New York Speeds Up Ad Replacement

New York Magazine

By STUART ELLIOTT

Talk about making up for lost time. Almost eight years after its last advertising campaign, New York magazine plans to start one that will change contents almost every day.

The centerpiece of the campaign, which carries the theme "This is New York," will be posters at five subway stations in Manhattan that are to be replaced each weekday. (The poster pasters will get a break on weekends.) The stations are Columbus Circle, 42nd Street-Times Square, Pennsylvania Station-34th Street, 68th Street and Spring Street.

Many of the posters, scheduled to appear from Friday through Sept. 30, will be related to events of the day or week they are to run. For instance, as the Red Sox arrive in the Bronx on Sept. 9 to play the Yankees, the posters that day are to present the results of the teams' previous meetings this season - with space to write in the score of the game that night. On Primary Day, Sept. 13, the posters will depict lapel buttons for the four Democratic candidates for mayor.

And on Sept. 15, as the Feast of San Gennaro starts, the posters will list the calorie counts of favorite festival foods like calamari, cannoli, pizza and zeppole.

There are also plans for daily promotional events inspired by the posters, at the five stations as well as other sites around the city. For example, if one day the posters show a crossword puzzle from the magazine, commuters and pedestrians may be handed paper copies of the puzzle, along with pencils to use to solve it.

The campaign, intended to woo magazine advertisers as well as readers, will also include posters on 32 telephone kiosks around Manhattan, which will use a mirror-like reflective material to offer passers-by a literal representation of the "This is New York" theme. The ads will also serve to publicize a rebranding of the magazine's Web site to newyorkmagazine.com, from newyorkmetro.com.

The campaign, with a budget estimated at under $1 million, represents the first work for the magazine from its new agency, the New York office of Wieden & Kennedy. The agency was chosen without a formal review, said Lawrence C. Burstein, the publisher of New York, based on the cheeky, risk-taking work it produces, like the campaign for ESPN carrying the theme "This is SportsCenter."

Hmmm. "This is New York." "This is SportsCenter." Is there an echo in here?

The last ads for New York appeared in 1997. They were bus posters that stoked the ire of the mayor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, by declaring the magazine to be "possibly the only good thing in New York Rudy hasn't taken credit for." Those ads were created by DeVito/Verdi.

The new campaign is intended to generate attention for New York after a series of changes to its editorial contents, presentation and graphics under Adam Moss, who became the editor in chief early last year. It is also the first time the magazine is raising its voice under its new owner, Bruce Wasserstein, the Wall Street deal maker who acquired New York in late 2003 from Primedia.

New York magazine has been "a big part of the culture of New York," Mr. Burstein said in an interview last week, dating to its debut as a stand-alone publication in 1968 and before that as the last Sunday supplement of The New York Herald Tribune newspaper.

"We felt we needed to get out there and show people more of what we're doing, more of what the magazine's about," Mr. Burstein said, particularly "to reach out to new readers."

The ads are to arrive not long after a competitor of New York's, The New Yorker, generated attention with an issue that had the discount retailer Target as its sole advertiser. The coverage the issue received was indicative of the attention paid to publications that are of, by and for the largest city in the United States, which is the largest advertising market in the world. Their ranks, online and offline, grow increasingly crowded, from Metrosource to Time Out New York to zagat.com.

"This is a city of incredible variety and the magazine tries to speak to and capture that variety," said Mr. Moss, who joined Mr. Burstein for the interview along with Todd Waterbury, executive creative director at Wieden & Kennedy New York.

After the agency figured out, Mr. Waterbury said, how "to express through static media this kinetic nature of the city," the decision was made to use the subway as the showcase because "it's the central nervous system of the city." Then began an exploration, not without its own nervousness, of the logistics of changing the posters so frequently.

"We can't quite function like a daily newspaper," Mr. Waterbury said, "but we'll do our best." For instance, if something especially newsworthy happens during the month, a poster on the subject could be added to the campaign.

The day-by-day aspects of the campaign will be overseen by the New York office of Outdoor Vision, a media planning and buying agency that specializes in out-of-home advertising. The ad space for the subway posters is being bought from Viacom Outdoor, part of Viacom, and the ad space for the mirror-like posters on the phone kiosks (which will remain posted, unchanged, throughout September), is being bought from Van Wagner Communications.

Jason Kiefer, vice president and managing director of the Outdoor Vision office, said that in his 11 years in the industry he had not heard of a campaign in New York that called for so many daily changes of subway posters.

"It's certainly a challenge," Mr. Kiefer said, adding: "Any time you create something new, there are always unforeseen problems that could happen. We're going to be monitoring the program very closely."

Mr. Kiefer said he intended to check on the stations himself to make sure the posters were being changed, sharing photographs he will take at each station with executives at the agency and the magazine.

"Thank God for digital cameras," he added.

NY Times

That's So New York

`Lestat' to vamp--tunefully--in San Francisco, NYC

"Lestat," a musical inspired by novelist Anne Rice's best-selling "Vampire Chronicles," will have its world premiere Dec. 17 at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco.

The show is a first for the songwriting team of Elton John and Bernie Taupin, but John's third Broadway musical, following "The Lion King" and "Aida."

Hugh Panaro ("Les Miserables," "Side Show") stars in the title role.

"Lestat" is scheduled to play San Francisco through Jan. 29, 2006, before opening on Broadway in March 2006, according to the show's public relations representative, Wayne Wolfe.

That's So New York

Cell service coming to NYC subways

New York this week started seeking bids to extend cellular phone service to its subway system, the New York Times reported Thursday.

The Times reported that all four national cellular operators -- Cingular, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile -- are among the vendors considering submitting bids for a system that will provide service in 277 or New York's 468 subway stations. The bids are due October 12.

The Request for Proposals (RFP) was released earlier in the week, on the same day that the city announced it had awarded a $212 million contract for an electronic surveillance system in subway stations. In the case of the cellular system, the aim of the city's Metropolitan Transportation Authority is to not have any city investment in the cellular network for subways. However, the winning vendor or group of vendors would have an exclusive 10-year license, the Times reported.

The RFP indicates that subscribers of all wireless carriers should be able to use the system, the newspaper reported.

Mobile Pipeline

The Party's on the Best Sidewalks of New York

Ramin Talaie for The New York Times

By CHRISTOPHER LEE NUTTER

As Lori Coats dropped into a folding chair near the stoop of her apartment building on West 21st Street, she let out a deep sigh. "This is fabulous," she said, cradling her 18-month-old baby, Cate, in one arm and a plastic cup of sangria in her other hand.

Her neighbor Robert Walker nodded agreement as he appraised the picnic table set up with plates of focaccia and pasta salad next to a giant pitcher of homemade sangria. Two neighbors from 10th Avenue maneuvered awkwardly through the crowd perched on the stoop or on chairs. When Mr. Walker heard a favorite disco classic on the iPod hooked up to computer speakers, he said, "That's my song."

Long a tradition in Harlem, Brooklyn and working-class neighborhoods throughout New York City, the summer stoop party has been a rarity on streets of $3,000-a-month apartments and single-family brownstones in the heart of Chelsea.

But lately residents of that neighborhood, as well as of Greenwich Village, SoHo, NoLIta, Gramercy Park and even the Upper West Side have been taking inspiration from uptown to give stoop parties of their own.

"I'll run into one about once a week," said Stephen Heighton, an owner of the restaurant Elmo in Chelsea. "This is the first summer I've seen anyone really partying on their stoops downtown like they do uptown. Hanging out in the open with your friends, watching the world go by, is usually done in a more formalized way down here, like in outdoor cafes and outside of gallery openings."

Merely sitting on a stoop to take in the cool of the evening, as people in many neighborhoods do in summer, does not qualify as a stoop party. A party needs music, food, chairs and drinks in some combination. And while the details of the traditional uptown stoop party tend to be more uniform - rap and salsa music, barbeque grills and beer are staples - Lower Manhattan versions include entertaining friends with bossa nova and expensive beer in paper bags, apartment building get-togethers with finger food on picnic tables and classic disco.

"Part of the appeal is that it's real and out in the open," said Tim Ranney, a party promoter and publicist, who has friends over on Thursday nights to drink margaritas on his stoop outside the landmark Colonnade Row on Lafayette Street in NoHo. "It's like a salon. Everyone is invited."

Why stoops in Harlem are peppered on summer nights with barbeque grills and boomboxes while the stoops of Lower Manhattan are used more as Carrie did in "Sex and the City" - as a platform for the occasional late-night talk with a friend, good-night kiss from a date or to smoke the solitary cigarette - is an old story that is mostly about economics.

"Up until the mid-19th century serving refreshments and socializing on the stoops was done by every income group all over the city," said Charles Lockwood, the author of "Bricks and Brownstone: The New York Row House 1783-1929." "But in the late 19th century the tenement districts became hugely overpopulated by immigrants swarming on the stoops. That created a stigma to the stoop, and by that time it became obligatory for the upper classes to leave the city for the summer anyway, so partying on the stoop went out of favor."

Similar social currents continue today. In affluent neighborhoods with an air-conditioner in every window, plentiful sidewalk cafes and ready access to a summer getaway, the social potential of the stoop is minimized. Rare is the Upper East Side brownstone stoop used for a summer party.

But in neighborhoods with fewer air-conditioners or sidewalk restaurants, families in need of a large communal space naturally find the stoop ideal.

"In Harlem your whole extended family just winds up spilling out on the street because you need the space, and it doesn't cost anything," said Joaquin Maceo Rosa, 31, an actor, who grew up on 105th Street and still lives in the neighborhood.

The increased social traffic in the last five years between Harlem and Lower Manhattan, as downtowners have moved uptown and in some cases, like Mr. Walker's, moved back downtown, has helped reintroduce the stoop as a place for a small party.

"Living up in Harlem, I used to look at all the stoop parties and think, oh my God, they are having so much fun," said Mr. Walker, the author of a comic book series called Delete. "That's partly why we started doing them."

Recently gentrified neighborhoods like Chelsea, full of stoops from pre-World War I construction, have also had time to mature, so that enough people have lived there long enough for neighbors to know one another well. Although these neighborhoods are high rent, they are often less pretentious, residents say, than other affluent areas of the city, and people are more comfortable visiting on a stoop. Many residents boast of loving New York in August and of having no need to flee to the Hamptons or upstate.

It is not even necessary to have a stoop proper to have a sidewalk party. Josh Hughes and Brian Ermanski began inviting friends to daily afternoon outdoor parties in NoLIta in the spring, with seating on trash bins and benches. They crank up the Velvet Underground on a jam box and crack open their Negra Modelo beer in paper bags.

"In the middle of all those models and filmmakers and rich women heading off to eat at Cafe Havana, it definitely creates a small scene," said Mr. Hughes, the author of "Punk Shui: Home Design for Anarchists," scheduled for publication next year by Three Rivers Press. "But that's a part of the statement we're making, that we're not above it."

Both Mr. Hughes and Ms. Coats said that passers-by at the gatherings on their blocks have sometimes muttered that partying on the street is "ghetto."

One who passed by and formed that thought, Ron Robinson, a beauty-trend consultant, said it was not meant as a derogatory comment. "Growing up in the outer boroughs," Mr. Robinson said, "this seems to me like a long-gone pastime which is reoccurring."

"I miss it," he added.

With stoop parties popping up in new neighborhoods, they raise not just the occasional eyebrow but also questions about legality and propriety. Will a neighbor complain to the building management or to the police about loud music? What about drinking alcohol on a stoop? (It is illegal, though the law is not widely enforced if no disturbance is taking place.) And what is the proper etiquette for passers-by?

Robin Lynn, the director of Municipal Art Society tours, said she recently walked through a stoop party on the Upper West Side three times in one night and did not know how to react. "Each time for a few seconds I was in their party," she said. "Do I stop and comment? Am I breaking into their party? Was it private or public?"

Ms. Lynn said she simply walked on by, quietly envious. "It made me wish I had a stoop," she said. "Maybe I'll just start traveling around with chips."

NY Times

That's So New York

We Remember Aaliyah

Four years ago last Thursday the on the rise singer Aaliyah was killed in a plane crash shortly after takeoff in the Bahamas upon the completion of the video for her hit song Rock the Boat.

Aaliyah died aged 22 in a plane crash in the Bahamas on 25th August 2005 along with the pilot and eight of her friends and crew. She appeared in two movies "Romeo Must Die" and "Queen of the Damned" as was scheduled to appear in the 2nd and 3nd sequel to the "Matrix".

Aaliyah's career began with the R. Kelly produced "One in a Million". Shortly thereafter, controversey erupted when Kelly married the underaged singer. In 2001, Aaliyah released her self-titled album which included the asforementioned "Rock The Boat" and "More Than a Woman".


The victims of the plane crash were: -- L. Marael, pilot (age unknown)

-- Aeliyatt (Aaliyah) Haughton, 22, White Plains, New York

-- Anthony Dodd, 34, Los Angeles, California

-- Eric Foreman, 29, Hollywood, California

-- Scott Gallin, 41, Pompano Beach, Florida

-- Keith Wallace, 49, Los Angeles, California

-- Gina Smith, 29, New Jersey

-- Douglas Kratz, 28, Hollywood, California (Virgin Records representative)

-- Christopher Maldonada, 32, New York

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Aaliyah grew up in Detroit, Michigan. She released her first album, "Age Ain't Nothing But a Number," at the age of 14.

Her hit single "Try Again" from the "Romeo Must Die" soundtrack was nominated for R&B Song of the Year at the Soul Train "Lady of Soul" Awards.

Aaliyah won Best Female Video and Video from a Film for "Try Again" in the 2000 MTV awards.

In an interview in March 2000 interview with the Boston Herald, the singer described the origins of her name.

"Aaliyah is Arabic," she said, "a name with great power. When I began in this business and we were talking about my image as an artist, it was a family decision to use just the first name."

sny spotlight: ihome

New Yorkers love their ipods and any way to intergrate the aerodynamic honorary body part further into our existince is always welcome.

So much thanks goes out to iH5 for creating the IHOME, an am/fm alarm clock that has a dock for your ipod and can even charge it while you're listening to it.

If it has always been your dream to have your favorite playlist wake up up in the morning then your dream has finally come true.

The pricetag is $99. A little sleep for an alarm clock, but well worth the price for a decent ipod player. ipodlounge gives it a rating of A- highly recommended.

ipodlounge

ih5

Get it from Amazon

That's So New York

Snakeheads Eat their Way to New York

By BILL STRAUB - Scripps Howard News Service

It's been featured in a horror movie - carrying the tagline "Welcome to the bottom of the food chain" - and some consider it a delicacy when delivered on a plate at an Asian restaurant.

But in places where it has taken up residence, the snakehead, a forever-hungry critter that tends to devour most everything in its path, is considered one of the least desirable aquatic guests imaginable.

New York is the latest state to fall victim to the snakehead with researchers pulling four from Meadow Lake in Flushing, not too far from Shea Stadium, last month. Ten other states, from Maine to California, have reported infestations. Snakeheads, which come in a variety of species, have been captured in the Delaware and Potomac Rivers. Florida has given up trying to deal with them in some areas.

Interior Secretary Gale Norton has described the snakehead, also known as the frankenfish, as "like something from a bad horror movie." (In fact, such a film was released in 2004) The snakehead is a non-native, air-breathing freshwater fish, long and cylindrical with a large mouth, protruding lower jaw and canine-like teeth. It makes lunch out of whatever other fish happen to be in the neighborhood.

And that neighborhood isn't confined to a single waterway. Since the snakehead is an air breather, some species can leave one pond after making mincemeat of its brethren and motivate across land to other aquatic spots where the fish therein will meet a similar fate.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service describes snakeheads as "voracious predators, feeding upon other fishes, crustaceans, frogs, smaller reptiles and sometimes birds and mammals.

"If snakeheads become established in North American ecosystems, their predatory behavior could drastically modify the array of native species," the service warns.

Snakeheads are native to Asia, Malaysia, Indonesia and tropical Africa - not the United States. It is the most recent and drastic example of invasive species.

Most snakeheads arrived in the United States before October 2002 when they were added to the list of injurious wildlife under the Lacy Act, which bans importation and interstate transportation without a permit. Before that, snakeheads were brought in and sold in pet stores and live food fish markets in places like Boston, New York and St. Louis. The Fish and Wildlife Service reports that 16,554 live snakeheads were imported into the United States between 1997 and 2000 and could be bought over the Internet.

"Several species of snakeheads are highly valued as food within parts of their native range while several species are sought by hobbyists through aquarium trade," said Michael Fraser of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. "The northern Snakehead in particular is a popular food fish and is cultured in China and Korea. This species has been imported to other nations, including Canada and the U.S., where it has been sold alive in certain ethnic markets and restaurants."

The Fish and Wildlife Service deduced that some pet owners and restaurateurs decided to rid themselves of their possessions by dumping them in nearby waters, hence the infestation.

Snakeheads are only one of hundreds of invasive species - plants, animals and fish - that a Cornell University study maintains is costing the economy $137 billion a year. The group runs the gamut from kudzu - a vine from Japan that can grow as much as a foot a day and now covers much of the Southeastern U.S. - to nutria, a semi-aquatic rodent from South America that has caused considerable damage to Louisiana's coastal wetlands because of its feeding habits.

The Nature Conservancy, a group dedicated to preserving native species, also is working to keep invasive species out, fearing potential harm to the ecosystem.

The conservancy cites an incident that occurred in the late 1980s. A transoceanic tanker, having visited the Caspian Sea in Asia, unwittingly dumped its ballast water somewhere in the Great Lakes, releasing some zebra mussels with it. Now the tiny mussels, which have been found as far east as Massachusetts, threaten to smother more than a hundred native mussel species. Dams and power plants are facing expenses that could reach into the billions of dollars repairing damage, such as clogged pipes, caused by the zebra mussel.

And then there's the Asian longhorned beetle, first discovered in 1996, that escaped from packing crates delivered from China. Their presence in parts of Chicago, New York and New Jersey have led to the destruction of more than 8,000 street and yard trees. The beetle attacks maples and other hardwood species, threatening the timber, maple syrup, nursery, and fall foliage tourism industries across the Northeast.

The Nature Conservancy notes that the United States has a long history of dealing with invasive species, with the snakehead being just one of the most recent and violent examples. In the 1930s, the American elm tree lined city sidewalks until the introduction of Dutch elm disease, a fungus brought in with a shipment of unpeeled raw veneer logs from Europe. The chestnut blight, which killed entire forests in the early years of the 20th century, is thought to have been caused by its introduction from Japan.

(Contact Bill Straub at StraubB(at)shns.com)

Judge allows New York graffiti block party to go forward

NEW YORK -- A federal judge on Monday ordered the city to allow an exhibition later this week in which 20 artists plan to spray-paint graffiti on models of subway cars.

The city, citing its years of work to clean up subways once plagued by graffiti, had argued the block party would encourage people to vandalize real subway cars.

But Judge Jed Rakoff of Manhattan federal court said the city's denial of a permit for the party was a "flagrant violation" of the First Amendment's free-speech protection.

Under the logic of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the judge said in a brief order, "A street performance of `Hamlet' would be tantamount to encouraging revenge murder."

The exhibition, set for Wednesday in the Chelsea district of Manhattan, is the brainchild of Marc Ecko, a fashion designer who began his career as a graffiti artist in New York.

According to plans laid out by Ecko's company, Ecko Unlimited, 20 former graffiti artists will spray graffiti onto two-dimensional replicas of subway cars.

The city initially granted a permit for the event, then said it was too commercial _ original plans called for promotion of an Ecko video game _ and ultimately revoked the permit on grounds it would encourage a crime.

City lawyer Paula Van Meter had told the judge that young people could get the message graffiti vandalism was acceptable and could easily repeat the act "down the street and down the stairs" in to the subway system.

"It will raise to the consciousness once again, in a celebratory way, graffiti vandalism on subway cars," she said.

The judge noted that anyone who vandalized public property could be prosecuted. In his order, he quoted Bloomberg, who, on his radio program Friday, said the exhibition was "trying to encourage people to do something that's not in anybody's interest."

The judge responded: "Such heavy-handed censorship would, moreover, fall particularly hard on artists, who frequently revel in breaking conventions or tweaking the powers that be."

Ecko, who sat before the judge with his lawyers on Monday, said after the ruling he was "just excited."

"We knew this was worth fighting for, and clearly the mayor must have been misinformed," he said. "I can't wait until Wednesday."

Ecko Unlimited has said it arranged for a private security firm for the event and planned to post signs explaining that graffiti in a public place is illegal.
Van Meter said after court that the city could still appeal.

By ERIN McCLAM
Associated Press Writer


That's So New York

New York City Real Estate Housing Bubble

When interviewed by NYCApartmentBlog.com, the Sy Institute of Economic Research on public policy and housing said that the fears of a NYC housing bubble have been over inflated. According to an informal study conducted by the three member think tank, the members agreed that the probability of a housing bubble is remote. They based their research on recent sales of existing homes, new construction, and economic data for NYC.

New data has shown that NYC is on a fast pace for economic development ahead of the rest of the country. This suggests that housing prices are in fact sustainable. Rental prices for apartments have also been on the rise in the last few months. Despite an increase of 10% in sale prices since the beginning of the year, demand for coops and condos have continued to be brisk.

When asked what prices will look like next year, the panel said, “It is doubtful that [real estate] prices will see a severe decline, there may be a short correction, but prices will continue to climb in the next few years, as the demand for housing increases from wealth and investment from around the world.” The declining dollar has also contributed to the rising costs of NYC housing. The stock market has also seen some of its best performance in the last two years.

Though it is doubtful that current owners are selling purely based on the speculation of a housing bubble in NYC, they can be rest assured that the price of real estate will not see a dramatic decline in the coming months. The media will likely continue following this story, thereby contributing more to the speculation, and making buyers more anxious. Buyers should always follow the advice of holding property for a minimum of 5 years to reduce market risks.

Read more at:

http://www.NYCApartmentBlog.com

Foiled Once in City, Wal-Mart Turns On the Charm for S.I.

After being rebuffed in its first effort to open a store in New York City, Wal-Mart is trying again, and this time it hopes that Wal-Mart enthusiasts like Sandra Como will flock to its cause. After all, she lives on Staten Island, where the company hopes to build a store.

She frequently crosses state lines to shop at a Wal-Mart in New Jersey. But she does not want one of the company's giant discount stores in her borough.

"If it weren't for all the traffic, I'd be for it," Ms. Como said as she packed boxes of disposable diapers into her Lexus at the Wal-Mart in Woodbridge, N.J., 15 minutes from her home. "But I'd rather come here and not have the extra traffic on Staten Island."

Ms. Como embodies the problem Wal-Mart has encountered as it attempts to scale the fortress walls of New York City, one of the few places in America where its logo cannot be found. In the past month, Wal-Mart has greatly stepped up its efforts to make New Yorkers warm up to it, running radio spots as well as ads in 70 community newspapers. But even in a city that generally takes pride in welcoming outsiders, Wal-Mart is facing a formidable not-in-my-backyard problem.

Whenever there are rumors that the company is contemplating this neighborhood or that, residents begin sounding off that they do not want a super-busy, colossal Wal-Mart near them, with all the expected traffic and pollution. Last February, objections from Queens residents, as well as a storm of opposition from organized labor, helped persuade a major developer to drop Wal-Mart from a large mall planned for Rego Park, Queens.

Despite that setback, executives with Wal-Mart Stores, the nation's largest retailer, say they are looking at other sites in all five boroughs. They say it is time that a company that has 3,762 stores in the United States and opens 250 new stores a year finally has one in the nation's largest city.

Wal-Mart has sought to bolster its cause with clever advertisements, like a full-page one that ran in The Staten Island Advance. The ad read: "On Staten Island, you can start the Marathon, take a ride on the Ferry, spend a day at Historic Richmond Town, and do just about anything. The only thing missing is every day low prices."

Wal-Mart has plenty of enthusiastic backers, even on Staten Island, where, according to government officials and developers, it hopes to open a store at a former Lucent Technologies factory site in Richmond Valley, on the southern part of the island near the Outerbridge Crossing.

"I'd like to have a Wal-Mart right in New York City," Evelyn Kwakye, a data entry clerk from Staten Island, said while shopping for school supplies at the Woodbridge Wal-Mart. "I'd prefer the convenience, and the price is right also."

Dennis Dell'Angelo, an architect who is president of the Pleasant Plains/Princes' Bay/Richmond Valley Civic Association on Staten Island, said he thought Wal-Mart was focusing its current efforts on his borough because of two factors that might mean less opposition than in other boroughs: it is more suburban and more Republican.

Mr. Dell'Angelo said he believed that if Wal-Mart got its foot in the door on Staten Island, that would make it easier for the retailer to expand into the other, more populous boroughs.

"We need this Wal-Mart like a hole in the head because on the south shore of Staten Island we don't need any more retail whatsoever," he said. "And this is a corporation that has a lot of baggage about how it treats its employees. I hope neighborhoods will consider that before they start welcoming Wal-Mart into their neighborhood."

On a recent afternoon at the Woodbridge Wal-Mart, just three miles from Staten Island and the Outerbridge Crossing, about a quarter of the cars in the parking lot had New York license plates, and a large majority of the New York drivers interviewed said they lived on Staten Island.

While shopping for light bulbs and baby bibs there, Lisa Tortosa, a self-described homemaker from the borough's Annadale section, said she would love a Wal-Mart closer to home. "It would be good for people like my mother, who doesn't drive," she said. Ms. Tortosa dismissed concerns that a new Wal-Mart on Staten Island would generate disconcerting new waves of traffic.

"There's already a lot of traffic in Staten Island," she said. "At least with Wal-Mart, you can go to one store like this to buy everything you need, instead of going to five stores. That might mean people actually drive around less."

Mia Masten, the Wal-Mart official in charge of shepherding its New York hopes into reality, said the company was being singled out unfairly. Wal-Mart's main competitors - Target, Costco, Kohl's and the Home Depot - have received permission to open stores in various boroughs, and she said hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers were eager for Wal-Marts to be built in the city.

"We already know New Yorkers are shopping at our nearby stores, and in fact, last year, New Yorkers spent more than $98 million at our nearby stores," Ms. Masten said, noting that many city residents drove to nearby Wal-Marts in Valley Stream, Westbury and Secaucus. "Our competitors are in New York. They're already successful, and we know it is a viable market for us. And we want to make it more convenient for our customers."

Ms. Masten, Wal-Mart's director of corporate affairs for the eastern region, would not confirm that Wal-Mart was seeking permission to build on Staten Island, saying it had not executed agreements on any site. But developers say Wal-Mart is loath to acknowledge that it is looking at any particular site, not only because that could spur a new explosion of opposition but also because Wal-Mart would be greatly embarrassed if it were seen as losing out at a second New York site.

Ms. Masten said Wal-Mart would bring jobs to New York. "Each store would bring abut 300 jobs, as well as a broad selection of merchandise at everyday low prices," she said. "Why should New Yorkers continue to have to travel to New Jersey or Long Island to shop at our stores?"

But opponents - labor unions, community groups and small businesses - say that Wal-Mart may take away as many jobs as it creates by driving other retailers out of business.

"Wal-Mart would mean a lot of low-end entry-level jobs, and New York City isn't suffering from a lack of entry-level jobs," said Diane J. Savino, a Democratic state senator from Staten Island. "We're suffering from a lack of middle-income jobs and high-end jobs. In addition, Wal-Mart has a reputation as being not just vehemently antiunion but of violating every labor law in the book."

Ms. Masten asserted that small businesses often continued to thrive even after a Wal-Mart opened nearby, noting that Wal-Mart was a general merchandise store. She said that the company's wages and benefits would be competitive. Wal-Mart has acknowledged that some managers have occasionally violated labor laws but said that it vigorously ordered managers to comply with laws and that it disciplined those who violate the laws.

Wal-Mart has 98 stores in New York State and says it pays its workers in the state $10.38 an hour on average. But labor leaders say that Wal-Mart's combined wage and benefits package is at least $6 less an hour than at unionized stores.

On Staten Island, political officials are divided over Wal-Mart, with some siding with consumer interests and others siding with labor unions, small businesses and community groups concerned about traffic.

Borough President James P. Molinaro said he would push for Wal-Mart's approval.

"Anything that develops economic activity in my borough is a good idea - that is, if it's legal and nonpolluting," he said. "And if it gives people place to shop and prevents them from going to New Jersey, it's a good idea. My responsibility is to give half a million people the best possibilities to shop."

Richard Lipsky, the coordinator of the Neighborhood Retail Alliance, the main anti-Wal-Mart coalition in New York, said that the way New York laws are structured, the matter did not come down to how consumers feel.

"You'll find a tremendously high number of people who say, 'They're a good store,' and, 'We go there,' but when you ask them whether they want it in their neighborhood, they say: 'Absolutely not. We don't want to be a magnet for traffic that a store of that size will generate,' " Mr. Lipsky said. "The ultimate decision-making will reflect the site battle more than the generalized goodwill that Wal-Mart can create."

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE (NYT)

Now, a virtual tour of New York

Internet users in the Big Apple and other cities will soon be able to navigate their way around with the click of a mouse button without ever leaving their monitors and PC consoles.

According to The Sun, Amazon has commissioned as many as 35 million street-level photos in 24 major American cities, including New York, which will allow Internet users to navigate their way around using the Web site's Block View system.

A spokesman for Amazon said that it would be like a virtual tour of the cities, and enable users to even locate parking lots.

"It's like a virtual tour of the cities. You can locate parking lots, check out the shopfronts and get a feel for the different neighbourhoods," the paper quoted the spokesman as saying.

The site under development is at maps.a9.com.

That's So New York

sny spotlight: Six Feet Under Finale

After 5 seasons, The Fisher's and their extended families are off to heaven.

In what may very be the best series finale ever (some still think Newhart holds the distinction), Ruth, David, Brenda and Claire learn to deal with life without Nate. For 75 minutes we spend our last moments with this amazing cast and in the final moments we get a sequence of brilliant closure very few finales offer.

Satisfaction is guaranteed. How is any of this so New York?

Guess where Claire is headed at the very end, and in a uber responsible Toyota hybrid Prius to boot!

So is there life after Six Feet Under? Stay tuned.

HBO
Prius


That's So New York

sny spotlight: New York Blackout

This week marks the 2nd anniversary of the big summer blackout that saw power shut down in New York City and as far away as Michigan and even in parts of Canada. All in all 50 million people were left in the dark for almost 24 hours.

Coming just 2 years after 9/11, the city was understandably tense, but once it was established that it was just a power outage New Yorkers made the best of it.

Rooftop parties, sidewalk BBQ's and local bars were popular that steamy Thursday night and most people got the best cardio workout of the life.

The day after, power slowly returned to the city borough by borough and on Saturday power was restored fully.

The last time NYC was darkened by a blackout was the Summer of '77 which was marked in history by the wanton looting that did not proceed the most recent blackout.

That's So New York

An ever-changing New York

Photographers 60 years apart document the evolving landscape of New York City

By Jerry Tallmer

In 1929, when she was barely 31 years old, Ohio-born, Greenwich Village-bred Berenice Abbott (she had, while abroad, added the middle “e” to her first name, French-style) returned from Paris, expecting not to stay in New York very long.

With her she brought 1,400 glass-plate negatives and 7,800 prints she had salvaged from the studio of the great Eugene Atget, who had died two years earlier, and from whom she had learned how to look at, and how to photograph, a city.

She did not intend to stay in New York very long – only long enough to find somebody or some museum willing to exhibit the work of Atget, and/or a publisher willing to publish a book about him. Easier said than done.

The other thing that happened was she looked around and saw what had been going on in the visage of this city, the great architectural flowering in the eight years she had been away in Paris taking photographs of people like Jean Cocteau, James Joyce, André Gide, and her friend and early employer Man Ray. It was a whole new New York City she beheld, and (after a quick trip back to Paris) she decided to stay.

Then the stock market crashed.

It took five years of scrabbling for survival (teaching at the New School) and recognition – principally by the fledgling Museum of the City of New York – before the Federal Arts Project of the New Deal’s Works Project Administration (WPA) came through with the $145 monthly stipend that enabled Berenice Abbott to go around with her heavy 8x10” Century Universal camera, and bellows, and tripod, and take the photographs of what may have been the greatest era in what’s been called the “architectural landscape” of this city.

Those photos were brought together in a book that became an instant classic, “Changing New York” (E.P. Dutton, 1939), and it is that book, and those photographs, some of them, that are now echoed, mirror-imaged, amplified, put into subsequent context, historically enriched, in another knockout photo volume, “New York Changing” (Princeton Architectural Press, 2005), by 39-year-old New York-born Douglas Levere.

What it does is put face-to-face on opposing pages a photograph of a given locale at a given time of day by Berenice Abbott (to the left) and, from the same vantage point, at the same locale, on the same time of day, by Doug Levere (on the right) some 60 or more years later.

The jacket cover almost tells the story:

Top half, Abbott’s 1936 shot past an ornate multiple-figured Custom House statue to the solid, elegant, tall-windowed façade of the 1886 New York Product Exchange; bottom half, Levere’s identically placed 1997 shot past the same statue to the trashy, tinny, mechanistic siding of a Metropolitan Transit Authority headquarters even then about to undergo its own complete makeover.

Let us turn to facing pages 90 and 91, for this is where the whole project started in the mind, and the existence, of Douglas Levere.

On the left, “Broadway Near Broome Street, 1935,” on the right, nearly identical but not quite, just as sharply stamped in sunlight and shadow, “Broadway Near Broome Street, 1998.”

The one on the left, the Berenice Abbott print, is what Levere suddenly saw staring him in the face at a pre-auction exhibit of works by many famous photographers, one day in 1996 or ’97. “I lived on Broome Street,” he writes in the “New York Changing” book. “Here I stood, unexpectedly staring at the view outside my building, taken six decades before.”

Doug Levere lives in Buffalo, N.Y., these days – his wife Luci, a pastry cook, is from there, and he went to the university there – but last week he came down to his native city to cast an eye upon the Levere/Abbott exhibit that’s at the Museum of the City of New York, Fifth Avenue and 103rd Street, through November 27.

“The Abbott photograph told me so much,” he says. “In those days Broome Street was two-way; now it’s one-way. The building on the near right is gone, but not the 1857 cast-iron building beyond it, the first building in New York City, or perhaps the whole country, to have an elevator. It’s the building where Mary Lincoln bought china for the White House. Now there’s a Staples on the ground floor.”

There is a platform of beer kegs in the Abbott photo (Prohibition had ended in 1933). “The Vegetarian Dairy Restaurant sign” – now gone – “tells you this was probably a Jewish neighborhood.” There are more trucks in Levere’s 1998 view, but if you squint along rooftops you can see, very tiny, the same water towers.

“Abbott’s photo had in it architecture and architectural history, photography and the history of photography. I was informed and enthralled.”

It was Ellen Carey, a professor at the Hartford School of the Arts — “my friend who was becoming my mentor” – who for some years had been urging Levere to do his own thing, invent his own project as a photographer.

“She’d been pushing me, and I’d been thinking of doing something on Alexander Rodchenko [Russian Constructivist painter and photographer, 1891-1956), but that didn’t work for today’s age. Now I realized that artists, musicians, poets, writers always stood on the shoulders of what came before. I went out and bought a $15 Dover paperback copy of Abbott’s ‘Changing New York,’ and started going around by bicycle – if I had a free day, had the time, and the light was right – taking snapshots, using the Dover reprint as a guide.”

He also thought back to “a group of photographers and geologists” who in the 1970s went out to cover the ground in the American West where William Henry Jackson and Timothy O’Sullivan had taken pictures a century earlier.

“Then 25 years later, these same photographers and geologists went back and did it again. If they could put so much energy into covering such a vast location, with such skill and such accuracy, I figured I could do it in my backyard” – New York City – “and come up with something better than a simple then-and-now book.”

One day a Life magazine photo editor named Debbie Bondilic asked Levere if he had “any personal projects.” He pulled out some of the snapshots he’d done scouting Abbott’s camera sites while trying to figure out if the whole long effort would be worth it.

“Debbie loved them, she called in David Friend, director of photography,” and the magazine published five pairs of Abbott and Levere prints, including a closeup of the big sidewalk clock at Fifth Avenue and 44th Street that Abbott had taken from the top of a double-decker Fifth Avenue bus. “So Life magazine actually rented a red double-decker tourist bus for me to take the same picture.” (Shortly to be followed by Life magazine, in that particular incarnation, going out of business.)

Curator/author Bonnie Yochelson was at that moment preparing the Museum of the City of New York’s fine 1998 retrospective, “Berenice Abbott’s Changing New York, 1935 to 1939,” and was also at work on a book on the subject.

“I introduced myself” – and her book would serve as Levere’s guide to the date, numbering, time of day, weather, light, shadow angles of every one of Abbott’s 300 photos of changing New York. “She had 300, I had 16.” In the end, for his own book, he had 114.

Todd Watts, an artist/photographer who early in his career had published Abbott’s photos and made one of those big, heavy 8x10” cameras for her – painting it, to her desire, black with salmon-colored metal fittings – now built such a camera for Levere.

One bleak day on the end of an East River pier, shooting a scene that had been a magnificence of Lower Manhattan skyline in Abbott’s photo but was now a hideous black mass, or blot, of brutalitarian 1990s office building, Levere asked himself: Why am I standing on this pier, in the cold – who wants to take this horrible picture?

“But then I thought: If these pictures stand next to one another, that’s change!”

Douglas Levere is the son of Julius Levere, printer, and Ann Levere, fashion illustrator, both still alive. “Children of the Depression,” he calls them. They remember the New York – much of it thrillingly under construction – that fell before Berenice Abbott’s eyes the day in 1929 she stepped off the boat, back from Paris, only as long as she might need to find somebody to take care of the legacy of Eugene Atget.

NEW YORK CHANGING: DOUGLAS LEVERE REVISITS BERENICE ABBOTT’S NEW YORK
Museum of the City of New York
1220 Fifth Ave. at 103rd St.
Through Nov. 27
212-534-1672

NEW YORK CHANGING
Photos by Douglas Levere and
Berenice Abbott
Princeton Architectural Press, 2005

For more: The Villager

That's So New York

More True Crime

The video game True Crime: New York City from Activision last mentioned in a July post is back with more screenshots.

Note the police car that reads: "PDNY". In the city the cars are actually labeled "NYPD", but that's why it's called hyper-reality.

For more, visit the link below.

True Crime: New York City

another preview and more screenshots:

Here

That's So New York

sny spotlight: Il Laboratorio del Gelato

New Yorkers love to eat, that's why there are restaurants on almost cover and almost every block. But more than a good meal, New Yorkers love a great dessert and that's where a place whose name translates to "The gelato lab" really takes the cake.

Opened in 2002 and located on Orchard Street, Il Laboratorio del Gelato is the brainchild of Jon F. Synder founder of another popular gelato shoppe Ciao Bella. What's most ironic--or maybe prophetic--is that Syder's family ran a Carvel ice cream drive-thru in Westchester County.

On any given day there are at 70 flavors to choose from, but on their website there is a whopping 101 flavors of gelatos and sorbets. You can even mix and match and add toppings.

While waiting for your creation, you can observe the lab techs at work complete with official white lab coats.

Il Laboratorio del Gelato placed number one for ice cream in this year's Zagat gourmet marketplace survey. Try it for yourself and see what all the fuss is about.

Il Laboratorio del Gelato

That's So New York

New lead found in oldest unsolved New York City crime

NEW YORK --A new lead may have been found in a case that has stumped New York City police for more than 70 years.

Judge Joseph Force Crater vanished in 1930 and was declared legally dead in 1939. The city's police department closed his case in 1979.

However, today's New York Post reports that a note left by a woman who died this year says her husband was one of three men responsible for the judge's death.

Stella Ferrucci-Good died on April second.And the Post says a note she left says her husband, Robert Good -- a city police officer -- another officer, Charles Burns, and his cab driver brother Frank Burns were responsible for Judge Crater's death.

It also says the judge was buried under the boardwalk in Coney Island.

Service fee replacing tips at New York eatery

Thursday, August 18, 2005

Wire reports

New York- Is the right to stiff the waiter as American as apple pie?

Thomas Keller, chef at the extravagantly priced Per Se restaurant in the Time Warner Center in Manhattan, does not think so. Indeed, he is dropping the tip system next month and replacing it with a flat service fee of 20 percent.

He is trying an approach that chefs and restaurant managers say has never caught on in this country for a simple reason: American diners relish the power of the tip to reward or punish their servers, and the servers want them to have it.

Per Se's customers might not balk. After all, they have been begging for a chance to pay $175 or more for a single dinner there - and on average, they tip at a rate of 22 percent.

But Keller might face a mutiny among his waiters, who might not stand still for his plan to divert a larger portion of the service charge to the people in the kitchen. He said he already had lost one talented young cook and that another had asked to become a waiter temporarily so that he could pay some bills.

Under the new plan, the waiters and all the other employees will earn steady wages, even for weeks when the restaurant is closed. He said the system worked well for seven years at the French Laundry, his restaurant in Yountville, Calif., which charges 19 percent for service.

But Danny Meyer, owner of Union Square Cafe in Manhattan, said some waiters want to preserve their chances of raking in some really big tips.

"What I heard was that the incentive that a tip provides really energizes the servers to go perform," he said.

Diners seem to notice, said Tim Zagat, chief executive of the Zagat Survey. About 80 percent of people surveyed say they prefer to decide how much to tip their servers, he said.

They reserve the discretion to give a very big tip or no tip at all, though they rarely do either, he said. Three out of four respondents say they have never left nothing, and the average tip has been rising steadily, he said. The average amount diners said they left last year was 18.6 percent, up from about 16 percent in the early 1990s, he said.

43rd NY Film Festival Line-Up Announced

Source: Filmlinc

The Lincoln Center Film Society in New York City has announced the line-up for its 43rd New York Film Festival. As in past years, there is a great selection of American and foreign films, including many returning favorites like Lars von Trier (Dogville, Neil Jordan, and Steven Soderbergh.

It had already been previously announced that George Clooney's second film as a director, Good Night. And, Good Luck., would be opening the festival on September 23. The film is a historical piece set in the '50s about the early days of television news, focusing on veteran CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow, as played by David Strathairn, and his on-air confrontation with Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Neil Jordan's Breakfast on Pluto, starring Cillian Murphy as an abandoned Irish boy in the '70s who becomes a transvestite, will be the festival's Centerpiece, and the festival will close on October 9th with the latest film from Michael Haneke (Code Unknown. Cache (Hidden) stars Daniel Auteuil as a man receiving mysterious packages from a stalker. The film, which debuted at Cannes earlier this year, also stars Juliette Binoche.

Another film that premiered at Cannes but will get its U.S. debut at the festival is director Lars von Trier's Manderlay, his follow-up to Dogville, which was shown at the festival two years ago. Michael Winterbottom's Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story reunites the director with his 24 Hour Party People star Steve Coogan. It will also be shown in New York shortly after its Toronto debut.

Director Steven Soderbergh, who also produced Good Night. And, Good Luck. returns with Bubble, his first film for 2929 Entertainment that will be released simultaneously in theatres, on television and DVD. Its a murder-mystery set in Ohio that was show on high-definition video.

Other films of special interest include Park Chan-wook's Sympathy for Lady Vengeance--the third in his revenge trilogy that began with Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, opening in New York this weekend; The Squid and the Whale, a Brooklyn drama from The Life Aquatic cowriter Noah Baumbach; the biodrama Capote starring Philip Seymour Hoffman as the stalwart writer; and foreign films such as Aleksandr Sokurov's The Sun and the Cannes Palm D'or winner L'Enfant from Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne.

Tickets go on sale to the general public on September 11.

That's So New York

NYC heart disease deaths tops nation

By UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
Published August 18, 2005

NEW YORK -- Experts cannot explain why New York City and suburbs have the nation's highest death rates from heart disease, raising more concerns about factors like stress.

A New York Times report based on death certificates also found that while heart disease may be more common among poorer people, Nassau County, one of the 15 highest-income counties, suffered heart disease death at a rate 20 percent above the norm.

The pattern has raised questions about whether people in the New York area live with an excess of heart disease risks -- stress, bad diets, too little exercise, the report said.

There is also the speculation that doctors in the area may be including deaths from other causes into the heart disease category to make the toll look worse than reality.

"It's an absolute paradox, and absolutely fascinating," said Thomas Pearson, an epidemiologist at the University of Rochester School of Medicine.

The city health department and the National Institutes of Health plan extensive studies to better assess poorly measured factors like stress, blood pressure and cholesterol in people in the New York area.

Marc Ecko Speaks to NYC

"Graffiti is a legitimate part of the great art history of our city."

Game and clothing designer Marc Ecko has posted an open letter to New York City on his blog, in response to negative criticism that the game promotes vandalism, defending not only his game, Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure, but the culture of graffiti that inspired it.

He writes:

I am well aware that drawing graffiti in public places is a crime, and I do not condone or encourage it. At the same time, however, graffiti is a legitimate and historical part of the great art history of our city. The visual dialect is alive and well, and contrary to the opinion of certain elected officials, just because you draw on paper that way doesn't mean that you are writing on walls. That is the dialect that these artists and others like them dream through, that informed their creative energy so early on and helped them to go on to become a muralist, a film maker, a story teller, and even a clothing designer.

It's interesting that a videogame is once again reviving anti-graffiti movements at the same time that graffiti artists are featured in museums and galleries...where videogames are also making inroads.

What is art? For that matter, what is culture? Discuss amongst yourselves.

Jane Pinckard

That's So New York