Rich Mintz  

In the past 3 weeks I’ve more than doubled my mileage on the FlyKly electric bike. In 250 miles I’ve been over every East River bridge (most of them twice), as well as the Pulaski, and been up and down the 1st, 2nd, 6th, and 8th Avenue corridors numerous times.

At this point I ride comfortably, without feeling awkward on the bike (despite the fact that now that I have the rear storage compartment installed, my seating position is a little squeezed). And I no longer have my eyes peeled for police: I watch for them, sure, but I haven’t been hassled at all, even when riding through areas where I’d be cautious even on a normal bike.

On a day like tonight, the FlyKly is perfect for a long loop like the one I took — from the West 70s looping through the bottom of Central Park, over the Queensboro Bridge, through Long Island City to the Pulaski, through central Greenpoint and down the Brooklyn waterfront to north Williamsburg, around the Navy Yard to the Brooklyn Bridge and then home. With 2 stops for coffee and one for a Tom Collins, of course. That’s about 20 miles, which (on top of the 5 miles I did earlier in the day) just about tapped my battery out. But it’s the kind of fun that I moved to New York in order to have — I saw about 10 neighborhoods (depending on how you count), and a beautiful sunset, in about two hours.

In the two months I’ve had the bike, I’ve been cussed at by a total of two bicyclists (one each on the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges) and told “you can’t park here” a total of twice. In exchange for that, I’ve been fawned over by at least a hundred cyclists, pedestrians, and motorists. Today alone I got an enthusiastic “thumbs up” from a guy in a van on Jackson Avenue in Long Island City, and had three separate substantive conversations about the bike with people who coveted it. And the curious include people of all ages (including the elderly), and everyone from douchey-looking dudes to barely-English-speaking deliverymen. Security guards and doormen especially love it, but it’s not just a guy thing; I had a long chat with a woman of at least 60 who saw the potential in it.

Shelley Bernstein at the Brooklyn Museum has appealed for our help with a fascinating project: Historypin is building a localized database of historical photos, pinned to a map of the world, and they need our help marking the location where their historical Brooklyn photos were taken.  So be part of this crowdsourced project — take 30 seconds and look over these historical photos of Brooklyn and see if you can suggest a location for them.

I’m sure these Brooklyn hipsters are perfectly nice in person, but when I read about them in the paper, it kind of makes me wish I had a sack of bedbugs to let loose in their coworking sanctuary in the middle of the night.

Don’t kids just, you know, “do things” anymore, without it being a Statement about What They Stand For?

I know the answer: “of course they don’t, and they never did.”  Every generation is intolerably self-important in its own special unique curated-and-encoded way.  (Remember, mine invented the Web the first time around.  And my parents’ generation? Don’t get me started.)  Not to mention that the company I work for isn’t exactly Dunder Mifflin (for my British friends: that’s “Wernham Hogg” in American).

But still… there’s artisanal coworking, and then there’s artisanal coworking. Just saying.

To the news that Atlantic Yards developer Bruce Ratner is considering erecting the world’s tallest (at 34 stories) prefabricated steel building right here in Brooklyn, I have only one thing to say: bring it on.

Prefab construction is cost-effective, environmentally sensitive, and fast. For lots of reasons, though — starting with the fact that you need room for a gigantic crane, and staging space — it’s often not feasible in the city. But it would work at Atlantic Yards, and the building would be really interesting — a first, a biggest, a one-of-a-kind.

To those who are concerned about jobs, while I’m sympathetic, I’d say this: society as a whole benefits when vastly more efficient methods become mainstream. The money no longer spent on the formerly-inefficient thing is freed up to be spent on everything else in the economy, or to be saved and invested elsewhere. It isn’t Bruce Ratner’s job to operate inefficient in order to create the maximum possible number of jobs; it’s his job to get the damn buildings built, after this long delay, so that economic health can begin to return to the hole in the middle of Brooklyn.

And if we as a society want to put builders to work, we have a way to do it — it’s called economic stimulus. We did it through ARRA, and the positive effects are being seen all across America, including right here in New York City:

…namely, that “if your aim is to attract people, food and drink are the main attractions,” in the words of Philip Myrick of the Project for Public Spaces.

The occasion is this story about cafe life in Portland — you can read it. Myrick’s point is that if you want people to organically gather on the streets of your neighborhood, you need food and drink, suitable for all ages and stages in the community, sold and served in a way that lets people consume them in an organic fashion outdoors or visible from the street.

All true. But argh!

I don’t disagree with any of this, it’s all true, and I mean no disrespect to the exceptionally committed people at PPS — my reaction is more a sense of frustration and missed opportunity that this isn’t intuitively obvious, that it has to be said, and re-said, and re-re-said every decade or so, to every generation. If you, dear reader, are just figuring this out now, what have you been doing to your own downtown for the past 25 years? And how many young people have you driven away, how many working-age people have you effectively locked in their office buildings all day for how many days/weeks/years, how many old people have you consigned to spend their waning days sitting in their apartments (or, worse, sitting on a bench in the mall) because there’s nowhere worth going to?

Let’s get with it, America!

Anyone older than about 60 who grew up in a healthy community probably already knows that food is at the center of everything social. Nevermind community events like church socials and picnics — every town over a thousand people had a drugstore, with big plate-glass windows and a soda fountain or lunch counter, once upon a time, where you could see people going about the private business of eating in a semi-public way. And even younger people know it, if we’ve lived part of our lives in a healthy big city. I was living in the newly minted municipality of West Hollywood when the first round of modern artisanal coffehouses appeared in the early 1990s; the moment cafes started to appear, whole new populations began to use the street. Nothing has driven the sidewalk re-revitalization of Santa Monica Boulevard over the past decade more than streetfront dining.

Closer to home, think of New York: the most transformational change to the streetscape in the five years I’ve been here has been the simple addition of lots of chairs and tables all over the place, including in what used to be traffic lanes in the middle of Times Square. People want to sit down and, very often, eat and drink, in public. What are the healthiest public spaces in Lower Manhattan? One of them is Stone Street, which today is given over almost entirely to street dining. (Photo above: the pop-up cafe thrown up by the DOT on nearby Pearl Street last month.)

Or look at the opposite case. I was on a message-board thread this week about Fulton Mall, the tattered retail strip in downtown Brooklyn that (due to the volume of people passing through, and the lack of local alternatives) commands among the highest retail rents in New York City, despite the fact that nobody can stand it. Sure, Fulton Mall is filthy and disorderly and way too crowded, but if you’ve ever been to, say, the Venice boardwalk in Los Angeles, you know that filth and disorder and crowds are not sufficient to make a place unlovable. There’s something else. And something landscape designer Gil Lopez said on the list reminded me that one of the reasons everyone hates Fulton Mall is also one of the most obvious: there’s nothing to eat except junk, and there’s nowhere to sit down and eat it!

From the Brooklyn Paper via Curbed: downzoning fever is  coming to my old neighborhood Boerum Hill.  The worst of the sore-thumb inappropriate development is probably over for a while, given that the money stopped flowing 18 months ago, but it will still be good to have clearer rules in place.

I’m sitting in the office listening to the kind of review (from a colleague) of the newly reopened Pies ‘n’ Thighs, in Williamsburg, that makes me want to take the rest of the day off and go get two chicken biscuits (“hot sauce,” “honey,” “mountain of fried chicken,” “best biscuit of my life”), eat them, then sit on the Brooklyn waterfront all day and watch the boats go by. This after reading this salivation-inducing review yesterday. So I’m making plans for dinner in Williamsburg next week…

Had another Montreal smoked meat sandwich from Mile End, and this time I was thoughtful enough to snap a photo before I gobbled the thing down in four minutes. (Half-sour by Ba-Tampte; plate by Fishs Eddy.) A perfect sandwich.

I found myself in Boerum Hill about 9pm Sunday and decided to walk 2 blocks to check out the famed Mile End, which has allegedly brought Montreal-style smoked meat to New York. I’ve had this clipping stuck up on my refrigerator for 6 months, so it’s about time.

Amazingly, 5 nights a week Mile End is open until 10, and they dispense take-out sandwiches right out a window onto the street. I took one home. The claims are true: the slow-smoked, peppery slices, thin and a little fatty, are almost buttery in their smoothness, infused with the smoke flavor you only ever find in the products of barbecue joints in the middle of nowhere, piled onto good rye bread with mustard. Best eaten with a half-sour or two contributed from your refrigerator, and maybe a seltzer. Sorry, no photos of the sandwich, it didn’t last.