Oil-production companies still have a lot of value, with a lot of long-lived assets that havent gone away.”

This week, I wrote about Loudmouth Weather and you shared some stories. This weekend, with temperatures soaring and the kids without money to head to the Hamptons, gear up for what promises to be a nightmare. Please let us know how your loudmouth weekend goes.

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In the years I have lived in New York, I have witnessed a myriad of trends and fads. With many of these, it seemed there was no end in sight and that it would become a permanent part of the city’s cultural landscape. And then as quickly as it came, it was gone - in some cases almost completely, in others, varying degrees of vestiges remain.
There was disco fever. I had a friend who took dance lessons with his wife at the very disco in Brooklyn (2001 Odyssey) where John Travolta performed in Saturday Night Fever. Disco roller skating became a popular spinoff with skating circles in the parks (still one in Central Park). For a time, small roller skating clubs opened - skating was done ad nauseum in a circle to DJ music.
During the same period, enormous boomboxes were toted and seen in the parks and streets. One of the few benefactors was Duracell - most of these required 8 D-cell batteries and only lasted some part of one day. Supporting your machine became tantamount to a drug habit.
There was the break dancing phenomenon with many youths spinning on all parts of their bodies including their heads on makeshift stages - cardboard on the sidewalks.
And then there were those “exclusive” clubs like Studio 54 and the Mudd Club with lines of patrons hoping they were special enough to be chosen for admission by arrogant, power-wielding bouncers. Ironically, in many of these, the throngs on the street were more interesting than the scene in the clubs themselves.
Even crime appeared trendlike. Graffiti on subway trains became a virtual icon for New York - witness movies like The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and The French Connection. Heroin users graced the parks. Broken car windows for radio theft were daily occurrences.
Puzzling was the rapid rise and fall of gelaterias. Many of these small shops were beautifully put together only to be dismantled in a short time. Most of the remaining shops (like Caf Dante) were there before the trend and after the dust settled.
The man in the photo is reminiscent of the rise of Andean street musicians in the late 1980s. The streets on weekends (and subway system) found many small troupes playing Andean folk music - mostly from Ecuador and Peru, with panpipes, flutes and strings. Read the rest of this entry »

Lately, it seems that empathy is being talked about. Over the past decade or so, throughout what felt like a peak in the ongoing Age of Narcissism, empathy was very much left out of the cultural conversation. The ability to step into another’s shoes, to feel another’s feelings, empathy is lacking in narcissistic and sociopathic personalities. That lack is a hallmark of those disorders.

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In a press release, Thor claims bringing Coney 100% back to life. [KC]

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In the time I have lived in this city, I have looked off and on at many real estate properties for sale, both apartments and small buildings. In these travels I have been privy to see places, most of which were only available for tiny windows of time in decades.
One of them was 75 1/2 Bedford Street, known as the “Narrowest House in the Village” (or alternately, the narrowest in New York City). The three-story building with its stepped gable roof line was built in 1873, squeezed into a carriage between the neighboring buildings. Its most well known occupant was Edna St. Vincent Millay who lived there from 1923 to 1924 - it has often been referred to as the Edna St Vincent Millay building. Other past occupants include anthropologist Margaret Mead, John Barrymore and cartoonist William Steig. The property has had an interesting cast of occupants and owners - read about it here in Christopher Gray’s article in the New York Times.
This property is so often written of and included in tours and books that I have left it on the back burner until today. But it is a worthy candidate for this website and if you have not seen it, you should, sitting as it does in one of the most charming areas in the entire city, around the bend from one of my favorite spots - Commerce Street (an ironic name for one of the quietest streets in the city).
The building sports a plaque, one of many in this neighborhood, proclaiming its historic heritage. These plaques or medallions are always a worthwhile read even for the seasoned New Yorker. The former residents of these homes are frequently household names as are many of the historic facts.
There are places whose charm, quaintness and uniqueness do not supersede their problems and this is one of them. Unique in its size - the width of 9 1/2 feet is the fact always included in even the shortest descriptions. However, being the narrowest building in New York City is not a desirable feature for living and in fact this property was on the market at one time for a decade before someone could see it as a habitable place. It was at this time that I visited it and my memory of it is of a horrid, squalid place that was and absolute mess and so claustrophobic as to be uninhabitable. I had been warned by the broker but still expected a place that with vision had potential. There are several peculiarly proportioned, scaled and shaped properties in New York. Wedges, slivers and itsy bitsy places. See the links below for some of them … Read the rest of this entry »

A preview of the summer season’s new open-air drinking spots.

Interactive map of Stumptown Coffee purveyors.

Andrew Cuomos ride to the governors mansion, on the backs of a furious mob.

If you thought those SATC fanatics were a nightmare, just wait. The Gossip Girls are about to take over your neighborhood. [Curbed]

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