Built By Ruth, Destroyed By Greed

Right now, the last game is being played at Yankee Stadium. This historic ballpark is going to be torn down so that the Yankees can play at a new stadium currently under construction next door in the Bronx. It is a sad day for every Yankee fan and every New Yorker. Our tax dollars are helping tear down a perfectly good and historically priceless landmark so the richest sports franchise in the country (if not the world) can move into a new stadium that will resemble a shopping mall.

My first game at Yankee Stadium was a regular season game against the Oakland A’s. I was in grade school and my family lived in Yonkers. Against my wishes, my family left the game early, after the 7^th inning, but the Yankees were ahead and won the game.

My second game at Yankee Stadium was on Phil Rizzuto Day, when the retired shortstop retired from broadcasting. Mickey Mantle came out of the dugout in his old uniform. The stadium went crazy. Former Yankee Tom Seaver, who was pitching for the rival Chicago White Sox at that game, celebrated his 300^th win against the Yankees. I watched Billy Martin kick dirt on an umpire. It was fantastic. Again though, I was forced to leave the game early by a parent who wanted to beat traffic. This is partly the reason I will never leave a game early, ever.

My fondest Yankee game memory is from October of 2001, when the Yankees won their divisional playoff series against Oakland. It was after September 11, and there was a great feeling of unity and patriotism in the city after September 11. I had managed to get great seats on the first row of the upper deck, and witnessed Derek Jeter make a diving backward catch into the stands. The crowd screamed “RUDY!” whenever Mayor Giuliani’s face appeared on the big screen.

I am a Yankee fan for two reasons: I am originally from The Bronx, and growing up in Yonkers in the late 70s, the New York Yankees were great heroes whose baseball cards were treasured. I remained a Yankees fan through the bad times and good, and made attending Yankee games a must when I moved back to New York.

Yankee Stadium is the House that Ruth Built. In fact, it was built with a shorter right field than was common at the time to accommodate Ruth’s hitting style. Babe Ruth hit the first home run in Yankee Stadium when it opened in 1923.

The new stadium is being built to do nothing but rake in profits and rake fans over the coals. There will be about 2,000 fewer seats and three times the number of luxury boxes. The park land that the Yankees organization said would be replaced by now has not materialized, and the number of prospective new jobs that the stadium will produce has been downgraded substantially. In face, the Yankees may have willfully defrauded the city to get tax breaks.

The cheapest seat available for tonight’s game, via links from the Yankees’ official web site, was $239 + fees for a bleacher seat. No thanks.

Another Anniversary

New York is a solemn place on September 11^th, or at least it should be. Like the rest of America, the events of September 11^th are pushed farther toward the back of our minds. This year I don’t believe has been any different.

I was on a trip to California when the attacks of September 11, 2001 occurred. One year later, I was working with a traveling poster sale and wasn’t able to attend the memorial at Ground Zero. I’ve made it a point to head down there every September 11^th since.

I left work with roughly 15 minutes to spare, and the walk to Ground Zero is between five and 10 minutes. My goal was to walk up Church Street and stand across the street from Ground Zero, but Church Street was blocked off, and I had to head farther West to Greenwich Street. Walking up Greenwich Street, I came across a small group of bikers. They were members of different fire fighter motorcycle clubs, with motorcycle vests with names such as Fire Riders emblazoned on them.

I came upon another blockade on Greenwich Street but there was a path opened back to Church Street. I found a place to stand on Church Street next to an entrance way for victims’ families, but the police told everyone they couldn’t stand there. The police were having their special “community affairs” officers— who are basically regular cops with light blue shirts and caps—hustle people along.

I walked up to Broadway and stopped at the intersection of Broadway and Cedar Street, where people had gathered. I found myself a spot against the wall and out of the way. A man with a crudely drawn sign that read ‘Hussein Obama is a terrorist!’ stood on the corner. His sign had other slogans on it, but it was hard to read.

Another police officer in a light blue shirt cleared people away from the center of the sidewalk. This was the second year in a row that the police made it difficult for people to attend the memorial service at the World Trade Center site. Access to the areas right up to Ground Zero was good until last year. In 2006, on the fifth anniversary of the attacks, conspiracy theorists swarmed the area. The police clamped down the following year, though under the premise that construction at the World Trade Center sight made it necessary to use more of the surrounding area for victims’ relatives to gather and to stage the event. That may be partly true, but no doubt the police were out to make it tougher on conspiracy theorist protester and on civilians attending the memorial service. There was no visible presence of conspiracy theorists from where I was. I’m sure they were still there somewhere, but it was difficult to get around and see things and they may have been concentrated elsewhere.

Across the Street, in Liberty Plaza, a group of police officers from London, Toronto, and other places gathered with their flags and banners. It was hard to hear what was going on at Ground Zero, but these police officers dipped their flags during the first moment of silence.

Mennonites from Massachusetts were at the corner handing out CDs of Gospel music and a booklet titled ‘Love Your Enemies’. The young Mennonite women were dressed traditionally, like Amish women, with long dresses and white head coverings (a white head covering means they are married, I believe, a black head covering means they are single; though I don’t think that knowledge will do me much good either way). A young Mennonite man handed out booklets and CDs while the women mostly handed out CDs. On the curb, a large Department of Environmental Protection HazMat trailer truck was parked. A DEP worker took one of the man’s ‘Love Your Enemies’ booklets and cracked that, “I have a lot of enemies.”

Though it was hard to hear what was going on, the bell for the second moment of silence rang clearly. Amid the bustle of the city, there fell a brief and imperfect pause. I couldn’t help but grit my teeth at the chatty Italian tourist, the cop moving the metal barricade (again), or the doofus scrambling to take a photo.

Shortly after the readings began again after the second silence, I headed back to work. Throughout the rest of the city, business as usual churned along. Beyond the barricades surrounding Ground Zero, the sight of American flags at half staff was the only indication of today’s significance. Most had no time to honor the dead of September 11, 2001. I didn’t sacrifice more than a few minutes of my time standing on a street corner.

We are not behaving like a nation at war. We are behaving like a nation waiting for others to go to war for us, and those nations don’t survive.

Palin Comparison

This year’s presidential election became much more interesting with John McCain’s choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Sarah Palin is not the right wing monster the left makes her out to be, nor is she the stalwart reformer that the Republicans would like to think she is. She is an ambitious politician who has embraced the mantle of the religious right when it has been convenient (God wants that gas pipeline built, halleluiah), but has been willing to buck her party’s establishment and the religious right when it worked for her as well. She has good political instincts and is an effective public speaker, but she’s no less of an opportunist. She’s nicer to look at than Joe Biden.

The media’s immediate skepticism of her candidacy and the avalanche of tabloid media coverage of her daughter’s pregnancy only made her a more sympathetic figure in the eyes of the Republican Party faithful. The New York Times ran an article about Palin (since removed from its web site) openly questioning whether she would be able to balance her demanding family life with her duties as vice president.

McCain’s real coup with this selection is not just picking someone who both shored up the conservative Republican base and made a grab for independent women and fringe Hillary Clinton supporters, but in picking someone who has now become the most interesting candidate in this race. Obama held that mantle for the past year and a half with the help of an adoring media. Everyone knows who he is and most have had a chance to form an opinion about him. The person that the people I work with were talking about the most over the last two weeks (the “water cooler” discussions that don’t happen near the water cooler) was Sarah Palin. With this one pick, McCain made his campaign exciting and newsworthy, garnering valuable publicity and capturing attention away from the Obama camp. That’s smart politics.

I cannot vote for the candidates of either major political party. Both tickets support policies that are unconscionable if not outright treasonous, in my view, and I plan on writing in Ron Paul. However, the more I learn about Sarah Palin, the more I want to move to Alaska. Caribou burgers, snow machine races, gun-toting women and vast wilderness—Alaska just might be for me.

Hot Weather In Cold Spring

Yesterday was Labor Day, the day set aside to lament the passing of the summer season and gird our loins to be kicked by working life for the rest of the year. This Labor Day, I decided to take an inexpensive ($7.75 each way on Metro North) trip to Cold Spring, New York, an hour’s train ride north of New York City to meet spend time with some family.

I met my mother, her husband and a friend of theirs at Foundry Dock Park, which sits across a parking lot from the Cold Spring Metro North train station. After lunch at a restaurant near the Hudson River, we began walking the West Point Foundry Preserve. This consisted of mostly un-preserved remains of buildings that once housed foundry works that were essential to the Union winning the Civil War. A historic marker informed us that President Abraham Lincoln visited the works during the War Between The States and witnessed a demonstration of one of the cannons that was made there. There are still reported to be unexploded munitions on the other side of the Hudson River.

Most of what was the foundry is now brick rubble that has been overgrown by woods. One building, an office building built in 1865, still remains mostly intact, though it is fenced off. The façade of another building sits nearby. Piles of bricks, low-lying brick and rock walls made for cumbersome hiking. Despite the difficult terrain and decrepit state of the remains, it was good to see evidence of things from the past. Visiting the surviving relics of things that happened long ago will give you both a greater appreciation for history and the fleeting nature of life. People working at the foundry during the Civil War probably never envisioned well-fed local tourists would be stumbling through rubble in the woods on the very spot where they worked smelting iron for the war effort.

After seeing the historic site and taking in some excellent views of the Hudson River, I walked on Main Street to see the shops and what else the town might have to offer. The first shop that caught my attention was a shoe store. Outside, all the men’s footwear on display were various forms of sandals. I walked inside to see if they had any footwear that a real man would wear. I did see some nice hiking boots, but at $190 they were priced for the rich and retarded shopper. Continuing up the street, there were many antique shops, each with its own character. The best one I saw had old 45 records stacked inside and inexpensive furniture in display outside. In the back corner, a female mannequin leaned against the wall in a vintage army uniform and a disheveled young man in long hair and large glasses discussed comic books and collectibles.

I patronized the Cold Spring Bake Shoppe and got some ice cream. I should normally stay away from such sweets, but I thought it was OK to indulge on the last day of the summer season. Some motorcycle convention or ride must have been happening, because people on motorcycles roared up Main Street at regular intervals. One man rode a colorful motorized tricycle and sported a long grey beard. Both real motorcycles and rice burners were represented.

But my brief stay in Cold Spring left me with the impression that it is a nice town that is being ruined by people with too much money moving in. While my mother went to buy a milkshake for my stepfather, a snide man with family in tow parked his white escalade in a ‘No Parking’ zone and sauntered away like it was no big deal. I got the impression from most of the people there that they had no interest in being a part of the good working-class American life that Cold Spring was built upon; they were just there to go shopping. While the people behind the counters in the places I visited were friendly, most of the patrons were out of towners (like me) who had too much money for their own good (not like me).

While I enjoy rustic environments and escaping the city for a while, Cold Spring is being transformed into a faux rustic town. It may be a Perrier Paradise for well-off city folk, but they are removing more charms then they are preserving.

When it was time for me to go, I headed back to the train station with other city people. I saw a man who looked like independent film director Jim Jarmusch waiting on the platform also. I’m a fan of his films, but I did not approach or attempt to photograph him for confirmation. If it was not him, then all I would achieve would be to photograph some guy who looks like Jim Jarmusch and embarrass myself as an incompetent celebrity stalker. If it was him, then I would be responsible for letting the world would know that Jarmusch is a pussy who goes antiquing in Cold Spring, and I love the cinema too much to do that. So it shall remain a mystery.

The Year of the “Staycation”

We are in summer’s home stretch headed toward the fall, and this year the new popular vacation spot among the masses is nowhere, meaning wherever you would normally be when not vacationing. This year, the term “staycation” was often (over)used to describe the vacation plans of ordinary working New Yorkers. The increased numbers of unemployed, high fuel prices and the general sad state of the economy have conspired to put the kibosh on many travel plans this summer. This Labor Day weekend I have joined the staycationing masses.

New York City has not been as deathly hot as it is known to get in August. We’ve lucked out this summer, at least heat-wise. We seemed to get our bad heat wave early, in June, and we had warmer-than-normal June and July weather. Where they have not received a reprieve is New Orleans. My good friend Voodoo Rue is currently holed up in a filthy hotel in Grenada, Mississippi. Hurricane Gustav is expected to reach Louisiana by Monday. We can only hope the levies hold. If New Orleans survives this latest hurricane, it will be luck and the preparedness of its citizens, not the work of our leaders.

Today I met my friend Mike Moosehead and his wife Christine for lunch and a movie. We all wanted to see Tropic Thunder. Everyone I know who has seen the film has raved about it, and I was eager to see it.

Walking through Union Square before the film started, we weaved through the crowds at the Farmer’s Market. Onions, apples, bread and all other manner of fresh food was available for sale under small tends and canopies. Other vendors, such as painters and people selling homemade crafts, were there as well. In the middle of this buzzing commercial space was a lone author, Michael De’Shazer. He was selling his books from a small table and handing out flyers, which request help in pressuring the Oprah Winfrey Show to book him as a guest author. I wanted to stop and tell him that Oprah Winfrey is a vapid egomaniac and the product of a declining culture and that I would respect him much more as an author if he avoided Oprah’s show like the plague, but I did not think a discussion with this author would be fruitful. He’s selling books in the middle of Union Square, and is determined to move units, as they say in the world of commerce.

The film did not disappoint. Tropic Thunder is a classic comical farce and expertly pillories the movie industry and the action film genre. My only regret is that I could not resist the concession stand and the resulting popcorn and soda cost almost as much as my $12 movie ticket.

Once the film was over and I bade farewell to my friends, it was on to the nearby Strand bookstore for more reckless spending. Sure enough, I found an armful of bargains in the 48-cent sidewalk bins before I even set foot in the store. I spent roughly an hour in the Strand, but could have spent hours more. It helped me clutter two successive New York apartments with books. I walked out of there with 12 books for $43.08.

I returned to Union Square Park as I chatted with my brother via cell phone, all the while looking for some speck of bench to park myself on. Finding a small, out of the way corner of the park is not possible on summer weekends, but I found a place to sit on a bench between an elderly man eating potato chips and a Chinese man waiting for a phone call. I paged through one of my books, The Complete Encyclopedia of Pistols and Revolvers (only $10), as city life buzzed around me. The Chinese man got his call and began speaking with someone in Chinese. The old man finished his potato chips and moved on. Soon, it was time for me to start heading home. I made my way through the crowds of people without losing my temper and caught the trains I needed back to Inwood.

My “staycation” is well under way.

East Village Then And Now

Twenty years ago, I marveled at the footage of the Tompkins Square Park Riots on television. The city was shamed by the sight of radicals smashing the lobby of a nearby condominium and hurling bottles at the police, and by the sight of police officers covering their names and badge numbers while they indiscriminately beat people. The police took down homeless encampments that had taken over large parts of the park.

The battle was, on the surface, waged over a curfew that may or may not have been legal. But it was an episode where East Village regulars rebelled against oncoming gentrification. Looking at the East Village and Lower East Side today, there’s no doubt that gentrification won.

More than 20 years later, I stood outside Manitoba’s on Avenue B and watched as police closed the park promptly at 1 a.m. The greenery of Tompkins Square Park is surrounded by iron fencing now. While people often jump over this to actually enjoy the park’s greenery, they never spend the night.

Our public parks cannot be open-air camps for drug addicts, the homeless and mentally ill, but neither can the character of the city survive if artists and musicians are replaced wholesale with stock brokers and lawyers. And there is no doubt that city government wants the rapidly increasing gentrification to keep happening; it increases property taxes which mean more revenue for the city. Also, many city political figures are in the pockets of developers.

And the authorities continue to Case in point: an open can of beer at a Tompkins Square Park punk show earns one a ticket, an open bottle of wine on the Great Lawn of central park during an orchestral performance does not warrant a second glance by New York’s Finest. This same selective enforcement was in vogue well before the Tompkins Square Park riots of 1988.

I remember going to the East Village when I was in high school. It was a scary place. Along St. Mark’s Place and The Bowery, homeless men sold junk and trinkets on blankets. It’s unreal how much the area has been transformed since then. Expensive hotels and wine bars permeate where destitute people once congregated. CBGB is now a store that sells overpriced designer clothing. While it’s good that the homeless aren’t crowding our sidewalks and the open-air heroine markets and rubble-strewn lots have gone, gone also are music venues, record stores, real artists’ lofts and a sense that the neighborhood was distinct. The Lower East Side looks more like the Upper East Side every day and I can’t stand it.

There have been some survivors in the yuppiefication of the East Village, and those were people who were working and creating things while others threw bottles at the cops (or at least between throwing bottles at the cops). C-Squat, a squat on Avenue C populated by punk rockers, endures, as does Umbrella House, a wrecked building that was taken over by squatters in the 1980s and renovated (it had been named “Umbrella House” because of its leaking roof). It was recognized as legal by the city in 2002.

This is the story of New York City today: a sense of great cultural loss that accompanied some welcome reductions in crime. It’s great that there are not homeless junkies crowded every other inch of sidewalk between Broadway and Avenue D, but a law-abiding person should be able to drink a beer on a park bench, and a small studio should not cost $2,000 a month unless it comes with a functioning glory hole attended to hourly by Scarlett Johansson.

The Conferences of Consequence

The best things at work, no matter where you work, are the things that break the mundane. When I worked at JFK airport, where most of my time was spent behind a counter indoors, one day that stands out above all others is the day that I spent driving people around the airport in a van. The times I was out and about are the ones that stick in my mind as pleasant and interesting.

I traded the mundane spot behind my desk downtown for a mundane spot at a conference in midtown. Still, being out of the office is good, even if the most enjoyable part of the day is walking to and from the subway, watching the city life up close and just being out and about during the workday.

For the past eight years, I have worked as a financial journalist. Working in financial journalism is like being a pornographic film star in a way. You get paid more than most people in the same position in your field, but you're stuck in that category forever. Ron Jeremy may do the best Hamlet we've ever seen, but we'll never see it at the Royal Shakespeare Company because no matter what other great work he might do, he'll forever be known as a porn star.

Being in the business of writing about business, one has to learn the lingo and use it, and also stay awake. Some of what we do is interesting. It's interesting, especially in times like these when the economy is hitting the shitter, to be able to explain to people what's happening and why. But most of the time we are trying to keep up with what's happening and interviewing people who know vastly more about our fields. We try not to sound like idiots on the phone and direct our fire at the printed page.

Disaster seems to follow me when I begin working in a given field of financial journalism. I began working in financial journalism in early 2000, when the dot-com era was reaching its peak. Dozens of companies that were selling pet food through the Internet were getting millions of dollars to develop their businesses.

This bubble began bursting with a stock market meltdown that April. After a bout of unemployment and several more years covering venture capital and private equity, I took the job where I am now, writing about credit markets. When I joined, in November of 2006, the credit markets were setting all kinds of new records and everything was coming up roses. Seven months later, the credit markets melted down and threw the economy into its latest tailspin.

Should I get another financial job, find out what sector that job covers and then get whatever investments you have in that area of finance out. Stuff your money in your mattress or buy gold (unless I'm covering the bedroom furniture or gold markets).

I arrive at the most recent conference at a midtown office building after a nice walk that lets me enjoy breast and leg season. I show my ID to a man behind a security desk and get a temporary pass that I'm supposed to stick to my jacket like a “Hello My Name Is…” nametag. I don't.

I take an elevator lined with ridged stainless steel to the appointed floor, get my materials, find the complimentary caffeinated beverages that will keep me awake for the next few hours and find a seat.

A discussion panel ends and people flood to the front of the room to speak to one or more of the speakers. I should be doing this, in order to meet important people in the field of finance I write about. But I refuse to join this bitch line. I tell myself that I will buttonhole one of these gentlemen (they are rarely women, but it makes no difference: the idea that women will bring more openness or more nurturing instincts to the business or political world is a myth) at one of the assigned coffee breaks, but most of them leave as soon as they are done speaking.

So I remain mostly in my seat, taking some notes and daydreaming, knowing that every day, in sterile hotels and banquet rooms, dozens of business conferences like this one are going on. There are conferences about real estate and the stock market and round table discussions on the credit crisis and private equity. There are breakfasts, briefings, conventions, forums, summits and symposiums. There are seminars, cocktail hours, lectures and lunches. There are bleary-eyed businessmen and women serving themselves coffee from the same stainless steel contraptions that in a few hours will be whisked away by a catering service to be refilled and sent out again to another and another and another.

And today I am one of those bleary-eyed men. Today it is my turn to try to make good use of this time, but it's time spent trying to be a better drone, to glad-hand yourself into the hearts of people who view you as another barnacle in a bountiful ocean.

You can only get so good at paying the bills. At a certain point, the paycheck job becomes just that, and you go through the motions and do what you have to do, all the while noticing younger, hungrier versions of the 10-years-younger you in action across the room or hall. You also see people 10 or 15 years older than you, with the light gone from their eyes, and you know you were not meant for this, and hope you can get out, do something else. But your thoughts drift back to the rent, the pile of bills.

But I’m supposed to enjoy these times away from the office. I’m supposed to use this time to clear my head, and I leave with a renewed sense of purpose: to get moving to where I want to be, and let the mundane conferences become a thing of memory. That’s what Ron Jeremy would do.

A New Kind Of Computer Hell

After dropping a not-so-cool $300 to squeeze more years of life out of my Dell computer, I find myself unable to print. I’m forwarding word documents to various email address so that I can print what I need to at work.

What led me to this computer hell? Buying a Dell again after my first one turned out to be such a piece of shit. I have any number of excuses: my girlfriend at the time may have had a discount, they were cheaper than anyone else and I convinced myself, like an abused wife, that things would be different this time around.

Though I understand that Dell is not alone in this regard, but Dell will refuse to help you with technical problems now if your computer is “out of warranty” unless you agree to pay them $39. I was desperate enough for help with my last computer a few years ago that I actually paid this money, though it was only $30 back then. Once they had my money, they transferred me to technical assistance where I was on hold for so long that I hung up and tried to call again. I was not able to get through, ever. I tried to call to get my money back, after I ended up fixing the problem with the help of some friends, and I was told they had no record of my paying $30 (funny, my bank had a record of the money I sent them).

I refused to be taken by Dell a fourth time, so I wound up paying NY Computer Express $300 to fix my computer. Dell’s technical assistance would have been no use anyway; I needed a new power supply. My computer runs fine now, except that I can’t seem to get my printer working again. I got it working last week, but now it doesn’t print anything. If you have a clue as to what could fix this, send it to me.