himself documenting the turmoil of life on the Lower East Side and protesting big business, including NYU expansion, through the last decades of the 20th century.
“This one is my favorite,” Penley laughed, holding a Daily News front cover photograph he took after he discovered locals were growing marijuana plants in Tompkins Square Park.
“It was obvious. I mean, I know what pot plants look like,” Penley said. After Penley called the Daily News, a reporter from the paper went to the scene and brought a leaf of the plant to a professor at NYU who confirmed it was, in fact, marijuana.
Penley started taking photographs as a journalist in Nicaragua in 1983 when he covered the Contra War and continued to document life in the Village until about six years ago.
“I quit. I got completely burnt out. You know, it’s a very hard way to make a living. I was arrested multiple times,” he said. “I got tired of looking at stuff like fires and car wrecks.”
The activist will move away from the Village to live in Pennsylvania next month where he plans to deejay at his friend’s bar and ice fish in his spare time.
“To be honest with you, I’m really sick of the [Village]. The people who would generate creative things there have been forced to leave the neighborhood,” he said.
Hordes of NYU students only add to Penley’s annoyances with the comparatively bland flavor of the area has taken on in recent years.
“I think it was irresponsible to dump that many students on the Lower East Side without educating them about how to behave in our neighborhood,” he said.
One of only a handful of existing Greek revival buildings that survived the great fire of 1835, 211 Pearl St. was constructed in the early 1830s by William Colgate, the founder of Colgate-Palmolive. Colgate used the building as a warehouse at a time when Pearl St. bustled as a hub for trading in dry goods.
The building's current owner, Rockrose Development Corporation, received demolition permits for 211 Pearl from the city's Buildings Department on Dec. 13, 2002, a Buildings spokesperson said. Rockrose is considering plans to demolish the building to make way for a rear entrance for a new, 650-unit residential development the company is constructing west of Pearl St., near Maiden Lane, Platt and Gold Sts.
"It's kind of ironic that, after having endured the tragedy of 9/11, we're talking about destroying a building that symbolizes the strength and endurance of New York," said Councilmember Alan Gerson.
At 211 Pearl St., only a silver remains of the historic Greek revival building that had stood there since the early 1830s. But elsewhere in the city, parts of the demolished interior have found new life, in a restaurant on the Upper West Side, in a tree guard on E. Fourth St., and possibly even on a music video set for Madonna and Britney Spears.
Since opening on New York’s Lower East Side in late 2005, it has enjoyed great success among vegans and non-vegans alike. BabyCakes reportedly grossed $1.2 million in sales last year, and, thanks to a significant number of customers whom McKenna describes as “celebrities who aren’t even vegan but [are] health conscious,” will open a second Los Angeles location in the spring, right around the time the BabyCakes cookbook is scheduled to hit shelves.
bryan said...
I don't think it's the same dog, but there's one like it on Mulberry Street over the door to an Italian place. Careful to whoever's calling Mulberry above Canal "Chinatown": those kind of words could still get you hurt!
February 3, 2009 4:42 PM
Jill said...
I am sure it's the same one. My camera battery died on me during Chinese New Years, but Mulberry Street sounds exactly right. How many big brown dogs perched over a canopy can there possibly be in one small town?
Sintir . . . met some opposition from nine members of the Block Association. They collected a petition with 109 signatures trying to block the restaurant and cited ads the owners had apparently posted on their MySpace pages advertising upcoming live music performances. After a half an hour struggle, the ap was denied, the owner was in tears.