a neighborhood blog for Ditmas Park, Windsor Terrace, and people who live near the Parade Ground and Prospect Park
Baylajo, a member of the ETSY collective - one piece from her collection
It’s really a steal, I think (although given my professional background,
I know more about the price of stolen and counterfeit goods than the real thing. (For the cynical among you: law-abiding, now a wiseguy, no veiled references here, former prosecutor, etc. etc.) but I know little about jewelry prices. Now all I have to to do is keep my dearest from reading this blog until her upcoming birthday.
Journalist Ashton Applewhite is working on her latest book, about people in their 80’s who are still working, called “So When Are You Going to Retire?” Applewhite has a history of deflating social tuisms, most recently demonstrating that, in fact, women often do better emotionally and financially after divorce - rather than the commonplace (but unsupported) observation that divorce is overwhelmingly likely to be bad for wives, and good for husbands. (Cui bono? Who benefits from this sort of factual misapprehension? Just asking).
Applewhite’s set up “So When Are You Going to Retire?” on-line as a sort of notebook/sandbox while she finishes her research.
According to National Terror Alert, a shot was fired into a girls’ yeshiva in Williamsburgh on Monday; no injuries reported, no arrests.
Link to “Shooting At Jewish School For Girls In Williamsburg Brooklyn”
David Crohn’s NYC Blocks , post by post, looks at one tiny geographic sliver of New York. Here’s an excerpt from a post about Irving Place:
Time is the most relative of all things.
There’s infinite time, which is less a neverending story than it is a concept separate from time itself.
When we jump from the abstract to the real, we encounter what the puny human brain perceives as the pokiest: cosmic time, in which stars many millions of years old are considered newborns, and anything deemed venerable can recall the dawn of existence itself.
Back on the earth-rock, our slowest mode is geologic time, the speed at which glaciers commute and mountains dissolve.
When living things are considered, we often look to the hummingbird and the snail as the two extremes of moving and not moving—the one that can’t get anywhere fast enough and the other just splendid exactly….where…it…is.
Where the hummingbird lies down with the snail is in the always strange, always mercurial world of Manhattan real estate.
Things here can mutate blindingly fast, sometimes dishearteningly so. Like when you step out of a cab returning home from a three-day weekend jaunt to find your favorite Chinese joint shuttered, the boards over the windows already collecting dust.
Thus, the architectural and visual patchwork of then and now that is downtown Manhattan.
In low-density, mixed-use neighborhoods like Gramercy, if you trust your eyes and your memory, it’s easy to distinguish the old from the new, the handiwork of the hummingbird and the slog of the snail.
Newer buildings are big and boxy; they wear muted colors like white, off-white, light gray. Older structures, built when the City didn’t have to accommodate as many residents, are small and rectangular; they often have rich, earthy hues like reds and browns.
It’s a simple formula, really. Or at least it is on Irving Place, between 17th and 18th Streets, where old and new cohabitate and the seams of the patchwork are conspicuous.
Gramercy Plaza, pallid, imposing, 16 stories high, inhabits a quarter of this block, and looms over its ruddy little neighbor, the townhouse at 56 Irving Place. The former was built in 1963; the latter dates back to the 1840s. That’s a fleck in Geologic Time, and a trifling fleck in Cosmic Time. But for Manhattan real estate, an epoch of formidable proportions.
What Happened Here
One of the great, yet-to-be-written graduate theses is the story of how so many private clubs and intellectual societies ended up on Irving Place and in Gramercy Park overall. The National Arts Club, “The Dial,” a onetime Transcendentalist literary magazine edited by Margaret Fuller and then Emerson, the New York branch of the Rosicrucian Order, Helena Blavsky’s Theosophical Society—all were headquartered, at one time or another, within blocks of each other in this neighborhood.This block had the Ingersoll Club, at number 54. Dedicated to the life and work of Robert G. Ingersoll, a famous 19th century orator and agnostic, the club met here “for some years,” according to historian Andrew Dolkart. The building was converted into the Cooperative Cafeteria in 1921, “one of several cooperative organizations founded shortly after World War I that sought to provide working people with quality services,” Dolkart wrote in a report published by Gramercy Neighborhood Associates.
In 1904, O. Henry returned home from Pete’s Tavern (at 18th and Irving) to 55 Irving Place. He sat down and, in three hours, wrote his most famous story, “The Gift of the Magi.”
The Poughkeepsie Journal on Friday published an editorial calling for the extension of hearing into the relicensing of Indian Point. Here’s an excerpt: We reproduce the editorial in its entirety, as it is so well-reasoned. The hearing process has been tainted - and if one is a proponent of nuclear power, all the more reason to want a transparent and thorough process. At present, it looks like the NRC is afraid of the hearing process. From The Poughkeepsie Journal:
Extend hearings on Indian Point
Question: When is a hearing not a hearing? Answer: When nobody can hear what’s being said.
That’s an accurate description of the ironic scene during the opening morning of testimony this week in White Plains on a possible 20-year extension of the license for Entergy’s aging Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant.
There weren’t enough microphones provided for witnesses giving testimony, and the hearing judge scolded members of the public who complained they couldn’t hear what was going on, though the judge later made sure witnesses were speaking more loudly and the situation was rectified in the following days. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, whose hearings in White Plains wrapped up Thursday, should schedule another day and have repeat testimony, and court officials should allow reporters to bring in cameras and recorders into the White Plains courtroom where the hearings are being held. Reporters were not allowed this week to bring in cameras or recorders because of a state court ban on these items, despite the fact the proceedings had nothing to do with a criminal matter.
Continue reading ‘Poughkeepsie Journal editorial: Extend hearings on Indian Point’
UPDATE: there was, in fact, a problem in at least one Verizon pair - but repaired the following morning. We’re back up.
Apparently having to do with Verizon - somewhere in the loop between Caton Avenue and the central office, or one of the switches, in Ditmas park.
Anyone else having service outages in the neighborhood? Perhaps related to all the digging on Church Avenue, and elsewhere in the nabe?
We’re adding Blogger Dog to our blogroll. We like this blog for a number of reasons, but most because credit is given where due - unless some other human-dog teams we’re aware of, in which the dog does all the creative heavy lifting - but somebody else takes the credit. Just saying.
This is all very tough on dogs. When a kid doesn’t do his homework - the dog gets blamed. But when the dog does the homework for the kid - shouldn’t there at least be a little credit for the assist?
From Matthew Wald’s piece in The New York Times [emphasis supplied]:
Opponents of the Indian Point nuclear power plants, including New York State, got their day in court on Monday - sort of - to explain why they thought the two reactors should not be allowed to operate 20 more years. It signified the first time that a state had stepped forward to flatly oppose license renewals.
But like much about the tangled history of the plants in Westchester County, the hearing before a three-judge panel appointed by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission was not that simple.
The proceedings got off to a prickly start when a member of the audience seated in a courtroom at the Westchester County Courthouse here complained to the panel chairman, Lawrence G. McDade, that he could not hear what was being said. “The acoustics here are what the acoustics here are,” said Mr. McDade, a former military judge, who was himself using a microphone.
The difficulty was that about 20 lawyers seated at five tables and flanked by cartons of documents, as well as another 20 or so who spilled over into the jury box, did not have microphones.
When Michael B. Kaplowitz, vice chairman of the Westchester County Board of Legislators, rose and said he could not hear the lawyers representing him - and that he was not a member of the audience but a participant - Mr. McDade told Mr. Kaplowitz that he could read the transcript later.
After a lunch break, Mr. McDade relented and had more microphones brought in.
Acoustics were not the only setback for those opposed to relicensing the two plants in Buchanan, on the east bank of the Hudson River 35 miles north of Midtown Manhattan.
It was immediately clear that for the opponents - the state, Westchester County and several environmental groups - to win the day, they would have to persuade the panel and the regulatory agency itself to reconsider what arguments are admissible.
The commission has ruled that for an argument to be considered in license extension hearings, it must deal with problems that may arise because the license is extended. The state contends, however, that the region’s extraordinary population density, when considered together with the threat of terrorism or earthquake, makes the plants unsafe.
“The presence of the Indian Point nuclear power plant in our midst is untenable,” the state argued in a legal brief.
Joan Leary Matthews, a lawyer for the State Department of Environmental Conservation, said in an opening statement that “whatever the chances of a failure at Indian Point, the consequences could be catastrophic in ways that are almost too horrific to contemplate.”
Sherwin Turk, a lawyer for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said that questioning whether the site was a good idea in the first place was not within the scope of the proceeding.
Foes of Indian Point Begin Legal Battle, The New York Times, March 11, 2008.
Preliminary evidence, then, supports these propositions:
Attempts by persons or groups to conceal their actions may be interpreted as circumstantial evidence of consciousness of guilt (Wigmore On Evidence, 2nd edition, 1915, § 178). We could probably find more citations, but the point is - what’s the NRC got to be afraid of?
Cross-posted at Popular Logistics.
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