Please call for help....

Good lord I'm still futzing around with Google 2001...Oh, look who's playing at Brownies!

Remember when...?

Google is celebrating its 10th birthday. In honor of this, they've brought back their oldest available index. Take a look back at Google in January 2001.

Better yet, search for some vile things in the East Village that arrived after January 2001...and its as if those things never existed! (Search for Pinkberry and see what you find...) Oh, we can pretend. I've just started playing around with this...there goes the rest of the day....

Uh, Mabius for mayor?

In Page Six Magazine this week, "Ugly Betty" star Eric Mabius was asked the following:

If you were mayor of New York City, what would you change?

I'd stop all of the high-rises that are going up. They're making New Yorkers tourists in their own town. Most New Yorkers can't afford apartments in those luxury buildings.

Done.

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.