Rich Mintz  

Today was Yellow Pages Day in Manhattan — that public holiday of long standing in which elves scurry about throughout the night and into the wee hours of the morning, depositing identical yellow books, shrinkwrapped in groups of six, on doorsteps throughout the land.

I passed several of these parcels, unwanted and unloved, on my walk from the subway to work this morning. I even momentarily fingered a copy of the 2010-2011 Yellow Book, thinking “I should take this home, maybe I’ll need it.” Then I stopped myself. For what? What could possibly be in that book that I can’t find more quickly, search for more effectively, evaluate more usefully online? I set it down, walked into the office… and found a copy of the 2010-2011 Yellow Book already sitting in the office recycling bin.

Like the landline that it once existed to serve, the Yellow Pages is on its way out. Even nine years ago (!), when I was trying to promote my fledgling bookstore, the ad salespeople were already desperate. (I didn’t bite. What they were charging was ridiculous, and even in 2002 the Yellow Pages already felt “over.”) Now they must be apoplectic from the stench of their own imminent obsolescence. This is a business that still exists only because certain parties (ad salespeople, printing companies, certain types of traditional businesses and conservative businesspeople) are locked in a cycle of mutual addiction and denial, reinforced by a dollop of voodoo and magical thinking. Of all the types of advertising your small business could possibly pay for in the current environment, the Yellow Pages must be one of the least trackable, and it’s certainly one of the least nimble.

Which is why you saw things like this on the street today in Manhattan:

The first three photos above were taken about 7pm, roughly 15 hours after the elves made the last of their deliveries. That last photo was taken at midnight (approaching 24 hours after dropoff) in the lobby of an apartment building. I repeat: in almost 24 hours, nobody in this 10-unit apartment building took a copy. To the constituency allegedly intended to consume it (whose consumption of it is the product being sold to advertisers), this product is literally worth nothing. Why is this thing still being produced again?

…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!

The Awl sends crack reporter Jordan Carr to Park Place in Lower Manhattan, to investigate the neighborhood where the new Islamic center is going in. He finds a defunct Burlington Coat Factory, an OTB full of sad old guys, and a bunch of people who don’t give a shit about Cordoba House, as, you know, pretty much any of us who live anywhere near there could have told you.

I’m ashamed of my fellow Americans this month, as allegedly intelligent and thoughtful people toss the Constitution (not to mention American values and common sense) in the garbage, and come out against the Islamic cultural center (abbreviated by everyone as “mosque”) on Park Place in Lower Manhattan.

This location is six blocks from my apartment, and I walk past it almost daily, so I think I have standing to have an opinion on the matter. The elected and appointed officials who have jurisdiction are, in large part, people whom I and my neighbors selected, who serve at our whim and whose salaries we pay. Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, live 4,300 miles away and 236 miles away, respectively. Would they kindly shut the hell up and go away?

There have been Muslim-Americans living in Lower Manhattan effectively forever, in planning terms; there were mosques in our neighborhood before the World Trade Center was here, and long before I lived here, and certainly before Sarah Palin ever came shopping here. Every day, hundreds of Muslim-American taxi drivers stop for lunch or dinner at one of the halal restaurants on Church Street around the corner from the proposed site. And last time I checked, neither the First Amendment nor RLUIPA had an asterisk leading to the disclaimer “except Muslims.” End of story.

Matt Yglesias’s Mosque Exclusion Zone posts are funny, and right on point, but this is a serious matter, which is why I was so disappointed to learn today that the Anti-Defamation League, one of America’s most important historical forces against intolerance and bigotry, has come down on the wrong side of this issue.

There are, to be sure, political issues in American social discourse that have two sides. But if you have any respect at all for equality, for freedom of religion, or for the founding principles of America, this isn’t one of them. And we do have plots of secular hallowed ground in America — but they’re not at “Ground Zero” (an embarrassing term that highlights all the wrong aspects of the events of the past decade). They’re in Montgomery, where Rosa Parks rode home from work on the bus. They’re in Little Rock, at Central High School. They’re at Tule Lake, in California, where my great-grandparents (I’ve been told) taught school during one of the most shameful failures of our constitutional system in our nation’s history. They’re at Gettysburg. They’re in Jackson Heights, Queens, home of some of the most diverse census tracts in the country.

I’m angry at Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich, but at the end of the day, what can you expect from anti-intellectuals and opportunists? But the ADL? I’m ashamed of them, for losing sight of their mission, and for the implication that they are speaking in my name as a Jewish American. They emphatically are not, and I’m afraid they have done permanent damage to their credibility today.

Thanks to Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and a passel of other inflammatory scab-pickers, the country’s been newly reminded that the World Trade Center site is still mostly a big hole in the ground. Those of us who live here, and deal daily with the dislocation of living a few blocks from a gigantic construction site, with arterial streets running along both sides and half a dozen subway lines in continuous service underneath and around it, don’t need reminding. (For the record: “yes” on the Islamic cultural center, which is six blocks from my house. Muslims were living and working in this neighborhood long before I moved in.)

There’s a piece of the project that isn’t about the World Trade tower reconstruction, isn’t about the memorial, that’s much more important than these to those of us who live down here. And that’s the Fulton Street Transit Center construction, which is just over halfway through its nine-year construction. It got a kick in the pants from the WTC project, and a $424-million-dollar jolt of energy from the stimulus, but we needed it in any case.

Being built mostly by Skanska USA, the Swedish construction behemoth you’ve never heard of but that dominates civil engineering projects here in New York, the project will link 13 underground train lines that currently pass through about six unconnected station complexes, serving hundreds of thousands of people a day. These train lines currently run through infrastructure that’s as old as the subway system itself, and they all have to continue running throughout the duration of the project, so this constitutes a massive project from the standpoint of both capital investment and logistics.

We see the logistics everywhere in Lower Manhattan, where we’re constantly detouring around construction equipment, Skanska employees, and Jersey barriers on the sidewalk and in the street. Fulton Street has been torn up, for this and other projects, the entire time I’ve been living in New York. (DeLury Park opens next month!) But the project is sorely needed, and those of us living and working down here are trying to be patient. When it’s done, we’ll have a shiny new station and vastly improved transit usability down here in Manhattan’s original dense urban neighborhood.