Month: August 2004

The South tried it, the Carolinas and Virginas achieved it, Hong Kong and Singapore manage to make it work. This New York Magazine article throws out the idea of New York City seceding on the basis of taxation equity, as well as making common sense for us downstaters.

From what it should divorce itself from is an open question. From the US entirely is out of the question. Definately from the state — upstate is really a totally different animal from downstate. A 51st state would be rather nice, but a territory like Puerto Rico would make equal sense for a city that is an international capitol.

On paper it seems like it would work. NYC has twice the Gross Domestic Product of Hong Kong and three times that of Singapore (it’s slightly less than Taiwan). It has more people than Switzerland. Our standing security forces — NYPD and FDNY — are larger and better equiped than many countries (we have tanks, water and air craft). Unlike pre-1997 Hong Kong, we get to keep our northern water reserves, because someone with foresight bought the land for the City.

The question of New York secession first came up in 1861, under circumstances that showed just this kind of ruthless pragmatism, when Mayor Fernando Wood hoped to preserve the right to trade with both the North and the South. Most other New York City secession proposals have focused on becoming a separate state. In 1788, Alexander Hamilton warned that the city’s secession was “inevitable” if the state failed to ratify the Constitution. In 1969, Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin ran on a mayoral platform arguing that the city, needing local control of its services and finances, should become the 51st state. The most inspired part of their proposal contended that the city had dibs on the name “New York.” The rest of the state, they suggested, should be renamed “Buffalo.”

That was really funny.
I’m still for a United States of America; New York City ought to be a discrete part of it.

It’s not a good feeling when you wake up in the morning, thinking, “Oh, I’ll just sleep in; it’s Sunday,” and then – thwack – uh, no, it’s Monday; you have to get to work. Ugh…

More police officers in downtown Manhattan. This is the new normal, I guess.

In a previous post, I referred to this NY Times’ Travel article profiling NYC for the tourists and recommending that people do the Staten Island Yankees since it’s extremely hard to do the Brooklyn Cyclones. It occurred to me that part of the reason why the Cyclones have been tremendously popular as they have been is because of that baseball legacy in Brooklyn, the one cursed (or blessed) upon us by the Dodgers.

But, the real question is, has the Cyclones been that great for Brooklyn, or more particularly, Coney Island? NY Times’ Lydia Polgreen explores the answers (if any) to the question. Apparently, people would come, maybe buy a hotdog at Nathan’s next door, but ultimately leave. They’re not staying to really revitalize the neighborhood. And, all plans to rebuild anything remain plans. The subway terminal is almost done, but the people driving in aren’t going to stick around. Troubling. We can be optimistic, but it’s troubling to me.

NY Times’ James Barron tries out a fascinating experiment: Send a piece of mail to Leonard Bernstein Place (aka West 65th Street) and will it get there? Barron reports that the US Postal Service “says it recognizes the city’s alternate street names, just as it recognizes streets that New Yorkers still call by their older, snappier names, like Sixth Avenue, which became Avenue of the Americas in 1945” and the findings are that the Postal Service sort of does it. Kind of:

To add the slightest trace of scientific methodology to the experiment, letters with the conventional street addresses were mailed at the same time. So two letters went to each addressee. All the letters were mailed from Midtown Manhattan at the same time, on a weekday afternoon. Of the ones that reached their destinations, most arrived two days later.

All the recipients received the letters with conventional addresses. But of the letters with the alternate street names, 4 of the 10 did not reach their destinations.

The Postal Service returned two addressed to people on Josh Rosenthal Way (72nd Street between Columbus Avenue and Central Park West). It marked one “Returned for Better Address.” On the other, it put a yellow sticker with R.T.S. in big letters and, for those who do not know their postal abbreviations, “return to sender” in small letters. Of three options on the sticker, one was checked: “Not deliverable as addressed – unable to forward.”

Nor did the Postal Service deliver letters to people on David Ben-Gurion Place (East 43rd Street between Vanderbilt and Madison Avenues) or Joe Horvath Street (West 52nd Street between 10th and 11th Avenues)…

But letters went through to addressees on Alvin Ailey Place (West 61st Street between West End and Amsterdam Avenues), Leonard Bernstein Place (West 65th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, beside Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center), Isaac Bashevis Singer Boulevard (West 86th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue) and Edgar Allan Poe Street (West 84th Street between Broadway and Riverside Drive). Nevermind that the envelope misspelled Poe’s middle name with a tell-tale ‘E’ in place of the second ‘A.’

Plus, a very interesting article on what it means to be Japanese-American, when the children of the nissei (second generation) are now sansei (third generation) yonsei (fourth) and gosei (fifth)? One becomes more identified as American, culturally at least, considering the drive for assimilation during the years after World War II; and has to recognize the need for instilling cultural education of the hapas (because, if you don’t count the hapas, the idea of “Japanese-American” gets harder to count).

So glad to have finally gotten “Entertainment Weekly” today. EW thought well of “Harold and Kumar” as it transcends stereotypes while still doing the pothead thing. EW also rated the dvd release of the 1st season of… Knight Rider. (oh, geez, there goes the flashbacks of watching mucho Knight Rider and each instance of KITT driving at faster speeds to rescue the day). But, EW was behind on the news on James Bond – so I understood it, Eric Bana is the new Bond (or really close to it). Personally, I still liked Clive Owen, but at least he can go do other projects. Eric Bana is not as chiseled looking, or as famous (“Troy,” “Hulk”), so I guess the folks behind Bond thought that made him a great pick. Plus, a very cute EW interview with Anderson Cooper (EW happily notes that he’s a Celebrity Jeopardy winner who ought to go up against perpetual Jeopardy winner Ken Jennings). Ah…