City is pushing for even smaller apartments

Last month, the Department of Housing Preservation & Development (HPD) unveiled a scheme to construct what the city is calling micro-units, apartments designed to be 300 square feet or less.

HPD has launched a design competition called adAPT NYC, asking developers to submit proposals to create these miniscule living spaces. The winning bidder will be able to build on a city-owned site in Kips Bay; at least 75 percent of the units in the building, which will be at 335 E. 27th St., will be micro-units, between 275 and 300 square feet (half the size of a subway car), and will be reserved for one- or two-person households.

The city will have to waive current zoning regulations that require new apartments to be at least 400 square feet in order to build the apartments, but the mayor is hoping not only that it will work but can serve as a model for new buildings around the city. The units will be designed with efficiency in mind and will be situated for maximum exposure to light and air. They will also be kept at below-market rates, which for a studio in Manhattan is currently about $2,000.

“Everyone is excited to see the response to the RPF [request for proposals] and what sort of creative designs and financial solutions are presented,” said Mark Thompson, chair of Community Board 6, where the new building will be constructed. “There’s been a lot of interest generated about the possibility of creating units that are below market rent.”

Thompson said that while the project could be welcome in such a densely populated neighborhood with few vacant apartments, it will also depend very much on the price point of the units. If they’re designed for people just starting out who can’t otherwise afford their own apartment, close to $2,000 isn’t going to cut it, he said.

There are, of course, the lucky few who rent apartments in Manhattan for well below market rent. Felicia McCoy lives in a cozy studio on West 104th Street. While she always thought she might one day move to a more spacious pad, the stabilized rent—currently $889—has kept her happily in place for 22 years.

“I’m trying to be a minimalist,” said McCoy of not having a lot of space. “I’m also not home a lot, so I really don’t care.”

For McCoy, the tradeoffs of living in a small space—no place to put a proper table, stray papers quickly piling up in the middle of the room, a tight squeeze with visitors—are primarily worth it because of the price and location. Paying close to $2,000 for a potentially smaller space in Manhattan, even if it was a design and amenities upgrade, just doesn’t appeal to her.

“I would move to the Bronx, like a friend of mine did,” she said, before she’d pay more for a studio.

But real estate agents swear there will be people clamoring to get into the micro-units if they are priced even slightly below normal market rents.

“Prices are so high now; if [renters] want to live and work in Manhattan, they have no other alternatives,” said Jason Haber, CEO of Rubicon Properties. He was standing with one of his agents, Eric Mendelsohn, in a tiny Upper West Side one-bedroom that rents for $1,975 a month. Haber and Mendelsohn said that the apartment, which is less than 500 square feet, would probably be snapped up soon because the lack of direct sunlight was offset by a dishwasher, an anomaly in a prewar building.

They both insisted that demand for micro-unit apartments in Manhattan will be high. The housing shortage practically guarantees that anything under $2,000 will be easy to rent, Haber said.

Mendelsohn said he works with a lot of recent college graduates who want to live in Manhattan, but their options are shrinking.
“There’s a real housing shortage and there’s not enough inventory,” Mendelsohn said. “Many managing agents aren’t allowing pressurized walls anymore,” which young people commonly use to turn an out-of-their-price-range one-bedroom into a divided two-bedroom apartment they can share with a roommate, he explained. The micro-units would be perfect for many of his clients, he said.
Lower East Side resident Lisa Travnik was among the young professionals scouring Manhattan for an affordable place two years ago, and she snapped up a studio for less than $1,500, with a big sacrifice on space. Travnik lives in a 275-square-foot apartment; she is living proof of how people might exist in the forthcoming micro-units.

“My kitchen is a decent size, my bathroom is a normal size and it has fairly high ceilings,” said Travnik. “Those are the things that make it livable.”

Travnik’s apartment, which she described as a “cozy cave” that doesn’t get too much direct sunlight or cell signal, has its charms. The exposed brick and new kitchen appliances are bonuses, she said, as is the prime location in her neighborhood of choice. Her queen-sized bed—something she insisted on having, since she spends much of her time sitting on it—takes up most of her living space, but she has it strategically lifted to fit baskets underneath. Still, it’s a challenge to keep it clutter-free, and it’s not necessarily a bargain-basement price.

“Sometimes it seems like [a lot to pay] for how small it is. But I know that rents are going up. When I first got it, it felt like more,” Travnik said. “For the area, it’s pretty low.”

Travnik hopes to stay at least another year in her place and thinks she’s set it up to maximize the little room she has. She’s become a de facto expert on storage, learning how to “store up” and utilize her vertical space and how to choose furniture pieces carefully to fit in exact spaces. She loves her apartment but can’t imagine sharing it with another person. She did say, however, that in a more mindfully designed space, it could very well work.

Sally Augustin, an environmental psychologist who studies how people’s surroundings affect their mental well-being, agreed that design is a key factor in whether two people, or even just one, could thrive in a micro-unit. But more important than that, she said, is the element of choice.

“We need to feel like we’re in control of our lives, including our physical world, and if people really get to choose to live in these apartments, they will feel better about the whole experience,” she said. “If it turns out that everybody getting a certain kind of aid from the city is forced to live in these spaces, there will be some real unhappiness.”

The city is positing that the micro-units can accommodate couples as well as singles, aiming to give more options to the 1.8 million one- and two-person households in New York. But can two people really co-exist in a space that small? Augustin said it truly depends on good design, as well as personality.

“All human beings need to be able to be alone to order their thoughts from time to time,” Augustin said. “You can be alone in different ways. Two people can be alone in 300 square feet, if they can sit in ways that they don’t see each other.”

She said that something as simple as having two chairs back to back can facilitate the kind of privacy that most people think only comes from having a larger apartment with multiple rooms. But it also depends on the personalities of the people living there—the cramped space is probably not great for an introverted person to share with an extroverted one, for example.

Perception is also a key factor, she said.

“Someone comes from Hong Kong to the United States, [it’s] not as dramatic [a change] as for someone who grew up in a great home in Chappaqua, a kid who grew up in that type of large home,” Augustin said.

She suggested that painting the walls light colors, eliminating clutter and using vertical storage can all help make a simple small room into a welcoming home.

“When we have more clutter, our eyes catch on more stuff, it’s quite difficult to survey our environment,” she said.

All of these prescriptions for small living could be the way of the future, especially if the city continues to grow in population with a mind for environmentally conscious development. For some, any move toward providing more middle-range rental housing is urgently welcomed, even if the space is minimal.

“There is simply too much demand and not enough supply,” said Haber. “And this is in a sluggish economy. Imagine if the economy picked up.”

"Susan" has frightened many residents of East 77th Street over the past six months; she spits, screams and coughs on residents that she comes in contact with.

By Amanda Woods

Nikki Henkin stood in front of her apartment on East 77th Street, between Lexington and Third avenues, holding up a flip camera to capture a video of Susan (not her real name), a neighborhood homeless woman who screams wildly, coughs repeatedly and deliberately spits on passersby. Pedestrians in Susan’s path clear sidewalks, subway platforms and cars to avoid her.

Henkin hoped she would be able to show her footage to the police as proof of Susan’s disturbing behavior. But once Susan spotted Henkin, she grew outraged.

“She started to scream at me, ‘It’s against the law to take my picture. You can’t do that. I’m going to call the police,’” Henkin said.
Henkin went inside her apartment’s lobby. Minutes later, Susan darted in and threw a plastic cup filled with a clear liquid at Henkin. “I don’t know what the liquid was—water, bleach, acid,” Henkin said. “Luckily, I’m OK and she left.”

Residents say Susan has made the Upper East Side her stomping ground for about six months and has been a nuisance and a hazard ever since.

“She will burst out screaming and you can hear her 10 floors up,” Henkin said. “She coughs violently, which made me think she has a communicable disease, and then she purposely, intentionally spits on people, spits on children in strollers and spits on people walking dogs.”

One resident who wished to remain anonymous said she and a friend visiting from France had to walk in the street to avoid the spitting woman.

“All that came on to my radar screen is that she had a strange look in her eyes, and at that moment, this woman started hissing and spitting and making almost animal noises,” the resident said. “It was horrifying and scary—like having a rabid animal in your presence.”

Pedro Ramos, a window washer on East 77th Street, said Susan once spit on passengers on the 6 train, prompting a commuter to call the police at the 86th Street station. Eliott Rebollo, an apartment superintendent in the neighborhood, said that six people who live in his building have told him they felt threatened by Susan. And Jimmy Gouvakis, owner of Soup Burg, located on Lexington Avenue between 76th and 77th streets, said Susan once traipsed through his restaurant, causing a scene and disturbing diners.

Susan, a thin, middle-aged woman with dark hair, clad in sweat pants, a brown T-shirt and a black woolen cap, travels with a younger man who may be her son or her nephew, but he usually remains quiet, residents say. Together, the two haul three or four suitcases and bags, which they carry down into the 77th Street subway station to travel elsewhere—but they always return to the Upper East Side.
Henkin and other locals want Susan off the streets, or at least treated for her cough, which some believe may be a sign of tuberculosis or whooping cough, and her supposed mental illness.

But Susan is only an example of a larger issue in New York City. The number of homeless living in New York City shelters has grown to 43,000, according to Patrick Markee, senior policy specialist at the Coalition for the Homeless. Three-quarters of the shelter population are families, of whom only a small number are mentally ill. But out of the 10,000 single adults who live in the city’s shelters, one-third to one-fourth are mentally ill, Markee said.

The number of street homeless in New York City, those who don’t go to shelters, totals 3,262, according to a Department of Homeless Services spokeswoman—and two-thirds of them are mentally ill, according to Markee. Last week’s report of a deranged homeless man stabbing and attempting to rob a young woman on Second Avenue near 86th Street has intensified local concerns about the homeless and mentally ill and whether they could be dangerous.

Although Susan has not committed a violent crime, some Upper East Siders fear that her behavior could escalate, and they’re hoping the police will take action before then. After the liquid-throwing incident, Henkin wanted to press charges but police told her that because the incident was only a violation and officers weren’t present when it happened, no charges could be lodged.

Police are monitoring Susan, according to Nick Viest, president of the 19th Precinct’s Community Council. The NYPD’s policy for this and similar issues is to send the precinct’s Conditions Unit, which handles quality-of-life and minor street concerns, to the area.

“What they do is they monitor it—they send police over to observe,” Viest said. “This one in particular is on the radar screen. They can’t make an arrest if they don’t observe the person doing something illegal. They try to stay on top of it and watch it.”

Viest explained that for police to act, the woman’s behavior would have to be more severe. “If she assaults someone or attacks someone, that’s a crime and police can act on it,” Viest said. “It’s simply that she appears menacing and she’s disturbing to a lot of people, so it seems like that’s the difficulty here.”

Spencer Korwin, an Upper East Sider, doesn’t believe police have reason to act just yet. “I don’t know if anything she does is illegal,” Korwin said. “She’s not doing anything wrong, just causing a disturbance.”

A source familiar with mental health issues said that if the police believe Susan is a danger, they can bring her to a hospital to be checked in. The hospital can keep her for 72 hours, but if the staff doesn’t find her dangerous, they can allow her to leave.

The problem is that there is no easy or immediate way to address Susan’s problems, according to Mary Lee Gupta, a social worker and the program director for the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill of New York City Metro. The criteria for psychiatric institution admission are stringent, and as Gupta sees it, Susan doesn’t fit the bill.

”If a person is not a danger to themself or others, you can’t have the police come and take her to a psychiatric hospital,” Gupta said. “She wouldn’t be admitted. Clearly, she has symptoms, but unfortunately, the bar is high for admission.”

If Susan threatened to hurt someone, carried a weapon or had a plan to commit suicide, she could be admitted, but her case isn’t nearly that severe, Gupta added.

“There are literally several thousand people on the streets of New York, and it’s simply not possible to scoop people up and mandate treatment,” said Ira Mandelker, executive director of the Neighborhood Coalition for Shelter, located on the Upper East Side.

Susan could voluntarily enter a hospital if she “has a mental illness for which care and treatment in a mental hospital is appropriate,” according to New York State Mental Hygiene Law, outlined by the State Office of Mental Health. But questions often arise about when a person should be considered dangerous enough to his or herself and others to be involuntarily entered into a mental health facility, making it difficult to find a safe and fair balance between protecting the rights of the mentally ill to refuse treatment and the rights of the people who feel threatened by them.

A Department of Homeless Services spokeswoman noted that a client can only be taken to a mental health facility involuntarily if he or she reaches “the highest threshold of danger.” In this case, Section 9.58 of the Mental Hygiene Law, which states that people who appear to have a mental illness and present a danger to themselves or others can be involuntary taken to a psychiatric emergency room to meet with medical doctors, licensed psychologists, registered nurses or certified social workers, would be enacted.

Of the 85,820 people in the five boroughs who are mental hospital patients, only 2 percent were homeless before admission, according to the Patient Characteristics Survey, a one-week survey conducted by the Office of Mental Health of all mental health programs statewide. In Manhattan, where 19,190 people are enrolled in mental hospitals, 5 percent were homeless.

Coupled with the hurdles to entering a state mental institution, the movement in state hospitals toward deinstitutionalization that began in the 1960s makes mental hospitals an even more unlikely place for the mentally ill homeless, according to a psychiatrist who lives on the Upper East Side and worked in the state mental health system for many years.

“It became a mania with state people to discharge patients wildly to reduce censuses because it was economical for state budgets,” the psychiatrist said.

The chances of Susan entering a homeless shelter are also unlikely. Homeless outreach teams can confer with her and ask if she would be willing to go into a shelter for evaluation, but if she is not willing, it can’t happen, Gupta said.

Kristen Edwards, director of the Manhattan Outreach Consortium at the Goddard Riverside Community Center, said the center’s outreach teams have gone out to see Susan, but she would not elaborate on specifics.

The Homeless Services spokeswoman said Susan appears to be part of the street homeless population rather than a shelter client. Homeless Services cannot force clients to enter a shelter, the spokeswoman said, but they can encourage them to seek help at a Safe Haven program, which is geared toward street clients and has semiprivate rooms and more relaxed curfews. She said an outreach team had met with Susan and considered her “civil and engaged with them.” They thought she didn’t pose an immediate danger.

But Mandelker said this behavior is to be expected.

“People, when they’re meeting with outreach workers and psychiatric outreach workers on the street—they can bring it together pretty well and not seem threatening when they’re in the presence of outreach workers,” he said.

Residents concerned about Susan or other neighborhood homeless people can respond in a few ways. Residents concerned Susan’s cough may be a sign of tuberculosis can contact the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene; the law allows people to be picked up for public health safety concerns, according to a source who wished to remain anonymous.

The Manhattan Outreach Consortium seriously considers community concerns, Edwards said, and residents can call 311 and request a homeless outreach team to come to a specific location. Team representatives will arrive immediately, Edwards added, though the person of concern must be at that location when the teams get there. The teams conduct basic psychosocial assessments of each case, determine if they need to be seen by a psychologist and work to connect them to transitional and permanent housing.

But community concerns alone won’t be enough to get Susan help, Gupta said. Locals can begin by talking to Susan and encouraging her to seek help, she added.
“I think that people can try to engage her in conversation and try to talk with her about whether she would be willing to go into a shelter,” Gupta said. “They can try to get a sense of what’s going on with her. If she says things of a level of concern, it would be helpful for them to call for help from the police.”

Henkin, though, is still looking for concrete answers.

”I understand the issues, but I also understand that I have to walk on the sidewalk and not be assaulted by somebody,” she said. “I don’t want anyone spitting on me and coughing. I think people in this community are entitled to an answer.”

A better movie than The Dark Knight Rises would invite discussion of its content, but interpretation (“What’s that?” say Avengers fans) isn’t even required of this third entry in Christopher Nolan’s Batman franchise. A film of empty spectacle, its actual content (formulaic violence, humorless dialogue, unvarying solemnity) runs second to the blatant process of supplying a pre-sold audience with brand-name characters and predictable action.

Whatever Tatum knows about working-class ambition and exploitation (personal or Hollywood style) gets lost in director Steven Soderbergh’s affectless look at Mike Lane (Tatum), a multitasking, self-described entrepreneur (“It’s French,” he says) who spends most of his time humping-and-grinding at Tampa’s Xquisite Club that specializes in male strip shows for female customers.

Soderbergh emphasizes the strip show, intro’d by club owner Dallas (Matthew McConaughey), a lizardy, leathery All-American huckster. But Soderbergh isn’t interested in eroticism. The sex-as-labor theme is itself exploited and trivialized in the Xquisite performances. Soderbergh shoots the routines (“It’s Raining Men” features the troupe in raincoats, suggestively stroking umbrellas) with the same slicked-up stylization that made Flashdance so phony–and yet made it a hit that set the sentimental template for the next several generations’ fuzzy ideas about egoism and success.

Magic Mike extends that sex/success fantasy with over-seriousness, misrepresenting Mike’s peculiar route toward his goal of making custom-designed furniture! If anything can be said with certainty in this life it’s that people who want to make furniture don’t become sex-workers. That term fits Soderbergh’s low-level shots of dollar-bills-in-thongs–a laughable Bresson affectation. But Magic Mike isn’t an analysis of leisure-as-work like Godard cinched in his capitalism/prostitution allegories A Married Woman or 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her(which were also insightful essays on contemporary Paris). Soderbergh slogs through backstage clichés: Mike struggling against a status-rigged banking system and his doomed mentoring of Adam (Alex Pettyfer), a naïve, unmotivated, emotionally unstable 19-year-old spoiling to be despoiled.

While avoiding the overblown existentialism of P.T. Anderson’s Boogie Nights, Soderbergh’s still arty. His oblique close-up of a dancer using a vacuum penis-pump pretends to be austere but it’s really just another example of Soderbergh’s strange detachment: he’s always distant from his subjects yet gives no perspective. Mike’s attraction to Adam’s motherly sister Brooke (Cody Horn) is as clichéd as the bits from Flashdance, 42nd Street, Showgirls and Saturday Night Fever although Soderbergh avoids their emotional payoffs. His drabness prevents dramatic satisfaction which ultimately prevents comprehension.

In Magic Mike, Channing Tatum trades-in his experience as stripper, dancer, actor for Hollywood glibness. Soderbergh seems uninterested in contemplating male sexuality (Tatum’s body) or the work of performance and public interaction–the things Ice Cube got superlatively right in his 1998 female-stripper movie The Player’s Club. This film is even more aggressively hetero. Among the gallery of specimen from pretty-boy Pettyfer to studly Joe Manganiello and the briefly exoticized Adam Rodriguez, Tatum’s charismatic athleticism is the most inviting. He’s open and energetic unlike his gloomy, introspective muse-characterizations for the urban poet Dito Montiel, yet Soderbergh’s disingenuousness encourages the self-defeating (so far) Hollywood stardom Tatum escaped his roots to accept.

Tatum’s Southern white boy essence and dancer’s eagerness could provide insight about the discipline of break-dancing culture, the working-class ambition and sexual currency of his pre-Hollywood years. But Mike’s glib soliloquies (“I’m not my goddam job!”) offer only recession-ready delusions. So does McConaghay’s impresario, a decadent business figure whose Dennis Hopper-craziness (“Fuck that mirror like you mean it!”) contrasts Mike’s magical innocence. Like the working-class slugs in Soderbergh’s 2005 abomination Bubble, all these characters are shallow. They strip to reveal nothing–despite Tatum’s promise of new physical truths. Dumb hunk stereotype confirmed.

Follow Armond White on Twitter at 3xchair

Ethical Culture Fieldston School. Photo by Andrew Schwartz.

By Rebecca Harris

When a group of New York prep school students were banned from attending their senior prom last month after getting high on a class trip, their parents were angry—some at the school administration more than at their kids, students say. Quick to lay down the law, one or several of those parents reportedly rented a yacht and, in an interesting display of discipline, threw the banished seniors an alternative, private prom party.

About 15 seniors at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School admitted to consuming brownies containing marijuana on an overnight class trip April 29-30 to Camp Mason, a YMCA summer camp in New Jersey, according to two classmates who just completed their senior year at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School.

The accused students were prohibited by administrators from attending May 19 color war festivities as well as the Fieldston senior prom at Studio 450 on May 29.

Two sources spoke on the condition of anonymity, and several other Fieldston students confirmed that the “anti-prom” was held the same night as the official school party.

“We had this field trip and some kids brought pot brownies to it. They couldn’t prove it, I guess, but everyone knew,” said a female student who graduated with the rest of her class—or “form,” as it is called at Fieldston—June 6.

On the same night as the scheduled prom, the banned seniors, their dates and some friends attended a party on a yacht.

“One of the parents ordered a yacht for them,” said a male student who just graduated. “I don’t think any of them said no—it’s a pretty cool alternative.”

One girl’s parents were angry with her for getting in trouble with the school, but most of her classmates’ parents “didn’t seem to care that much,” according to a source.

Pictures and posts on Facebook and Twitter documented a night of revelry—or “yachtingtons” as dubbed by one photo album title—for the banned seniors, courtesy of their parents. Comments branded the event “Fieldston anti-prom 2012.”

In one photo posted on Facebook, a group of girls who had been involved in the drug incident posed together. It was captioned ‘j sisters’—“like joint sisters,” the female student said. She added that the picture has since been taken down.

The Fieldston administration has made a concerted effort to prevent students from discussing the incident and school officials denied repeated requests for comment.

Fieldston Upper, whose campus is located in the Riverdale area of the Bronx, includes students in ninth through 12th grade and is a member institution of the Ivy Preparatory School League, often considered the Ivy League of New York City private high schools. Fieldston is included in the League alongside schools such as Horace Mann, Trinity and Dalton.

In 2011, Business Insider reported Fieldston as America’s 11th most expensive private high school. Tuition and fees for the 2011-12 academic year totaled $37,825 per student.

Fieldston also has two lower schools for pre-kindergarten through fifth grade: Ethical Culture, on the Upper West Side, and Fieldston Lower, on the Riverdale campus along with Fieldston Upper. Sixth through eighth graders attend Fieldston Middle, which is also located on the Riverdale campus. The four schools serve about 1,600 students in total, many of whom hail from the Upper East and Upper West sides.

According to both students, Fieldston administrators threatened harsher disciplinary consequences in order to elicit confessions from the students accused of getting high on the Camp Mason overnight trip. They said the school claimed to have a list of “the kids we know who did it,” and that the accused teens were told that if they confessed, they could avoid further disciplinary action—including potentially notifying the universities they will attend in the fall.

“The administration said, ‘If you come and confess, you won’t be allowed to go to prom…but if you don’t confess and we know you did it, we’ll contact your schools and you may not be able to walk at graduation. And you still won’t go to prom,’” the female student said.

The other student criticized Fieldston officials for using “scare tactics” to compensate for what he desribed as a lack of evidence that the students were under the influence of marijuana.

“They all confessed,” he said, “but parents were angry at how [the school] gathered evidence. A lot of people thought they handled it badly.”

The female student disagreed with his criticism of how Fieldston officials handled the incident.

“I think the school was more or less fair about it,” she said. “[They said,] ‘We’re not gonna ruin your future, but there will be consequences if you go against our rules.’”

The students’ accounts are confirmed by an email sent to parents of the class of 2012 by Fieldston Upper Principal John Love on May 11, after most, but not all, of the students involved, had confessed. The email does not go into detail about the accusations—students eating marijuana brownies on a school trip—referring to the situation only as “a recent incident.”

“We feel it is absolutely essential to our mission and to the environment we want to create for our students that we take violations of this rule very seriously,” read the email. “We asked that the students involved come forward and take responsibility for their involvement, telling them that if they did so they would lose the privilege of participating in the color war on Friday, May 18 and of attending the prom at Studio 450 on May 29. We also said that if a student was involved and chose not to come forward, his or her case might be brought to the Discipline Committee, with potentially severe consequences.”

No students other than those who came forward voluntarily were ultimately subjected to disciplinary action at Fieldston.

I’ve had a lot of time on my hands lately, and now that I’m tapering down the percocet, I have the motor skills with which to take advantage. See, a few weeks ago, I underwent open heart surgery to fix a frayed valve (I’m fine now, thanks). Here are a few fun, pertinent details: it was on my 26th birthday, and I was in the hospital for nine days.

Yes, early on my 26th birthday, a team of doctors sawed through my chest and replaced one one little pesky aortic instrument with the other, ending (I hope) a long saga that has served as a personal B-story for my entire life. If there was celebratory cake, I didn’t get any, though there was something particularly festive about the ice chips when I woke up a few days later. Still, I’m lucky: I have a job that offers me health benefits, and the timing of the procedure, by just hours, qualified as part of the extended amount of time that a grown child can receive help from his or her parents’ healthcare coverage.

So, you’ll imagine my relief when I got a $350,000 estimate over the phone from the hospital, the sum total of all my expenses. Life is priceless, I know, but I didn’t even order room service, so I’m not sure how they arrived at the number. I’ll have to negotiate the cost — I’m a writer, not a Goldman Sachs intern — but for the most part, I know insurance will bear the heavy fiscal burden.

But picture, if you will, those two small details just slightly readjusted. Instead of on my 26th birthday, let’s say my surgeon had caught a cold, and couldn’t operate until a few days later. And instead of being insured by my employer, I was a full-time freelancer, without insurance benefits and too poor to feasibly purchase my own coverage in this market. Then what?

I’ll tell you: I’d be in $350,000 debt. Instead of being excited to return to the real world, I’d be selling all my possessions — and breaking the lease on my new apartment — and moving back in with my parents, just to net a few garage sale bucks and save rent (the bodega economy would be devastated). I’d be working three extra jobs, just to pay off the interest on the loans I took out to cover my hospital bills. I’d probably have to declare bankruptcy (is an Xbox collateral?) and I’d lose about two decades of my life slaving to pay back the bill for living.

Not bills for a fun vacation; not comeuppance for a lavish lifestyle. I’d be slaving until my mid-40s just to pay back the cost of not dying. I had no choice in the matter; I was born with this heart defect, and I’ve worked hard to minimize its impact on my daily life. I sometimes don’t vote in primaries and have biked on the sidewalk a few times, but for the most part, I’m a pretty good citizen, and a healthy participant in a progressive society. But that’d be irrelevant with just a few standard, Manhattan-twentysomething tweaks to my biography.

And that’s if I even went to the doctor; without insurance, I probably would have continued to put off the appointment when I wasn’t feeling well, chalking it up to stress or too many late nights.

Now, normally, I don’t like to burden others with my problems. But it’s hard to just sit around when the scuttlebutt is that, Later this month, you may strike down the President’s health reform law. Word is that some cranky people consider it an infringement on their rights, President Obama’s request that everyone purchase health insurance, for their own good. Now, it’s an imperfect law, to say the very least; the northeast college-educated liberal that I am, I’d have prefered a single payer healthcare system. But at least it was progress.

The fact of the matter is that because of the President’s law, my employment status was irrelevant; I was covered for my open heart surgery. My life, as I know it, isn’t over. I can participate in society; I can give to charity, volunteer and participate in the economy. I am warm flesh and blood, not a fiscal zombie.

When you consider the health care reform act this month, I just ask you measure rhetoric with the arc of humanity. You have a chance to draw a line in the sand, batten down the hatches and push our country forever forward, declaring that the law is legal and that people have a right to healthcare, and with it, an actual life.

I know they don’t honor that at CATO dinners and speaking engagements at lobbyists’ birthday parties, but I’m hoping you can look past that. I also know that court cases tend to deal with the obscure, the philosophical and legal wording loopholes, so it can be hard to fully understand the consequences of a case, and especially a reactionary, regressive decision.

So consider this: striking down the law will create a national debtors’ prison, filled with inmates who dared to not die. Many more will put off necessary healthcare, because they don’t have the cash to get checked out. The consequences are life and death here, and rare is it that the choice between the two is so obvious; there are no tricks, no unintended consequences, no secret moral stories available in both sides. Strike down the law, and you kill people. Keep it, and you’ve moved history forever forward.

As a bonus, I’ll even send you a slice of the birthday cake from my delayed party.

Best,

Jordan Zakarin

Actress Edie Falco with Sponge Bob

By Paul Bisceglio

New York’s tubbiest tabby has a new home.

Sponge Bob, the 30 lb. feline media sensation, made his debut with his new owners last week on the purple carpet at Animal Haven’s second annual Performance for the Animals benefit concert and auction at City Winery in Tribeca.

Two months ago, Sponge Bob’s previous owner went into hospice and left the nine-year-old cat with Animal Haven, a non-profit cat and dog shelter on Centre Street in Soho. The shelter started a blog about Sponge Bob to aid his adoption that won him instant fame last week, including press coverage in the UK and an appearance on the Today Show. He is likely the world’s largest living cat.

Sponge Bob now belongs to Courtney and Matthew Farrell, a young newlywed couple living on the Upper East Side. They hoisted Sponge Bob up for the cameras on the red carpet – no easy task, for sure – and shared hugs and kisses with the cat and each other while expressing their enthusiasm for the new member of the family

Mrs. Farrell said that she and her husband started to play with the idea of getting a cat once they were married, but did not want to bother with a kitten or anything too out of control. When she first read about Sponge Bob, she sent Mr. Farrell a picture as a joke. A few conversations later, they knew they had found the perfect match. They were amazed that he had not yet been adopted.

“We’re gonna whip him into shape,” promised Mr. Farrell when asked about the cat’s health. He and his wife both exercise regularly and believe in promoting healthy lifestyles.

“He’s already on a no carb diet,” Mr. Farrell added with a smile. “Catkins.”

Courtney and Matthew Farrell, the proud new parents of Spongebob the cat, pose on the purple carpet.

Kendra Mara, Animal Haven’s Associate Director, said that blood work done on Sponge Bob showed that he has no current health complications beyond obesity. Dangers of diabetes and arthritis persist, though, so it is essential for Sponge Bob to maintain a healthy weight loss routine, with the target of shedding about one pound per month.

Ms. Mara noted that Animal Haven had been careful not to over-sensationalize Sponge Bob’s Garfield-esque physique, and believes that his sudden fame has helped raise much-needed awareness of feline and pet obesity, a serious issue in the city.

The Farrells enjoyed their moment in the spot light, but packed Sponge Bob into his baby stroller and hit the road before the evening’s concert and auction began.

“He’s been through a lot,” they agreed while scratching his portly chin. “We just want to get him home.”

Follow Sponge Bob’s progress on his blog, spongebobthecat.com, and learn more about Animal Haven, its mission and pet ownership in the city at animalhavenshelter.org.

Illustration by Brian Taylor

It’s still the early part of the season, the good part, when summer hours kick into effect (for the luckiest among us), before the tourist invasion starts and the city starts to heat up and emit that special odor that’s uniquely New York in August.

There’s no better time to be in the city for those who love culture or the outdoors. Every street corner seems to sing with its own event or festivity, and even the most jaded New Yorker can find something to pique their interest.

Those fortunate enough to live here are in the epicenter of a marathon celebration that runs all the way through the dog days of August.
Inside, we’ve created a handy-dandy guide to the best live concerts, film festivals, theater openings, museum shows, outdoor events, summer reading series and more that will help you plot out the next few months of your life.

So heat up the grill and pour yourself a cold one. We hope you’ll find something that will brighten your summer within these pages.

-Allen Houston, Executive Editor of Manhattan Media

Music
Top 10 Concerts
Reading Summer Film
Film
Best June Events for Kids
Cultural Events & Festivals
Hamptons Events
Celebrity Summer Guide
Out of Town
Summer Reading Series
Theater
Eats & Drinks
Top Food of Summer
Museums
Outdoor
Bike Share
Top Bike Trails
TV Guide

Summer Guide was compiled by Allen Houston, Marissa Maier, Megan Bungeroth, Adam Rathe, Robby Ritaco, Laura Shin, Armond White, Regan Hofmann, Rachel Khona, Angela Barbuti, Sean Creamer, Anam Baig, Andrew Rice, Magdalena Burnham, Doug Strassler, Max Sarinsky, Whitney Casser, Robin Elisabeth Kilmer and Andrew Bartel, Ed Johnson

All interviews by Angela Barbuti

Dylan Lauren, owner of Dylan’s Candy Store

What’s your favorite thing about New York in the summer?
The colorful flowers along Park Avenue and in Central Park and the happy vibe when seeing New Yorkers in bright candy colors on the street.

What’s your favorite summertime activity?
Going to the Hamptons and biking there. Or having a picnic outdoors in Central Park.

Your best and worst summer memory?
Attending concerts on the Great Lawn or jogging around the Great Lawn as late as 8:45 p.m., as the sun is still out and the park is safe and packed!
The worst is walking to work or taking a subway on 100-degree days and knowing I’m going to have to take two showers to get the sweat off, then going into an air-conditioned room.

Are you a mountains or beach person?
Both. I love to hike and go to Colorado. But more often, like every weekend, I run along a vast ocean on a long beach like Montauk—my fave.

Favorite summertime restaurant?
Barronda downtown on West Broadway between Broome and Spring because of its beautiful outdoor garden. Also, Cipriani downtown, on the same block.

Whoopi Goldberg, co-host of ‘The View,’
Oscar winner, comedian

What’s your favorite thing about New York in the summer?
New York is like a party—all kinds of music everywhere, the smells of street fairs and carnival food wafting through the city, open hydrants offering a way to cool off.

What’s your favorite summertime activity?
Coney Island, Atlantic City, Central Park, Bryant Park

Are you a mountain or a beach person?
I’m both.

Favorite summertime restaurant?
Anywhere there is a street fair with Italian sausage and cotton candy!

Michael Ian Black, comedian, actor,

author, gadfly, man about town

What’s your favorite thing about New York in the summer?
I love how many New Yorkers leave. They disappear for beaches, where they will sunburn surrounded by their friends and grouse about how much they hate the beach.

What’s your favorite summertime activity?
Hammocking, my made-up verb for falling asleep in a hammock with a book splayed on my chest.

Your best and worst summer memory?
Best New York summer memory: getting dropped off at NYU my first day of college in August, 1988. It seemed to me like my life was beginning on that day.
Worst New York summer memory: Getting caught shoplifting at Tower Records the summer after my sophomore year. People like me are the reason Tower went out of business (back then it was shoplifting—now it’s called pirating).

Are you a mountain or a beach person?
Definitely mountains, minus the poison ivy and the bears. Actually, I like bears. So just minus the poison ivy.

Favorite summertime restaurant?
In New York, I will always have a soft spot for eating outside at Maryann’s on 16th Street and Eighth Avenue. It’s heavy Mexican food, not at all good for summer eating, but I have so many fond memories of stuffing myself with cheap tacos and enchiladas that, no matter the season, it will always hold a warm spot in my heart.

The orthodox community came out to protest the dangers of the internet, but a counter rally shed light on a different problem—hushed up sex abuse.  

By Matt Harvey

They traveled in cars and buses from far Rockland County and Lakewood, New Jersey. But mostly they took the subway from points in Brooklyn: Midwood, Crown Heights and Williamsburg. They spoke a mixture of Yiddish and English. By the strike of 8 pm on Sunday, well over 40,000 ultra-orthodox men—ranging in age from children with ringlets to gray-bearded grandfathers, representing all the iterations of Haredi dress—had passed through the gates of Citi Field and Arthur Ashe Stadium for what was billed by its organizers as a “big family meeting.” It was an impressive show of strength by the standards of any religious movement.

Event spokesperson, Eytan Kobre, an attorney and editor for Jewish newspaper, Mispacha, highlighted the night’s stated theme, “raising awareness” about the dangers of an unregulated internet (especially readily accessible porn) with a broad-based secular appeal to family values. “Do you like clean water?” he asked reporters rhetorically. “These people just want clean internet!” Haskel Landau, who had come down from Muncie, New York, translated the main points found in the slim Yiddish volumes that each of the attendees had received at the gate for an inquisitive stranger. He said: “It tells you how to stay within the law when surfing the web.”

After briefly pausing to take a phone call, Landau hints that there might be more to the night’s program than a simple rejection of the latest trapping of modernity, adding, “we’re here to show that we have a group of very old rabbis protecting us.”

Members of the media and a small contingent of millennial bloggers who showed up dressed like cavemen and were chanting “ooga-booga”—in an ironical “counter-protest” to a perceived threat to their own internet freedoms—mostly took Kobre’s anti-internet message at face value, but there were indications everywhere that the stately event (which cost between $1-$1.3 million depending on who you ask) had less to do with internet porn than a “rabbinical hierarchy” flexing its muscle in the face of mounting criticism about how it has handled accusations of child sexual abuse within the community. (Earlier this month the New York Times published a particularly explosive investigative account about Hasidic rabbis directing their congregants to shun members of its community who go to the police with allegations of sexual abuse against their co-religionists.)

Such criticism flourishes online where it might otherwise lie dormant, explained Avi Burnstein, a 36-year-old Manhattan resident who was part of a more serious and larger counter-rally—made up mostly of former-Haredi, including Deborah Feldman, author of the memoir Unorthodox. “The Internet is not the problem,” said Burnstein, who added, “90% of these families already don’t use the Internet in their homes, they’ve already been told all about it.”

Hannah Shapiro, an attractive 35-year-old mother of four who very recently left a tightly-knit ultra-orthodox Brooklyn community was standing on Roosevelt Avenue holding up a sign in Yiddish that said, “Stand Up to Perverts.” Choking back tears, she recalled “three close friends” who suffered at the hands of sexual predators and herself going to school with marked “signs of physical abuse that no one did anything about.” She adds that her generation was “taught not to ask questions,” but she hoped her presence on Roosevelt Avenue would “force some people to open their eyes.”

Standing as close as he could to the counter protest without feeling uncomfortable, a thirty-year-old Hasidic man from Midwood who would only give his name as Moishe, because his parents would “kill him” for even “watching” the counter-demonstration, agreed that the organizers of the event mainly want “outsiders,” referring mainly to apostates and secular Jews, “to see their strength.” Eyeing the signs and commotion across the avenue, his sentiments wavered from “curiosity” to “pity.” Before finally walking back to Citi Field he said: “These are our people and they’ve cut their ties with friends and family . . . with well everything,” he added unable to mask his astonishment. “It’s just the type of thing an event like this is meant to avoid.”