Internet, meet Mia

My baby niece Mia Vivian Schwarzfeld the first day in the Age Of The Exersaucer.

I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone that happy. My friend Lauren (not to be confused with Mia's mom Lauren) observed on viewing this photo that we spend the rest of our lives trying to reclaim this level of happiness. It got me thinking: is there an Exersaucer for adults? If so, I worry that it's probably illegal or at least taken best in moderation.

Rockaways spec development

I just ran a long piece in City Limits on spec development in the Rockaways, Queens. It came from a basic observation: blocks of new homes were rotting away and everyone is seethingly angry at city government for somehow letting it get that way.


It's a long complex story of with no easily identifiable bad guys - including city government. The closest thing to a villain are the spec developers, who would be better described as reckless rather than malicious. Mostly just people trying to make a quick buck but failing miserably.

A sad story of a place that has always been left behind.

The antidote to eminent domain

An 86 year-old woman lived in this Seattle cottage -- once a working class neighborhood, then a rotted-out junkyard, now a chunk from a future Trader Joes -- until she died last week. The neighborhood literally gentrified around her. I like how her old buick stretches the length of the house -- about enough room for the future chutney aisle.

From the Seattle Times

Our beloved filthy streets

I was recently riding the DC metro. Easy, user-friendly, acoustically-sensible... and astonishingly clean. You can't not notice the smell that's deafiningly not there.

I was horrified.

Where are the smears, the splotches, the steamy liver-and-onion stench? Where are all the black globby splotches on the floors?

The experience got me somewhat obsessed with NYC's splotchy sidewalks. I asked around, and the answer: gum. It's all gum. Us New Yorkers are apparently chronic gum litterers.

The Times ran a story on the phenomenon a couple years back. Some highlights:

• It takes a wad of gum 24 hours to turn from pink/green/blue to dark black.
  
• Shapes differ mostly because you stretched the wad out when you got gum on your shoe.
• Because of the composition of cement, there's really no easy way to clean it up. It requires a special solvent and some serious, back-breaking scraping. Unsurprisingly, some clever entrepreneurs have taken up the cause.
  
• For decades, city officials have bemoaned our sticky streets but never really had a coherent response.
• The problem is less pronounced in more touristed and affluent areas. Street cleaners employed by business improvement districts, such as Downtown Alliance or Times Square Alliance, pick the sticky fight. As do the Doe Fund's employees. Because sidewalks belong to property owners, and because the city has bigger fish to fry, Sanitation workers pretty much look past the blemish.
  

All of this apparently has DC feeling a little bit haughty -- but I'm guessing most of us would take New York, gum-warts and all.

Crown Heights riots, redux?

Been a long time, blogworld, but I'm back.

Racial tensions in Crown Heights, and the Shmira, the Hasidic civilian police force, seems to be at the center of it. Charles Hynes, the Brooklyn DA, is going after them:

“You can’t have a group, whether it’s the Bloods, Crips or Shmira, acting like vigilantes,” Mr. Hynes told The New York Jewish Week last month.

Pretty stunning comparison, and especially bold in light of the publication he was talking to. But I find it rather refreshing to see an elected going after a group that raises some pretty sticky ethical questions and tends to racialize its rhetoric.

Subway breakdancers

I came upon a dozen or so breakdancers, organized as a kind of troupe, at the Herald Square subway station last Saturday afternoon. I was fascinated. First, they were amazing - the athleticism and training it requires is fairly awesome (for a taste..). Second, they worked the crowd beautifully, lining us up in an orderly but cozy circle, and greased our pockets with some effective one liners (of the large collection bucket: "Let me introduce you to my friend, Putin, as in 'For you to put in your money.'"). It was clearly a well-worked routine. But what most stood out to me was the social dynamic of the group. All but one were African-American (the oldest and most talented was Latino). They ranged in age from about 30 (a guess) to 7 or 8. They performed in age-order, oldest (who were the best dancers) to youngest. The older ones clearly ran the show: they worked the crowds, got the dancers in line, ran the music, barked the orders. The younger kids weren't very good - they clearly lacked both the experience and the upper-body strength - but the older guys made sure the crowds clapped for them anyway.

I wondered how the group is organized - how did these dozen or so guys meet? Is there a social network through which these guys got to know each other (like a dancing club), or is it just a bunch of neighborhood kids who were messing around and realized they could make some money off of it? Does the group operate as a training camp, with the younger kids working through the ranks? I wonder if groups splinter and compete against each other.

If anyone's looked into this, let me know... otherwise, more to come on the blog...

Crime rates in New Orleans

Interesting article in Radar Magazine on some very scary trends in New Orleans' crime rate. Paints a picture of complete lawlessness and a police force that lacks both ability, capacity, and will to do anything about it. Part of the problem, from a policing perspective, is that gangs don't operate as an organized institutions, but as loose, mostly direction-less packs; thus reducing the police department--already thoroughly undermanned and poorly led--into a reactive posture.