At NY1…

I have nothing else to add.

The elimination of something as large of Shea Stadium reminds me of what a jarring experience it is when a building is suddenly just…gone.  When a person dies, it’s more painful.  But despite the initial shock, it’s something we all know is going to happen to each of us eventually.  Ultimately, I suppose, every man-made structure will fall.  At the very least, though, I instinctively expect a building to outlive me.

The obvious example is the World Trade Center.  A more personal example for me is an apartment where I once lived in a small town in western Massachusetts.  The apartment was in an addition that was attached to a two-century-old house.  The original house was made of stone.  The addition, close to a hundred years old itself, was made of wood and was in pretty horrible shape when I lived there (think: dangerously sloping floors, hurricane-force drafts, and an ever-present musty stench from the dirt-floor basement).  It used to be part of a restaurant that extended into the original portion of the house, so my kitchen was as large as many New York City apartments.  It had two sinks.

Years and several apartments later, I was driving through the area and naturally made a point of looking at the place where I once lived.  But it wasn’t there any more.  Just empty space.  The original house was still there, but the addition had been put out of its misery.

I had the sensation that the portion of my life that took place in that apartment was gone, too.  It felt more “gone” than it would have were the structure still standing.

Yankee Stadium means more to me than Shea, but since they’re selling off every fragment of the thing, I suppose I can hope that someday someone will collect all the fragments and put Yankee Stadium back together again.  A Resurrection…

• Someone playing a dobro in a subway station when no trains are coming and it is otherwise very quiet.
• A clean person sitting next to you on the subway (shoulders touching) falls asleep.
• A beautiful girl smiling gently and sincerely.
• Suddenly realizing that a cat, enjoying the sunshine while sitting in a window, is watching you walk by.
• When it feels as if the entire city is in the park (whichever one you happen to be in).
• A street bookseller having exactly the book you’ve been looking for and happily making the sale.
• Realizing that most of the people around you in the subway car are reading fiction.
• A moment of transformative solitude at the water’s edge.
• A couple of teenagers canoodling like they mean it on the subway.
• An everything bagel just minutes out of the oven.
• A buyback (in a bar, not the stock market).
• Woody Allen.

This is one one of those situations that feels shocking to me even if it’s not exactly surprising.  The 55,000+ movies in the collection of New York institution Kim’s Video are literally on their way to their new home in the town of Salemi in western Sicily.  Yes, of course, video stores in general are going the way of blacksmith shops.  And anyone who has been in this town for more than a few years should know not take take any seemingly permanent business, building or neighborhood for granted.  But couldn’t somebody in New York, whether for love or money, have found a way to meet store founder Yongman Kim’s three conditions?

“We hope to find a sponsor who can make this collection available to those who have loved Kim’s over the past two decades.” He promised to donate all the films without charge to anyone who would meet three conditions: Keep the collection intact, continue to update it and make it accessible to Kim’s members and others.

The proposal from Salemi was the only one that properly met those conditions.  I must admit, their plans do sound pretty cool.

Plans under way include what is described as a Never-ending Festival - a 24-hour projection of up to 10 films at once for the foreseeable future. The town also plans a relationship with the Venice Biennale, a collaboration with the University of Palermo and a professional translation company to subtitle the films, a Web site with a searchable database and, eventually, the conversion of all Kim’s VHS films to DVDs to ensure their preservation. Projection spaces and lodging for visitors will be created within a restored 17th-century Jesuit college, which will house the collection. The building, which now serves as the town’s municipal museum, has a large inner courtyard perfect for public projections.

Just as people who buy most or all of their books used from Amazon get bent out of shape when the quaintly unprofitable local bookshop closes down, many of Mr. Kim’s former customers (and probably a good many non-customers) are not taking this so well.

Mr. Kim, for his part, still gets daily calls from irate customers.

“I was very shocked,” he said last week, sitting in a bar near his new retail store on lower First Avenue. “If this number of people went to Kim’s Video, we would have stayed for a while. And we would be a very healthy operation. But once we’re down, now I’m getting a lot of support. It’s very ironic to me.”

He lamented the end of the business that he loved, a business that once allowed him to carve out his own contribution in America. And he mourns more than the loss of his movies.

“My passion was the introduction to my new community in U.S. of my film love,” he said. “This kind of passion is no longer welcome, due to the new technology of the Internet.”

He looked off into the distance. “The future of the video rental business is really dying and declining so fast, so fast,” he added. “I realized this thing so late.”

Alright, this is getting into heartbreak territory.  I feel worse for Mr. Kim than I do for New York.  People should cut him some slack.  At least he cared enough about his collection to give it away for free to those who are willing to do something meaningful with it.  If you choose the convenience and cost-savings of internet retailers and services rather than supporting your local businesses, then those local businesses will not survive.  It’s so damn simple.

Arrivederci, Kim’s!

Good old dive bars get to stay open (or in this case reopen) instead of being replaced by cheaply and unimaginatively constructed pseudo-luxury apartment buildings.

For decades, the Holland Bar, on Ninth Avenue between 39th and 40th Streets in Hell’s Kitchen, made a name for itself serving cheap beer to loyal drinkers who did not mind squeezing into a tiny, crusty room barely wide enough to fit the bar and the stools in front of it. [snip]  Then last summer the Holland became one of those typical New York institutions: the beloved local haunt forced to shut down. According to Mr. Kelly, who has owned the bar since 1998, the landlord refused to renew the lease in the hopes that he could make more money converting the building for residential use or selling it off. But such plans apparently did not work out, and the landlord offered Mr. Kelly his old space back starting Jan. 1, albeit at a 20 percent increase in the rent. Now the Holland is scheduled to reopen its taps as soon as Wednesday.

It’s not all good news, though:

Since the Holland closed its doors, the bar had been destroyed, the plumbing had been removed, the floor had been ripped out. And much of the physical record of the bar’s history that had been pasted to its walls - the photographs of customers who had died years before, the posters for shows at the dear, departed CBGB - is gone, too. Mr. Kelly sent many framed pictures home with regulars as farewell gifts, other memorabilia went into storage. One of the relics of the Holland’s lore - an urn containing the ashes of Charlie O’Connor, a former bartender - had gone missing.

It would have been so much easier if they’d just left it alone in the first place.  Someone needs to create some kind of of landmark status for dive bars…no, that would turn them into artificial representations of themselves.  How about we just agree not to tear anything down for a while?  Just ten years and see what happens.

ATTENTION TRENDY GIRLS IN NEW YORK CITY:

There was nothing sexy about old ladies in the 1970’s and there is nothing sexy about young ladies in 2009 wearing floppy knitted hats like old ladies in the 1970’s.

Thank you.

When I’m on the pier that extends into the Hudson River outside the office building where I work, I sometimes look up at the all the planes coming and going from LaGuardia, JFK and Newark airports, at all the helicopters buzzing around like prehistoric bugs, and I expect one of them to crash right then when I’m watching.  There’s too much going on.  And in New York City, weird and extreme things just happen sometimes.  The unexpected is to be expected.

I confess I’m usually a bit surprised and even disappointed that it doesn’t happen.  When you work in an office with a beige and charcoal gray color scheme, your survival instincts long for whatever excitement might be enough to break the life-crushing monotony.

So I was not shocked today to see U.S. Airways Flight 1549 drifting along in the Hudson’s current past my office building fifteen minutes after it had crash-landed into the river.  Perhaps I would have felt differently if all the passengers had not already been pronounced rescued and safe, but the sight was almost beautiful, like a closing scene that Godard might have pulled off during his Maoist period in the late 1960’s, if only he’d had the budget.  The plane’s length gently rotating as it drifts downstream with its fin jutting out of the water, surrounded by more than a dozen Coast Guard, police and tug boats with their flashing lights.  The mysterious presence of the Circle Line tourist boat in the mix–a nice touch.  Emergency helicopters hovering in a circle overhead.  The spinning red and blue lights of fire trucks and police cars on the opposite shoreline, celebrating the coming twilight.  Everything was in a gentle slow motion.

It has happened, I thought.  I missed it, but the inevitable has happened.  Gravity enjoys a victory over technology.

I do feel sorry for those geese, though.

Craving some thorough coverage of BOTH the New School Occupation AND the riots/protests in Greece?  Open Anthropology should satisfy your deepest, darkest desires.

Does this kind of thing even work any more?  Did it ever work?

I understand how they feel, and it’s good that they care about anything at all, but I don’t see how this will help accomplish their objectives.

But maybe I’m just old and still bitter that the pre-Iraq war protests accomplished absolutely nothing.  In this country, in this age, those in power react to protest by digging in.  Yes, it’s still essential to voice your opinion and try to change what needs changing, but this retro shit ain’t gonna cut it.

Stephen Millies, subway rider, hero, attempts to throw his shoe at Metropolitan Transit Authority CEO Elliot Saunders shortly before the MTA board voted 13-1 in favor of next year’s 23% fare hike.

“We don’t need any fare increases and we don’t need our transit system ravaged either,” said Mr. Millies, who said he was an Amtrak signal-tower operator and a member of the Bail Out the People Campaign, a group that has stood up for victims of the economic crisis. He called for the subway and bus fare to be reduced to $1, to help unemployed New Yorkers.

Then, referring to the authority’s chief executive, who was sitting about 15 feet away, he said: “Where is Elliot Sander?” He stooped, slipped off one of his shoes and shouted, “You made $300,000 last year.”

Immediately, authority police officers swarmed him and pushed him out of the room. He was clutching his shoe, a black, thick-soled oxford, in his hand.

“This shoe is for you,” he shouted as he was hustled out.

MTA heaquarters is at 300 Jay Street in Brooklyn.  What if every regular bus and subway rider went there and threw a shoe at the building (that would be well over 6 million shoes)?  Think they’d get the point?

Susan Cheever, daughter of John Cheever, says people at (the best) New York City parties don’t get drunk anymore.

That dinner party was almost 10 years ago; it was the last time I saw anyone visibly drunk at a New York party. The New York apartments and lofts which were once the scenes of old-fashioned drunken carnage - slurred speech, broken crockery, broken legs and arms, broken marriages and broken dreams - are now the scene of parties where both friendships and glassware survive intact. Everyone comes on time, behaves well, drinks a little wine, eats a few tiny canapés, and leaves on time. They all still drink, but no one gets drunk anymore. Neither do they smoke. What on earth has happened?

What happened is you got older and started hanging with a more staid crowd.  Come to Brooklyn sometime…

Despite significant increases in the number of jobs and the population of New York City between 2003 and 2007, traffic actually decreased slightly while mass transit ridership increased dramatically.

“What you see is that for the first time since at least World War II, all of the growth in travel in the city has been absorbed by non-auto modes, primarily by mass transit,” said Bruce Schaller, New York’s deputy transportation commissioner for planning and sustainability, who wrote the study, which is to be released on Monday.

That massive jump in mass transit ridership in the late 1990’s, out of proportion to the increases in jobs and population, was a result both of the lower crime rate and the cost-savings available with unlimited ride weekly and monthly MetroCards.  Both the improved safety and the MetroCard’s relatively good deal have remained, so we see almost all new residents and new commuters using mass transit.

This of course is a very good thing, but what then are we to make of the MTA’s $1.2 billion deficit and plan to raise fares by as much as 23%?  When your customer base increases by almost 9% over the course of five years, you should be sitting on a sweet surplus, not a deficit.  One of the MTA’s more commonly used excuses is that revenue is not is great as expected because more riders than expected are using unlimited MetroCards rather than paying the “full price” of a single-ride fare.  But why should this have been a surprise?  Obviously most people who use mass transit to go to work five days a week are going to choose the least expensive option.  They should have been able to predict this.

And what will be the effect of the fare increase when combined with the planned decrease in service and maintenance?  Will we see the positive trend in favor of mass transit reversed?

We should take every member of the New York State Assembly who refused to support the congestion pricing plan (we lost not only the revenue from congestion pricing but also $354 million in federal grants for mass transit) and force them to work as rickshaw drivers to compensate for the service cuts.  Same goes for all the outer borough and suburban meatballs who drive into the city each workday because they think they’re too good for public transportation.  Same for every Upper East Side twit who takes a taxi to work.

Former Senator and New School President Bob Kerrey annoyed the hell out of me during the presidential campaign with all his Hussein business during the primary and his barely lukewarm support of Obama during the general election.  I honestly had a recurring fantasy of bumping into him on the street and giving him a piece of my middle finger (actually, my fantasy was much more violent than than that).

So I can’t say I’m terribly surprised or upset to learn that he has been treated to a nonbinding but overwhelming vote of no-confidence by senior faculty at the school.

Mr. Kerrey has clashed with some professors since the day of his appointment as the New School’s president, with complaints that he lacks a Ph.D. and that his politics - particularly his early support for the Iraq war - were too moderate for the unabashedly liberal campus. But the underlying controversies became an open uprising this week after Mr. Kerrey announced that he would serve temporarily as provost as well as president after cycling through four provosts in seven years. [snip]  “I don’t fear any vote that the faculty could take,” Mr. Kerrey said, noting that the group meeting on Wednesday involved a fraction of the New School’s 333 full-time and 1,733 part-time faculty. As president, he said, he has ruffled feathers because he is trying to “move from one kind of university to another kind of university,” adding, “The problem at the New School is not necessarily me.”

I know it’s wrong but I’m taking pleasure in the fact his life is difficult right now.  He may sound all cool and calm, but you just know he’s suffering on the inside.