Rich Mintz  

I did a little research (one Google search, it took five seconds), and was able to confirm that yes, it’s a DEP environmental law violation in New York City to leave the doors of your store open on a hot day, with freezing-cold air-conditioned air flowing into the street. (Exemptions apply, e.g., if you’re not a chain store or are under 4,000 square feet.)

Today at lunch I passed five violating establishments along just three blocks of one side of Fifth Avenue. I shut one of the doors myself; I had words with employees of two of the other stores, one of whom immediately closed the doors (perhaps to reopen them after I left). The greeter in the third, it was clear, had no interest in the ravings of a sweaty lunatic, but it turns out there’s an easy way for me to get my revenge: I’ll fill out this form on NYC.gov and the DEP will put an agent on the case. Your tax dollars at work, doing just a little at the margins to reduce our carbon footprint. Go team NYC, and score one for the grumpy old man!

Once you’re looking for it, you see it everywhere. Clearview’s starting to show up on ordinary street signs (the green ones on every corner that say, e.g., “Broadway” and “Fulton St”). Just this evening I saw a “Clinton St” Clearview street sign here, and multiple Clearview street signs in Chatham Square, all looking spanking new.

Also, the green point-of-interest signs I mentioned are called “trailblazer signs” by the DOT.

Regarding the decades-out-of-date Ed Koch sign: we visually pinpointed the location tonight as we went past at 60mph, and it’s within a block or two of Southern Boulevard and Leggett Avenue in the Bronx.

On the way upstate yesterday, we pulled off I-95 in the upper Bronx to avoid traffic and cut the corner to the Hutch (thanks, GPS), and found ourselves at this intersection … right in front of a sign proclaiming that Pelham Bay Park, which I had never heard of and was apparently now in the middle of, is “NYC’s largest park” at around 2,500 acres, hard by Long Island Sound.

I just looked at a map. Holy cow, it’s huge!

This is worth a weekend day trip to explore, later in the summer, and a side trip to City Island, which is just down the road over a causeway to the east. I’ve been once to City Island, a New England fishing village whose presence inside the New York city limits is an accident of geography and history. I remember a main street that’s a three-way hybrid of a working waterfront town, a tourist trap, and, you know, Maspeth or Bayonne.

High up on the side of a NYCHA apartment tower in the southeast Bronx — plainly visible from the southbound Bruckner Expressway on the Triboro Bridge approach, I’m guessing somewhere within a few blocks of here — there is a sign that clearly reads “Edward I. Koch, Mayor.” I know it’s hard to get all the way up there, but you’d think that in the past 20 years, someone would have gotten around to it, no?

It appears that Clearview, the typeface specifically developed for road and highway signage in the United States, is getting a firmer foothold in New York City. It’s been on bike-route signs for at least two years (see the photo here at Streetsblog), but now it’s showing up on those green DOT points-of-interest signs too. (You know the ones — they’re usually posted so high up on a light pole that you don’t see them until it’s too late.)

Now that I’m a Busy New Yorker with Places to Go, I have much more respect than I used to for efficiency in the customer experience.

When I first arrived here, and realized that it was very common to be served coffee with the milk already added, my reaction was, “ew! What if they put in too much milk? Or too little?”

But I got over myself, after realizing that (1) once you’ve decided to add milk in the first place, coffee is equally delicious with milk added in a pretty wide range of amounts, (2) people who add milk to coffee for a living know how much to put in, and (3) who gives a crap?

If you’re on the way to work and you stop at a coffee cart to grab a cup, the guy in the cart knows what to do. It’s fine — let him put in the milk. And the same for sugar. I know how much sugar I like when I’m preparing my coffee myself. Sometimes the cart guy puts in too little; sometimes he puts in too much. But it’s fine. The coffee always seems to come out somewhere in the “drinkable” range. And it’s nice to save that extra time and effort.

Now, after a few years of doing it the New York way, I can’t stand being forced to adulterate my own beverages, and when you’re outside New York, you almost always do. And increasingly I’m finding New York is just like the rest of the world. This is presented as a convenience — “make it your way” — but, really, at 8:45 in the morning, when my briefcase is over my shoulder and the newspaper is under my arm and I’ve got a CVS bag in one hand and my wallet in the other, really, I have to walk over there, put everything down, take the lid off, and add my own milk?

Even worse is “we’ll add the milk, but you have to add your own sugar.” Really? I’m talking to you, Wichcraft 20th Street, and you, Zaro’s Penn Station. Penn Station! All day long people come in there with bags and luggage slung over their shoulder, hot and sweaty, their hands full. You’re adding the milk already. You can’t add the sugar? There’s nothing as generic and fungible as a spoonful of industrial sugar. I don’t care if it’s Domino’s Golden Crystals or Sysco sugar — it’s sugar! Get yourself one of those metal bins like the coffee cart guy has, and add my damn sugar.

Thank you for your consideration.

Yahel Carmon mentions credit-card taxi payment. My tipping rules for that are as follows:

• Same as cash, except
• 50-cent reduction in tip if driver makes a comment early in the ride about preferring cash to credit cards, unless comment is extremely polite
• $1 reduction in tip if driver attempts to talk me out of using card after card is already in my hand
• Zero tip if driver falsely claims credit card machine is out of order, or truthfully claims it is out of order (for any reason other than “cataclysmic rainstorm blocks GPS”), or if any comment on the subject is made in an embittered or sullen manner
• If driver warns me that the machine is out of order at the beginning of the ride, I stop the cab and get out, flag pull or no. I got in an argument at La Guardia with a taxi driver about this once — he was furious, but the dispatcher backed me up and threatened to call the police over if the driver didn’t cool it.

There was a lot of grumbling about the cards at first, but it’s mostly stopped — probably because cards result in a higher income, both by boosting demand (by people who take that extra ride, at the margin, because they don’t have to stop and consider whether they have the cash) and by boosting tips (due to the suggestive system defaults) by more than they cut into income with fees.

I’ve just learned that I am a jerk, by the decided opinion of my two friends here, both of whom grew up in New York City and have lived here most of their lives.

The domain of jerkiness in question is taxi tipping.

My friends (in the course of a conversation that we openly admit constituted a Seinfeld moment) say that the minimum cash taxi tip, under any circumstances, is a dollar.

My own cash tipping policy, which has never before (to my knowledge) gotten me in trouble after hundreds of taxi rides, is as follows:

1. For fares over $5, tip 20% or more of the base fare plus tolls and fees, rolling up (above 120%) to a round dollar amount. Add extra dollar(s) for exceptionally attentive service, in the rain, after 11pm or on a holiday, in heavy traffic (especially if the cab will continue to be stuck in it after I get out), if the driver is or I am in a visibly jolly mood, if the driver appears to need a pick-me-up, if music I like is playing, if I’ve stranded the guy in a second-class borough and/or left him pointed in an inconvenient direction, or otherwise at the slightest inclination that the tip as initially calculated doesn’t feel like enough.
2. For fares under $5, tip up to the next dollar (e.g., $3.50 becomes $4.00). If very late at night, or the driving seems hard due to weather or traffic, or in other exceptional circumstances, add another dollar.
3. Round up to a round dollar amount. Except in rare circumstances, don’t bother handing over coin, and never, ever accept any back. The former is inconvenient for me, and the latter seems petty and rude.

Our story begins when I board a northbound taxi stopped at the light at Church and Barclay, in the left lane. I ask to be taken to Church and Duane, left side, near corner. The alert reader will observe that this is a trip of six short blocks, in a straight line, without even changing lanes.

The fare on the meter at flag pull is $3.50 (the $2.50 base fare, plus the 50-cent night charge, plus the 50-cent New York State “balance the budget on the backs of NYC tourists” surcharge).

Traffic is light and the trip takes about 60 seconds. Just as the taxi is about to stop, as I am extending my hand with a $10 bill in it, the meter jumps to $3.90.

I ask for six dollars back. The driver pauses. “You’re giving me ten cents?”

(It’s worth noting here that today is the wrong day for anyone to get in an argument with me about nothing. Those of you who have kept me company through the challenges of the past week may understand why.)

“It was six blocks in a straight line — in the direction you were already pointed when I got in the cab.”

Grumble grumble.

“You didn’t even have to change lanes! It took us one minute to get here. There’s no ‘service’ to tip for.”

He mumbles something hostile as he hands me the bills, and that sets me off. “Okay, fine. I’ll have the ten cents back, too.”

“I don’t have it. I have a quarter — here you go, now give me fifteen cents.”

I decline the quarter, get out of the cab and walk away, in a hail of grumbling.

Now I get that someone might look at a ten-cent tip and be offended. What I see, though, is that I turned him a full $3.50 fare (with that flag-pull minimum), plus 40 cents’ worth of mileage, in 60 seconds. And all he had to do is keep the wheel straight and step on the gas — he didn’t even have to pull over to pick me up! And it’s a Friday night in Tribeca, there are fares all over the place. He probably had another in the cab in 30 seconds.

What say you: am I a jerk?

It turns out that dog poo (see photo at left, taken 1 door down from where I enter my building) isn’t the most disgusting thing I’m liable to encounter as I round the corner onto my block.

Tonight’s surprise: 2 semi-drunk Dockers-wearing douchebags, late 20s or early 30s (read: old enough to know better), cheerily pissing against the building next to mine.

“Hello!” I called out, mustering my best huffy-buzzkill voice. “People live on this block!”

To their credit, they immediately got embarrassed, mumbled something placating, zipped up and left. And I realize that this street looks like (ok, is) a deserted alley. But, like, did they just get off the boat? (Actually, from the looks of them, probably — the Hoboken ferry — but I digress.) Here in New York, as is known to all from song and story, people make their homes in the most unlikely places. Even, you know, in what are obviously APARTMENT BUILDINGS on downtown streets!

Cherry on the sundae: I got to my floor, walked toward my apartment, got there just in time to squish a cockroach racing for the crack under my door. I left it for the super (who, to *his* credit, will be horrified).

Have a lovely evening!

Out in the country again over the weekend, spending a misty, breezy quiet afternoon outdoors. One thing New York City doesn’t have that I regularly feel the lack of is this: stillness.

In Atlanta, I could just walk out on my back deck with a cup of coffee and I was facing a 10-acre wooded ravine; I even had a little pond with a bullfrog in it. In Washington, there were places right in the city that were still, especially on a quiet Sunday. But in New York, for stillness, especially of the natural variety, you really have to scrounge.

I do okay — my building has a public roof deck, and my apartment looks out on a little stand of bamboo (along with a bunch of other people’s windows), but there’s nothing like this, which justifies the 90-minute drive out of town.

The place in the city that most reminds me of this, unexpectedly, is the Central Park Reservoir, where the vistas are long and the greenery is relatively untended and even the crowds, at times, can be thin. I’d never been there until recently, and I was so impressed that I should make a point of going back.

In the meantime, here are some more photos of the weekend.

A firefly caught on camera:

Peonies rattled by an overnight rainstorm:

Vegetable garden: