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File under “cautiously optimistic”
Although I know that the MTA breaks everything it touches, I’m still looking forward to this month’s automation of the L train. Getting trapped in the closing doors doesn’t concern me on the automated L train any more than it does when I ride an elevator. Otherwise, anything that allows the MTA to run trains more frequently (if, indeed, this project lives up to that particular bit of hype) is all right in my book.
My kind of place
After weeks of sousing in Mexico, Dan Freeman has resumed his thousand-bar crawl in New York. I wondered what gave a man time to pub-crawl all day, but now I see he’s retired. What a way to retire. Too bad his liver’s still working OT.
Also of note, NYC Dives, cataloguing New York’s dive bars. I had a half-formed thought to do something similar once, but these fine blogs got there first.
Living in Bushwick
Jen blogged about this before, but I have a few things I’d like to add.
This guy El Moreno describes the Opera House Lofts, across the street from us, as a happy building of artists and musicians, plagued by a neighborhood full of rapists, drug dealers, thugs, and whores. (Although I have to laugh when he says his budddy’s “stash” got stolen. I guess El Moreno has one set of morals for poor people who smoke crack, and another for artistic people who smoke pot.)
But the neighborhood he describes isn’t the one I’ve experienced. Sure, I’ve heard the “all these fucking white people” comments. They annoy me, but I take them in stride. See, I’ve watched Opera Loft dwellers pass through the neighborhood. They nearly run from the train at Broadway and Myrtle down to their nice lofts, seemingly afraid that if they’re not inside their razor-wired bunker, they’ll be attacked. They never lift their heads to acknowledge their neighbors, much less say Hello or stop for conversation.
Contrast that with some of the neighbors Jen discussed. The Delgados and Pedro have been open, friendly, funny. Pedro offered the use of his van if we ever need it. Emily Delgado described our street as one where the neighbors look out for each other–the implication being that they’ll look out for us, too. The Lofters, meanwhile, are seemingly only looking out for themselves and each other.
They live inside an insular community, guarded by razor wire, flood lights, alarm systems, and security gates. They have a laundry, music and rec rooms, a yoga studio, a rooftop patio, and a garden. They have no reason to be part of this street, and so they choose not to. They walk briskly past the storefronts on Broadway, never lifting their heads. They don’t buy from those stores, except MAYBE to go to the corner market for milk, smokes, or beer. If FreshDirect delivered here, they wouldn’t spend a dime in this neighborhood.
El Moreno bitches about how “dangerous” this neighborhood is, but he doesn’t mention that Opera House dwellers come and go at all hours of the night. We hear them coming home at 3, 4, and 5am. Common sense might tell you that any part of most cities and towns is potentially dangerous at 4am, but I guess El Moreno flunked Common Sense.
By the way, we know they come home that late because they’re loud. They yell like drunken frat boys, they bicker among themselves, and they slam the security gate behind them when they enter.
When Opera House residents have parties, we see stylish 20-somethings running drunk, up and down the street, wearing very little no matter the temperature. I will never say that any woman deserves to be assaulted, but I will say, again, that common sense suggests that perhaps it’s unwise to run down a street in an unfamiliar area, after midnight, dressed only in a miniskirt and a loose-fitting blouse.
El Moreno discusses an incident from late October, when an Opera House resident was badly beaten late one night. I can understand why that shook him up. It shook us up. But I wonder whether El Moreno knows or cares that our neighbor upstairs called the police that night.
When Opera House residents have parties, we hear car services coming at 3 and 4 and 5am to pick up party guests and take them home to Williamsburg and SoHo and the East Village. We know they’re out there because we hear the drivers honking for ten or twenty minutes or more; Opera House guests, apparently, never bother waiting downstairs for the car.
When the weather warms up, I know that there will be Opera House residents and their guests in the courtyard across the street or up on the rooftop patio, partying and laughing and shouting until 5am every weekend.
Opera’s neighbors are happy that the lofts are here. For decades, that beautiful, historic building was boarded up and empty. Large empty buildings breed crime. They’re happy that the new owners didn’t demolish and rebuild because our neighbors value the history of the neighborhood.
El Moreno and his former neighbors in the lofts clearly disdain Bushwick. Perhaps they were dumb enough to believe the “East Williamsburg” hype, and came here looking for young pretty white people, cool bars and restaurants, and cute little record stores.
So they hide away in their ghetto oasis, sneering at the Salvadorans and Puerto Ricans around them, unaware that they’ve made themselves a target by being so conspicuously “protected” all the time. The razor wire and other security measures tell the few bad eggs who are around, “Look at us. We have stuff you want that you can’t have.”
It’s hard for me to blame people for hating them, when they’ve gone out of their way to be such assholes to people in the neighborhood.
More MTA hoohah
The MTA has so far failed to pass the subway photography ban, Newsday reports. The article cites a spokesman for NYC Transit, who says that a flood of public comments about the proposed ban has led the MTA to temporarily shelve the measure, pending further review.
I still think we’ll see a ban of some sort–probably on photographing “sensitive” equipment such as switches and support structures–but I suspect the MTA will back away from a full ban.
Save a horse, ride a barmaid
Admittedly, I don’t know much about this Patriot Bar (for example, how long it’s been open, or how long the tenants quoted here have been living above it), but I do know one thing: If I were thinking of moving in over a bar, I’d spend some time in the bar and outside the bar before I dropped my security deposit. I’d meet the bartenders and the owner, and I’d find out how late it was regularly open and how loud it is at, say, 2am.
[via Curbed]
Big, orange banners
Over at Carbongeek, Tom writes: “Apparently having solved all problems with crime and education, New York City spends $21 Million on lots of big, orange banners.”
Set aside for now the fact that NYC didn’t pay for the Gates. (Christo did, by raising the money himself. He’s even paying for the cops who are protecting the project.)
Tom seems to think this $21 million is a waste of money–that no matter who raised it, it should have gone instead to solve problems of crime and education.
I disagree with this on a couple of counts: First, problems crime and education will always need more funding than governments are willing to give. The War on Poverty and the War on Drugs and the War on Illiteracy and the War on Obesity and the War on Other Unpleasant Stuff are just as unwinnable as the War on Terrorism.
Throw ALL your money at them, and you’ll never win those wars. That’s not to say we shouldn’t generously fund education, antidrug programs, welfare, and so on. But to say, We can’t build new parks, or We can’t go back to the moon, or We can’t fund the arts, because we still have hungry people…
Well, we’ll always have hungry people. Throw all of NASA’s budget into food programs and nutrition education, and we’ll still have hungry people. Wait to fund art until you’ve “solved hunger,” and you’ll never have art.
Second, this is $21 million. That’s not a lot of money when you think about it, and as I noted before, it was funded privately. If George Lucas had funded hunger relief instead of Attack of the Clones, I kinda think the world would be a better place. Why is it cool for Steve and Tom to reimagine War of the Worlds, but it’s dumb to put up “big, orange banners”? To pick on someone other than Hollywood, how much did the Grammys spend to fête John Mayer and Bratney Spears last night?
Finally, if Christo’s priorities are screwed up, perhaps we should examine our own as well. We spend money on comic books, Maxim subscriptions, cigarettes, video games, DVDs. Perhaps all of that should go to the poor instead. Perhaps, instead of going out drinking, we should spend our time teaching people to read.
The Gates might not be your thing. That’s cool; many things aren’t my thing. But let’s please not make the Gates a moral issue. You spend your time on pop tunes and dumb popcorn films; I’ll spend mine among the banners.
Sniffin’
I saw a guy yesterday on the uptown 6 train, stretched out on a bench, passed out. In his mouth was the nozzle for an aerosol bottle of cleaning spray from Staples.
He slept on one half of a bench. A family came on and tried to occupy the other half. The kids sat at the end farthest from him. Dad stood, but taunted Mom and tried to cajole her into sitting next to passed-out man. A look of revulsion crossed Mom’s face, but she sat down, all scrunched up, and as far from him as she could get.
Then at the next stop, some hipster kids boarded the train. One of them got pissed off that the guy was taking up so much space. Have you ever seen self-righteous hipster fury? It’s funny. It’s so passive-aggressive. Hipsters say it’s okay to be non-hipster, just so long as you’re non-hipster somewhere over there, where you won’t smudge us with your uncoolness.
He started nudging the guy. His friends told him not to bother. I turned away with a smirk, not wanting to see aerosol man pull out a knife and slice off a hipster ear for his collection. But as I left the train at Union Square, I saw that aerosol man was sitting up and making room, so I guess all ended well.
Subway mobster
Dispatching Trains Manually, or Al Capone, Dispatcher.
More on 9′s demise
I missed this first time around, but the Times has a piece on the end of the 9 train. The 1 and 9 offer so-called skip-stop service, in which each train leap-frogs past alternating stations. As the Times describes, it’s common on 9-train stops to see three 1 trains in a row pass your station while you wait for the next 9.
What killed the 9? Ironically, suggests the Times, the gentrification of West Harlem. The riders most inconvenienced by skip-stop service tend to be lower-income Blacks and Hispanics, but now that higher-income Whites are coming into the area and buying up homes, they don’t want to stand around and wait for trains to carry them downtown.
What the article doesn’t mention, however, is that the 1 and 9 aren’t the only skip-stop trains in the system. The J and Z run skip-stop along the Broadway-Brooklyn line.
