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!

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Regarding the decades-out-of-date Ed Koch sign: we visually pinpointed the location tonight as we went past at 60mph, and it’s within a block or two of Southern Boulevard and Leggett Avenue in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

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.

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.

• 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.

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?

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!

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:

The press was largely approving (with the obligatory acknowledgments of the end of the Old New York and its replacement with a commercialized simulacrum of itself), and I have to say that (my obligatory acknowledgments aside, which should be taken for granted) I agree. They did a respectful job of converting the interior of the historic church building into an interestingly-laid-out space with small retail areas (most of them larger than kiosks, smaller than shops) on three levels. The interior was larger than I expected and the retail mix was much better than I expected, and I could imagine coming back and browsing here for longer than I did.

The biggest surprise was a large gourmet food hall on the ground floor, with a fresh produce stand in the courtyard. The food hall is no Harrods or even Zeytuna, but it was quite a bit more capacious than I expected. I picked up some Tanzanian peaberry coffee beans roasted right on the premises.

I do feel sorry for the girl whose job it is to smile and say “Hi, welcome to [name of food counter]” to everyone who comes around a certain corner — that must get old after about the 3,000th time.

I spent my enforced two-hour hiatus taking myself out to dinner around the corner at Les Halles — if I’m going to force myself to eat a dinner I’m not really in the mood for, it might as well be delicious — where I had the steak frites and two glasses of an excellent Long Island Merlot. It’s also worth noting that the music on the Les Halles Web site is so jazzy that I’m leaving the page open as I continue typing…

And I spent my dinner thinking over the lessons of the day — given that my iPhone died shortly after I sat down — which are, in order of importance:

Charge your damn iPhone, you idiot. I spend the entire day sitting at a desk upon which I wisely placed an iPhone charging dock back in the distant past. Why don’t I insert phone (a) into dock (b) as a matter of course at all times during which I am seated thereat? Idiot. And another thing…

Where’s your damn iPad? This morning as I was leaving for work, I thought to myself, “why carry the iPad? You won’t need it; you’ll be at your desk all day, then stopping by an event right after work (bonus plug: New York Council for the Humanities), and by the time you think to pick it up again, you’ll be home again.” Unless you WORK SO LATE YOU HAVE TO SKIP THE EVENT and then LOCK YOURSELF OUT OF YOUR APARTMENT. My briefcase already weighs a zillion pounds; I can’t handle a zillion and one point six pounds? And while I’m listing lessons…

When you get out of a taxi, get the damn receipt. Today I wore my “shallow pockets” pants to work, and it was very possible that my keys had fallen out of my pocket onto the seat of that aforementioned wet taxi. If they had, damned if I’d ever find them again without the cab number. The fact that I didn’t actually need that receipt isn’t a reason not to have taken it. Which leads to…

Don’t ever wear those “shallow-pockets” pants again. You bought them on sale for 30 bucks, they won’t be missed. Err in the direction of pants that have the proper keyring-protecting pocket dimensions. And while I’m on the subject of attire…

Those leather high-top Converse All-Stars might have looked sweet in the store. They might even look good on your feet. But any 11-year-old boy knows that the soles don’t grip in the rain. I took a spill on Duane Street, on a slick metal surface, that twisted my left leg under me so hard I half expected a bone to be sticking out of me like when Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep fell down the stairs in Death Becomes Her.

I’m okay now. Of the mundane indignities that New York inflicts, there are very few that aren’t offset by a hot bath spiked with hotel-amenity body wash, accompanied by a very wet issue of The New Republic.

As this post is already starting to read like the transcript of a late-80s Howie Mandel comedy routine, I’ll stop here. But let (all) that be a lesson to you!

Everyone from Sheldon Silver to city council member Margaret Chin signed on to a March letter to the federal Department of Transportation pressing them to collaborate with DHS to get the street reopened.

Boy, would that be nice.

As a resident of Lower Manhattan, I understand the value of security theater as well as anyone. We depend on the NYPD to operate both openly and behind the scenes to identify and neutralize risks in the name of public safety, and the terrorist threat isn’t just a Republican talking point; it’s real.

But let’s be realistic.

Map

For nine years, Park Row between Frankfort Street and Chatham Square has been closed to traffic, except to police and emergency vehicles and MTA buses on their routes. It’s open to pedestrians, but the entrances on both ends are so forbidding, what with all the security folderol, that hardly anyone bothers.

As you may be aware, Lower Manhattan is one of the most congested neighborhoods in the United States, and the alternate routes (chiefly St. James Place and Centre Street) are neither convenient, nor direct substitutes, nor themselves particularly free-flowing.

The claim (implied, and sometimes stated) is that Park Row needs to be closed to keep One Police Plaza secure. But does it? Reynolds found a NYC DOT traffic engineer willing to say on the record that the security concerns are out of line with the risk. Certainly there are dozens of security targets of equal or greater significance in the city that are more exposed than police headquarters, even with Park Row open. And in any case, you can’t and shouldn’t run a free society on lockdown indefinitely.

It’s time for the balance to begin swinging back from security toward liberty in our neighborhood, and reopening Park Row would be a great place to start. (And while we’re at it, how about reopening Pearl Street between St. James and Avenue of the Finest? Or maybe one thing at a time…)

When I lived in Jersey City and worked at home, the car had practical usefulness: not only did I have it available for daily shopping and errands, but on evenings and weekends I was 10 minutes via the Holland Tunnel from Lower Manhattan, where evening and weekend street parking is pretty easy to find.

After that, in inner Brooklyn, I lived in a neighborhood where storing a car on the street was possible, if not convenient, as long as you resigned yourself to one street cleaning ticket a month; I got fewer than that, on average, and still had the car available not just for weekend trips, but also for on-demand use when the need arose.

Moving back into Manhattan, however, has pretty much eliminated the on-demand use, because my car now lives in a parking lot across the Brooklyn Bridge in downtown Brooklyn, 4 subway stops from my apartment or a $9 cab ride each way. Yes, dear reader, my car and I live in different boroughs, and as I write this, I’m just back from dropping the car off at the end of the weekend and coming home in a taxi.

What makes this crazy-sounding situation rational is the pricing. Manhattan parking is priced like the scarce resource it is — in the $400-600/month range with very rare exceptions — and so I save upwards of $300 a month this way, even taking into account those taxi rides over the bridge. And this despite the fact that the category of parking I pay for, “storage,” requires me to fork over an additional 5 bucks plus a tip each time I pick up the car. (I can still get at the car 24/7, I just need to pay the 5 bucks each time I do.)

Now that I’m so used to the situation that I no longer dwell on its apparent absurdity, let me make a few observations:

Storage parking is a good idea. People like me are willing to live with a little inconvenience in exchange for saving a lot of money, and everybody wins: the garage keeps occupancy incrementally higher, the city gets a bit more parking tax, and I have a place to park.

My willingness to park in Brooklyn is evidence of a healthy market, not evidence that I’m somehow being “forced” to do something I “don’t want” to do. On the continuum between cost and inconvenience (given the underlying economics of providing this good in this city at this time), it so happens that a vendor is occupying the very position that I feel maximizes my happiness. Lucky me! This is a good thing, and in general, fostering new and creative ways of letting buyers and sellers “settle” their supply/demand transactions is a good thing. Let a million flowers bloom.

To whatever extent I’m typical, congestion pricing will work. I’m responding to a market disincentive (a $5 per-use fee plus inconvenience valued at $X) by using the car only when I really need it. I can afford the 5 bucks whenever I decide it’s worthwhile or don’t have an easy alternative, but every time I choose not to, that’s an incremental bit of public benefit in the form of foregone externality. There have been dozens of times when I opted for the subway because getting the car out seemed like too much of a pain. There have even been a couple of hauling jobs where, all things considered, it made sense to leave the car parked in Brooklyn and pick up a Zipcar on 7th Avenue, and I did.

It should be hard to have a car in the city! The infrastructure needed to support city cars is finite and expensive, and the land used for parking in Manhattan comes out of the same finite supply of land that’s used for everything else on this narrow island. We’ve made a philosophical decision as a society that most of our automotive infrastructure will be supported out of general revenues, but at the margins, whatever portion we can allocate back to the users will help keep the market for that scarce resource a little more honest, by discouraging whatever portion of demand can be satisfied just as well by less socially onerous means.

In Atlanta, I had an entire 2-bedroom house to myself, a small house to be sure, but with a somewhat-useable dirt crawlspace below and a full attic above, both of which encouraged me to spread out, keep everything forever (AC adapters to God-knows-what device I threw out in 1993, etc.), and waste no time sorting or organizing. The difficulty of getting to those spaces (not to mention the moldy dankness of the crawlspace and the infernal heat of the attic) only made it more likely that I would visit them rarely and that whatever I put in them would be forgotten about, or if it wasn’t forgotten about, at least it would be impossible to find when needed.

I’ve gone through three aggressive winnowings since then (I gave thousands of books to the DeKalb County, Georgia Public Library before moving north, and hauled a shameful amount of perfectly good clothing over to Housing Works before leaving Brooklyn). But even so, I’ve had to become ruthlessly organized since moving to New York, and having only one closet in this current apartment just makes it more crucially important to be ruthless about it.

So I was particularly proud of myself just now when I needed an extension cord for a mundane task (okay, it was to plug in this iPad without moving my chair), and I was able to go into the closet, reach for a box marked EXT CORDS, and take my pick from among several neatly packed in there. I’m sorry it took me until my forties to understand the virtues of living this way, but I plan to make the most of it in the years I have left.

This isn’t really the time or place to talk about Fairway the supermarket, other than to say that this small local supermarket chain — the chain is small, not the stores — carries the best combination I know of fresh produce and meat and cheese and baked goods, affordably priced and creatively sourced gourmet and specialty products, and ordinary groceries. I think after a particularly difficult case of weekend shopping exhaustion I once described the Red Hook Fairway (the Brooklyn outpost, full of Park Slope stroller families in their Zipcars on “big weekend shop” excursions) as “imagine that Trader Joe’s had a baby with Ikea,” but that isn’t quite sufficient, because the raison d’être of Fairway is its produce and meat and cheese, which are truly spectacular.

But I digress. Today’s topic is Fairway’s upstairs restaurant, which (like Henrietta’s) aspires to a cuisine that might be called “fresh and honest,” although with the look-how-fresh-and-honest-I-am brassiness of a New York place. And I have to say I’ve consumed plenty of excellence at Fairway Cafe, which shares some of the traits I like about Henrietta’s (starting with the open kitchen, which I neglected to mention about Henrietta’s last night). It makes a steak that is very good indeed, along with great cafe dishes like chicken schnitzel; traditional sandwiches (like egg salad on black bread) are exceptionally sharp and good; the by-the-glass wine list is extensive; the desserts are classics, and much less snooty than the ones at Henrietta’s. Salads are well composed; vegetables are always fresh. It won’t do for everything Henrietta’s will do for (I wouldn’t take a client there, for instance), but it’s the sort of place that I want to want to eat in four times a week.

The food itself, in other words, is steady, in the best sense. The sourcing is not as fastidious as Henrietta’s, but it’s quite good (hello! it’s inside of Fairway — there is no better retail source for consistent fresh food in New York City). And the prices are reasonable.

The problem with Fairway Cafe is that the service is irregular. The staff have their friendly and competent moments, and everyone means well, but there are times when it takes forever to get someone’s attention and another forever to get what you wanted. (At Henrietta’s, all I have to do is look in the general direction of “up” and someone is at my side asking what I need.) Plating at Fairway can be slapdash; I’ve had orders go in a little wrong; and generally the experience just doesn’t feel tight.

I am endlessly giving Fairway Cafe second chances, because when it is good it is very good indeed, and I like the setting (looking out on Broadway from a big second-floor window, left alone to read a good book while I eat a delicious and reasonably priced meal). I keep bringing friends there in the hope that they’ll have a one-of-its-best-days experience and see the magic that I see. They rarely do. Maybe with a little pressure from my millions of readers they’ll tighten up the ship just a bit and it will become the place it deserves to be.

Paying more than half their income in taxes violates most people’s sense of fairness. More importantly, the higher the marginal rate, the bigger the payoff from tax avoidance–and the more you can afford to pay smart tax lawyers while still coming out ahead yourself.

I think this is probably right on both counts. A decade or more ago I knew people who relocated to Florida and New Hampshire solely for tax reasons, and I thought they were insane, but the older I get and the more I start thinking about retiring someday (yes, I know, ack!), the less sure I am. I instantly got more interested in tax avoidance when I moved from Georgia (a very low-tax state) to New York City (subject to a high New York state rate, a separate New York City income tax, and on top of that an “unincorporated business tax” seen nowhere else that feels incredibly punitive to those of us new to the city). I haven’t done anything about it, except at the margins (incrementally more charitable giving, and so forth), but you can bet that if someone came to me and said “for a thousand bucks a year in perpetuity, I’ll give you a legal way to cut your tax burden by X percent” or whatever, I’d at least buy them a cup of coffee and hear about it. And, for the record, I’m not even “rich”!

None of this means I don’t appreciate the benefits of living in a high-tax, high-service jurisdiction like New York. I moved here on purpose, for a number of good reasons, and wanting to experience life in a place with a strong social contract (excellent public services and community amenities, and one of America’s strongest social safety nets) was one of them. But they call New York expensive because it is expensive, and even in New York (a place where, a year or so ago, millionaires supported in public a proposal to slap a surtax on their incomes to cover the budget gap in basic services, even as some of them unsuccessfully lobbied in private to kill it), there’s a limit to how high you can turn up the dial.

As McArdle notes, we’re pulling ever closer to that 50% threshold, so watch out.

Your price may vary. There may be times when that 25 minutes you save on the Acela between New York and Washington really are worth the extra money; but this morning I’m on the Keystone to Philadelphia, which is a good hundred bucks cheaper than the morning Acela, and (more surprisingly) 40 bucks cheaper than the Northeast Regional service that leaves and arrives 10 minutes later. I’m not sure why, since between here and Philadelphia it runs on the same tracks to the same station at roughly the same speed, but it doesn’t matter; I’m no fool, and a $46 ride beats a $150 ride any day.

Newark Penn Station is a secret that ought to get out. From Lower Manhattan, where I live, it’s an easy 20-minute PATH ride to Newark, where I can catch the southbound trains about 16 minutes into their routes. Given the inconvenience and general ugliness of Penn Station, this is much preferable; the Newark concourse has everything I care about that the Penn concourse has (including a Zaro’s) but your schlepping is cut by 80 percent. Not to mention the fact that in the early morning, I can leave my house half an hour before the train leaves Penn Station and still head it off at Newark, with time to spare to load up on coffee. Try that on the C train. Which leads me to…

Bring your own mug. It sounds ridiculous, but trust me. Navigating the station and negotiating a crowded train car is much easier if you’re carrying your coffee in a metal mug with a tightly seated lid, rather than whatever paper/plastic combo you happen to be handed at the coffee spot. I know you’re thinking “I don’t want to schlep that thing all the way back to New York later,” but, again, trust me, it fits in the bottom of your briefcase, and the morning benefit is worth the incremental evening inconvenience. Just try it. I use a nothing-special stainless mug with a plastic top, which I bought at the Edgewood Target in Atlanta about 5 years ago for under 10 bucks.

More news as it develops.

Finding myself at home unexpectedly for dinner, approaching 9pm (at which point delivery starts to get complicated in this neighborhood), I remembered that I now live next door to Zaitzeff, the home of one of Manhattan’s best quasi-gourmet burgers and fries. I ate at Zaitzeff a few times shortly after they opened several years ago, back when I was in full startup-company mode and couldn’t really afford 15 bucks for a burger and fries. It still feels like a lot of money, but I remember the experience fondly, and so tonight I said, “What the hell?”, and I dug the menu out of the menu box and gave them a call.

They were backed up on deliveries, but they cheerfully accommodated a pickup right away, so I walked next door to pick up my greasy and aromatic brown paper bag and brought it home.

Here are the contents, unloaded onto a plate in my kitchen:

And here’s the same photo with something added that I really think it needed:

I got the 1/4-pound sirloin, well done, with cheddar, and an order of Idaho fries. The burger came with a generous hunk of iceberg and a slab of tomato and a mound of well-sauteed onions, on which was melted a lump of high-quality white cheddar. The burger itself was done to my taste, well-seasoned and flavorful. And the whole thing was served on a big sweet chewy Portuguese muffin. No complaints here.

The fries were hand-cut and well-done, fried in peanut oil (I’m guessing), streaked with dark brown and salted just right. The closest fries I can think of are those at Five Guys, but I always roll out of there feeling like I ate way too much; these fries were satisfying but not heavy, so maybe there’s a trick of some kind.

All in all, another satisfying fast-food meal, about a 15-second walk from the front door of my building — and more evidence that the living down here in the Financial District is better than you think it is.

To those of us who came to live in the city in the last decade, it’s sometimes difficult to imagine the Upper West Side, and New York City generally, as Podhoretz (like Saul Bellow, and a parade of others) assures us it was: physically neglected and crumbling, the social fabric frayed, at times menacing to the point of anarchy. Neighborhoods that today are overrun with $900 strollers and yoga studios and some of the most expensive brownstone real estate in the city can be difficult to imagine otherwise. But it was not always this way, and the documentary evidence exists of how it used to be: in the Times, in contemporary news footage and in the photo archive of the Museum of the City of New York (seen in the current exhibit and in the “Lindsay Years” documentary recently shown on WNET), in the memories of three generations of people born between 1920 and 1980. All those people didn’t move to Westchester and Merrick (and, on the coast I grew up in, to Northridge and Anaheim and Walnut Creek) for nothing; they were searching for a place where they could be free of the weight of a place where (in their view) the social contract seemed to have broken down. I knew a family of Brooklyn refugees in the San Fernando Valley in my early childhood; they obviously longed for the sweet place they had known, but they longed for it with (as I inferred) the resolution of people who knew that, at least for now, it was gone.

Even I am old enough to have had experience of New York in its anarchic and menacing days, or at least the tail end of them, in the 1980s, when the chattering classes were unified in the sense that something had to change — that the old responses to the breakdown of the old ways weren’t going to work — but nobody was yet quite sure how to pull it off. When I first visited the city in 1982, the overwhelming impression was of a place where people had lost the daily experience of routine social order, though they never lost the hope of regaining it. A city where armed guards sit in the entranceways of college dormitories is a city that is gritting its teeth in the face of an onslaught it can’t quite marshal the resources to defeat, waiting for a savior to come along.

We all know what happened: the city bounced back, changed in some ways but not in others. Podhoretz seems pretty emphatic that all the changes are for the better; I’m not so sure. The corporatization and homogenization of the city have exacted their costs (most notably in pushing popular cultural activity out of the central core). But, re Podhoretz, what right have I to expect otherwise from someone who in childhood was serially mugged, grew up in a world where assault was routine, watched a generation of failed attempts to tame the chaos in his own neighborhood? If you’re the one being punched in the face and knocked to the ground, it’s hard to take the long view.

And on a warm evening like this, you get to eat your meal surrounded by a mob of good-looking people — comprising a broad cross-section of New Yorkers of all ages, and a good many of whom meet the qualifications to have their photos posted here — enjoying the pre-summer air.

As a counterweight to all the calories in this post (not to mention the implied lust), here’s some brain food: a bonus Madison Square Park photo of Secretary of State William Seward, the one who purchased Alaska for the United States from Russia in 1867.

This can’t be unique to New York City, but in case it is, and/or for those who are just joining us, here’s how you do it:

• Dress like you’re pitiful and you don’t have much to lose; alternatively, puff yourself up to look bigger and more menacing than you actually are. Your choice.
• Find a pair of broken eyeglasses. (Alternative: find a pair of unbroken eyeglasses, then step on them.)
• Stand on 20th Street near a busy sidewalk — busy enough that you can pretend to have been jostled, but not so busy that you will actually be jostled.
• Scope out your quarry — ideally a man (because they’re more likely to be willing to pay you to go away) in a hurry, of apparent means, ideally someone distracted, preferably a rube (which makes me wonder why I was chosen, but let’s not dwell on that). Bonus points for choosing someone who is smaller than you, weaker than you, or has vague interethnic or interclass unease around you. With practice, you’ll learn how to watch your prey and respond to his signals to get the most money out of each rube you roll.
• As your quarry approaches, hold the pair of glasses in your hand. Pretend to be wiping or adjusting them, then at the last second, bump him on the shoulder and toss the glasses in his path.
• When he steps on (or near) them, cry out in horror. Say, “You broke my glasses!” Demand and collect payment, and be on your way. (Don’t forget the glasses — you’ll need them to try this again over on 7th Avenue in a few minutes.)

Now, this is obviously, patently, clearly a hustle. I know this not just because my common sense tells me so, but because it’s happened to me before on the streets of New York, back in 2005 right after I arrived. (That time, I’m pretty sure I could have been pegged as a rube from 2 blocks away.) I can’t remember the details, other than that (1) I really felt intense emotional/social pressure to pay up; (2) I don’t think I paid up; and (3) I felt angry, frustrated, and a little dirty after the experience — I had a very strong sense that I was being rolled, but I couldn’t prove it. Robert Cialdini could probably explain where the social pressure to pay comes from (and some of it certainly comes from the New Yorker’s determination not to “make a scene”). But it doesn’t really matter; obviously the scam works, or it wouldn’t keep happening.

It didn’t work on me this time, though. At all. I was really pissed, and showed it. (It wasn’t a great day. I’d left the house without an umbrella, and was in the process of being drenched by cold sideways rain for the third time in six hours.) I picked up the glasses I’d “broken,” looked him in the eye, and handed them to him. “Hey,” he exclaimed, his timing all off, “you broke my glasses!” I think what I said was “Dude, this is a hustle. Do you think I just got off the boat?” before I turned around and resumed walking in the direction I’d been heading. He came after me, halfheartedly, for about 50 yards, calling “Hey! Hey!, then moved on to try it again somewhere else.

What is wrong with people?

Ryan points out that for many people in neighborhoods like Bushwick, Williamsburg, and Ridgewood, life will actually improve, because they’ll now have a one-train route into Manhattan.

Effective January 29, 2010, all TLC licensed drivers must comply as follows:

You MAY NOT have a Bluetooth or other wireless or wired telephone device in or near your ear – even if you are not talking on it or listening to it.

You may not use a handheld or hands-free cell phone while driving – you MUST be “Legally Standing or Parked.”

While driving, you may NOT use any portable electronic devices that allow you to talk, text, communicate or become distracted in any way.

Only FHV drivers may receive dispatch information from a base using a mounted electronic device or FCC-licensed two-way radio. Communication must be brief and strictly business-related.

If you are convicted of using prohibited electronic devices while driving, you will be fined $200 and will earn three (3) penalty points on your TLC license under the TLC’s Persistent Violator Program. (Please be reminded that within any 15-month period if you accrue six (6) TLC points, you will serve a 30-day license suspension, and will have your license revoked if you reach 10 TLC points).

If you are convicted of a third violation within a 15-month period, your TLC license will be revoked – three strikes and you’re out!This includes any combination of summonses issued by TLC officers as well as those issued under the Vehicle & Traffic Law that are heard at the NYS Dept. of Motor Vehicles’ Traffic Court (e.g., summonses issued by NYPD police officers and any other authorized law enforcement personnel).

If you are convicted of any cell phone violation, in addition to accruing points, possible suspension and fines, you will be required to attend a mandatory Safety Refresher Course that illustrates the dangers of distracted driving. The course will review the rules governing the use of portable or hands-free devices, and the dangers of driving while distracted. Also, all newly licensed drivers, and probationary drivers, will be required to receive similar training as part of the licensing process.

Full text of the rule here (PDF).

WIth my friends list hitting critical mass, and the venue database filling out, the whole thing is becoming more than a curiosity from where I sit. As a sort of experiment, I’ve tried to take the game seriously for the past couple of weeks — checking in religiously at every legitimate venue I visit, adding those that are missing, trying to recruit more friends to participate.

As a result, I’m currently leading my friends in points, and (as Andrew Hearst called to my attention this afternoon) I’ve hit the NYC leaderboard for this week, and am currently ranked somewhere in the mid-forties. (The numbers reset to zero on Sunday night, so I have another two days of glory before I fall off the list.)

This certainly won’t last (at a minimum, the resourceful Ryan J. Davis will certainly figure out a way to push back up to first position among my friends, where he usually is). But it’s been fun.

Foursquare has evolved; at least among the comparatively middle-aged people I know, it’s no longer only about keeping track of your friends when they “go out” at night. That’s resulted in some gray areas about what kinds of check-ins are legitimate, which the game designers didn’t or couldn’t anticipate or resolve. So in honor of the game, I’m going to publish a draft set of rules for fair play right here, for your review and comment.

Rule #1: You may check in only at publicly accessible places.

A place has to be publicly accessible, otherwise it’s not fair to others who might be passing by and could benefit from a check-in. Workplace check-ins are legitimate, as long as your workplace is open to the public or frequently visited by people who don’t work there. Checking in at your house is tacky; checking in at the “100 Park Avenue Apartments” is right on the line. I’d say it’s “acceptable,” but I wouldn’t do it.

Rule #2: You may check in only at named places.

A place has to have a name in order to be legit. What I really mean by this is that it has to have a Platonic identity; it has to exist at all times of the day or night, and everyone has to agree on what its name refers to. So, for instance, any named business is okay. “City Hall Park” or “Times Square” or “Staten Island Ferry” are all legit, because everyone knows what you mean. Your doctor’s office is okay. Public landmarks and facilities are okay. “Coffee Cart at 23rd and 6th” (or “JetBlue Flight 807″) — well, now, that’s just sad.

A geekier way to express Rules #1 and #2 together: if it doesn’t belong in a venue database, what are you doing checking in there?

Subway stations are legit (and someone has helpfully loaded all the NYC stations into the system in a consistent manner — search for “MTA” when you’re standing outside the station). You may check in once when you enter the system and once when you leave. NB: A bus stop (streetcorner, parking lot, etc.) is not a place!

Rule #3: You may check in at a place more than once in a day, as long as you go somewhere else in between.

This one will stir some controversy, but I think it’s fair (as long as Rules #1 and #2 are also observed). Abusers of this privilege will be executed by lethal injection.

Rule #4: You must physically be on the premises in order to be permitted to check in at a place.

So, for instance: if Duane Reade is closed when you walk by, you’re out of luck. And parking in the parking lot of a business that is closed does not count as “being on the premises.” Nor does placing an online order from a restaurant via Delivery.com. (However: if you stop at the ATM outside the bank and transact business, you’re on the premises — go to town!)

Rule #5: Hiding your location from your friends is not cheating.

You’re given an option not to tell your friends when you check-in. Use it whenever you like, as long as you’re respecting all the other rules. For instance, you’re not necessarily entitled to know who all my clients are, or where my dentist’s office is, or where I’m taking my sweetheart out to dinner. But if the venues otherwise qualify, why shouldn’t I get the points?

Rule #6: Play the game with goodwill.

This rule always trumps Rules #1 through #5.

Accreted urban infrastructure (today’s, yesterday’s, Robert Moses’, and on and on back to whatever motley crew of Dutch and English filled in Lower Manhattan’s canals) is everywhere in New York. Indeed, metro NYC must benefit from the densest infrastructure (especially given its land area) of any settled place in human history, with the possible exception of London. And infrastructure is the single most important reason that New York, and especially Manhattan, remains such a desirable place to live and do business. Infrastructure is what makes Manhattan levels of density bearable in the first place, which in turn enables all the positive second-order social effects of such a dense environment.

And all that infrastructure is the result of hundreds or thousands of smart, forward-looking choices made over the past 300 years.

Consider the infrastructure I’m using right now: from where I live and work, I have my choice of two separate and mostly non-overlapping public transit pathways to JFK, and three or more to Newark Airport. All of of those routes will get me to their respective airports in about an hour, give or take; all cost about $12 or less. (Apparently, Google Maps’ transit planner isn’t yet aware of the Newark AirTrain; any human smart enough to make it to Newark Penn Station can probably do better than Google thinks.) We in New York take these things for granted, but they should not be taken for granted, as a visit to any place of comparable size with an “infrastructure gap” (like, for instance, Los Angeles, where I grew up) will make immediately clear to you.

Those smart choices didn’t happen by accident; in each case, someone decided that they were worth the pain and cost of planning, construction, ongoing operating subsidies perhaps forever. (Don’t discount the costs of coordination and promotion, either: the fact that I consider “A train to Penn Station; LIRR commuter rail to Jamaica; Port Authority dedicated rail to the terminal” as simply “the train to JFK” constitutes a marketing triumph by the Port Authority.) And each component of these systems took years, sometimes decades, to put in place. New York City has been extending and tinkering with the subway system more or less continuously for 106 years.

What are we going to need in 50 years? 100 years? We’d better get moving.

Now, if only someone would build a dedicated high-speed link to La Guardia Airport, we’d be in business. Then again, La Guardia is the most overtaxed (and the most convenient to the central core) of our three major airports, so it was probably smart policy to link to the others first.