Bloomberg's Million Trees campaign included 200 ginkgos that bear fruit that stinks like vomit.

The NY Post reports:

"They are only supposed to put in the male tree -- it doesn't produce the berries -- but they've been putting in females, which is driving everybody nuts."

ADDED: There are reports that a male ginkgo can turn female... or something:

I read an article that a Virginia study showed that male Ginkgos can morph into females. That is completely false. What happens is the grafted clone dies on the seeding rootstock and the rootstock sends up a shoot. If the tree farm is not carefully watching this, then nobody knows the "certified male" is no longer alive and they are selling plain ol’ Ginkgo. It happens a lot!

The "most iconic block" in Greenwich Village "has been taken over by drug peddlers, prostitutes and marauding youths."

Christopher Street.

It's news — in the NYT — that a lot of black people these days think they'll be better off in the South

It's "an inversion of the so-called Great Migration" — in which black people moved "to the industrializing North to escape prejudice and find work."

About 17 percent of the African-Americans who moved to the South from other states in the past decade came from New York, far more than from any other state, according to census data. Of the 44,474 who left New York State in 2009, more than half, or 22,508, went to the South....

The movement is not limited to New York. The percentage of blacks leaving big cities in the East and in the Midwest and heading to the South is now at the highest levels in decades, demographers say....

“New York has lost some of its cachet for black people,” [said Spencer Crew, a history professor at George Mason University who was the curator of a prominent exhibit on the Great Migration at the Smithsonian Institution]. “During the Great Migration, blacks went north because you could find work if you were willing to hustle. But today, there is less of a struggle to survive in the South than in New York. Many blacks also have emotional and spiritual roots in the South. It is like returning home.”...

The Rev. Floyd H. Flake, pastor of the 23,000-member Greater Allen African Methodist Episcopal Cathedral in Jamaica, Queens, said he was losing hundreds of congregants yearly to Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia.

“For decades, Queens has been the place where the African-American middle class went to buy their first home and raise a family,” Mr. Flake said. “But now, we are seeing a reversal of this as African-Americans feel this is no longer as easy to achieve and that the South is more benevolent than New York.”

The South is more benevolent than New York.

"Norman Redlich, Ex-Dean of N.Y.U. Law School, Dies at 85."

The NYT reports. Redlich was the Dean of the law school when I was a student there, and he was my teacher in Conlaw2 (a course I now teach). From the obituary:

He helped Jane Jacobs defeat Robert Moses’ plan to build a four-lane highway through Washington Square Park in the late 1950s — brokering an unlikely alliance between Ms. Jacobs, the urban theorist, and Carmine De Sapio, the Tammany boss, that eventually saw not only Moses’ plan killed, but all vehicular traffic banished from the park.

What a hero!

He negotiated the deal in which the City of New York bought and renovated Yankee Stadium in 1971, when the team’s owners had threatened to leave and Mayor John V. Lindsay resolved to make them stay.

Again, a hero.

[In 1963, Redlich became] executive assistant to the Warren Commission’s chief counsel, J. Lee Rankin. In that job, he and several other staff lawyers, including Arlen Specter, the future Pennsylvania senator, devised the single-bullet theory...

The widespread doubt cast on the theory in later years caused Mr. Redlich to tell a Congressional subcommittee reviewing the commission’s findings in 1977, “I think there are simply a great many people who cannot accept what I believe to be the simple truth, that one rather insignificant person was able to assassinate the president of the United States.”

A more ambiguous accomplishment. It resolved everything, but the resolution could never be fully accepted.

RIP.

What Panchito's did to The Fat Black Pussycat.

It's a terrible shame!

Panchito's owner Bob Engelhardt was a regular at the Pussycat which he described as a 'cesspool'. It was situated in a quiet street behind the tourist mecca MacDougal Street.

He said the nostalgia was misplaced, and that the preservation group did not understand the spirit of Greenwich Village.

Engelhardt added:'There are buildings that are worth preserving. Ninety per cent of what's in the Village isn't.

'The Village was freedom. The Village was not rules and regulations set in concrete. It destroys everything the Village was always famous for.'

Consider freedom and historical preservation. What if the history to be preserved was a time of great sleaziness? What if that sleaziness is connected to artists we love?

Pick the choice closest to your beliefs.
	Property owners deserve great freedom in the putting up of signs that represent their business.
	Historical preservation outweighs the interests of the current owner.
	The old sign is cool and the new sign is dull and transitory, so I'm for preservation in this case.
	The old sign is sleazy and I like the new business, so I'm against preservation in this case.
pollcode.com free polls

Dominique Strauss-Kahn confined to $14 million apartment in Tribeca.

"It's a three-story, 6,800-square-foot palace with a movie theater, antique French oak floors, a gym and a terrace - and $50,000-a-month rent."

Beautiful restaurants in that area. But he can't go out. Had to order in. Got $242.790 worth of "steaks and salad" delivered last night.

The bill was put on 26-year-old daughter Camille's credit card, and deliveryman Ramon Leal walked away with a handsome $25 tip.

"It's a good tip considering I just walked around the corner," Leal said, dismissing reporters' questions about serving Strauss-Kahn. "I'm just doing my job."

Actually, that's not a good tip. It's about 10%. Leal is rationalizing and refraining from bad-mouthing the rich man. And, by the way, the place may be huge and well-located, but — see the pictures at the link — it's in pretty bad taste. Aptly bad taste. Feh.

Revelry at Ground Zero.

Excellent photographs here.

My first reaction: It's not right to party at Ground Zero, where so many people died. You don't dance on their grave.

Second reaction: Where are you going to go? It's New York City, and people want to go out on the street and celebrate. Even if most people regard Ground Zero as a solemn, sacred place, some people are going to think it's... the place.

Third reaction: Even though dancing on the mass grave of the victims is a nontraditional way to celebrate the death of their murderer, it makes sense. If we believe or imagine that the dead are spiritually or symbolically there and that they could know what has happened and respond, then this is the place of celebration, and it's fine to congregate with them for the revelry.

The best cheeseburger in NYC is at the Corner Bistro.

This interests me for 2 reasons:

1. In the late 1970s, we lived in the apartment building across the street from the Corner Bistro. From my window on the third floor of what is still called "The Rembrandt," I watched people going in and out of the good old Corner Bistro. It had good cheeseburgers.

2. Why doesn't the best cheeseburger in NYC have a good tomato on it? From 1,000 miles away, I can see that the Corner Bistro puts one of those things on its burger that I'd get my hands messed up pulling out. I don't even use the word "tomato" for that.

IN THE COMMENTS: Richard Lawrence Cohen, the other half of the "we" referred to in point #1, says:

The burgers were thick with high-quality beef, but slow-grilled, which didn't thrill me, and if you ordered rare you wouldn't get it rare. But the atmosphere was homegrown urban hip, with knife-gouged wooden tables, and customers who were longtime Villagers perpetually anxious about their media deals and their love lives. A holdover from the Dylan Thomas era (he'd drunk his last set of eighteen whiskies in another burger bar, a couple of blocks away), and great eavesdropping. The silent, bland owner, short and wide with balding red hair and what might conceivably have been interpreted as a fractional smile, was a reassuring enigma, lovingly rolling down his awning and sweeping the front sidewalk every morning. And then there was the psychotic psychiatrist who lived and worked next door.

"Even the dead can't escape the ineptitude of the city's Sanitation Department."

"Sanitation crews dumped tons of dirty snow from the Christmas-weekend blizzard into the city's biggest Jewish cemetery, toppling 21 gravestones and wrecking an iron fence."

"Some adventurers have taken to exploring the sometimes dangerous subterranean world in the sewers and tunnels beneath New York."

That's the teaser on the front page right now. Here's the article it refers to. Excerpt:

We inspect our exit point — a manhole in the middle of the road. Will Hunt, a bespectacled 26-year-old who is writing a book about the underground (“The last frontier,” he says, “in an over-mapped, Google-Earthed world.”) will serve as our spotter. Will’s job is to watch for traffic: ascending from the hole, we do not wish to be hit by a car. We are to communicate by walkie-talkie. Will ties a long pink ribbon to the inside of the manhole cover. Dangling downward, this will be our signal we have reached the end....

Filthy, backpacked, smelling of the sewer, we board a rush-hour subway....

The sewer under Greene Street was only four feet high (Erling is 6 foot 3.) It got smaller and smaller, until they were forced on hands and knees, then eventually on their bellies. Crawling through raw sewage. The ceiling was higher on Canal Street, they report, but the floor was caked with so much feces they sank in it like quicksand. They were turned back by an impassable mountain of waste....

Time to hop on the subway again?

Where should the intrepid explorer go when the world is totally over-mapped and Google-Earthed? Where do you go? And why? A rewrite of my favorite quote:

Why do we require a trip through the sewers in order to be able to perceive one moment of reality? I mean...  is the sewer more "real"? I mean, isn't New York "real"? I mean, you see, I think if you could become fully aware of what existed in the cigar store next door to this restaurant, I think it would just blow your brains out! I mean... isn't there just as much "reality" to be perceived in the cigar store as there is in the sewers? I mean, what do you think? You see, I think that not only is there nothing more real about the sewers I think there's nothing that different, in a certain way. I mean, because reality is uniform, in a way. So that if you're — if your perceptions — I mean, if your own mechanism is operating correctly, it would become irrelevant to go into the sewers, and sort of absurd! Because, I mean, it's just — I mean, of course, on some level, I mean, obviously it's very different from a cigar store on Seventh Avenue, but I mean...

But, well, I agree with you...  But the problem is that people can't see the cigar store, now. I mean, things don't affect people the way they used to. I mean, it may very well be that ten years from now people will pay ten thousand dollars in cash to be castrated, just in order to be affected by something!

Well, why...why do you think that is? I mean, why is that? I mean, is it just because people are lazy today? Or they're bored? I mean, are we just like bored, spoiled children who've just been lying in the bathtub all day just playing with their plastic duck and now they're just thinking: "Well! what can I do?"

Okay! Yes! We're bored! We're all bored now! But has it ever occurred to you, Wally, that the process that creates this boredom that we see in the world now may very well be a self-perpetuating, unconscious form of brain-washing, created by a world totalitarian government based on money? And that all of this is much more dangerous than one thinks? And it's not just a question of individual survival, Wally, but that somebody who's bored is asleep, and somebody who's asleep will not say "no"? See, I keep meeting these people, I mean, uh, just a few days ago I met this man whom I greatly admire...? And he told me that he no longer watches television, he doesn't read newspapers and he doesn't read magazines. He's completely cut them out of his life, because he really does feel that we're living in some kind of Orwellian nightmare now, and that everything that you hear now contributes to turning you into a robot!

"They go out and see all these new condos that have them... and it plants a seed in their head."

"Them" = a washer and dryer.

Jonathan J. Miller, the president of Miller Samuel, the appraisal company, said that “while there is no known empirical data to reliably measure this amenity,” a washing machine can add as much as 5 percent to an apartment’s price tag.

“It is the ultimate convenience,” said Doug Steinberg, whose one-bedroom condo, at 315 Seventh Avenue in Chelsea, is now on the market for $739,000. The apartment, No. 7B, has its own laundry tucked behind a louvered door, with shelves for detergent and towels.

5% of $739,000 is $36,950.

It's so hard to live in New York City. You need to be rich to have such ordinary things. (It's tough going to a laundromat, but sometimes that's what you have to do.)

"Wisconsin fans will be taking this very seriously while enjoying $8 brats, $7 fried cheese curls and $10 pitchers of beer at Mad River Bar & Grille, 1442 Third Ave."

The NY Post is telling New York City folk where to go out to watch the various bowl games, and this is the advice for Badger fans. That's all very nice. But it's not cheese curls! It's cheese curds! Unless they've got some sort of homemade Cheetos over there at the "grille," it's cheese curds.

And, by the way "grille" is the thing on the front of a car. "Grill" is the thing you cook on. But that's not the Post's fault. Maybe the curl/curd mix-up isn't the Post's fault either. I see the Mad River Bar & Grille's idea of a Wisconsin experience is Coors beer. Come on! Pick a Wisconsin beer!

"Sanitation Department's slow snow cleanup was a budget protest."

Headlines the NY Post in an article that begins:

These garbage men really stink.

Selfish Sanitation Department bosses from the snow-slammed outer boroughs ordered their drivers to snarl the blizzard cleanup to protest budget cuts -- a disastrous move that turned streets into a minefield for emergency-services vehicles, The Post has learned....

New York's Strongest used a variety of tactics to drag out the plowing process -- and pad overtime checks -- which included keeping plows slightly higher than the roadways and skipping over streets along their routes, the sources said.

The snow-removal snitches said they were told to keep their plows off most streets and to wait for orders before attacking the accumulating piles of snow.

Dino De Laurentiis, "the high-flying Italian film producer," has died.

He was 91. His name is attached to some of the greatest films ever — notably "La Strada" and "Nights of Cabiria" — and some all-out trashy pop entertainment — like "Bararella" and "Mandingo."

Here's a list of his 166 movies. How many of them have you seen? I've got to say I've managed to steer clear of de Laurentiis films. Other than "La Strada" and "Nights of Cabiria" — 2 of my favorite films, directed by Fellini — the only one I've seen — and we watched it for a laugh — is "Conan the Barbarian."

I never saw the de Laurentiis remake of "King Kong," which was filmed in New York City in 1976. I was living there then, and I remember the open invitation to anyone to come down to Lower Manhattan to be in the crowd scene. I considered going but didn't. I read this article in the NYT on June 22, 1976:

Drawn by 1930's nostalgia and 1976 excitement, a horrified crowd of more than 5,000 New Yorkers surged past police lines at the World Trade Center last night on cue and fought its way to the spot where a giant gorilla lay dead after a 110-story fall from the North Tower.

The ape, constructed of styrofoam covered with horse hair and bleeding a mixture of Karo syrup and vegetable coloring was of course King Kong, the resurrected star of the 1933 thriller being remade by Dino de Laurentiis.

Ah! The unreachable past! When the the death was fake and not even human. What absurd fun we had!

The extras cheered when a technician climbed on the chest of the fallen 40-foot ape to replenish its oozing "blood."

"When I was a kid, Halloween was strictly a starchy-vegetable-only holiday, with pumpkins and Indian corn on the front stoop..."

"... there was nothing electric, nothing inflatable, nothing with latex membranes or strobes. I do remember the first time I saw bright orange lawn trash bags decorated with smiley pumpkin faces, which was about ten years ago; I thought they were kind of clever and festive, if a bit commercial. Now they seem quaint, compared to, say, yard decorations like Demonica Zombie Baby ('a latex skin foam filled child with sound and motion activated flashing eye lights,' in stock and ready to ship for $39.99) or a life-sized Hellraiser Pinhead Animatronic (a big investment at $279.99)."

That's Susan Orlean, who also bemoans the trend toward Halloween as a time for adult revelry: "when I was young, Halloween was a holiday celebrated only by children." That made me look up Orlean's age — 54 — and city of origin — Cleveland. The trend toward Mardi Gras-style street parties and parades for adult revelries goes back to the 1970s. That's when Freakfest began here in Madison, Wisconsin and the time of the first Greenwich Village Halloween Parade in NYC. I remember those parades in the late 1970s, when I lived in Greenwich Village. It was a continuation of the counter-culture of the 60s, isn't it? They called us Baby Boomers, and we internalized the concept of "baby." You'll just have to deal with it now.

ADDED: Orlean... Mardi Gras... Maybe that has something to do with her annoyance at the migration of adult revelry to the autumn holiday. That and the fact that — as she reveals in the article — Halloween is her birthday.

Another classic case of hardass New Yorkitude.

From the comments section of the NY Post:

this story actually makes me furious. she peed her pants and she's suing a club. another classic case of an "entitlement cvnt".

last time i checked pregnancy was a personal choice. you aren't bestowed with any special powers, knowledge, or freedoms.

don't like being pregnant in big bad ny -- then leave, and go the burbs where you and giant stroller belong.

i have a country house in CT. they'll let you pee anywhere here. get out of ny, spoiled whining cow.

This story makes me furious too, by the way. I'm furious that a newspaper reports on a lawsuit without stating what the legal claim is. Is there a tort claim in New York for failing to give special treatment to pregnant women? "She blames Hammerstein management for the humiliation of wetting her pants"... but isn't this publicity, brought on by the lawsuit, humiliating? Or is she trying to "humiliate" the Hammerstein Ballroom into paying her off to undo the bad publicity she's giving them — with the help of a lawsuit and NY Post?

ADDED: I'm removing the "lawsuits I hope will fail" tag, because I don't understand what really happened here. My criticism is of the journalism, and my reason for writing the post was the hilariously unsympathetic comment. I'm not entirely unsympathetic myself. I remember being pregnant in New York City — twice — and wanting people to be spontaneously helpful to me — giving me a seat on the subway or offering me a place to nap at the law firm — and feeling sad about humanity because I didn't get that help. But I never asked for special concern.

Except once, actually. It was 1982, and I was going on a religious retreat with a group of individuals from a Manhattan church. It was about a 3-hour drive to the place, and a woman in the van lit up a cigarette. Would you please not smoke? I asked. She said she would continue to smoke, so I said that the reason I felt I had to ask is that I was pregnant. The woman and everyone else in the van rejected my request. I was told that smoking is only bad for the smoker — as if I were dumb to think otherwise. I said I couldn't go with them, and they stopped the van and gave me my luggage. As they left me there on the wrong side of the West Side Highway, which I would have to cross, at night, before hiking a couple of unfamiliar blocks to get to a place where I could begin to try to hail a cab, one young woman detained me for a little lecture: I was being selfish and not considerate of others, and therefore I was not a good Christian. I used to feel chastened by criticisms like that, and it wasn't until I was in the cab, crying, heading back toward Brooklyn, that it occurred to me that I might have said to her that I was concerned for others, because I was concerned about my unborn child.

CORRECTION: That was the NY Post, not The Daily News. Sorry.

"The Ground Zero Mosque will be so hip, everyone will stop fighting."

Could wacky, chaotic architecture make everyone happy... or at least flummox us long enough for the whole controversy to dissipate?

What is the sound of 250,000 signs yelling?

New York City must change every single street sign because the federal the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices adopted a rule against all caps. 250,000 signs X $110 per replacement.

Now, now. It's a lot of money. But you know all caps is the same as yelling.

September 11th...

... 2007:



A photograph taken from my apartment in New York in the fall of 2007. Here's the post, not that I added words to it. And here is my post that morning, looking at the skyline in the fog. And here is the skyline on the evening of the 10th, with the memorial lights cut short by the low-hanging clouds:

50% of NYC residents oppose the mosque near Ground Zero, and only 35% support it.

This NYT poll undermines the belief that the attitude toward the mosque is quite different in New York City and those of us who don't live there don't understand. Here, for example, is a comment written in an August 2d thread on this blog:

Do you live there Ann? No. So its actually none of your business. So you should just shut up about it.

I however, DO vote in that district. I own property in that district. That is MY community board. And I wholeheartedly support that mosque. The vast majority of those in that district support the mosque. And there is another mosque just one block away.

And it is not the Ground Zero Mosque. You can't even see the mosque from Ground Zero.

There was zero controversy about this mosque until the bigots made a stink about this. And yes, you're siding with the bigots now.

Obviously you no zilch about New York City. You have no connections to New York City. You are not a voter in New York City.

This mosque is trying to build bridges with the community. That means community board #1, who support this.

It certain does not mean YOU or Sarah Palin's "fake America".

So the bigots should just mind their own business.

Muslims in Community Board #1 have the right to pray in their neighborhood.

On the other hand, this commenter (downtownlad) can say the poll supports his position. If you break out Manhattan, 51% support the mosque and 41% oppose it.

***

And while we're on the subject of the mosque, did you hear Mark Steyn on the subject (as he was guest-hosting on the Rush Limbaugh show yesterday)? I can't find a transcript or long enough audio clip. He doesn't so much care about building the mosque. He's more concerned with the failure to rebuild on the WTC site and where Imam Rauf gets his money. Perhaps opposition to the mosque is displaced disappointment with America's failure to demonstrate its strength and its values with a dramatic, finished, brilliant architectural achievement that dominates lower Manhattan. It's been 10 years.