Iced Coffee on the bar at Abraço

Food and Wine just listed Abraço Espresso - one of my personal favorites since before it began - as one of the top new coffee bars in the country today.

The tiny shop is located on 86  East Seventh street between 1st and 2nd avenues. While Abraço was under construction, I was merely passing by and when I approached partner Jamie McCormick about details, he was thrilled to talk and offered a hug. But I opted for the delicious individually dripped coffee instead.

Since then, there was love. Another partner Elizabeth whose last name I don’t know since I have only called her Elizabeth used to bake only vegan goodies. Being that I’m vegan she even changed up the menu one weekend to make all the food vegan & Jain.

The shop has an essence about it that is hard to beat. Brazilian beats playing on a turntable atop one of the highest shelves in the shop. Hand painted walls with beautiful art, a mosaic on the floor as you enter. A bay-window that opens up to the sidewalk. Some of the nicest people in NYC. Oh and the coffee isn’t that bad either. After not drinking it for about 3 months, when I first pressed it to my lips, a surge of energy went through my body and I completely fell in love with it all over again.

Definitely worth checking out - not just because Food and Wine says so - but because it’s damn good (and because I say so and so does the New York Times & NY Magazine).

Wikipedia

It’s 8pm in Brooklyn and the sun has already set, one of the many reminders that it isn’t summer anymore. Another sign is last weekend’s final show at Greenpoint’s McCarren pool, once again relegated to a desolate reminder of good times, at least unti 2011, when the pool will reopen as a real, live, wet, swimming pool! The New York Times chronicles the end of (good) times here. We know you’ll miss them (or you missed them).

Yah, we know you all didn’t brave the lines at Yo La Tengo, but we will miss the crouching, sitting, lying on our stomachs on piles of chipping lead paint during the Tuesday movie nights — oh how hard it is to sit in one place for two hours on concrete. This summer we did manage to go to the nostalgic edition of Wet Hot American Summer, and that one flick about glam rock that we couldn’t concentrate on because we overindulged in that bucket of free Starbucks energy drinks. But what we’ll miss most, and we know you do, will be the after-pool traipse over to Matchless across the street, and the valiant attempts to score [an innocent chess] game with the crowds of lingering directionless hipsters.

Thankfully, we’re going to have a public pool of epic proportions if all goes well with Bloomberg’s budget, construction, and all. Hopefully the VIP line won’t be as long as the one into MGMT on that one soggy day in early August. And, I suppose, we’re equally scared of the lines everywhere else next summer, when all of the label PR kids and their legions of tag-along writers are trying to get into, when there is no universal pool event to house them all. Glasslands: watch out, they’re coming for you.

Everyone, get out of the pool. [NYTIMES]

Rego Park, Queens
quick facts:
location: Central Queens bordered by Elmhurst and Forest Hills
subway stop: 63rd Drive, Rego Park [V and G lines]
Brief history: Basically farmland until the 1920s, when the REal GOod Construction Company purchased the land and built 575 eight-room homes; apartment buildings followed. Until 1962, there was a Long Island Railroad station in Rego Park.

I decided to start this series closest to home, where I live. When I say “I live in Rego Park”, I get one of two responses:
1) Where’s that? or 2) Oh, isn’t that where the mall is?…….Actually the Queens Center Mall is in Elmhurst, just over the LIE. Rego Park is becoming a shopping mall of sorts, with a little mall on the Boulevard [Sears, Marshalls, Circuit City, Bed Bath and Beyond, Old Navy], and another one to come in 2009 [Home Depot, Kohl's, Century 21].

Bukhara-on-the-Boulevard? Rego-stan? Forest Hills’ poorer cousin? Shopping mecca? If you judge Rego Park by its hub — the corner of 63rd Drive and Queens Blvd., you’re missing something. Venture down 63rd Drive toward 99th Street, up to 108th Street, and further down to 67th Avenue, and notice a scene which looks like it could have come out of Anatevka or “Borat”. Stores have signs in Cyrillic Russian lettering, and in winter, many heads are covered with big fur hats, and in all weather, “babushkas”. Rego Park is the center of immigrants from what is now Uzbekistan, a former Soviet Republic, and specifically from the areas of Bukhara,Samarkand, and Tashkent. These are not the Russians of Brighton Beach. These are people of Central Asia. If you walk on the north side of Queens Boulevard up 63rd Drive past Citibank, CVS, and Dress Barn, you enter another world. Walk down the long block toward 98th Street. and stop in the delis with the signs in Russian — one is mid-block, and the other on the corner. You will see an amazing array of smoked fish, cheeses, pickles, fresh yogurts, sweets, breads, and pastry. Continue on just past 99th Street and stop into Tandoori Bukharian Bakery. Eat a samsa - the Central Asian version of the Indian samosa. If you walk to 108th Street, otherwise known as “Bukharian Broadway”, you run into even more of these Central Asian delicacy shops. The fresh yogurt is amazing, and the sweets are like nothing you have tasted before.

But Rego Park is also getting an influx of young American families, and young professionals who are sick of paying rents $3,000 a month for an apartment the size of a walk-in closet, or who are sick of paying rent at all, and want to own a co-op for less than $500,000. There is now a Starbucks at the corner of 67th and Queens Boulevard, and a new vegan place with Soho-like decor and soft couches across the boulevard [Tierra Sana]. But the old standbys are still popular — London Lennies [seafood] on Woodhaven Blvd, Ben’s Best serving up kosher deli for over 50 years, and Knish Nosh [knishes and other Jewish dishes. Other places that don't disappoint are Avellinos [Italian] near the 64th Street entrance to the subway, Tung Shing Palace, [Chinese] one block east from Avellinos, and the Shalimar Diner on 63rd Rd. across from the library.

I’ve always been a fan of Donald Trump’s devil-may-care attitude, lies about his bald head, several failed marriages and 2 successful television seasons of a reality show. What I’m not fond of are the ugly monstrosities that Trump shoots up within a few months’ time and then calls them buildings.

What I’m especially not fond of are the buildings he puts up that destroy everything in its path. During my brief stint with the U.N. I knew a lot of colleagues that were upset about the ugly tall tower that sits right besides the Secretariat. He’s also run Conan O’Brien out of his own apartment by stealing its view. And the latest chronicle in his assault on the New York City skyline involves the death of a construction worker, tweaking city zoning guidelines and a lot of overall b.s.

I’m not sure where there’s a form available to have Trump stop, but someone needs to take charge of this campaign.

Imagine for a moment a giant multiarmed god; with half of its arms hitting itself with a hammer and the other half trying to stop the bleeding and bandage its wounds and you have a perfect metaphor for New York City government.

While mayor Bloomberg and many city agencies are actively trying to reduce the problems caused by private vehicles in the heart of Manhattan, fund improvements in mass transit and provide affordable housing; city mandated policies in the outer boroughs promote driving and car ownership by requiring building owners to build parking garages even in areas reasonably well served by mass transit.

The Times ran this OP -Ed in January

“But off-street parking requirements have themselves become an expensive problem: developers must devote money and space to parking lots and garages, or not build at all. This limits the supply of housing, retail and office space, creating higher rents for residents and businesses, and higher prices for consumer goods.

Like any market distortion, parking requirements have created their own set of absurd choices. For example, affordable housing developers looking to build in most parts of New York outside of Manhattan must either provide parking that their target market can’t use, forgo construction altogether or change their mission and construct fewer apartments for higher income tenants.” (Which is what usually happens)

Streetsblog has pointed out the harmful effects of these policies, on recent construction along 4th Ave in Brooklyn in which a line of new condos are being built with ground floor parking instead of stores. The city is even dumb enough to be trying force parking minimums in a vital area like Hells Kitchen in the heart of its congestion pricing zone!! The result is often that the city government is force feeding cars into areas against the will of many local residents.

One such area is Atlantic Yards, in which at least 4000 parking spaces will be put in with over 2000 required for residents in spite of the fact that the site is a major transit hub served my multiple subway lines and the Long Island Railroad. Many of these will come in the form of hugely expensive and potentially dangerous underground parking. Doesn’t anyone remember the first World Trade Center attack which thankfully did not involve plastic explosives?

“Last year, several commentators on the Atlantic Yards Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) questioned the provision of parking–not just interim surface lots, but also the 2570 underground spaces intended for the project’s residential component and an additional 1100 underground spaces for the arena.”

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

A few of the major advocates of congestion pricing have authored a little report with suggestions on how to make the concept more politically popular. Previously, road tolling and congestion pricing has been implemented in areas, like London, Singapore and Stockholm, in which drivers are a minority or on entirely new toll funded highways. Tolling existing “free” roads in the car dependent, United States is another story.

I liked the fact that they started things off with a quote from Niccolo Macciavelli which grasps the heart of the issue which is that any system, no matter how bad creates a constituency of people who have adapted to it and have learned to benefit from it while the proponent of change stands alone offering hypothetical benefits in an imagined future.. The authors advocate the idea of splitting any cash gained from congestion pricing and road tolling directly with the communities through which the roads go through to use as they please. These pots of money may well attract support. They also make a powerful social justice argument that the areas which bear the high negative social and health affects of major highways cutting through them should receive something back. They also point out the negative potential results of just plowing all the money from road tolling back into a “highway slush fund” which might very well result in the construction of even more roads in low density areas and compound the traffic/sprawl problem.

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old order of things, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.

NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI
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It seems like the MTA has finally woken up to the potential value of the land it is selling at the Hudson Yards site, the last substantial piece of undeveloped land in Midtown Manhattan. It’s now interested in holding some kind of equity stake in the property and a cut of future profits from its development. This is highly logical, since a large chunk of the land’s value will come from the transit improvements the agency will be building such as the westward extension of the 7 line. The developers point out the potentially weakening property market and the billions they will have to be putting out as reasons for opposing such an idea.

Chanel Thirteen recently showed the American Experience documentary on the construction of Grand Central, a huge project largely funded through land development by the New York Central Railroad. A core problem at work here is that a government agency neither has the skills or more importantly the financial incentive (it’s not their money) to run the numbers properly and think about these projects in a business like way. Hong Kong’s awesome transit infrastructure is funded by a private company that also acts as a land developer.

I would like to present to you a scenario. This scenario involves a double-parking issue and exactly what not to do if you are presented with this situation. Actually, I suppose you could do it this way, but you risk the wrath of my roommate!

Yesterday morning, my roommate and I were both working from our home offices, both of which are near windows facing a crosstown residential street. We started hearing some honking from the street below. Now, this isn’t unusual, because occasionally people will honk when there’s a garbage truck or something in their way, but this was different. The same horn, hooooooooooooooooooooooooooooonk, every minute or so, was being leaned on for 30 or more seconds at a time. This went on for about 15 minutes (!) before my roommate went down to the street to see what the hell the problem was.

As it turns out, a young lady in an SUV with PA plates was parked on the street, and a large pickup truck with construction logos on it had double-parked next to her. Did she a) call the number of the construction company, which was printed clearly on the truck, or b) go up to the only building with construction permits on it and knock on the door? No, she felt the best course of action was to roll up her windows, lock her doors, and lean on her horn. My roommate asked her why she hadn’t called or knocked, and she said she didn’t want to bother them. Instead, she bothered the ENTIRE NEIGHBORHOOD. Logic in action!

By the way, she had a way to get out, if she turned her wheel and drove up on the sidewalk a bit, but she “didn’t want to” do that, either. So a woman in her pajamas who appeared to be sick with the flu came outside and guided her out of the parking space, just to stop the friggin’ honking already.

Oh, and the construction truck? It got three tickets before it was finally moved, an hour later, into the parking space vacated by the honker.

So, I think that by now, I’m not to confident in the citys future ability to hold the position as the the world’s cultural capital or even a decent place for creative people to exist in. Like almost everyone, I know– I am keeping my options open.

The federal reserves latest BIG ASS BURSTING BUBBLE seems to be in housing and one of it’s epicenters is starting to look interesting. There certainly seems to be nice oversuply of fancy new construction in Miami, which just happens to be the location of the world’s largest art fair orgy. Could we end up with prices getting down to artist levels? Chances are that they will at least attract more dealers.

This is kind of an open thread– anyone think this makes sense?

It seems like most of the New York media failed to see the humor and irony in the collapse of the UFT’s plan to create affordable housing in the city for New York Teachers. The idea was quietly killed when the developers and the city refused to use only union construction workers. The obvious question the whole thing raises is the role of union labor in driving up the cost of construction in the city beyond a level that average consumers can pay for. One question that comes up is why the union’s pension fund doesn’t take a hit to fund the higher construction costs. It’s likely a lot of city labor leaders want to bury the whole issue before people start thinking about it.