Rich Mintz

… with the opening of Manhattan’s first Target store today in East Harlem. The city’s been blanketed with advertising, advertorial, and adverlivery, including this subway car I was in last week:

I’m not actually of the mind that Target is the beginning of the end — I’m a Target shopper when not wearing my New Yorker hat, after all, and I’ve even been known to stock up at the big spacious store in Jersey City — but there’s definitely been plenty of carping this week among trendy big-box haters. And if you’re going to put a Target in New York City, isn’t there a place more convenient than 116th and the FDR, four l-o-o-ong blocks from the 6 train?

One of my favorite things about this time of year is that on a nice sunny day, especially early in the season, everyone takes just a little more care putting themselves together in the morning. Even people like me, who aren’t particularly fashion-forward, relearn the word “accessorize.” (I’m no schlub, but as a satisficer, the first clothes I pull out of the closet are usually fine, and once I’ve checked the mirror to be sure my fly isn’t open, I’m ready to go.) And on every subway car, you see foulards tossed jauntily over shoulders, bright chunky jewelry, maybe a hat. (There was one particular day in May this year when, as though a switch had been flipped, suddenly by common agreement it was “good weather” time and everyone started dressing real purty.)

This goes for men as well as women. But women especially, having access to choices like the sundress and the social sanction to choose them, not to mention arguably better sense across the board, really do it up in the summer. Tonight after work, here in the lunchtime shopping district I call home, I passed several of those bargain-priced women’s clothing stores that tend to flourish around subway stops used by 50,000 municipal employees a day, and all of them had their sundresses in the window. Some of these shops push the “sundress” boundary a bit (a lot of petroleum-based fibers, and patterns you expect to see on East German tablecloths), but their hearts are in the right place.

Because I was raised the way I was raised (you can thank my mother for this), I am not afraid to occasionally walk up to people in the street, usually women, and say “You look beautiful today.” I usually precede it with a polite apology, and I’m always ready with a “don’t worry, ma’am, I’m a homosexual” — although I’ve never needed to use it. Turns out people love being told by total strangers (especially clean and tidy strangers who then walk away and leave them alone) that they look fabulous — who knew?

Today was an uncommonly summery day in the streets of New York, and on the subway this morning, a woman in her early 60s reading the New Yorker was wearing a lace-trimmed summer outfit, which went out of fashion around 1973 (I think Maude Findlay wore it to an E.R.A. meeting) but which looked lovely on her, and I said so. She was delighted. Another woman was wearing a necklace of chunky jade that was so perfect, I wanted to say something, but she was so engrossed in her vampire novel, or whatever it was that was on her Kindle, that I didn’t break the spell.

…and I just heard in the office that the reason for the insufferable delays this morning on the F line was a track fire. Jesus! On days like yesterday, I’ve often thought, in the bowels of Chambers Street and especially Brooklyn Bridge station, when the heat seems to pass the point of human habitability, that something might spontaneously catch fire. Apparently, something might.

And, not to be an old lady, but, you know “it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.” The problem with yesterday was that the day was just ****ing UNRELENTING, like a blast of exhaust out of a filthy clothes dryer full of old shoes and dog hair. The heat did eventually break (meaning: it dropped from 96 degrees to 87) in the late afternoon when the clouds rolled in, but the relief is over; today’s apparently going to be even worse.

So stay inside, drink a lot of fluids, maybe eat some fruit, and wait it out. Fortunately my office is air-conditioned…

Photo, by Edward O’Connell, is of a PATH track fire in 2004.

Anyone know what these colored footprints on the sidewalk (near 20th and 5th) are all about?

…I bring you this photo of a brownish Volvo wagon bearing tags reading “NYC Council 7,” with a New Paltz decal in the back window, parked alone in the curb lane of Canal Street at the height of the lunchtime rush. I had plenty of time to photograph it, as the taxi I was in sat behind it for more than five minutes before we were able to merge left, inch around it, move right again, and make a right turn. Just to be clear, because of this fellow, it took us five minutes to move half a block in the right lane in order to make a right turn.

Now, I’m not in a position to say for sure that this car belongs to New York City’s District 7 councilman, a New Paltz graduate. But it’s a plausible first hypothesis. And if I were a detective, or, perhaps, a journalist, trying to identify the guy who personally narrowed Canal Street from three lanes to two, sucking perhaps 50 hours of inconvenience out of the lives of several hundred strangers, the first call I’d make would be to his office. I might ask what errand he was on that was so important that it justified taking an entire lane of Canal Street to do it.

The little things aren’t the only things that are important. But they are important — they set the bar for civil behavior across the city.

Subway compasses are back, this time in guerrilla form rather than in the sanitized form they took a few years ago in the DOT’s test. They’re apparently popping up all over town; I ‘ve seen three of them within a couple of days, including this one outside the 72nd Street 1-2-3 station.

Popping out of the subway in an unfamiliar location can be disorienting even for locals; I think this kind of wayfinding signage is really helpful, and I hope the MTA or DOT doesn’t do something foolish like scrub them all away.

One of my favorite people-watching plazas in New York City: Verdi Square, at 72nd and Broadway. These photos were taken in rapid succession about 6:30 in the evening, standing in the same spot and rotating to face in five different directions. I could sit here for hours, and I often sit here for minutes at a time.

What makes this place so great?

• Lots of people passing through — never a dull moment
• People moving at different speeds: some sitting, some strolling, some hobbling, some racing through on scooters (as you see in one of the photos). Some passing through on the way to somewhere else; some in a hurry to or from the subway; some here on purpose.
• Porous: several ways in and out, including the subway.
• Trees for shade, some public art (including a large statue) for visual variety.
• Seating, comfortable and welcoming, both on the main throughway and a little secluded. Nothing fancy; the stone fixtures feel sturdy, but not intimidatingly snooty.
• Two news kiosks providing eyes on the public way at all times.
• Possibly more important than anything else, an adjacent Mister Softee ice-cream truck…

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.