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Cyanide Death in Park Slope

Matt Elzweig — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:59:20 +0000

A Department of Environmental Protection truck, cops and firefighters and “people in Hazmat suits,” were standing in front of a brownstone at 401 Fourth Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues in Park Slope, Brooklyn, Brownstowner reported today. Detective Martin Speechley of the NYPD’s public information unit said that inside the home investigators found a dead white male, age 65, and “a clear, white liquid believed to be cyanide,” in a telephone interview. The victim was Robert Siegel, and his wife called police after finding him there. Speechley said that no cause of death has been determined yet. When asked whether this was a suicide, he reiterated that the medical examiner is still investigating. "We just don’t suspect criminality," said Speechley.

Photo from Brownstoner.

Journalist Ben Westhoff, Impersonating John Corbett, Accuses Darren Star of Editing Aidan out of ‘Sex and the City’ Movie

Matt Elzweig — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:40:15 +0000

Freelance journalist Ben Westhoff (pictured top left), 30, who writes for the Village Voice, New York magazine’s Vulture blog and the LA Weekly, has found an odd way to amuse himself in his spare time. He posts entries on his blog that falsely purport to be written by former Sex and the City actor John Corbett (pictured bottom left).

In his most recent posting under Corbett’s byline on Wednesday titled "Hold On To Your Hats", Westhoff wrote an extended post accusing Sex and the City creator Darren Star of editing Corbett out of the forthcoming Sex and the City movie directed by Michael Patrick King.

Westhoff, writing as Corbett, went so far as to invent a phony role played by Corbett’s character, Aidan, in the SATC movie – in which his character saves the life of a subway jumper, and is invited by former flame Carrie Bradshaw for coffee. As Corbett, Westhoff then claims that Star (the movie’s executive producer) forced King to remove him from the finished film.

Westhoff-as-Corbett then threatens to reveal the entire plot of the movie on the Internet unless Star restores his role.

"…I am fucking pissed, nonetheless, because I cleared a big WHOLE in my schedule to do this shit, even passed up a part on Bones. And that’s why I’ve decided to give Darren an ultimative and say that if he doesn’t put me back in there, I’m going to spoil the whole movie. That’s righty. I’m going to give out ALL the plot ALL over the internet, including right here at my bro-dawg Ben’s site the Healthiest Mutherfucking Pimp in Park Slope."

That’s a reference to Westhoff’s blog, “The Healthiest Man in Park Slope,” where Westhoff has been posting as Corbett, off and on, for more than two weeks.

"It’s not John Corbett. It’s me posting as John Corbett," the Hoboken, New Jersey-based Westhoff acknowledged in a telephone interview.

Westhoff began by introducing "Corbett" and then Corbett prefaced the item by explaining he had asked Westhoff "for a chance to take over his little site for a day because I got to get something off my chest."

Steve Lovett, the Los Angeles-based manager for the actual John Corbett, said Corbett is "not a blogger" and denied that his client had actually written the item. "The facts aren’t true, either," Lovett said of Westhoff’s scenario which pitted the saccharine-voiced actor against producer Darren Star.

Westhoff admits that he does not know Corbett, and said the popularity of a similar parody he wrote this about rapper Lil Wayne and actor Zac Efron for the OC Weekly in Los Angeles, inspired him to continue experimenting with satire. "This is in that tradition. It’s kind of a satirical, Onion-style, kind of ongoing series of those kind of parodies about John Corbett, but more about pop culture in general."

Was Westhoff concerned whether the actual John Corbett might not appreciate Westhoff’s misrepresentation of his opinions?

"I think the odds of [Corbett] stumbling across it are slim, but if he did, I would like to think that he’d find it funny."

Gladwell Hunting

Matt Elzweig — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

“The Tipping Point is the biography of an idea,” Malcolm Gladwell wrote in the introduction to the number-one best-selling 2000 book that vaulted him to rock star status in a profession that has, well, none.

What a line—a brilliant, shorthand statement of purpose that defined his objective and his subject in nine simple words. That gift of glib simplicity had distinguished Gladwell as a journalist from his early career as a Washington Post reporter to his dispatches in The New Yorker for the last dozen years. He’d always found a way to distill complex ideas into compelling, easily comprehended prose, and here he’d defined his objective with typically engaging directness.

But a few months ago, after finally catching up with The Tipping Point and then following up his fascinating book with some Googling to satisfy my deepened curiosity, I was surprised to stumble on the names of Morton Grodzins, Mark Granovetter and Thomas Schelling, three prominent American social scientists—and to discover that they, not Gladwell, were the originators of the Tipping Point. Had I missed something? I’d read his book voraciously and been mesmerized by its theories and ideas. Wasn’t the Tipping Point concept a product of Gladwell’s inventive, idiosyncratic mind? Who were Grodzins and Co., and why didn’t I remember them?

I returned to the Gladwell “biography” and flipped furiously through its pages, endnotes and index, looking for any explanation of the birth of the Tipping Point idea. Surely, I thought, a biography would have devoted some space to the origins of the concept at the very root of its title!

And sure enough, it did. An entire sentence.

On page 12 of the introduction, Gladwell had written: “The expression first came into popular use in the 1970s to describe the flight to the suburbs of whites living in the older cities of the American Northeast.” After giving a brief example of how that works, Gladwell concluded, “The Tipping Point is the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point.”

But where were Grodzins and Schelling? I’d forgotten that Granovetter turned up a bit later in the narrative on the subject of connectors—another Gladwell obsession—but none of the landmark contributions of these three academics managed to make it into Gladwell’s text. The research of Schelling and Granovetter do earn a mention in the fine-print “endnotes” as “classic works of sociology” in which “the Tipping Point model has been described,” but that’s it. There’s no indication of the path followed by the term that took flight only upon publication of Gladwell’s best-selling book.

And there was no mention at all of Grodzins, the University of Chicago political scientist who, in 1957, conceived the idea that Gladwell’s biography purported to chronicle.

Where was Grodzins? Why had he not been credited with the launch of this groundbreaking concept? There began a journey into the mind and methods of Malcolm Gladwell, the brilliant author and journalist who turned that remote academic notion—among dozens of others in his illustrious career—into a national obsession.

***

Like all others who study the work of Malcolm Gladwell, I quickly discovered just how intimidating his intellect can be. In catching up with his considerable collection of books, magazine articles and essays, I recognized in Gladwell a writer who had a powerful capacity to persuade readers to his world view without ever resorting to cynicism or harsh language. Indeed, he specializes in the journalism of inclusion; he makes readers comfortable with his theories, and finds ways for them to apply principles of social behavior to their own lives, thus making them better.

The 44-year-old Gladwell was born in Great Britain and raised in Canada, and he often cites his Canadian upbringing as an essential component of his agenda. “We think the world is basically a good place,” he told The New York Times in 2006. “We’re pretty optimistic. We think we ought to take care of each other.” That sort of positive thinking has helped Gladwell become the foremost counterintuitive journalist of his generation—a reporter/writer who can take ideas like white flight (in The Tipping Point) and impulsive decision-making (in his 2005 megahit followup, Blink) and flip them into frameworks for a happier life. Both books remain on the paperback best-seller list, and it’s no surprise in a culture starved for solutions, answers, recipes for revitalizing our lives. Buy a Gladwell book and you will learn that epidemics can work in our favor, that connections can guide us to success, and that trusting our instincts can enrich our existence.

It’s that gleefully benign approach to life—coupled with a keen intelligence and offhand wit—that has protected Gladwell from the kind of critical scrutiny you might expect of someone so successful. It has functioned as a force-field around him; negative reviews or polemical potshots have not been able to knock Gladwell off his pedestal. He continues to be adored by even a critical establishment set up to debunk; Gawker, the media establishment’s unofficial attack dog, has actually defended him in recent weeks against charges elsewhere that he may have made up stories about his life on NPR. (The website conducted a mock poll on the accusations, in which readers aligned with Gladwell by an almost two-to-one margin.)

Two weeks ago, an editor at The New York Times Book Review went on its “Paper Cuts” blog to attack Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, for a glancing reference to Gladwell as an “idiot.”

“I think he stepped over the line,” fumed the editor, Barry Gewen, going on to say that “the rest of us should care, not about the attack itself, but about its drive-by, bomb-tossing quality.”

Gee, which of us doesn’t fantasize that a New York Times Book Review editor would rush to our defense whenever someone calls us an idiot? But that’s just another facet to Gladwell’s charmed existence. His glib, upbeat, friendly voice and his sharp, incisive mind disarms almost all who come under its spell. While many may quibble with aspects of a Gladwell position here and there—and many have—he has proven himself a hard man to argue with, perhaps one of the hardest of our time.

As I would soon learn firsthand.

***

But first back to Grodzins, who was teaching political science at the University of Chicago when he coined the phrase “tipping point” in 1957.

The 38-year-old department chairman had been studying the phenomenon of whites who left neighborhoods as the black population increased; he’d observed a pattern of behavior in which, after a threshold number had been crossed, white families chose to move elsewhere. Later, that process would become known as “white flight.” But to explain the phenomenon in an article for Scientific American—under the slightly less provocative title, “Metropolitan Segregation”—Grodzins wrote: “But for the vast majority of white Americans a ‘tip point’ exists. Once it is exceeded, they will no longer stay among Negro neighbors.”

Too bad Grodzins couldn’t toss in the type of rhetorical flourishes that Gladwell seemed to have at the ready. It was true that Grodzins had already achieved some notoriety with an earlier piece of writing; in 1949 he’d published Americans Betrayed, a powerful attack on the United States’ infamous relocation of Japanese-Americans in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack. But this piece—despite its long-term significance—didn’t catch fire, to say the least. When he died in 1964 at the age of 46, his four-paragraph New York Times obituary didn’t even mention the notion.

So there it sat, relatively unnoticed, until 1971, when Thomas Schelling—a University of Maryland economist who went on to win the 2005 Nobel Prize—expanded on Grodzins’ theories in an academic treatise called “Dynamic Models of Segregation.” (In an unrelated achievement, Schelling also worked with the director Stanley Kubrick on the making of Dr. Strangelove.) In 1978, Mark Granovetter, a Stanford University sociologist, followed up with “Threshhold Models of Collective Behavior,” a paper that took Schelling’s Tipping Point theory in a new direction.

Suddenly, Grodzins’ Tipping Point idea had pushed a new generation of gurus to understanding its meaning and implications. Among those academics, there was no doubt that Grodzins deserved credit for the term. But Grodzins was long dead; I would never know how the man who invented the Tipping Point felt about Gladwell’s uncredited borrowing of the phrase.

So how did Thomas Schelling, still on the faculty of the University of Maryland, feel about the fact that Malcolm Gladwell had achieved global success with his Tipping Point theories? After some friendly emailing we finally connected on the phone one Friday morning in January.

***

“I have a sort of vested interest in the Tipping Point,” the 86-year-old Schelling said, laughing, to start things off.

But the Nobel Laureate didn’t sound bitter—at least not at first. He’d read Gladwell’s book as soon as it came out in 2000, of course, even though the writer had never interviewed him or contacted him. And he liked it, too. That was my impression, anyway, from his description of Gladwell’s version of the tipping point as “original, different from the original notion of the Tipping Point”—a notion, Schelling hastened to remind me, that had originated with Grodzins, not him.

But after several minutes of explaining the differences between his use of Tipping Point and the new dimension added by Gladwell, the subject of credit emerged in the conversation before I’d even asked about it.

“I thought he missed an opportunity to say he was adding a new dimension to this,” Schelling was saying. “And what I couldn’t tell was whether he was avoiding that in order to get full credit for the whole concept of the Tipping Point, rather than giving credit to people who had already worked on the project.”

Was Schelling actually accusing Gladwell of purposely withholding credit from Grodzins and him so he could take it all for himself? Searching for a benign view of the potentially sticky situation—a Nobel Prize winner taking on a New Yorker writer—I pointed out to Schelling that Gladwell had included a reference to one of his articles in the book’s endnotes, following the text.

“Well, I tell you, I’ve read some books in which the procedure was endnotes, not footnotes,” Schelling said.

“Mmm hmmm,” I replied.

“And I don’t like it. And for two reasons. One is, people don’t read endnotes.”

“Uh hunh,” I said.

The second reason took a lot longer to explain. Schelling went into some detail about the benefits of having a footnote that appears on the same page as a reference—sometimes for commentary on the text, sometimes for comic effect, and sometimes for purposes of giving pertinent credit. “You miss that,” Schelling concluded, “if you put it all at the end of a chapter, or the end of the book, for that matter.”

We chatted for a while longer, and Schelling made it clear he wasn’t angry at Gladwell, jealous of his success, or fearful that other scholars wouldn’t know of his contributions to Tipping Point literature. “Malcolm Gladwell came along when I was far enough along in age and career and all of that,” Schelling said, “that the fact that he didn’t give me any significant credit didn’t bother me. It just made me wonder why.”

It made me wonder why, too. So I figured this would be a good time to email Malcolm Gladwell a few questions.

***

“Hey matt,” Gladwell emailed me the following Wednesday, after I’d asked if we could meet for an interview. “I’m afraid I’ve come down to the wire and really crazed [sic]. So email is best. You’re likely to get much more thoughtful responses, too, if I can write them. Cheers, m.”

Two days later, on Friday, I emailed Gladwell a long list of questions. I asked him why he’d used endnotes instead of footnotes, why he’d included a biography, why he hadn’t mentioned Grodzins anywhere in his book and why he’d relegated Schelling to the endnotes. I quoted at length from my Schelling interview—including his speculation as to whether Gladwell had left him out on purpose, to take full credit for the term—and asked him to comment.

On Sunday afternoon, I got a lengthy email from Gladwell.

It began without salutation this time.

“The ‘tipping point’ phrase was part of the vernacular of academic and policy circles long before I ever decided to use it as the title of my book,” Gladwell wrote. “When I was [sic] reporter at The Washington Post, covering the AIDS epidemic, I used to hear epidemiologists use it all the time.”

He went on: “Your questions about Schelling and Grodzins are based on a significant misunderstanding. There are two very different academic traditions associated with the idea of tipping points. Schelling and Grodzins represent the economic tradition. As I understand it (and I might be over-simplifying things here) the way economists think about tipping points goes something like this.”

What followed was a 500-word restatement, in classic Gladwellian prose, of the Schelling-Grodzins Tipping Point model, that brilliantly contrasted the economist’s view with that of the epidemiologist. He summarized the notion of white flight with a well-wrought hypothetical about the shifting racial composition of a neighborhood, and he gracefully juxtaposed it to the depiction of a syphilis epidemic—an example he used to articulate his own Tipping Point approach.

“Economists and epidemiologists both use the term ‘tipping point,’” Gladwell wrote. “But they’re using that term in profoundly different intellectual contexts. My book is about the epidemiological model. In fact, although it’s called the ‘Tipping Point’ is really a book about epidemics, and how the epidemic model can be applied to social phenemona. The three principles—the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context—are all simple restatements of the principles that epidemiologists use in analyzing epidemics. The researchers who are quoted in the book, as a result, are overwhelmingly epidemiologists, psychologists and sociologists. The intellectual bones of the book lie with diffusion theory and Granovetter’s pioneering work on networks.”

I especially liked that phrase “intellectual bones.” Yet again, Gladwell had impressed me with his gift at eloquent shorthand—so much so that at this point in reading his email, I was embarrassed that I’d ever thought to challenge him on anything. This dude is so much smarter than me.

But what about Schelling and Grodzins? Well, it turned out Gladwell had just been clearing his throat, preparing to take on the core of Schelling’s point with his usual, self-effacing literary flair.

***

“So when Schelling says I didn’t ground my work in the ‘tradition’ of tipping points, what he means is that I didn’t write my book from the perspective of his academic tradition,” Gladwell continued. “And he’s absolutely right. But I didn’t intend to, because I don’t think the economic model is at all useful in understanding the kinds of contagious social processes (smoking, suicide, crime, bestsellers, social power, fashion etc) that The Tipping Point is focused on. I think the economic model is fascinating—and that’s why I credit Schelling in the endnotes and describe his work as an academic ‘classic.’ But since I’m not building my argument based on the economic model, I’m not sure I need to do more than that.

“If you are in any way uncertain about this distinction between economic and epidemiological models, please let me know. It’s a pretty critical point.”

As I sat at home staring at my computer screen that Sunday afternoon in January, I wondered if I would ever be able to write an email as effective as the one I’d just finished reading. I realized, for the first time, that part of his genius lay in his ability to deflect any criticism with his intellectually rigorous yet disarmingly friendly voice. Suddenly I felt guilty for ever doubting Gladwell’s intentions and put aside this piece to pursue more feasible projects, like cleaning out the Augean stables in a single day.

OUR PRICES ARE IN-SA-A-A-A-A-A-N-E!

Matt Elzweig — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Good Deals

$6.99 sirloin at Tad’s Steaks

761 7th Ave. (at 50th St.)
212-767-8348

If it’s true that the lowest markup on menus is on steak, then what does that say about the 7-ounce sirloin lunch special at Tad’s Steaks, available for $6.99 with a baked potato, garlic bread and salad? Our advice: Don’t think about it. Or look at it. Just order it, eat it and forget it ever happened. Look on the bright side: It beats eating your shoe.

$16.99 “15-bite hot dog” at Brooklyn Diner

57th St. (betw. Broadway & 7th Ave.)
212-977-1957

The 15-Bite “All Beef” Hot Dog at touristy Brooklyn Diner looked suspiciously overpriced when judged by its description and photo online. Almost $17 for a hot dog is almost $16 more than most self-respecting nitrite lovers can afford. The photo of the dog did look formidable but no more than the foot-longs you might find at respectable pubs and street carts. While Robert Rilley, executive chef of the Fireman Hospitality Group, which owns Brooklyn Diner, Redeye Grill and other restaurants, explained that one 15-Bite Hot Dog serves one person, a recent eyewitness thought four was a fairer estimate. Rilley said the dish earned its name after a contest was held to determine how many bites it took to finish one of the beef franks, which are handmade by “all our butchers in Brooklyn” and packed into a “homemade Brioche Roll.” It has been on the menu since Brooklyn Diner opened its doors in 1995. “Brooklyn was the birthplace of hot dogs, and our oversized version is a salute to that,” Rilley wrote. And it’s a salute to overpricing at its most outrageous.

Four dumplings for $1 at Dumpling House

118 Eldridge St. (betw. Broome & Grand Sts.)
212-625-8008

This used to be the five-dumplings-for-$1 deal at the Dumpling House, but you missed it. Now that the restaurant has been renovated to three times its size, each dumpling costs five cents more. Eight of them makes a meal, says chef and manager, Vanessea Weng, conveniently, adding that chive and pork is the most popular filling. Better get there fast, because Weng explains that the price of flour and real estate will soon mean yet another dumplings-per-dollar increase,to $2.50 for eight. The dumplings go best with hot and sour soup; that’s another dollar and another deal.

$4,900 for a 1991 bottle of French burgundy at BLT Market

1430 6th Ave. (at W. 58th St.),
The Ritz-Carlton New York, Central Park
212-521-6125

One bottle of 1991 French burgundy at BLT Market for $4,900? Not a bad deal for something that began as a grape. The flagship burgundy produced in the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, a famous French estate, is “the most expensive bottle of wine in the world,” says Rick Sullivan, the rare and fine specialist at cellarbrokers.com, where a bottle is on sale for $8,418. “1991 was a fantastic year.”

The BLT Market, which is the offspring of BLT Steakhouse, known more for its Cabernet and Bordeaux, sells about five bottles of burgundy a night, says Jeremy Christie, the sommelier at BLT Market. In one month, BLT sold out of the half-dozen bottles of Echezeaux from the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, but those were priced in the hundreds, not thousands, of dollars. As for what Christie calls the “king of burgundies”? No buyers yet in the restaurant’s first six months. “We’re waiting,” says Christie. “We’re waiting for whoever’s got the checkbook!”

Monday Night Menu at
Café Steinhof

422 7th Ave. (at 14th St.),
Park Slope, B’klyn
718-369-7776

Some restaurants shut down Monday nights. This one just drops the prices down. “We can either be closed, or do goulash. Let’s make some money,” is how waitress Skyler Schrempp explains their thinking. On any other night, the Austrian comfort food menu offers six soups, six salads, 19 sandwiches and small meals, 20 main courses and 10 desserts.

But on the most stressful day of the week, you can avoid “going to Steinhof” (a Viennese expression that means “losing your mind”) by going to Steinhof, where no decisions need be made. Choose one of two $6 entrees: a bowl of goulash (made of beef, onions, red peppers and paprika powder), or a fried trout with potato. Rolls are on the table. Dessert? With luck, you’ll like apple bread pudding with homemade applesauce and sour cream ($3).

Get there before 7 p.m. and all beers and simple well drinks are $3. That’s dinner, dessert and a Schneider Weisse Hefeweizen for $12. Don’t ask, just drink it.

30-Cent Wings at Reservoir

70 University Pl. (betw. 10th & 11th Sts.)
212-598-0055

For tiny, bony pieces of chicken, slathered in sauce and dropped in a basket, Buffalo wings can be surprisingly expensive. At Dallas BBQ, for example, a half order (six wings) costs roughly $1.33-1.49 per wing. Sure, you can save by ordering a full 11-piece order for $1.09-1.18 per wing, but it still adds up. So wing nuts should consider Reservoir, a favorite gathering spot for “college students, sports fans, businessmen” and a regular lunch crowd, according to manage Phil Guerrieri, offers wings for just 30 cents on Sunday and Monday nights from 6 p.m. until closing. The deal does not apply to takeout orders. They come in orders of 10 and 20, and on regular nights they cost just $5.50 (55 cents per wing) and $7.50 (about 38 cents per wing), respectively. Wings night has been going strong for a decade at the small bar and grill . The kitchen uses Frank’s RedHot hot sauces (mild, medium and hot) and also makes wings with teriyaki and barbecue sauce and honey mustard. No extra charge.

$5 Breakfast Plate at Tehuitzingo Deli & Grocery

695 10th Ave. (betw. 47th & 48th Sts.)
212-397-5956

The cost of doing business at this Mexican restaurant is steeper than it was when Miguel Fuentes opened it in the back of a cramped food market in Hell’s Kitchen seven years ago, but the prices haven’t changed. Fuentes will have to charge more for the Puebla regional items he serves at some point. “I have to figure out how much and when I’m gonna raise the prices up, but I don’t know right now,” he says. And if everything really is relative, then at $2.50 to $3, the quesadillas and the $5 breakfast plate (an egg dish with rice, beans and a tortilla) will still be a steal: At San Loco, quesadillas start at $4.95 (cheese) and end at $6.65 (catfish).

$14 Margaritas at
Los Dos Molinos

119 E. 18th St. (betw. Park Ave. & Irving)
212-505-1574

The margaritas at Los Dos Molinos have been called the best in New York, and not just by the restaurant. Why? “We have a lot of alcohol,” says manager Miguel Camacho. “It gets you really drunk.” Served in a heavy glass goblet, the regular size is an irregularly large 14 ounces (a bottle of beer is 12 ounces). At $14, they’re no steal, until you try getting happy for that price anywhere else in Manhattan—without pounding shots. But if it were just about that, New Yorkers could just stay home and drink grain alcohol. “I guess it’s an old recipe, all the way from Phoenix, when they opened [the first restaurant] there eight or nine years ago,” says Camacho. It includes fresh lime juice, triple sec, premium tequila and any of 12 different purees. The most popular are strawberry, raspberry and mango; the most exotic, prickly pear and tamarind. Occasionally, on a Friday or Saturday night, a single person will consume an entire $55 pitcher. “But our food’s spicy,” he says, “so it kind of cleans up the hangover.”

Free drinks at
The Mitzvah Tank

Various locations

“Can I get the orange juice?” a customer asks a little tentatively. The dark-bearded, bespectacled Orthodox Jewish 22-year old has paused in his chanting of the Megillah, so that the red-bearded, bespectacled guy smiling in the corner can translate what’s just been read from the yellowing scroll into English: “So the king is looking for a new wife, and everyone is trying to do things to make themselves the most beautiful, but Esther, she is already beautiful. She doesn’t need to do anything. She is naturally beautiful.” At this, the drunk Vince Vaughn look-alike who has wandered into The Mitzvah Tank off St. Marks Place starts saying “organic beauty,” and fist pumping everyone. He passes the carton of orange juice, and some is poured into the customer’s plastic cup (which already has a shot of vodka in it) as he waits for the dark-bearded man to finish reading the Purim story so all can drink. After finishing a hamantash, the triangular pastry with jelly in the middle eaten on Purim—and after stepping down from the RV back onto St. Marks Place—the customer is handed a goody bag with a little Mott’s apple juice box, a bag of pretzels and wrapped candies. The food, drink, company and wisdom (they don’t clink cups before they drink, because that tradition is a holdover from when it was common practice to off people by poisoning them) is absolutely free. This piece of advice is free as well: Next time you see an RV full of young Hasidic Jewish men and they ask you if you are Jewish, say yes.

$7 Kobe Beef Sliders at
The Stanton Social

99 Stanton St. (at Ludlow St.)
212-995-0099

Those wondering whether to believe the hype of Kobe beef—but not yet willing to fork over a week’s income for the opportunity—can get much cheaper Kobe at The Stanton Social on the Lower East Side, where Kobe beef sliders are $7. For those uncomfortable with the notion of eating anything referred to as a “slider,” Kobe cheese steaks made with black truffles and goat cheese fondue go for just $2 more.

Not-So-Good Deals

$24 Turkey Club Plate at E.A.T. Cafe

1064 Madison Ave. (betw. 80th & 81st Sts.)
212-772-0022

Unlike the turkey clubs at its Upper East Side neighbor Rathbone’s Pub & Grill ($8.95), the Turkey Club plate at Eli Zabar’s E.A.T. Café will cost you $24. However, that doesinclude cole slaw and a garnish of salad. “It’s a very big turkey club,” insists Maureen Smith, a manager at the café. Customers are often skeptical of the price, she says, but only at first. “Once they’ve tasted it, she says, “they think it’s worthwhile.” One major difference between most turkey clubs and E.A.T.’s version is that E.A.T.’s is made with prosciutto, not bacon. If you’re desperate for this “lunchtime signature sandwich,” but you just won’t spend more than $20 for a club sandwich, you get it to take out from the shop’s retail side for only $18.

$30 Grilled Cheese Sandwich
at GILT

The New York Palace Hotel, 455 Madison Ave. (betw. E. 50th & 51st Sts.)
212-891-8100

GILT appears frequently in Gossip Girl, and the result is frequent late-night requests for the sandwich Chuck Bass bribed the chef into making for Serena van der Woodsen in that first episode. That has prompted chef Christopher Lee to re-create it as a regular item on the bar menu. Dubbed The Gossip Grill “You Know You Love It,” the grilled cheese is made with Fontina cheese on freshly baked white bread and truffles, which is what makes it affordable only to fictional characters and those with what is quite properly described as “disposable” income. Since Black Winter Truffles are currently in season, the two-hander costs $30. When pricier white truffles are in season, the sandwich goes for $50. “People are obsessed with it. It’s definitely one of the best-selling [dishes] in the bar,” says Josephine Zohny, GILT’s publicist. Of course it is, the publicist says so!
If you’re an actual human being with a craving for grilled cheese, you may consider heading to The Malibu Diner in Chelsea, where grilled cheese sandwiches with your choice of cheese—American, Swiss, mozzarella, cheddar or Monterey Jack—sell for just $4.65. Those who were lucky enough to get a hefty raise in December can splurge on the grilled cheese “with tomato & bacon or ham” ($6.55).

Chocolate Peanut Butter Palette at Eleven Madison Park

11 Madison Ave. (at E. 24th St.)
212-889-0905

A bite of the $12 chocolate peanut butter palette with popcorn ice cream at Danny Meyers’ Eleven Madison Park has the power, like Proust’s Madeleines, to send a shudder through your spine and dredge up childhood memories that had been palpitating in the depths of your being. You’re back in sixth grade, standing in front of the vending machine with a scotch-taped dollar bill in your pocket. You’re pretending to be making up your mind so that the hovering eighth-grade boys will wander off instead of snatching your candy and making you buy it off them. But you know what you want because you get the same thing every day. What’s better than a Butterfinger? However, the palette at Eleven Madison Park is not just a Butterfinger, or so they insist. It is served with a gold leaf, caramel popcorn and popcorn-flavored ice cream. And frankly, manager Will Guidara does not appreciate the comparison to a candy bar that can be obtained for pocket change. “I think we would probably, maybe, if you had to compare it to a candy bar like that, we’d compare it to a Snickers,” he sniffs.

$13.95 Shun Lee Salad
at Shun Lee West

43 W. 65th St. (nr. Central Park West)
212-595-8895

Like the human body, this restaurant’s eponymous Shun Lee salad is composed primarily of water. For $13.95, you get lotus root (lightly cooked, then chilled), water chestnut, sugar peas and bean sprouts, in a “kind of vinaigrette, with different assorted Asian seasonings,” says general manager Steven Ng. “The chef is very secretive.” Here’s a calorie-per-dollar guesstimate: Half a cup of cooked lotus root is 40 calories, according to www.calorie-count.com; one ounce of raw water chestnuts is 10 calories; 10 sugar pea pods are 14 calories; a cup of bean sprouts is 31 calories; and an Asian vinaigrette is typically 28 calories. That’s one dollar for every nine calories. Make sure you chew slowly.

$41 Kobe Beef Burger at
Old Homestead Steakhouse

56 9th Ave. (betw. 14th & 15th Sts.)
212-242-9040

During the U.S. Civil War, the target meat ration for Union troops was 20 ounces per person, per day, although as U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps doctor and historian Steven E. Anders writes, “reality proved otherwise.” During World War I, then-United States Food Administrator Herbert Hoover set the ration for hotels and restaurants at 20 ounces per person per week to conserve food supplies for the Allies. Fortunately for the Old Homestead, no such limits exist today.

Owner Marc Sherry explains that despite its exorbitant price, the Kobe Beef Burger is usually ordered for one person to be eaten in one sitting. The burger is made of American Kobe beef, which is prepared using the same hand-massaging and beer-feeding technique native to the Japan’s Hyogo Prefecture (Kobe is Hyogo’s capital city). It’s served on a brioche bun, alongside Chipotle ketchup, “an assortment of 13 different baby greens” and stone-ground mustard sauce, made using a “kind of a secret recipe Executive Chef Oscar Martinez made up, that includes domestic champagne,” among its ingredients. Sherry calls the burger a “loss leader,” because although the restaurant sells “anywhere from 400-500” Kobe burgers per week and it i brings in lots of customers (most of them eat-in), the burger is not very profitable. “It’s extremely expensive to make,” explains Sherry, with beef ranging from $40-$50 per pound. If these prices sound high, consider the Kobe steak at Old Homestead. Made with 10 ounces of Grade 5 Kobe Wagyu beef, it’s pegged at $195. “It’s a perfect center cut,” he says. A Kobe pork chop is on the menu for $34, and soon an $81 chop will be added. Something to live (and eventually die) for.

$7.25 Beer at
Madison Square Garden

4 Pennsylvania Plaza

It figures that beer at Madison Square Garden costs more than it’s worth – so do the guys playing for the Knicks. It ranges from $7.25 for domestic (Bud, Bud Light, Coors) to $8.55 for imported (Heineken, Amstel, Pilsner). The non-specialty drafts are all $8.25. But the worst deal in town now comes with a pretzel rod, which fits in the hollow handle of the plastic beer mug! This has been hailed by Scoreboard Gourmet blogger Sara Pepitone as “the best food-related concession item at Madison Square Garden”—which is saying very little. “You can keep your mug, which is about as useful as keeping any plastic cup from a game except that this one has no logo,” says Pepitone, whose apartment is full of plastic game cups. A Wisconsin visitor who took in a Knicks game wrote: “I was completely smitten with the beer/pretzel cups when I was at the Garden this last weekend.” But remember, she’s from Wisconsin.

$8 Cup of Green Tea at Morimoto

88 10th Ave. (betw. W. 15th & 16th Sts.)
212-989-8883

Sixteenth-century Chinese tea master Senno Rikyu wrote: “Tea is nought but this; First you heat the water, then you make the tea. Then you drink it properly. That is all you need to know. Why then, tea master, is a cup of green tea eight bucks at Morimoto? Is there something special about it? “I think so,” says Nikkie Reiss, who works for Morimoto’s PR company, Baltz & Company. “There’s so much dedication to the tea program.” But nobody will ever know for sure, because Reiss could get no more information from the restaurant’s beverage department. The secret of Morimoto’s green tea lives on.

Gastropub Spitzer’s Corner Not Phased by the Guv’s Fall From Grace

Matt Elzweig — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 13:02:23 +0000

When brothers Will and Rob Shamlian opened Spitzer’s Corner on Rivington in the Lower East Side in August, then-Governor Eliot Spitzer had been in office 14 months, and few if any could’ve anticipated that a certain service for Very Important People would signal the end of his life in politics.

When the Times reported that Governor Spitzer was a regular customer of the Emperor’s Club VIP on March 11, it didn’t faze Rob Shamlian. He was confident he had “the best beer selection in New York,” and a great menu. And moreover, it’s not like the restaurant had anything to do with Eliot Spitzer. “I wouldn’t name it after that motherfucker,” he told me recently when I called him up.

The Shamlians’ “New American Gastropub” takes its name from the schmatta supplier, “Spitzer’s Dress Shop,” that occupied the space for generations before Spitzer’s Corner moved in. The Shamlians had lobbied the owner, Ziggy Spitzer, for months before he agreed to give them the lease, and as a token of their appreciation, and of how nice this Spitzer was, they named the place after him. They also felt it would help preserve the space’s “downtown flavor” … “It would’ve been named Spitzer’s Dress Shop’ but we threw the sign away,” he explained.

Shamlian was never a fan of Eliot Spitzer, and said he doesn’t know how any business owner could have admired the ex-governor considering his hands-on methods. That said, he wasn’t bothered when the hard-charging moralist got caught with his pants around his ankles. “He’s a politician. I don’t think more poorly of him because he screwed a prostitute. I could care less."

Opana: A Brief History

Matt Elzweig — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 03:27:02 +0000

Opana – a powerful painkiller that went on the market less than two years ago – is twice as strong as OxyContin, with a potential for addiction that rivals the prescription drug that has ravaged the lives of thousands of abusers.

Opana goes by names like "Stop Signs" "Octagons" and "Baby Blues"on the street.

Little is yet known about the potential for Opana abuse, because of its relatively short shelf life in the pharmaceutical marketplace. Significantly more potent than morphine, itself a powerful painkiller with potentially fatal side effects if abused, its existence has created a possible new menace for those who use pain medications for recreational purposes. Those numbers have grown significantly in recent years, as the addictive properties of prescription drugs like OxyContin and Vicodin have become better known.

In that time, reports of abuse have grown widespread for OxyContin, introduced in 1995 and once known as “hillbilly heroin.” In its first six years of existence, news reports put revenues from OxyContin at nearly $3 billion for its manufacturer, Purdue Pharma.

The effects of Opana are closer to those of morphine than of OxyContin, doctors say. Whereas OxyContin has a more stimulating effect, Opana can cause a user to fall asleep. Like morphine, Opana’s greatest danger to abusers is the possibility of “respiratory depression,” or reduced lung functioning.

As with all prescription painkillers, the addictive properties of Opana present another possible danger, especially to recreational users. According to James Zacny, a professor of anesthesia and critical care at the University of Chicago, users could eventually become physically dependent on the drug, depending on dosage and frequency of administration.

Why did Opana get introduced now? Its manufacturer, Endo Pharmaceuticals, said the drug was developed in part to provide an alternative to patients who’ve developed a tolerance for a specific painkiller.

But an Endo spokesman also cited Opana’s added benefit to patients as a “true” twice-a-day opioid. He suggested that while OxyContin is advertised as a 12-hour medication, its users “tend” to take OxyContin more frequently. Doctors say that excessive doses of OxyContin can lead to abuse.

A spokesman for Purdue Pharma, the makers of OxyContin, took issue with Endo’s assessment. “OxyContin is indeed a true 12-hour medication,” he said. “All of our clinical studies were conducted using the medication at 12 hour intervals and the product was both safe and effective.”

But the main reason for the drug’s arrival in the marketplace may be yet more simple: the market for prescription painkillers grows with every passing day. An Endo spokesman put Opana prescriptions at 8,500 a week, and growing.

An injectible form of the drug – known under the generic name of oxymorphone hydrochloride – has been available since 1959, but was available only as a intravenous drip to hospitals. The oral form was originally approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 5, 10, 20 and 40 milligram extended release tablets, and immediate release tablets in 5 and 10 milligram doses. On March 3, the FDA approved three additional doses.
The Opana pill has a waxy consistency designed to deter users from crushing it into a powder, which would defeat the timing mechanism if snorted. The drug’s warning label specifically cautions users not to break the tablets down before ingesting orally, because it “leads to the rapid release and absorption of a potentially fatal dose of oxymorphone.”

This isn’t the first time oxymorphone hydrochloride has been available in tablet form. Until it was taken off in the market in the 1970s, it was available in 10 milligram tablets under the brand name Numorphan. That was the drug referred to as “blues” in the 1989 Gus Van Sant film, “Drugstore Cowboy,” about a family of traveling drug addicts set in the early 1970s.

Read a first-person account of one person’s illegal use of Opana here.

OPANA: A BRIEF HISTORY

Matt Elzweig — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Read a first-person account of one person’s illegal use of Opana here.

I See Dead Catchphrases

Matt Elzweig — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Do you think it’s amusing to say “I drink your milkshake…I drink it up!” at regular intervals throughout the day at your office water cooler, in the hopes of heightening your popularity?

Do you look for ways to insert the word “milkshake” into after-work or party conversations as a means of making your friends laugh knowingly at your pop-culture savvy?

Do you enjoy scrunching your face up like scenery-chewing British-Irish Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis and making gestures that mimic the “milkshake” sequence in his latest exercise in over-the-top madness, There Will Be Blood?

If so, I have some bad news for you. What began only seven weeks ago as a potentially long-lasting new movie catchphrase from the Oscar-nominated Paul Thomas Anderson film—“I drink your milkshake! I drink it up!”—has already reached the end of its limited-run lifespan. Thanks to the Internet, YouTube, some overanxious entertainment journalists, Saturday Night Live and a healthy smidgen of common sense, “I drink your milkshake!” will now take its proper place alongside “It’s not a tumor!” from Kindergarten Cop as a potentially memorable line left to languish on the side of the road to perpetuity.

Does news of the line’s unusually speedy trip to the dustbin of movie-catchphrase history make you wistful?
Frankly, reader, I don’t give a damn.

It all began on December 26th, when There Will Be Blood opened weakly in limited release despite rave reviews. Even by the second weekend in January, when it had earned two Golden Globe nominations, it had grossed just $1.86 million, one slot above Alien vs. Predator: Requiem.

But by then the “milkshake” line had leaked into the media’s consciousness, if not that of the water-cooler culture itself.

On January 8, New York magazine’s highly attuned Vulture blog noted that the “volcanically dramatic, mind-bendingly cool line” was about to “enter the pop-culture catchphrase lexicon, nestling alongside such former lazy-writer tropes as ‘I see dead people,’ ‘Say hello to my little friend,’ ‘Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in,’ and all the rest.” This was unfair, Vulture writer Josh Ozersky observed, because the line had “such Dickensian grandeur that its miniaturization in the mouths of SportsCenter anchors, scab gag writers, bloggers, and their ilk is practically a national tragedy.”

Two days later, an online film critic named Jürgen Fauth launched idrinkyourmilkshake.com, “where you [could] discuss Paul Thomas Anderson’s magnificent ‘There Will Be Blood’ or just hit that play button again and again to hear Daniel Day-Lewis bark,” he stated, in what sounded like either a promise or a thinly veiled threat.

On February 4, shortly after the movie’s wide release to 1,500 theaters—at this point it had still only grossed $21 million—USA Today published an article in its Life section on the “milkshake” sensation. “‘Blood’ stirs the milkshake: movie catchphrase has historic roots, Web cred,” the headline breathlessly promised. As “evidence” to support his assertion, reporter Scott Bowles cited only the New York magazine item, the Fauth website, and a YouTube posting of the video (mashed up with a song from Kelis) that had gotten all of 60,000 hits: hardly a ripple in a world where YouTube postings sometimes reach millions of fans. Nevertheless, USA Today had found itself a trend. Never mind the fact that the only people quoted in the article were the website creator and Kevin Kunze, the University of San Francisco student who’d posted the YouTube video.

Oh, and there was an interview with Blood director Paul Thomas Anderson, who professed to be “puzzled” by the line’s popularity. And it’s no wonder, since he confessed to having copied it verbatim from a volume of testimony taken during the Teapot Dome scandal.

Entertainment Weekly, which had already posted the YouTube mashup, returned to the milkshake trough the next day with another post on its Popwatch blog calling it the “Movie Quote of the Year?” a reference to the USA Today article, which called the line “Hollywood’s hottest catchphrase.”

The publicity team at Paramount Vantage—the studio that released There Will Be Blood—was happy to ride the wave of media-generated “milkshake”-related publicity. On February 8, Variety blogger Kristopher Tapley reported that a fresh milkshake had been delivered to his door fifteen minutes earlier and said that it came with a Blood-themed card that prominently displayed the phrase. Bloggers like Slash Film’s Hunter Stephenson got the card and a gift certificate good for one shake at Cold Stone Creamery.

I’ll admit to having a certain soft spot for memorable lines in movie history. I still smile knowingly during my 132nd re-watching of The Godfather, as those wonderful aphorisms about cannoli and offer refusals spill forth. At this point, it doesn’t matter whether we like hearing them or not; they’re a permanent part of the culture. I’ve come to realize this every Thanksgiving, when my cousin makes his annual declaration over the sweet potatoes that “in five years the Elzweig family will be completely legitimate.”

It makes sense that we embrace these lines—they’re the connective tissue of a society that rarely speaks in declarative sentences like “Make my day!” or “Here’s looking at you, kid.” They remind us of the marvel of movies—the way they speak broad truths and address universal emotions in ways that resonate in our minds. Like it or not, “You complete me”—a line from Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire that some find utterly nauseating—spoke to an inner feeling shared by millions and still turns up in conversation more than a decade after the movie’s release. What makes a catchphrase last? I called Richard Schickel, the longtime film critic and historian, who explained that a successful catchphrase—he cited their abundance in Casablanca as an example—has “some metaphorical applications to other aspects of life.” People, Schickel explained to me, have “a hunger for smart, efficient, witty phrases that we can somehow apply in our daily lives.”

We get it, Dick. The witless among us need screenwriters to help the conversation along.

But why do some lines achieve mass popularity and others don’t? Why is it that today’s young people can go through their lives without inserting the phrase “Yeah, well, I’m from Buenos Aires, and I say, kill ‘em all” from Starship Troopers? Schickel’s theory is that the quality of the movie matters as much as the line itself. “If it appears in a movie like Definitely, Maybe,” he says, “it’s not going to resonate down the ages.”

Perhaps that’s why in early February I allowed myself to hope that “I drink your milkshake” might transcend the curse. It was derived from a movie millions (okay, hundreds of thousands) adored; the actor who spoke the line had won an Oscar and seemed destined to earn another for this performance: It had the declarative feel of a “Here’s Johnny!” or “Make my day!” and the literate cleverness of an “I’ll have what she’s having” or “Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.” It tripped off the tongue with such smooth insouciance that no one seemed to care that it made no sense.

But any hopes I may have harbored for the permanence of “I drink your milkshake!” melted before my eyes in mid-February. Its denouement began with a clever send-up of the phrase in the now-officially-obsessed New York magazine Vulture blog, which presented a guide to witty ways of inserting the meaningless mash-up of words into comprehensible sentences. Here are some examples: “‘Let’s face it. The Celtics drank the Knicks’ milkshake last night.’” “Or maybe,” the blog continued, “in a nod to the godlike venom of its utterer, a taunt: ‘You best back down before I drink your milkshake, bitch.’”

In its ironic homage to the catchphrase’s potential, the blog was doing precisely what the Internet succeeds at most: over-saturating us to the point of annoyance. Its cleverness had made it next to impossible for anyone to slip the “milkshake” phrase into normal conversation without looking like they were hopelessly out of touch.
But nothing caps a comic premise like a satiric jab on Saturday Night Live. And true to form, on its first weekend back after a three-month strike hiatus, a sketch offered up Bill Hader as Daniel Plainview on a Food Network series called “I Drink Your Milkshake,” in which the star travels across America with a long straw and a quest to taste milkshakes wherever he goes. In classic comic tradition, the SNL writers took the figurative meaning of the phrase and turned it literal—and in doing so, forever removed its potential for metaphoric meaning. Plus, they’d co-opted the comic value, rendering it useless to anyone except film critics and Daniel Day-Lewis devotees. By the next night, when he accepted the Academy Award for best actor, I accepted the sad truth that it was time to look for a new movie catchphrase.

I wasn’t worried, though. After years of catchphrase-mongering, I knew that if I built it, they would come. Nobody puts Elzweig in a corner!

Teddy’s Last Jam

Matt Elzweig — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Ted Kheel’s not wearing a watch. At 93 years old, what’s the point?

To any New Yorker over 50, Kheel is a household name —or was—because he understood that it didn’t matter what time it was; the clock was always ticking, a deadline always loomed. As the city’s chief labor negotiatior through the 1960s and 1970s, he helped settle urgent strikes by teachers, transit workers and cops that threatened to paralyze the city he loved. He bridged the often distant gaps between belligerent workers and a cash-strapped city government, and averted crisis after crisis with his conciliatory methods.

Now, as he sits in his fifth floor office on East 55th Street, he has another deadline ahead of him—perhaps his last, and perhaps the most important of his career. If he could see down to the busy streets below, he would be able to point out, to a visitor, the crisis that has engaged his passion since the 1960s: the growing gridlock that has turned his beloved metropolis into a teeming mass of moving vehicles—or, more to the point, stalled vehicles stuck in a congested mess that threatens to overwhelm New York in the years to come.

Kheel saw the crisis building long before anyone else, and decades before Mayor Bloomberg turned “congestion pricing” into a buzzword for change. And now, as politicians scramble for sides in the likely battle over the mayor’s proposal to charge a toll on cars coming into Manhattan, the man in the white turtleneck and dark suit—possessed of a vast trove of energy that belies his age—has a proposal that will shock New Yorkers with its boldness, anger politicians with its simplicity and annoy experts with its impracticality.

He wants to makes the New York City mass transit system free of charge. No Metrocards, no toll booths, no monthly passes, no transfers. He wants all of us to be able to descend into the subway without a nickel to our name, and travel the length of our city at no expense. Perhaps he knows, in his still-beating, still-passionate heart that it will never happen, but he can’t help himself. He believes it’s the only way to save the city from the ominous prospect of overcrowding: to offer an economic subsidy to the needy New Yorkers who face, next month, yet another rise in transit fares, the 14th in 60 years.

This is Ted Kheel’s last stand.

The underlying argument of the Kheel plan—presented to the public at a Carriage House breakfast in January with his friend and fellow city legend, retired NBC reporter Gabe Pressman, at his side—is that with congestion pricing, the city can pay for the transit system, so riders won’t have to. Kheel has taken the cornerstone of his proposal, first offered to the city in 1971, and attached it to the Bloomberg administration’s congestion pricing model, only doubling it. Instead of an $8 toll for cars entering the most congested neighborhoods of Midtown, Kheel proposes a $16 fee. His plan also includes a 25 percent increase in cab fares, and would raise curbside parking fees.

But in keeping with the liberal, pro-government stance that has defined his entire career in city life, the Kheel plan puts City Hall squarely in charge of taxing the rich to help the poor.

Here’s the difference. The London-inspired plan detailed in Mayor Bloomberg’s plan calls for an $8 daily toll on passenger

vehicles “entering or leaving Manhattan below 86th Street,” and $21 for trucks, from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. during the week. There would be no fees on the FDR Drive, the West Side Highway or West Street. Vehicles driving only within the city’s central business district would pay half price. In Kheel’s plan, the fee for passenger vehicles is double that: $16 for cars, and $32 for commercial vehicles. Although drivers are charged only for entering the Midtown area (the Kheel proposal involves only 19 tolls, contrasted with 340 in the Bloomberg plan), the fees apply 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

By doubling the Bloomberg price tag on cars and trucks, Kheel believes, the city can afford to cut subway and bus fares to nothing—the crux of his seemingly crazy proposal.

“The evidence is clear: If the price of mass transportation goes up, more people switch to automobiles. If congestion pricing goes up, more people switch to mass transportation… We’re not against congestion pricing, but we think it’s only half of the problem.”

The proposal may seem like an attempt by Kheel to upstage the mayor at fixing congestion, but Kheel—who last served the city in an official capacity in 1982—believes he shares with the mayor an idealized view of the city’s future. And there may be some truth to that; Bloomberg told WABC radio’s John Gambling in March 2007 that “from a public policy point of view, you really should have all of your mass transit free. And then raise fines and parking fees and everything else.” During his weekly broadcast, the mayor has made the same point at least two more times, calling free mass transit “the ultimate system,” and most recently calling it “the perfect system,” on the February 1, 2008 broadcast.

“Right now, the mayor—I think he’s a good mayor and congestion pricing is a good thing,” Kheel says. “He did mention at one point that free would be great. So I think this is something that the people [will] come to appreciate when they think about it…and how good it will be for working people and for the people who drive because there’ll be more using mass transit.”

Kheel’s vision for a fare-free New York goes something like this: In a New York where subways, buses and even commuter trains are free to ride, and motorists pay for the system through congestion pricing, pedestrians would be able to get around much easier, breathe cleaner air and, as he puts it, “every working person who uses the subway would have $1,000 more a year to spend.”

In Kheel’s romanticized view of a New York without Metrocards and congestion, residents would be more productive because they’d spend less time inching along in traffic. Stores would do more business, since people would have more time and more money to shop with and because so many businesses are located around subway stations, there would be much more public space that would, in effect, turn New York into a walking city with wider sidewalks and public plazas. More working class and poor New Yorkers in the outer boroughs would be able to commute to work, which would increase productivity and offer them a chance to improve their financial situations and lifestyles, which would in turn improve the economy and society as a whole. And with fewer cars and trucks, and more bikers and walkers, there would be fewer auto accidents, which would lower insurance costs.

But could it work? For all his theoretical support for free mass transit, Bloomberg told Gambling during the February 1, 2008 broadcast that, it’s “not realistic.”

Security is among the many objections raised by equally rabid realists. They point to the Staten Island Ferry, where free rides have encouraged increased vandalism. If subway stations were open to everyone, critics say, the same problem could occur. People would flock in droves to the stations. Regardless of their intent, an open house combined with congestion pricing could mean lots more people. And more people require more crowd control. Where would the additional police presence come from and who would pay for it?

And would subway cars suddenly become packed morning, noon, day and night? Could an already-overworked subway system handle the 28,000 potential new riders brought into the system by Kheel? Kheel expects 32,000 current peak time riders to switch to other modes of transportation, which “slightly more than offset,” the new riders. The bulk of them will switch to the commuter lines, which will be discounted, and the free buses, which will be faster since there will be fewer cars on the streets. He expects that 5,000 peak-time subway commuters who live near or in the central business district will start walking or biking to work instead.

In the end, Kheel insists, there will be 4 percent more space per passenger on the subway under his plan.

George Haikalis, a transportation planner and civil engineer who managed the Kheel study, says that there are now at least 1,000 new subway cars being built, with another 1,000 old cars marked for death that are, by his calculation, still salveagable. Haikalis also says that the tracks can handle more trains at peak hours—all except the Lexington Avenue Express and the E and F trains in parts of Queens.

But there are other, unanswered questions. What will happen to the MTA employees left idle by the Kheel plan? (“We envision no decrease,” the Kheel report says.) And how likely is it that anyone will approve a plan that charges drivers $16 to enter the city at 4:30 a.m. on a Sunday? Given the high cost—and the possibility that some businesses might opt out of a mid-Manhattan base in light of it—how can the Kheel team be so certain that congestion pricing revenue could pay for the transit system, year after year?

Dr. Michael Horodniceanu, a former commissioner for the city’s Bureau of Traffic, and now CEO of Urbitran, a planning, design and engineering firm, doesn’t “believe in the long run it could work without being supported by tax dollars.” He is intrigued by the concept, which he calls “bold,” and has a lot of respect for the Kheel authors, whom he says are “smart people.” But he thinks definitive studies are needed to see if free mass transit could work for New York. To describe certain parts of the Kheel proposal, he uses the term “half-baked.”

Kheel is well aware that many questions remain to be answered, and many potential problems are still to be solved. In fact, he concedes that he doesn’t expect his plan to be approved. Still, he embraces free transit as a mantra, much as he has for decades, without the slightest doubt in his firm, conciliator’s voice.

“This is the solution,” Kheel says. “And the city is going to have more people … another two million people. And I am convinced this is going to happen. I’m not convinced it’s going to happen this year. I know there are lots of things that need to be done to make a change of this sort, but the basic concept is sound. And it’s good for the drivers and good for the people who use the subways. It’s a sound approach to a very serious problem that exists throughout the world.”

After talking about his proposal for the better part of an hour, Kheel says he has to leave. He’s on his way to Gotham Hall, the cavernous bank-turned-event space in Midtown Manhattan, to attend a fashion show that will benefit Earth Pledge, an environmental group he is president of and founded in the early 1990s.

He will not be taking the subway. The only immediate sign of age is the bad back that requires Kheel to walk with a cane and an extra hand or two to get where he’s going, and which forces his athletic frame into a crouch when he stands up. He’s traded subway cars and buses for a car and driver that takes him to appointments. It’s a typically busy day for Kheel, who’s up every morning in his East 61st Street apartment at 8:30, at work from 9:30 to 6 or 7, and up til at least 10 p.m. (He likes to end each day with a viewing of The Colbert Report.)

When Kheel was born in Brooklyn in 1914, the first New York City subway line had only been in existence for 10 years, and single ticket fares cost a nickel—the equivalent of about 70 cents today, according to the Kheel report. The fare stayed put until 1948 when it doubled, the equivalent of 85 cents. But between 1948 and 1995, it was increased 13 times, and in 2003, it went from $1.50 to $2. The hike scheduled for March 2, 2008, will not increase the current $2 fare, but will raise one-day passes to $7.50 from $7, seven-day passes to $25 from $24, monthlies to $81 from $76, and the MTA will introduce a new 14-day pass for $47.

Kheel’s advocacy for free mass transit and congestion pricing grew out of his work with the transit system as an arbitrator. He was the city’s official mediator for Transit Authority disputes for more than three decades; he resolved some 30,000 labor conflicts during and after that period. As such, Kheel is no stranger to public crusades and controversy and has been fighting to keep transit fares down since the 1960s with a zeal that borders on obsession. “If I was half my current age, I’d run for mayor on a ticket for free mass transportation” he says in his slow but solid way of speaking.

But are free mass transit and congestion pricing actually the soul mates that the Kheel plan claims they are? Or is it Kheel’s final salvo—his one last stab at immortality?

When asked if he sees the proposal as his legacy, he laughs a little.

“I don’t know,” Kheel says. “I haven’t thought much about the legacy. Once you’re gone, you’re gone.”

It’s either false modesty or, from what interviews with one of his five daughters (he also has a son), his assistant and reams of newsprint overwhelmingly suggest, it’s a gross understatement. (His wife Ann, whom he married the day after he passed the bar exam, died in 2003.) Whatever his motivations, Kheel has generally been known as a forward-thinking, optimistic altruist.

But after he was forced out by Mayor Ed Koch, who considered him excessively pro-labor, his profile began to shrink. While the lifetime New Yorker remained a highly respected figure, he was no longer the same Ted Kheel who, along with Mayor Robert Wagner, ended a 114-day newspaper strike in 1963 when federal mediators gave up. He was no longer the same Ted Kheel who, as the first chairman of Edmund J. Safra’s Republic National Bank of New York, arranged for Robert F.

Kennedy to cut the ribbon on the building when it opened in 1966. And he was no longer the same Theodore Kheel whose Park Avenue law firm The Washington Post called “a center of power in New York which commands the respect of labor and the city’s leading politicians,” in 1980. But he continued to settle labor disputes after leaving public office and then became concerned with environmental issues in the 1990s with sustainable development as his focus.

Here are some facts Kheel likes to cite when campaigning for free transit.

Increased traffic congestion will soon cost the city as much as $13 billion a year. At an average of 7.9 miles per hour, New York City buses are slower than Chicago’s (9.7), Boston’s (10.5), Washington, DC’s (11.2) and Los Angeles’s (12.3). According to a study conducted by New York City Transit (part of the MTA), 133.50 million subway riders in October 2006 became 143.50 million riders in October 2007, that’s an increase of one million people per month in just a year’s time.

With this kind of congestion, it’s difficult to fault Ted Kheel for feeling a sense of urgency, whatever the practical limitations of his plan may be.

And despite the doubters, there’s no question Kheel has captured some support for his plan. Robert Abrams, a former Bronx borough president and state Attorney General, has not read Ted Kheel’s proposal, but he began pushing for mass transit as soon as he was sworn in as Bronx borough president in 1970—angered by what in a New York Times article he called then-Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s “disgraceful acquiescence to the transit fare increase” from 20 cents to 30 cents. Abrams says he now believes that “mass transit is inextricably tied to the health of the economy.”

“[It’s] no mistake that Bloomingdale’s is located where it’s located,” Abrams says. Real estate values go up the closer they are to mass transit, he explains—which is why Abrams doesn’t think the system should have to be financed only by the riders. Either the burden should be shared, he says, or the city should pick up the entire tab.

“Basic vital services are provided by the government,” Abrams argues. “The police department, the fire department, the parks, sanitation—why not transit?”

Kheel sent copies of the plan to Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Eliot Spitzer along with a letter he signed, laying it on thick, by calling them “courageous reformers” but questioning their support of transit-fare increases, as “a policy that drives commuters back to the car, effectively nullifying the very result you are seeking to achieve through congestion pricing.”

They never wrote back.

Washington Square Park Struggle Continues

Matt Elzweig — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 10:30:59 +0000

Unless neighborhood activists decide to lie down in front of the bulldozers, Manhattan L.P. will be celebrating its latest acquisition very soon: Washington Square Park. That’s because a Supreme Court judge dismissed a suit filed against the city by the activists who oppose a controversial redesign
of the park yesterday. The petitioners had hoped to stall the city by
forcing it to conduct a lengthy environmental impact study of the
project.

After its victory, Manhattan L.P. said construction will begin this
month. Whether you’re a fan of New York, Big Box Edition, or not, that
means three-years of a largely closed park for everyone – neighborhood,
chainsaw jugglers, dogwalkers and oregano-sellers alike.

If the renaming of what is now called “Tisch Fountain” is any indication of the shape the iconic gathering spot will take in the near future, doomsayers visions of a privatized, sanitized park will be realized.

Photo by David Shankbone