In the meantime, another project–one which would serve a vastly greater number of (ostensibly less well-connected) city commuters seems to be languishing: the Second Avenue subway. It too costs many billions of dollars, but at least it serves a real purpose–to relieve the severely overcrowded Lexington Avenue line–and extends from 125th Street all the way down to the Wall Street area. Oh, and it’s been on the drawing board for eighty years. Which means that the next time you’re packed like a sardine on the 4/5 and it’s bumper-to-bumper traffic, you can console yourself with the fact that it was never meant to be this way.

Well, the good news is that this stupid line is about to run out of money due to the MTA’s perennial money shortage. At seven billion dollars to tunnel one mile, it’s easy to see why there’s no money. One can hope that in the meantime somebody else will come into power–someone not beholden to suburban commuter demands–and put a stop to this nonsense before it sucks in any more of our tax dollars.

“People define themselves by their real-estate holdings much more than their ZIP codes.”

Well, that’s a relief. For a second I thought people were being shallow.

Mr. Murdoch said Wednesday that the company was taking separate steps to stem losses at The Post. He said the paper would raise its cover price within the next two weeks to 50 cents, from a quarter.

Some of us haven’t forgotten that the Post dropped its price to a quarter several years ago in an attempt to… turn a profit. I guess that hasn’t worked out. No mention of Mr. Murdoch having any interest in, I don’t know, improving the paper’s dreadful content, which combines the lowest of low-brow trash journalism unworthy of the weekly gossip and alien-abduction rags with the hard-right pro-war conservative editorial content Mr. Murdoch is known for. My guess is Mr. Murdoch isn’t actually concerned about turning a profit at his vanity press – otherwise it would have folded years ago.

THE HL23 tower … is the kind of commission Neil Denari has being waiting for his entire working life. Mr. Denari … has labored on the profession’s periphery for decades. But because of a recent demand for name-brand residential architecture in New York, he is finally getting a chance to test his ideas in the real world.

“The profession’s periphery” refers, I presume, to the 99.9% of architects who do the grunt work that doesn’t merit special attention from the Times. “The real world” probably refers to the rarefied atmosphere inhabited by the sort of architects who get invited to New York Times cocktail parties.

There’s the usual glorification of everything “strange” and “unexpected”, and the attendant condemnation of anything “banal”, which in the language used in Times architectural articles refers to any building that attempts to fit harmoniously within the existing urban fabric of the city:

In other cases, however, the seemingly noble aim of working within a neighborhood’s character leads to lackluster design. The scale and placement of the windows on the facade of Deborah Berke’s new limestone-and-steel apartment complex just across from 40 Bond, for example, does echo the neighboring buildings. But the results are tepid.

“Tepid” is Times-speak for “unchalleging” and “not designed to shock or confuse”; the opposite of every building designed by Times favorites such as Frank Gehry and I.M. Pei.

The Times gets it right, however, in the depiction of today’s newest Manhattan prototype, the international jet-setter:

But the banal interiors of New York’s luxury apartment buildings may also have to do with our reactionary times. Among architects it is now common wisdom that today’s clients are less willing to upend conventional living arrangements than earlier generations were. … This resistance may not be surprising for a class of people who increasingly want the same residential experience whether they are in Moscow, Paris or New York. Arriving in New York by private jet — or wishing they had — they tend to view their homes as personalized hotel rooms, and developers are more than happy to indulge them. Many of the new buildings provide the same kind of services you would find in a luxury hotel, from breakfast in bed to spa treatments to dog walkers.

Anyone who’s been priced out of Manhattan lately has been witness to this phenomenon. The jet-setters are filling the new (and the old) luxury buildings that draw the attention of the Times, while residences that were once within reach of the rest of us are now packed with their children: young, hip, and super-wealthy. The sort who eye a tiny $2000-a-month studio and proclaim “It’s so cheap!” in European-, Indian-, or Japanese-accented English. This is the more interesting story of what’s happening in Manhattan. It’s a story that’s beneath the notice of the Times, except for a once- or twice-yearly report bemoaning the fact that Manhattan isn’t “funky” any more.

The State Liquor Authority lifted the jiggle joint’s liquor license Wednesday for allowing prostitution to flourish on the premises. … Undercover Manhattan South vice cops found women selling sex to customers in back rooms, VIP lounges and even bathrooms in the W. 28th St. club.

One has to wonder, from where does the liquor board derive its authority to combat sex “crimes”? And since the charge seems to be prostitution, isn’t the usual punishment a short jail term for the “criminals”? None of this makes any sense. Nevertheless, the government will continue to pat itself on the back for fighting these “crimes”, thinking there is any relationship whatsoever between vice and real crime. In case they intend to bring up the “broken windows” theory where stopping smaller crimes leads to a decrease in larger crimes (about which topic and whether this theory is actually responsible for NYC’s dramatic drop in crime during the late nineties and early aughts one could fill an entire book), I offer the following memo to the NYPD, or the liquor board, or whoever the fuck they’re getting to fight crime these days: stopping vice does not have any effect on real crime, unlike other petty crimes such as vandalism or trespassing. The people who seek expensive stripper sex and the strippers who service them are not the same people who go on to commit larger crimes.

The real crime is that victimless crimes are crimes in the first place™.

There are few things more irritating than listening to some pale, behoodied ectomorph hold forth about how much better New York City was before Rudy Giuliani got hold of it.

And one of those more-irritating things is when a “serious” writer resorts to grade-school strawman rhetorical techniques in order to bash his enemies.

What the rat–I mean hipster–population always forgets is that what seems colorful and diary-worthy when it can be escaped at a moment’s notice is considerably less so when you’re stuck in it forever.

Yes, because a disdain for New York’s current cycle of hyper-gentrification automatically means a desire to return to the bad old days of 2,000 homicides a year and rats chewing on your heels. Because the character of New York must be one or the other extreme; there is no middle ground. You know… the one that people who care about the city actually show a preference for: a city that is both interesting and livable. Because the fact of the matter is that while New York is indeed much more livable now than it was in 1990, it (and here I mean specifically, Manhattan) is also undeniably much more boring. The Meatpacking District serves as a convenient example of the progress that New York has made in the last ten or fifteen years. A neighborhood that once contained fascinating nightlife and affordable housing (and I don’t mean the faux “affordable housing” required by city codes and which nobody who has a job can actually qualify for–I mean actual, market-rate affordable housing) now contains million-dollar condos and Crate & Barrel. The corner of West 14th and Ninth Avenue that used to bristle with trannie hookers is set to feature a super-mega-deluxe Apple Store. The hookers are long since gone; doubtless they can’t afford to live anywhere in Manhattan. Our grade-school writer would probably cheer the loss of a harmless group of hookers as a win for “decent” society. Never mind that hooking is a victimless “crime”–there’s property values to think of! And seven-figure Wall Street whizzes don’t want to live amongst such scum. The Meatpacking District is the new Tribeca: unaffordable to mere mortals and devoid of interesting street life. The same pattern has changed other once-affordable neighborhoods such as Hell’s Kitchen (sorry, “Clinton”), the East Village and even much of the Lower East Side. What we’re left with in Manhattan is a core of long-time, relatively low-income residents who managed to hang on to their rent-stabilized apartments (a regulation I don’t support, but that is another story) and a massive influx of wealthy new residents who can afford rents that have been jacked up into the stratosphere and who move to Manhattan to enjoy the all the city has to offer, and who unwittingly have made it such a dull place. The rest of us live in Brooklyn and Queens.