Rich Mintz  

Via eBroadsheet: a 2-bedroom, 2-bath clapboard house has been erected on the World Financial Center plaza (by the marina, apparently). It’s a demonstration of green, efficient, cost-effective housing design. Tour info here; through June 17th.

Made a quick lunchtime visit today to the Limelight Marketplace, the church-turned-nightclub-turned-empty-building-full-of-pigeons-turned-fashion-retail-minimall around the corner from my office. I hadn’t been inside, but I’d watched the transformation on the way to and from the subway, and had seen the coverage.

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 got home tonight after a long day — culminating in a schleppy ride downtown in a wet taxi with a (friendly and delightful) colleague — ready to collapse on the couch, and discovered at the door to my building that I’d locked myself out. This does happen from time to time, and the typical social economics of living in the city suggest that I probably have a friend or two who have spare keys to my apartment. I do, and was able to intercept one of them about two hours later, get the spares, and get into my place to discover that my keys were there safe and sound on the table. So, score one for “things might have been worse.”

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!

Writing in the Downtown Express, Aline Reynolds makes the case for reopening Park Row, an important north-south thoroughfare between Chinatown and the Financial District that’s been closed on the pretext of security since shortly after the September 11 attacks.

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…)

Just wanted to put in a quick lunch plug for A Desi Diner, on 31st Street between 5th and Madison (open until 4am — and 24 hours on weekends). At lunchtime during the week, they serve impeccable, freshly prepared Indian steam-table dishes, to eat in or take out, for a price so low I can’t believe they make money doing it. And they deliver from 23rd to 42nd Street, almost river to river. It’s the kind of neighborhood place I wish I had in my neighborhood!

Like a lot of people who came to New York from somewhere else, I owned a car when I got here. And unlike many others, I’ve kept mine. It’s city-sized (a VW New Beetle), has been well-maintained, and is cheap to insure; and it happens to be at that cost-effective point where it’s paid for, but still a few years away from starting to fall to pieces. I like driving it, and we use it 20 or 30 weekends a year to get out of the city and for local hauling and errands.

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.

I live in a big open loft apartment. One of the best things about this apartment is that it has a gigantic closet, but one of the worst things is that it has only one closet, and that one closet must be organized so as to usefully contain everything I own that I don’t want in full view: shirts, pants, sweaters, linens, suitcases, stationery supplies, candles, coaxial cable, the extra TV, the odd painting, an AeroBed, 11th grade journals, and so forth. (Like many New Yorkers, I also have a storage unit, inconveniently located on the wrong side of a river and rarely visited, in which I keep even less important possessions that surely aren’t worth keeping, and eventually will be gotten rid of.)

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.

Last night I said I thought Henrietta’s Table in Cambridge, Massachusetts was my favorite restaurant in America, because I couldn’t think of another restaurant I’d gladly eat in four times a week for the rest of my life. And I still can’t. (I’ve already eaten there again since I wrote that, and I’m having breakfast there in the morning.) But I do want to call out one other place that I like, on its best days, for some of the same reasons: Fairway Cafe and Steakhouse, upstairs from the flabbergastingly superb Fairway supermarket at 74th and Broadway in New York City.

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.

In Megan McArdle’s post “Why We Can’t Just Keep Raising Taxes on the Rich”, she notes that there’s a marginal tax rate beyond which tax avoidance behaviors start to be more attractive, and that that rate (empirically speaking) seems to be in the vicinity of 50 percent:

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.

Work has taken me up and down the Northeast Corridor, mostly on Amtrak, a dozen times over the past month, which means it’s time for some Commuter Chatter:

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.