Getting nostalgic 10 years in advance

I've been enjoying Alex's "things that aren't here now" series of photos. Made me think that I shouldn't delete any photos on my computer, no matter how insignificant they seem now. What if we're looking at the photos below 10 years from now? What might we be saying? (Oh, I did something similar to this during my guest stint at Curbed this past August...)

"Wow, this area was still called the Bowery."

"The last ATM that the government shut down!"

"$5 for a Subway sub? So cheap! And this was before Subway merged with Starbucks to create StarSubs (SubBanks?)."

"Who?"

"Freedom Towers should be completed in just another 7 years."

"Only $4.75 for a Coke at old Yankee Stadium? Bargain!"

"Ha! Look! No ads on the bridge!"

"How quaint! When there were shoe repair shops run by people who have been in business 40-plus years!"

"Pay phones....Wha....?"

"Wow, the Christodora was the tallest building on the block; and before Ford Models bought it for their girls!"

"No shopping mall on Grand and Clinton?!"

"The Staten Island Ferry was free!"

"Ha ha ha -- remember when there were newspapers?"

"Wonder when that $20 million will kick in for the repairs at St. Brigid's..."

"Ah, Coney Island..."

"Iggy hasn't aged a bit!"

"Wow, a corner on the Bowery without a high rise...and that was the best Bond since Thunderball!"

And now the obligatory crash-crime story

Now that we're all broke, we have something else to look forward to: More crime! Or maybe not. This is all debated in the Times today:

Expert opinions differ . . . The last time stocks on Wall Street fell hard, in 1987, crime was exploding, and the city saw historic highs in murders in the following years.

Before that, the fiscal crisis of the 1970s helped lead to the abandonment of neighborhoods, failing schools and startling crime rates: robberies built through those years to a high in 1981, when there were 107,495 of them, for an average of 294 a day. (Last year’s total reported robberies, 21,787, was the lowest figure in modern history.)

“Every recession since the late ’50s has been associated with an increase in crime and, in particular, property crime and robbery, which would be most responsive to changes in economic conditions,” said Richard Rosenfeld, a sociologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Typically, he said, “there is a year lag between the economic change and crime rates.”

Uh. How about New York?

New York, of course, has over the last 15 years seen an extraordinary drop in crime, from the most serious to the mildly irritating. But across all those years, economists and sociologists have debated how much of the success was attributable to new trends in policing and how much to other factors, including a robust economy.

Now, if the dire predictions of economic hardship prove accurate, the city may be poised to find out in a real-time experiment. And it will have to conduct that experiment with thousands fewer police officers than it had in 2001.

For his part, the New York police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, said he did not subscribe to the idea that there was a strong connection between a city’s financial fortunes and its safety. He said he and his top commanders had had informal talks about the current economic conditions and what they might mean for crime, but had set no specific policy changes in motion that are related to economic circumstances.

Noted

The end of bling. Via The Wall Street Journal:

Francesco Trapani, chief executive of Bulgari Group, is cutting back on the fixed costs of his jet-setting lifestyle. The jewelry, luxury-goods and hotel magnate recently sold his 137-foot yacht, the "Christianne B," and he's holding off on buying any more homes. Even his bespoke Micocci shirt was slightly frayed at the collar last week -- a fact he acknowledged with an apologetic smile.

"I'm being more prudent," Mr. Trapani said. "I spent a lot of money this summer renting houses and things. But when the summer's over, it's over."

Not even the richest people are feeling untouched by our current financial crisis. In their personal lives, as in business, the purveyors of luxury are sizing up what it all means. Some of the questions: Is it unseemly to spend money publicly? Will people still shop for the all-important holiday season? Is this the end of bling?

Francois Henri Pinault, chief executive of French luxury giant PPR, said a few weeks ago that there will always be rich people, but the question is how they will behave as consumers.

The answer may have a lot to do with how these consumers want to be seen. It's not necessarily a good thing to show up at the tennis club with a new $30,000 crocodile handbag when your friends' net worth has been halved and the Federal Reserve is spending billions to keep the banking system afloat

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Dunzo Journalism

Via Guest of a Guest...:

The Bowery may be the hottest street in the city, but is it too hot for its own good? We have already gotten more than one email from very “in the know” New Yorkers that insist that the LES (Lower East Side), including the Bowery and her hip hotel and bars are OVER. As in DUNZO. At least for the “cool kids” of the city that refuse to follow trends.

Down by the Hipster's take:

What happens when someone asks a question that has already been answered years ago? ...
So yes - the LES is Dunzo, and has been for quite a long time. It certainly doesn't take an "in the know" New Yorker to tell you that. Or maybe it does, and that makes us weep.

Loving "Kojak"

"Life on Mars," the new time-a-traveling crime drama, debuts tonight on ABC at 10. The show, based on the BBC series, follows a NYC detective who's transported from 2008 to 1973. Confusion ensues! They've been filming the show around the East Village and LES, as Bowery Boogie and Jeremiah have chronicled for us. The show's main character, Sam Tyler (Jason O'Mara), lives in the East Village. In any event, it looks interesting...and I may actually tune in.

Still! The show goes to great lengths to recreate 1973 NYC. The time in which "Kojak" was on the job. The Telly Savalas crime drama debuted in 1973 and played for five seasons.

Here's an entire episode from season four that aired Sept. 26, 1976. Guest stars Richard Gere. Oh, the thing is 45 minutes or so. I'd recommend tuning in for some tough Telly love at the 24-minute mark...and again at the 38-minute mark.



[Via the YouTube page set up by Nicholas Savalas. There are other full episodes there.]

Bonus trivia:
"Life of Mars" co-stars Esquared favorite Gretchen Mol.

A touch of Hollywood on C

A neon sign that I like. On Avenue C.

Caution: objects in mirror are dumber than they appear

Driving on 7th Street near Avenue B.

VIPs leaving City Hall

Bet I know who the Mayor was with!



Wonder what Elmo thinks of the third term...

EV Green

Check out the cool video by East Village Podcasts on the Wild Project, the eco-conscious gallery/theater on East Third Street between Avenue A and Avenue B.

Noted

At St. Jerome's on Rivington between Clinton and Suffolk. Via BC at NYC.com.

Are we in a recession because that one seller on craigslist says we are?

Are we in a recession? (New York Times)

Hogs and hoboes, gloom and doom

Catching up on this week's New York.

There's James Cramer's column:

What will New York look like a year from now? The answer: bad and probably worse, and perhaps downright catastrophic. Three degrees of awful.

And an interview with financial historian Niall Ferguson:

I’m in Venice now, which used to be a financial center and is now a tourist center. And the nightmare is that a crisis of this magnitude will turn New York from a financial center into a tourist center. The good news is that London seems to be handling this crisis slightly worse than New York. My sense is that the great financial crisis we’re living through will fundamentally tilt the balance of the world from West to East. Sovereign-wealth funds will matter much, much more because they’ve got the money and we haven’t. New York isn’t quite Venice yet, but I certainly am quite relieved that I don’t own a large block of real estate in Manhattan right now.

And there's a piece on that newish place on 7th Street between Avenue A and First Avenue that sells fancy sliced hog:

It fills the shop with a lovely aroma that wafts its way down the block, causing startled passersby to lift their noses and sniff the air like cartoon hoboes on the trail of a windowsill pie. Resistance is futile.

Unless you're a vegetarian.

NYC's boutique baseball teams

Pablo S. Torre on SI.com:

If you're a typical sports fan -- you know, the kind who worries about gas prices, tuition and the trade deadline -- New York's new stadiums might look as if they belong behind a boutique window.

In the Bronx looms the skeleton of Yankee Stadium 2.0, a coliseum with half as many bleacher seats as its predecessor but more than three times the luxury boxes. In Queens, the Mets traded Shea's 20,420-seat hull of an upper deck for Citi Field and its 54 suites, burnished by leases priced firmly in the six figures.

The fro-yo wars will be getting ugly (and pricy!)

AdAge.com delves into the competitive world of marketing frozen yogurt.

Red Mango is throwing down the gauntlet in the "authentic frozen yogurt" wars. The chain has hired the Richards Group, Dallas, in a seven-figure deal to create online, in-store, public relations and event marketing. Print and outdoor work will likely be added in 2009.

The chain's announcement comes just weeks after news that archrival Pinkberry hired branding firm Bulldog Drummond, San Diego.

EV Grieve's complete Fro-Yo library.

An end to the bank branch glut?

Some passages from a Times article today:

[I]t seems highly likely there will be some branch closings and that the dynamics of the market for retail space in Manhattan could be altered, although not immediately.

Brokers say that eventually Chase will almost certainly want to shut some branches once Washington Mutual has been absorbed.

Chase has 121 full-service branches in Manhattan, and WaMu has opened about 45.

But shedding excess branches may prove problematic. For one thing, WaMu signed most of its New York leases in the last four years. Banks tend to favor 15-year leases, so a lot of these leases may have 11 to 14 years left before they expire.

Window shopping at the Build-a-Bear Workshop store

On Fifth Avenue and 46th Street.






Oh, and I found this user review on Yelp:

Yahoo!'s new e-mail interface remains optimistic about the stock market

Noted

Forbes released their annual list of most expensive zip codes.

How a prolonged decline in the finance sector will affect next year's list is unknown, but there's already been slowing in prime areas around New York that depend on Wall Street cash. Amagansett (11930), on Long Island, home to mansions, sailboats and big cars, fell $375,000 this year to $1.675 million. Great Neck, N.Y., (11024)--the model for F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby--on the landed North Shore, dropped $310,000 last year to $1.03 million.

Crain's broke it down for us.

[Long Island] claimed five of the Top 25 wealthiest ZIP codes in the country . . . Two of the Top 25 were in Manhattan, and one was in Westchester. The rankings were based on 2007 median home prices.

Taking the cake for New York state was Mill Neck, ZIP code 11765, in Nassau County, which ranked third overall with a median sales price of $3 million. Water Mill, ZIP code 11976, in Suffolk County ranked fifth with a median sales price of $2.7 million, and Wainscott, ZIP code 11975, in Suffolk County ranked eighth with a median home price of $2.6 million.

Manhattan joined the list at No. 14 with TriBeCa, ZIP code 10013, which had a median sale price of $2.2 million in 2007. ZIP code 10007, also in TriBeCa, came in 17th with a median sales price of nearly $2 million. Bridgehampton in Suffolk County, Purchase in Westchester County and Old Westbury in Nassau County came in 19th, 20th and 22nd, respectively.

Bars and quality of life

Time Out tackles community boards and liquor licenses:

It was only a decade or so ago that the presence of restaurants and bars in neighborhoods like the East Village and Lower East Side defined a new quality of life there. Now . . . those same establishments are degrading neighborhood conditions. The fears usually amount to sidewalks littered with noisy smokers, loitering cabs and loud cell-phone conversations at 4am.

Maybe this will seem funny in a few years

National Debt Too Big for National Debt Clock to Handle (Gothamist)

Today's Post fails to instill confidence in the economy

The Dow's Damage: 13 percent in Five Days (WSJ)

Seen in the Bad Timing Department

At Whole Foods on Union Square.

Doing what New Yorkers do best

I'm all for good causes, supporting our public schools, helping with the education of our children, etc. Still, given this recessive economy, is this the best time to be encouraging people to go shopping? And check out the walk-off line for this Fund for Public Schools ad..."help support public schools by doing what New Yorkers do best -- shopping." Really? Is this what people think we do best? What does this say about what NYC has become?

Seeing this prompted me to revisit Jeremiah's shopping essay from July. Maybe we should be encouraged to save some money.




Spotted on Avenue C near 8th Street. Note the "this is light pollution" graffiti.

"The Battle Hymn of the Republic" on Wall Street

A (rather eerie, if you ask me) version of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" performed on the steps of Federal Hall on Wall Street across the street from the New York Stock Exchange.



We can probably read into this in many ways...

Looking at old Wall Street

Well, old as in 1966, with this spot for Shearson Hammill. Love the ticker tapes and punch buttons on the NYSE floor. And the fat cat getting a shave...

A peace offering at Cooper 35?

At 35 Cooper Square, who, of course, has a big new shiny neighbor...

Rich people to share space with kids

At 20 Pine in the Financial District.

A comment

There's a lengthy comment about the coming global depression on my post from Friday that was titled From a gilded age to a great emptiness...

Beloved children's show being filmed in the neighborhood -- and they will TOW YOUR ASS if your car is left on the street

Noted

New York City to become wedding destination

The Manhattan Marriage Bureau is on the second floor of the Municipal Building downtown. As the Times describes today, its hallways are "lined with cracked tile floors, fading yellow walls and dim fluorescent lighting where city employees . . . have been giving true love a brief, secular send-off since 1916."

No more, though. This fall, the Bureau moves to shiny new digs up the street at Centre and Worth. Why the move? Stupid question! As the Times notes:

The relocation will mean more than just swapping one space for another, or reconfiguring furniture into new surroundings. What will happen, in fact, is the death of the marriage bureau as Manhattan has known it for generations: a storied but shabby place, long on protocol but short on charm and comfort.

The move, an idea that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has nursed for almost as long as he has been in office, was inspired in part by concerns about dignity. The bureau’s appearance has not changed much over its 92 years, and despite periodic renovations, Room 257 — which houses the wedding chapel — looks as bureaucratically stiff as all the other Municipal Building offices. The chapel itself has no adornment except a pulpit used by the handful of officiants who perform the ceremonies.

The other reason for the switch is purely strategic. City officials see in the revamped marriage bureau an opportunity to market the city as a wedding destination, offering it as a more tasteful alternative to Las Vegas.

[T]here will be are doors coated in bronze, heating-unit covers fashioned by a Brooklyn artisan to match the building’s Art Deco style, and ornate columns throughout the 5,000-square-foot space

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I know a few couples who were married at City Hall. They've said there is something romantic about the drab surroundings. If they wanted fancy (say, art deco style and ornate columns), they'd have got hitched in a hotel ballroom somewhere. According to city records, there have been 1.2 million weddings at the Bureau since 1930. Here are a few of them, via YouTube.

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!”