What Was Under All That Snow?

by Liz Galvao

• Gum
• Plastic bags
• So many cigarettes

• Matchbooks
• Lost gloves
• A stream of brown water that is actually just dissolved cigarettes

• Gravel
• Potholes
• Four month’s worth of recyclables

• The promise of De Blasio’s New York
• Bike lanes
• Indoor/outdoor cats

• A wad of feathers mashed into the pavement, how o — oh my God, this used to be a bird!
• The next Brooklyn
• A recording of you complaining about how hot it was last summer

• Hipster jokes (they’re not dead yet)
• Used condoms
• Used plastic dog booties (ewwww)

• My latest mixtape, check it out
• A VICE reporter
• A child who didn’t get into the “good” pre-school

• Rocks
• Your super
• Thirty feet of receipt from Duane Reade

• A middle-aged white woman in a pashmina, complaining
• A screenshot from Instagram of that day it was one degree out
• Perfectly preserved dog poop from last Christmas

• A new luxury condo building
• The souls of forty bicycle messengers you murdered when you ordered pad thai during that third blizzard
• One last thinkpiece on why New York sucks now

• James Gandolfini’s final performance
• The secret to finding an affordable apartment in the city
• Falafel

• Vitamin D
• The middle class
• A community garden

• Your taxes, am I right?
• A parking space, except on Tuesdays and Thursdays
• Kimchi

• More snow

by Hallie Bateman

Can blippy-bloopy-meer-meer music make you happy? You had better hope that it can, because given what the rest of the day looks like this is probably going to be your best shot at a smile until the sun comes up again. Anyway, try to enjoy.

“An article on Wednesday about Diana Taurasi’s experiences playing professional basketball in Yekaterinburg, Russia, misidentified the church there that is built over the cellar where the Romanovs were assassinated. It is the Church on Blood in Honor of All Saints Resplendent in the Russian Land — not the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood, which is in St. Petersburg.”

You will quite possibly have feelings of despair over word from the weather assessors that, here on this first day of spring, snow will begin to fall around noon and the precipitation will persist for twelve hours, leaving us with a potential four to six inches of accumulation by which to mark the closing of winter. Your despondency is understandable. The last couple of weeks, with their relative warmth and sun, may have convinced you that winter was over, that the darkness and cold had done all the damage they could do and soon enough the birds would be singing, the children laughing and each stroll down the street accompanied by the pungent and persistent seasonal scent of urine. You elected to ignore the warnings of the wise, who only recently reminded you that winter was forever no matter what the weather looked like from your window. You rejected the sayings of the sage who admonished you as to the hopelessness of it all in the face of any climatic condition. No, you chose to become a beacon of hope, to embrace spring and all its empty promises even though we always get a couple of warm days before nature in its infinite cruelty yanks them back and covers the face of the earth with its terrible powder once more. And here you are, staring down another day (and night) full of listlessness-inducing liquid falling from the sky. A man with a harder heart than my own would mock you in your moment of melancholy but, dismiss me though you did, I cannot take any joy in being proved correct, nor can I blame you for wanting to pretend that things might really be better. Dr. Johnson got it wrong: The real triumph of hope over experience is simply deciding to get on with it each day in spite of everything we know about how badly it will end up. So I will tell you something to make you feel a little better in this your time of trial: Someday you will die and all of your anguish will evaporate as if it never existed in the first place. Every hurt your heart feels right now will all fall away. The entire history of suffering our species endures is written on water and soon all the water will be gone anyway. Everything will end. So what’s a little snow right now? Happy spring, everybody!

Photo via Shutterstock

“Even though the conditions were cloudy for the last eclipse, which affected only the South-West in 1999, more than 60 people telephoned a helpline set up by the Bristol Eye Hospital, reporting damage to their eyes. Sixteen years on, it is feared the risk to eyesight will be much higher as almost everyone in the country now has a smart phone. The selfie craze has also taken off, sparking concern that many over-excited viewers will permanently damage their sight by holding their phones up to capture the event. Daniel Hardiman-McCartney, clinical adviser at the College of Optometrists, says: ‘Taking a selfie could potentially put you at risk as you may end up accidentally looking directly at the Sun while aligning yourself and your phone.’”

★★ Little pink and gold clouds glowed benignly in the morning sky — and then, on the next look, there was a dark snow squall blowing sharply north to south, unheralded and unexplained. Almost as abruptly, it faded, and the plain cold clarity returned. The fur hat had to be dug back out of the bin; it was worth considering taking the boots down from the shelf again. “It’s fucking cold. Fuck,” said one of two men who had made the mistake of trying to walk along the street in mere jackets. A traffic cop wore a balaclava. More pink clouds, a little row of them, lined up where the setting sun had gone. The snow seemed like a story someone had told about some other day.

Based on Business Insider’s flawless execution of the form.

In 201 , launched a website, , in ’s living room. They worked from for the next six months tirelessly, building a media site they hoped could become the next BuzzFeed.

moved to New York City and now their site has has 0 million monthly readers, according to the site’s internal analytics. It just raised a $ million convertible note at a $ 0 million valuation cap, sources with knowledge of the deal tell .

The founders confirmed the fundraise to but declined to comment on the valuation. Investors include and Ventures, A-list celebrities (who sources says are getting offered a lower valuation of ~ $ 0 million), *, Gary Vaynerchuck, of Ventures, and co-founder .

We hear rappers and are being asked to invest and that they’re already part of the network.

ended the year with $ million in revenue, up from $0 eleven months prior, a source says, adding that the founders hope to eclipse BuzzFeed’s 2 million monthly uniques by .

Despite its soft launch in , the site has actually been around for a bit more than a year. According to ’s , who did a deep dive into the viral site, was originally a service that launched in 201 but failed to gain traction. It pivoted to become an editorial shop in early 201 .

met when he was the founder of , a startup that went through Y Combinator’s accelerator program in Silicon Valley and was acquired by .

The software engineers teamed up with and plotted ways to combine their technical backgrounds with ’s extensive social reach. The result was , a viral, socially-concious media company that uses celebrity influencers to boost stories farther across the Internet. is CEO, is president, and is chairman of the board.

“We built technology to source content from around the web before it goes viral,” says. “It can predict the performance of different pieces of content and we use it to reach as many people as possible. We combined that with the social reach of and we were able to reach of millions of people in first few months.”

wouldn’t say exactly how their works, but it involves crawling lots of sites, such as news publications, YouTube and Tumblr, and determining which new posts are starting to gain traction. They hired a machine learning specialist to help analyze the data.

Links are then kicked to ’s -person newsroom, which curates the content and pings relevant celebrity partners to blast the stories to their social media followings. say celebrities see more engagement in their social streams when they share content.

The long-term vision is to partner with all sorts of influencers across many verticals, like for a section.

* is a investor

by Elmo Keep

In Los Angeles, downtown is empty as a matter of course. The city has no center to speak of, its sprawl seemingly endless. Helicopters circle above like buzzards. At one point, we counted six in formation. We didn’t know where they were going.

“That’s weird,” said a friend who lives here.

Weirder is when it started to rain.

I am thirty-four years old and I saw snow for the first time in my life, on the peaks of the San Gabriels, far in the distance from where I was driving on the freeway under a hot sun. At night, I went to parties in the hills at houses perched atop the canyons where everyone is from somewhere else and the city stretches out below us for miles.

On another day, I walked from where I’m staying on Hope and 5th to the Million Dollar Hotel. The Hotel Rosslyn’s famous sign is updated now: The New Million Dollar Hotel. Fire proof rooms, it read. They’re for rent. Perhaps I could stay, I thought, looking at fairy lights hanging from the windows.

The hotel borders one edge of Skid Row, which takes up three thousand acres of downtown. So endemic is its poverty, so impossible to ameliorate, that the city has given up trying to fix it. On the day I skirted its edges, the police shot a schizophrenic homeless man to death two streets away.

A few days later, at the Echo on Sunset, I waited for a hot band to play. A friend I know reps them at her agency. She and I know each other from Sydney, where we’d lived in the same Darlinghurst sharehouse a few years apart. By the time I lived there, she’d already moved to New York. Tomorrow I’m picking up the truck I’ll drive across the country to that city where I’m going to live. My friend told me dreamily about all the space in Los Angeles; seven years in Manhattan were enough. I listened like I understand, but part of me couldn’t wait to get out of here. I don’t care how small the space might be.

I liked the band fine. They were great. And wasted as hell. Before, we’d been at a bar up the road sinking chili margaritas. I wonder if anyone in the thousand-strong crowd could tell.

I think about us when we were so much younger and we met at that show. We thought music was everything. Your favourite ever band was playing that night, supporting Patti Smith. I know now you were only there to see them but I was only there for her; I didn’t even notice you were standing next to me the whole time.

After that show, the band sprawled on awkwardly placed couches on the Opera House forecourt lying under the stars, where you’d come outside to follow me and had ignored their presence completely. Not like the kids at the bar tonight who’d walked right over to give high fives, to shake hands, to say, hey, so excited to be seeing you play.

There would have been people at that show tonight like we were back then, finding each other for the first time together. Statistically it has to be so. But that was oceans ago for you and me. Here now, the moon is full and upside down.

I didn’t stay for the whole set. I walked out into the street and hailed a cab, leaving the sound of the band hanging in the air behind me.

Correction: This piece originally identified the mountains as the Sierra Madres; they are the San Gabriels.

by Brendan O’Connor

Welcome to Surreal Estate, a new column in which we will explore listings and stories from the tumultuous New York City real estate market.

343 West 29th Street
• $11,900/month
• Three bedrooms, 2.5 bathrooms
• 2,200 square feet
• Nearest subway: A/C/E at Penn Station

“So this is English House,” Citihabitats’ Donna Kreeger said as we walked up the steps to the townhouse at 343 West 29th Street. “The owner named it that. She’s English.” Light streamed through the massive townhouse windows as Kreeger heaved the shades open. “The blinds weigh about fifty pounds each,” she joked. Then, more seriously, she added, “even when it’s gloomy out, there’s something very comforting about this old home.”

Walking into the house, you enter on the second floor, where there is a half bathroom, a set of stairs down to the ground floor, and three wide, open rooms from the front of the building to the back. The ceilings soar, and the molding, trim, and door casings are all either original or restored to the original style. Built in the late eighteen forties, the house, a landmarked brownstone, is now part of what is called the Lamartine Historic District. “They built things really well,” Kreeger said. “There were no shortcuts back then.”

Indeed, there is a lot of history here: a famous Abolitionist family, the Gibbons, lived at 339 West 29th Street. Their home was apparently a stop on the Underground Railroad, and several houses on the block were targeted during the Draft Riots of 1863. According to the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s designation report, the owner at the time — it wasn’t English House, then — was beaten when he came outside and tried to persuade the rioters from rioting.

“I come in here and I imagine dinner parties, ball gowns, and dancing,” Kreeger said. “It’s fine if you prefer contemporary architecture, but people respond to history and craftsmanship and elegance.” Downstairs, in the master bedroom, a monitor displayed video feeds from four security cameras. “So much detail, so lovingly restored,” Kreeger said as we walked into the kitchen. Living here, she said, you get a sense of what it was like to live in New York almost two centuries ago. “Plus, modern amenities.”

English House’s English owner, Sonia Cozzi — “originally British, raised Italian; a daughter of the world, shall we say” — invested a great deal of time and a lot of money into the property during the ten years she lived there, raising two children and a dog. “There are so few brownstones left in Manhattan, on the island itself,” Cozzi said. “I thought it was really important to bring life back into the building by restoring, rather than renovating.” The duplex has had several tenants since Cozzi and her family moved out, and unfortunately one had a dog that chewed up the molding along the floor in eighteen places. “It was traumatic,” Kreeger said.

“This is a strong home,” Kreeger said. “It’s strong. Nobody cares about that anymore. They just build quick and cheap.” She lives in a new construction in Harlem. “It makes me appreciate everything it isn’t.” Kreeger and several other tenants in her building recently settled a lawsuit with the builder over their apartments’ windows. They were too heavy to open, and if you managed to get them open they would slam shut without warning. “Like a guillotine.”

137 West 110th Street, #3A
• $2,395/month
• One bedroom, one bathroom
• 720 square feet
• Nearest subway: 2/3 trains at 110th Street

At the top of Central Park and the bottom of Harlem is an area tenuously referred to as Central Park North. It is “the mirror image of Central Park South,” broker Sandra Ospina said. “Actually, the views are even better, because you’re facing south.” One building here is called the Semiramis, and it was built in 1901. “There are very few pre-war condos,” Ospina said. “And this one is very well-kept.” The apartment was recently renovated and the floor is brand new, according to Ospina.

From this apartment, though, you’re not looking at the park. “You don’t have park views. You have those when you go outside,” Ospina said, looking out the window. “You do have sky views, which is not so usual for New York.” Indeed, the space between this building and the next is quite broad. Looking at the building across, she added, “Sometimes you might see a raccoon!”

When the building was purchased in the late eighties, the buyers kept some apartments for themselves to rent, and because the landlord is the sponsor of the apartment, applicants won’t have to go through the condo association. Nice.

150 Ocean Parkway, #6C
• $599,000
• Common charges: $358; Monthly taxes: $117
• Two bedrooms, two bathroom
• 996 square feet
• Nearest subway: F/G trains at Hamilton Parkway

Mary LaRosa Lederer, the proprietor of Brooklyn Real and a twenty-year resident of Windsor Terrace, had an open house at a two-bedroom, two-bathroom condominium in her neighborhood on Sunday. Seventy-three people signed in. “I have a bunch of offers already, and I’m expecting more,” Lederer said. “It’s a frenzy!”

The condo faces west, over a low neighborhood of houses; the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge is visible in the distance. There is a walk-in closet in the master bedroom. “This could be a bedroom in Manhattan,” Lederer joked. “Two-bedrooms are all bidding wars,” she told me. But really, “the second bathroom is the clincher.” And moreover, “because it’s a condo people feel like they can rent it out if they want to.”

The seller is the unit’s original owner, who has been there since whenever they let people move in, about ten years ago. “She wants to downsize, she’s a single person,” Lederer said. Right now, she is using the second bedroom as an office. “It will definitely go above asking. I hope one hundred thousand more,” she said. “I heard about one in Windsor Terrace that went a hundred and fifty thousand over, but that was just one crazy buyer.” Best and final offers must be in by noon Friday.

Have you noticed a real estate listing that you would like to have investigated? Send cool tips, fun listings, and hot gossip to brendan@theawl.com.