Chinatown: Stop letting the other ’hoods use me. If they don’t want to meet for dim sum during the day, then they can take their club beats elsewhere at night. And tell Nolita to quit invading my space.Photo by Christopher Schoenbohm

Look at you, New York! I hardly recognize this group of non-smoking, exercising, healthy-eating and organized individuals. What happened? You used to be fun. Interesting, at least.

The truth is, if everyone in New York sticks to their resolutions, it could throw off the balance of this entire city, country and world at large. Grocery stores will sell out of fresh produce, and SeamlessWeb will go under faster than it can send a confirmation email. Gyms will become so overcrowded that citywide riots will break out in a moment of elliptical desperation. Cigarette companies will—er, bad example.

Countless livelihoods depend on your laziness, unhealthy habits and destructive behaviors. Think of the artisan baker who relies on your sweet tooth to pay the bills. Don’t you believe in supporting small businesses? Don’t you want to stimulate the economy? Or how about the bartender who depends on your liquored-up generosity to support his true passion? Thanks to your selfish resolution to drink less, you may be robbing the world of his future Oscar-winning documentary exposing the slaughter of bonobos in the Congo. Maybe that film would have started a worldwide movement to save the bonobos from extinction. Perhaps even inspired an end to the Congo’s years of devastating warfare in the process. Don’t you want to end violence in the Congo? Don’t you think bonobos are cute?

So go ahead and smoke your first cigarette of 2013. Bite that hangnail. Fall so hard off the donut wagon that you might have broken something if not for their—and your—pillowy softness to cushion the landing. It’s the least you can do.

Our neighborhoods, however, are another story. They could use a few resolutions, and from the look of things, they have their work cut out for them in 2013:

Meatpacking: Drink lesssss [hiccup]. And learn Italian.

Chelsea: Stop making fun of MiMa. He didn’t make it up.

West Village: Start growing vegetables on the roofs of my restaurants. Oh wait, that was last year’s.

Midtown: Separate my work from my social life. Leave my Blackberry at—sorry, gotta take this … What? Now? I’m just finishing a scorpion bowl with my boys at BroJim’s. I’ll be at the office in 10.

East Village: Keep my beard clean.

Tribeca: Stop letting myself be defined by my friends. Tell De Niro I need some space. Again.

Nolita: Stop giving all the other neighborhoods adorably personalized gifts from my shops. When did anyone ever give me a necklace made of gilded flower petals in the shape of my name?

Little Italy: Go gluten-free.

Murray Hill (hers): Stop wearing my Kappa Delta Phi butt pants to unlimited champagne brunch.

Murray Hill (his): Stop hitting on girls wearing Kappa Delta Phi butt pants at unlimited champagne brunch.

Times Square: Meditate more. Like, all the time.

Donna Schofield, the owner of Stationery Toy World at 125 W 72nd St., is comforted by a local customer after losing her home and inventory in Midland Beach, Staten Island, during Hurricane Sandy.

Hurricane Sandy spared most of the Upper West Side, but it did not spare Donna Schofield. On Monday, Oct. 29, the Stationery Toy World owner was away from her West 72nd Street store and at home with her two children and father on Staten Island’s east shore. Floodwater was in her house, climbing toward her second floor.

Police rowboats came to rescue Donna and her family. Some of her neighbors, whose houses did not have as many power lines above them as Donna’s, were rescued by helicopter.

“Not in a million years would we ever think that we would have to leave,” Donna told West Side Spirit. Though well aware that she lived in one of the city’s most dangerous flood zones, she had built her house several feet above previous high-water marks.

Other Midland Beach residents flocked to her home as their own houses began to submerge. Ninety percent of her neighbors remained in the coastal neighborhood, Donna said, despite a mandatory evacuation order from the city.

“We’ve stayed for every flood,” she added. “We were used to it. It wasn’t a big thing to us.”

As her house filled with water, Donna watched in dismay as three nearby warehouses also were inundated. They contained the entirety of her business’s inventory outside of what was in the store itself. Everything was destroyed.

Donna returned to work two days later at 125 W. 72nd St. completely overwhelmed. Her father was with her cousin, her 17-year-old son was with a family friend, and she had taken her 8-year-old daughter to move in at another friend’s home. The family salvaged what they could from their home, but not much was left. As the shock diminished, she realized what she needed most: clothes, toiletries, a bath mat.

Then word of Donna’s plight spread. Suddenly, Stationery Toy World—a store Donna opened with her father 26 years ago to escape wholesale and to pursue her dream of owning her own retail

business—was as busy as it had ever been. Families from across the Upper West Side began stopping by, offering their support to Donna in any way they could and sending their children on mini shopping sprees.

Last Friday, Donna joked with customers between laughs and tears as they asked her what she needed. Some came in to drop off clothes. Many reached across the counter to giver her a hug.

“It’s just unbelievable—the amount of support, and how much people love us up here,” Donna said, then choked up for about the tenth time that morning.

Customers spoke passionately in support of the store. Multiple locals likened it to the type of small business that characterized the Upper West Side years ago.

“The store represents a tradition in the Upper West Side that’s being destroyed by the real estate business. The new buildings going up, the new stores—they’re all the same,” said Hannah, an Upper West Side resident for over 40 years. This one, she says, is “well supplied, it’s up to date. They’re cheerful in spite of everything. It’s a wonderful store.”

“It’s one of the few mom and pop stores we have left,” agreed Morgan Humphries, a close friend of Donna’s who owns a Malaysian restaurant next door. “She’s still giving the feel of a store that cares. She puts her heart and soul into it.”

More than that, though, Humphries said, the store matters because Donna brings the neighborhood love. “She’s so genuine,” he said. “She brings a real positive energy, and a sense of reinforcement. She’s just so selfless.”

Karen Starr, a toy seller who quickly befriended Donna when they began working together, called Donna “one of the kindest, warmest, willing-to-do-anything-for-anybody people.”

“You can’t know Donna without it crossing over into personal,” she added. “Everyone has a unique relationship with her.”

Donna said that she plans to rent an apartment through the holiday season, and to see how her insurance and FEMA aid pans out before relocating in the city. She loved her house on Staten Island, she said, but thought it might be time to seek “higher ground.”

As far as Stationery Toy World is concerned, however, Donna has no plans of going anywhere. “If there’s any place to have a business,” she said in tears and with a big smile, “the Upper West Side is where you want to be.”