Rich Mintz  

I’ve been wanting to put on some extra miles, so this afternoon I decided to do a Brooklyn loop over two bridges, the Brooklyn and the Williamsburg. You can see my route here:

View Two Bridges Brooklyn Bike Loop in a larger map

This is almost exactly ten miles — long enough to get some real cardio exercise, but short enough to do in about an hour. (Plus there’s excellent coffee at the 3-mile and the 7-mile marks.)

OK, sure, I like greenmarkets as much as the next guy, but aren’t these people coming off as a little… whiny?

If you live in Southbridge Towers, not only do you have a (rundown, grungy, crowded, but serviceable) supermarket in your complex, you have Jubilee 2 blocks away, Zeytuna 3 blocks away, and a bright new Gristedes 4 blocks away, all of which are well-run and well-stocked, with lots of local and organic items. Zeytuna alone has about 100 varieties of olive oil. There’s a Whole Foods 5 minutes away by cab (and right on the M22), right near those greenmarkets they’re complaining are too far away.

I get it, farm-to-table is nice to have. But, hello, a record number of New Yorkers are on food stamps — I don’t consider “farmer’s market is 8 blocks away” a serious social problem.

This idea of building a land bridge to Governor’s Island — is it serious? Whether it’s actually a good idea or not, I’ll leave to the experts, but wouldn’t it be awesome to make some more Manhattan and connect it to a great big park?

The governor, prodded by Christine Quinn, has called upon New York City to stop fingerprinting applicants for food benefits, which according to a City Council analysis deters 20,000 people from claiming needed aid they are eligible for. That’s 20,000 families going hungry unnecessarily, for fear of fraud.

But the scale of actual fraud is tiny (as is virtually always the case when fraud is cited). The city says that in the last fiscal year, $4 million was saved through fingerprinting, through 1,200 duplications. 1.8 million people in New York City receive food stamps, meaning that the fraud rate is two-thirds of a tenth of one percent. Or, put another way, the number of families going hungry because of this policy is 17 times the number of fraud cases. Isn’t something wrong here?

I just saw NYC human resources commissioner Robert Doar on NY1 calling fingerprinting a simple and effective measure, but I doubt that the sort of people Doar (and Bloomberg) run with would put up with being fingerprinted so easily. Doar is a good guy, and should have enough sense to understand that New York City’s most vulnerable are the very ones who need fewer hurdles to jump, not more. Not to mention that even hungry people are entitled to a full measure of human dignity. Not being able to afford enough to eat is not a crime.

We all know the yahoo New York press has manufactured a bike lane culture war, because old people don’t like change, and certain of those old people are used to getting their way and go batshit when they don’t. But it’s nice to see the actual facts bearing out what everyone who thinks about it for 30 seconds can figure out for themselves: bike lanes don’t “cause accidents,” and if the data were more complete, it would likely be demonstrated that they reduced them. That, at least, is the on-the-record conclusion of one of the study’s authors, transportation engineer Cindy Chen.

If you’ve ever been on a bike on a city street, trying to ride safely and not get hit by guided missiles 15 times your weight going 8 times your speed, you would intuitively understand that establishing a designated part of the street where drivers and pedestrians should expect to see bicycles would likely reduce bicycle-car and bicycle-pedestrian collisions, because some huge fraction (90%?) of collisions are due to one party “not seeing” the other. (The other 10%: equipment failure, other operator error, and the occasional instance of homicidal or suicidal mania.)

In other words, “duh.” But studies by the DOT are mistrusted by … well, by people with a political agenda, is the polite thing to call them. So it’s nice to see an independent academic study bearing out these common-sense results.

Last week Mayor Bloomberg named five board members for the proposed World Trade Center Performing Arts Center, securing $155 million in funding before the December 31st deadline.

This will be a nice thing to have in the neighborhood, and I’m not griping, exactly; but even in New York, couldn’t a 1,000-seat theatre be built for a lot less than $155 million? That feels like an awful lot of money in tight times. (It’s roughly in the same range as the operating budget for twenty NYC public elementary schools.)

Also saw The Naked City tonight — I’d seen bits and pieces, but never the whole thing. This is the granddaddy of every police procedural ever made, and was filmed on location all over New York City, mostly in spots instantly recognizable. The 10th Precinct house on West 20th Street, which I bike past every day on the way to work, was used extensively, and not only the exterior; many interior shots were filmed in a room in the front of the building, probably on the third floor, because out the window you can identify buildings across the street (which I confirmed via Google Street View).

You know all those Netflix DVDs you have sitting around in your living room, collecting dust and costing you $9.95 a month? Maybe you should, you know, watch them. I dug through my little DVD stack and found The Best of Everything (1959), made from Rona Jaffe’s book, which I read earlier this year.

The book is one of those “young women come to NYC from the sticks with the dream of making it big” affairs, like The Women and so forth. I really enjoyed it, although having four or five parallel subplots intertwined throughout the whole thing was kind of hard to follow. I kept having to flip back to figure out whether the girl from Colorado was the same one who was dating the country club guy with the roadster, and who was it again was divorced with a small child?, and exactly which married guy was sleeping with who, and so forth, but on the whole it was a satisfying experience, and right after I finished the book I rented the movie.

Of course I didn’t watch it until now, several months later. And I was struck by the extent to which all the men in this 1950s office-romance movie were utter cads (with the occasional exception), and all the women were either baldly husband-hunting with no ambition, or so ambitious they’d lost their souls. Joan Crawford plays a slightly older woman in the office who has more or less literally lost her soul, and much is made of this as a plot point. It’s pretty bleak. But the movie is largely faithful to the book; that’s simply how Jaffe wrote it.

On the upside, the movie is gorgeous. It’s a lush evocation of its era in New York, with gorgeously and matter-of-factly dressed women throughout, office furniture that you mostly see now in expensive Brooklyn junk shops, interiors in pastels and primary colors, a spectacular coffee-shop scene near the beginning, and lots of identifiable 50s New York exteriors. And every woman wore a hat and gloves every single day!

I have to admit that I’m of two minds on last night’s NYPD clearing of Zuccotti Park, the birthplace of the Occupy movement — which happens to be three short blocks from my apartment building.

Obviously (and in case it isn’t obvious, I’ll say it) I support the movement. I’ve gone from being one of those mildly curious “what are their demands?” people to being impressed by the extent to which this movement has made inequality a legitimate subject for serious public debate — for the first time in a generation. So, good on them.

But as someone who lives close enough that I was awakened at 2am today by helicopters and sirens, and that people were arrested in the early morning hours at a police line right at the end of my street, well — I’m not so sure an indefinite and semi-organized domination of a public space by a loud and intimidating (yes, intimidating) band of grubby, confrontational people is something you’d want in your neighborhood. People live down here. For weeks I’ve avoided turning left at the end of my block instead of right, because going left just wasn’t worth the anxiety. And I’m a six-foot-two man, sympathetic to the occupiers, and someone who, in ordinary circumstances, isn’t much bothered by anything or anyone.

Bloomberg’s been in an impossible position for weeks — not because of his “girlfriend” or his “cronies,” but because even a liberal mayor (which, duh, have you ever paid attention to anything the guy has said?) is obligated to protect public order for everyone. There are times when “public order” is a cover for an anti-idealistic crackdown, but this isn’t one of them. Camping on private property without the consent of the owner is in clear violation of the law. (If it were a public park, the violation would be even clearer.) And when an EMT doing his job is assaulted, you’ve reached a point where public order has broken down.

The media blackout was a terrible idea, and is being rightly treated as such in the public debate. But I suspect a silent majority of Occupy’s supporters — and certainly of the hundreds of thousands who live and work in lower Manhattan — are ready for the next phase of the Occupy movement. The Zuccotti occupation has achieved what it needed to.

It’s not even November yet, and outside our window this Saturday morning, lumps of goopy snowy muck are falling. It’s almost pretty, as long as you’re inside.

I have no idea where the year went. I mean, I did a lot of stuff and all, but there was no sense of time marching forward in an orderly manner, season by season; it all just went by. I guess that’s what happens when you pass the chronological midpoint of your life — you start falling toward the precipice, like a little red wagon full of rocks on a steep mountain road.