New York City, February 25, 2015
★★★ The sky and air were crystalline to the north, hazy southward into the sun. If the winter was unceasing it was also for the moment out of tricks: standard cold, standard breeze, standard ambient frozen matter. Beside the bodega flowers, under the ever-higher angle of the light, one could pretend to catch an intimation of spring. Later in the day, high wispy clouds curled so extravagantly they came out undulating. The building tops were in loveliness; the sidewalks were appalling with melt-freed soggy garbage. The cigarette butts alone were a time-lapse allegory of misery. Up the stairs from the subway, uptown, a bright print dress and high-cuffed pants stood in a department-store window.
Lines from the New Yorker's 3.5-Star Yelp Listing
by Nathan Deuel
“I will never read The New Yorker again.”
“NYC bores nowadays.”
“Thank you New Yorker for helping me kill time the other day.”
“I had lost interests in their article qualities so I stopped subscribing paper version a year ago. However I would like to have a free New Yorker logo tote so I subscribed digital version…Today In receiving this tote I feel not only disappointed but also cheapened myself.”
“This is a great magazine to subscribe to if you’re too busy to find a better one.”
“I sometimes pull out a New Yorker on the train just to make myself look smart.”
“Yeah, I’m kind of over the New Yorker.”
“I have a confession to make: I have never actually visited NYC.”
“Leo Carey, the book review editor, speaks with a low tumultuous voice and sounds like he is near orgasm.”
“Oh, and I love those goddamned cartoons.”
“The New Yorker may be just about the best thing in the world (short of pizza and sunshine).”
“I used to like it better.”
“Sadly, they probably NEVER read these reviews.”
Why Aren't You Sharing, Loser?
“On the social web, the person who doesn’t share is subscribing to an outmoded identity and cannot be included in the new social space. If not off the grid, he or she simply is not on the grid that matters — he may have email, but is not on Facebook, or he is present but not using it enough. (The prevailing term for this is ‘lurker,’ an old online message board term, slightly pejorative, describing someone who reads the board but doesn’t post.) It is not uncommon to ask why a friend is on Twitter but rarely tweets, or why she often likes Facebook statuses but never posts her own. Why are they not busy accumulating social capital?”
The Real Estate Broker Who Got Priced Out
by Brendan O’Connor
Welcome to Surreal Estate, a new column in which we will explore listings from the tumultuous New York City real estate market.
144 Carroll Street, #4
• $2,300/month
• 1.5 Bedrooms, 1 Bath
• 650 square feet
On Tuesday, I took a short tour of Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens — which used to be considered part of Red Hook, and is still served by the same zip code, 11231 — after a visit to one listing fell through. The broker, Realty Collective’s Josephine Ciliento, and I drove over to a $2,300/month, one-and-a-half bedroom fourth-floor walk-up down by the water, at 144 Summit Street. “This was called Carroll Gardens West. And then it was changed to Columbia Waterfront District,” Ciliento said. “Realtors like to rename neighborhoods.”
“What are they calling Ridgewood now?” she asked. “Bushwood?”
Born and raised in Sheepshead Bay, Ciliento is moving to Charleston, West Virginia, in a month. She was reflective about leaving New York, Brooklyn, and her family home behind. “It’s bittersweet for me, having grown up here,” she said. “It’s very sad. Because my mother got the home from her parents, and it’s not gonna happen that way.” She’s leaving — why else? — because New York is just too expensive.
Ciliento, who has been working as a broker for almost five years, was looking to make a move when she got offered a job in Charleston as a broker working on both sales and rentals. “I’m so prepared for West Virginia. It’s not like I’m coming from West Virginia into New York doing real estate. It’s the other way around,” she said. “It might be too relaxed for me, at first!” She’ll also be working as a property manager. “So I’ll be getting a salary.”
The rental market has been stagnant for months, Ciliento told me. In the past, she could expect to close between three and five deals a month in December and January. “I haven’t made a deal since December,” she said. The lull stretches back to the summer. “I’ve had a lot of clients relocating, and they say, ‘It’s not like this in my state, it doesn’t take this much to get an apartment.’ I’m like, well, it’s not New York City, that’s why. Totally different ball game, that’s why.”
241 Carroll Street, #4
• $2.75 million; Common charges: $209; Taxes: $442 (monthly)
• 3 Bedrooms, 2 Bathrooms
• 1,517 square feet
Elsewhere in Carroll Gardens, a hundred-and-fifty-year-old brownstone that collapsed in 2012 has been rebuilt and is back on the market as four multi-million-dollar condos. The developer, Gino Vitale, who bought Red Hook’s famous House of Pizza and Calzone in 2004, had plans at the time to put up another eighty apartments. “I don’t want to do anything to harm or ruin a gorgeous place,” he told the Brooklyn Paper in 2006.
Speaking of the new construction at 241 Carroll Street a few years later, in 2013, he told the Paper, “It will last 500 years. It’s going to be all steel and concrete.” One of the condos, #3, is already in contract.
Vitale was recently charged with one count of bribery in the third degree, a class D felony, in Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance’s recent sting. According to the district attorney’s complaint, Vitale bought off Department of Buildings Supervisory Inspector Wilson Garcia with a trip to Puerto Rico. Garcia was allegedly paid to “expunge Vitale’s complaints and alert him to impending audits.”
241 Carroll Street is right next to Public School 58. Select students at PS 58 are able to enroll in a dual-language, French-English curriculum — very attractive to parents of a certain demographic. “Being zoned for that school right there will raise your rent a few thousand dollars more,” another broker who works in Carroll Gardens and asked to remain anonymous told me. “Prices go up, it’s because of that school.”
This broker speculated further that landlords have a tendency to undermine their own listings by constantly seeking higher rents, even as the slowing rental market is signaling that they need to lower their rents — or at least stop pushing them up. “In some ways it’s not good for our business,” this person said. “But it gives me hope.”
“Landlords love it when they can get a high price. Except for one landlord, she’s a judge. She prices her apartments, like, seven hundred dollars below market, because she wants an opportunity to look at multiple applications, and she also wants to give it to the person who deserves it because she’ll keep their rent low so they can buy eventually. That’s her service to her community. And that’s how landlords should be.”
“People have an ethical code. It’s hard, because you can’t talk to a broker and ask, ‘How ethical is this landlord?’ You can usually tell by the price though.”
A Poem by Bruce Bond
by Mark Bibbins, Editor
Geppetto in Hell
Not the voices of the dead
wood I carved into a child.
No lie or license of the boy,
my son, who was not my son,
I know, though I talked to him
as blocks of wood talk to me
about their struggles and I listen.
Sometimes you find yourself
in hell, well, just because.
You, the puppet of your story.
I should know, stranded
in the belly of the big fish.
Last night I dreamt a man died
on a cross and put the wood
to sleep where, like blood, it blossomed.
It played its part. A fallen thing
that leveraged a better life.
Yes, I loved a wooden boy
who was, like me, a fool for toys.
I made him shoes. I gave him
the sweat of my hammer because,
alive together, we were alone.
Who is to say he is not out there,
approaching as life once did.
This broken boat is going nowhere.
This oar however. It asks me,
are we real yet, you and I.
This blade, this handle, this time to carve.
Have we crossed the dreamless part.
Tell me, faith turned true and so
no longer. Tell me, still black air
of day that makes the cricket sing.
Bruce Bond is the author of fourteen books including five forthcoming: Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (University of Michigan Press), For the Lost Cathedral (LSU Press), Black Anthem (Tampa Review Prize, University of Tampa Press), Sacrum (Four Way Books), and The Other Sky (Etruscan Press). Presently, he is Regents Professor at University of North Texas.
Clark, "Flame Rave"
Clark’s Clark was one of my favorite records from last year so I am predisposed to enjoy this, but if you like your blippy with a high level of skree and krik-krik-krik to it you will probably enjoy this as well.
This Week's "American Icons"
• Liberace
• Daytona International Speedway
• The Coca-Cola Co. (NYSE: KO)
• Oreos
• Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima
• Selena
Check back next week for more American Icons!
Mac McCaughan, "Lost Again"
A spare and mellow approach to so many of the things that made/make Superchunk fun to listen to.