A couple dining at Katz's Delicatessen were asked to pay a $50 fine after the girl lost her ticket, according to an email to Eater. The boyfriend, who explained to the staff that a busboy had cleared the ticket from the table, refused to pay the fine on top of the $45 bill for their meals, which brings up an interesting question: if the tickets are so goddamn important—$50 dollars worth of important, in fact—how did Katz's know what to charge them for the food? Ah:
They write the price of your check on *one* of your party's ticket, so there's no reason why everyone has to present their ticket... Also: they write a proper check that they just don't give you.
Well, that makes good sense. Not like, say, having an antiquated raffle ticket system at a restaurant where half of the orders are pastrami on rye.
Patti Smith, speaking to Jonathan Lethem at Cooper Union, gave this advice to artists looking to come to New York: "New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York City has been taken away from you. So my advice is: Find a new city." Meet the new old person, same as the old one. It's safe to say that the New York City that coddled and heralded Smith in her early years as an artist are long gone—the Bowery is no longer flophouses and heroin addicts, CBGBs is now a fashion boutique for the clinically retarded—but her lack of distinction in this advice is startling. Had she said "Manhattan" instead of "New York," the gripe factor would be halved, maybe quartered, but it's probably fair to guess that, just as it is with a lot of people who don't know better, Manhattan is New York to Smith. It certainly is that way for my uncle, a long-time New Yorker who once quipped that he'd "been to Brooklyn once."
That's fine and good. In thirty-five years, when the hot mess of the '10s is giving advice at the 92Y Park Slope, telling artists to stay away from Brooklyn—when she really means Park Slope and Williamsburg and Prospect Heights and so on—it'll be the same thing. But it will be no more true that it is today, from the mouth of Patti Smith. It's also disingenuous: the great thing about artists and young people is that they are required by biological law to disregard anything they're told by 63 year olds. Even more so when Jonathan Lethem is in the room. Hell, the people Smith is probably hoping to reach very likely don't even know she's still alive.
The place for artists to be is where artists are. It's a simple rule that holds when held up to every point in the cultural timeline. No one's taken New York away from the artists—what's really going on here is that they've taken Patti Smith's New York away from Patti Smith. And she could have it back, too, if she wanted it—if you want the Bowery in 1972, try Broadway in Bushwick in 2010—and the people she's advising to find a new city have already found the new shitty places to lament thirty years, without any help from the city's retired vanguard.
This is making the rounds, so for the sake of SEO, we present PIXELS:
Bicycling magazine wants you to know what the top 50 bike-friendly cities in American are, according to their polling. The East Coast captured the #8 (New York), #13 (DC), #26 (Boston), and #27 (Philadelphia) spots on the list, although it probably ranked #1 overall on the list of Top 50 Cities Who Don't Give A Shit How Bike-Friendly Their City Is. Buy a Metrocard, hippies!
Via Brick Underground comes the story of a family all set to buy a nice little apartment in an Upper East Side co-op. Why is this a story? Because the co-op board rejected the buyers based on their kids' Facebook profiles. This isn't as surprising as it might seen initially; after all, who doesn't Facebook stalk on occasion? It helps allay the fear—omnipresent, seemingly, among New Yorkers—that everyone is, at the bottom of it all, a raving lunatic waiting to snap. But!
“The board looked at all of the kids’ Facebook pages and there was something a little strange on one of them,” says our source. The page apparently revealed ties to a hate group.
That's strange, I was always under the impression that co-op boards—much like the storied Community Boards here in New York—were also hate groups. BU goes to Steven Goldschmidt, a realtor who also sits on an Upper West Side co-op board, for his expert opinion on looking up potential buyers and leasees, and the drift of the quotes is "I look for any reason, online or off, to shoot down a candidate."
So, long story short, no one should be caught off-guard by being creeped—by people you've just started dating, exes, employers, and even, yes, members of co-op boards—on Facebook. There's no excuse anymore for being caught with your profile hanging out. It's unfair to judge anyone based on their Facebook or Twitter profiles, anyway—it's the people who still have MySpace that should be judged.
I don't know how it is elsewhere in the country, but in New York, we don't consider spring officially in effect until some cranes start collapsing. Daniel-san's weak-sauce broken-leg workaround notwithstanding, crane style is the best. Just as the Wu-Tang Clan, who are the resident experts on such things.
Happy spring!
The killa bees of Staten Island
Hey, just in time for warmer weather, New York City has lifted a ban on dying in a swarm of fucking bees that escaped from your neighbor Tyler's backyard because he was daydreaming about that sweet, sweet honey dripping in and left the apiary door open. Thanks locavores! Hope you have some locally sourced epinephrine right next to the free-range aspirin in your medicine cabinet!
It's going to come off as mild lunacy to complain about an 8-bit map of New York's accuracy, but come on. Staten Island is way closer to New Jersey than it is to Brooklyn. We all know that. It's so far away from Manhattan and Brooklyn, in fact, that no MTA train goes there (the SIR doesn't count, thanks so much). It's altogether plausible that the only reason Staten Island is a "borough" is because in the olden times of shipping, it was important to have both sides of the Verrazano Narrows in order to not split the transit taxes with New Jersey. Whatever.
As part of the two on-going series "Old Man Hipp" and "When Does A New Yorker Become A New Yorker," I filed my first noise complaint tonight against an apparent housewarming party in the building next to ours. I am a man of great reserve: I can abide loud music, I can abide late hours. But I cannot and will not abide Cyndi Fucking Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" at any volume.
"I should add, parenthetically," that on nights and days when I do find myself wondering whether I am, in fact, really a New Yorker yet, I think back to earlier this year when, attempting to cross Hudson Street with the light, my body absorbed the sum total force of an entire delivery person, bike and all, who was approaching from the opposite direction of the stopped traffic.
I say "earlier this year," but the truth is I can't remember when it happened. You try hanging on to short term memory after being clobbered by the mobile food service industry.