Celebrities Gaze Into the Stars

The Protagonist’s Literary Predictions

Conjectures on the Great White Way: Broadway Preview

Lady Smarts: 2013, the Year of the Megging

Politics: Two Dans Walk Into a Fortune Teller

Bonus Question: We asked our readers, what’s going to happen next year?

Some said nothing. Some said very depressing things. Several said “zombies.” Our favorite response was this:

“Locavore movement becomes even more specific; all hip foodies now only eat mushrooms grown in NYC sewers.”

—Seth, activist

What’s going to be the biggest news story to come out of your district in 2013?

Garodnick: Dan Garodnick will kiss every baby in Council District 4 in support of his reelection bid.

Quart: As the first phase of the Second Avenue Subway moves closer to completion, the MTA is going to have to start planning for the next phases of this project. We’ll begin discussing the next phases of construction and how to fund it.

What’s going to be the biggest political upset in 2013?

Garodnick: Hillary Clinton will take Mayor Bloomberg’s advice and run for mayor, but she will lose in a nail-biter to a young, charismatic politician who comes out of nowhere and gives better speeches. He is gracious enough to give her a deputy mayor post.

Quart: Scott Stringer winning comptroller. He has some serious competition in that race.

What will be the single most important development for the downtown community in 2013?

Garodnick: With the Roberts settlement announced, 2013 will be the year Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village tenants get management to work with them on a condo conversion, and begin the process of taking ownership of their community.

What’s one thing that everyone thinks will happen in 2013 that probably won’t?

Garodnick: Joe Lhota will lose the Republican nomination for mayor when his campaign is saddled by allegations that sometimes the MTA’s trains are late.

Who will win the Super Bowl in 2013?

Garodnick: Giants. I got this right last year, so why stop now?

Quart: Anybody but the Patriots.

Read our predictions on literature, Broadway, politics and fashion.

Ebook sales will continue to spike now that Digital Book World has officially changed the spelling from “e-book” to “ebook.”

Read our predictions on literature, Broadway, politics and fashion.

Mario Cantone, comedian and actor

• The economy’s going to get better.
• Marijuana is going to become legal in a few more states.
• Gay marriage is going to become legal in a few more states.
• It will be a long time before there is an Italian-American sitcom that is successful.

Billy Eichner, host of “Billy on the Street” on Fuse

• The new season of Smash will be celebrated as the most realistic depiction of the theater industry since Alf.
• Lea Michele will die of jealousy when Anne Hathaway wins the Oscar for Les Misérables.
• Tina Fey and Amy Poehler will kill at the Golden Globes, but Jennifer Lawrence will look amused more than she’ll actually laugh out loud.
• I will force Rachel Dratch to run an obstacle course on the new season of Billy on the Street (less a prediction, more of a guarantee!). 

Pauly D, reality-TV star of “Jersey Shore”

• Vinny will still be pale
• I will release my first album on G-Note records
• Everyone will be pre-gaming with Remix cocktails
• My hair will still be able to survive 150-mph winds

Michael Symon, co-host of ABC’s “The Chew”

• I hope and feel that TV continues to go in a friendlier direction. If they continue to do reality TV, I’m hopeful that it’s done more in a style that celebrates success as opposed to humiliating those who have failed.
• I think food will continue to become more specific—as opposed to being billed as American, Italian, etc., it will focus more on specific regions and towns.
• This is more personal and selfish than a prediction, but I would love to see more green space and dog-friendly areas developed in the city. One thing the world doesn’t need more of is big-ass buildings!

Madison Dirks, actor in Broadway’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

• I’m pretty sure it’s going to start with January and end with December. Everything in between is a mystery. And thank God for that.

Read our predictions on literature, Broadway, politics and fashion.

Hurricane debris near the damaged ConEd power plant on 14th Street and Avenue C. Photo by Laura Mishkin.

This week power returned downtown, kids went back to school and the crane dangling 74 stories above West 57th Street was secured. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, however, New York City is far from fixed.

More than 70,000 residents remained without power on Monday. The inundated Brooklyn-Battery and Queens-Midtown tunnels remained closed. Ruined homes and businesses along the city’s shores left thousands of New Yorkers in emergency shelters. The city faces billions of dollars in damages and billions more in lost economic activity.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg summed up the city’s recovery on Oct. 30, the day after the storm: “This is going to take a while.”

Looking down the long road ahead, though, New Yorkers are also looking back, and asking big questions about the city’s readiness for a storm of Sandy’s magnitude. Did we see it coming? What more could we have done to prepare?

The threat of a massively debilitating hurricane in the city, it turns out, is nothing new to local weather experts. In fact, many have anticipated—with near-faultless accuracy in regard to damages—a Sandy-sized storm in the city for years.

In 2005, Aaron Naparstek, a writer for New York Press (this paper’s predecessor, now online at nypress.com), interviewed emergency preparedness and response coordinators and weather scientists to find out just how likely it was that the city would soon be struck by a large-scale hurricane. The resulting article was prescient.

“A storm of that magnitude may repeat every 70 to 80 years or so,” said Mike Lee, then-director of Watch Command at New York City’s Office of Emergency Management. He spoke with Naparstek about the infamous 1938 “Long Island Express,” a near-Category 4 hurricane that hammered West Hampton and decimated parts of the East Coast. “Do the math,” he said. “Whether it happens this year, next year or in five years, it’s going to happen.”

Naparstek’s article lays out the evidence for Lee’s claim: The city’s location at the apex of Long Island and New Jersey’s right angle is ideal for collecting water; its shallow continental shelf acts as a funnel for storm surges(New York City, Naparstek mentions, has some of the highest storm-surge values in the country); wind shear and sea-surface pressure are low; and climate change is only making things more tempestuous.

“In the event of a direct hit by a Category 3 hurricane,” Naparstek writes, “surge maps show that the Holland and Battery tunnels will be completely filled with seawater, with many subway and railroad tunnels severely flooded as well. The runways of LaGuardia and JFK airports will get flooded by 18.1 and 31.2 feet of water, respectively.”

The article is all too convincing in light of the devastation Sandy wreaked, but there never was an opposing argument. Naparstek said he began interviewing weather experts for the article when he received a standard-issue Hurricane Emergency Evacuation Map at his western Park Slope apartment and saw, to his disbelief, that parts of his own home would be underwater in the event of major storm.

“A lot of people say, ‘How can you come up with these numbers? Thirty feet, that’s ridiculous. It’s science fiction.’ ” Lee told Naparstek. “Actually, it’s science fact.”

The question that motivated Naparstek is still relevant today. “How can it be that nobody’s talking about this?”

“I think people are aware of the threat of flooding,” says Professor Nicholas K. Coch, a coastal geology expert at Queens College who once bore the nickname “Dr. Doom” for being the first scientist to widely publicize the city’s hurricane history and vulnerabilities. “But there are political negatives about forcing people to do things.” He said that people are reluctant to spend money on infrastructural defenses against disasters that are unlikely or infrequent. The installation of storm-surge barriers along the city’s coastline, for instance, could cost $10 billion.

When major storms do hit, though, Coch emphasized, huge amounts of money are lost in reparations, as made clear in Sandy’s aftermath.

“There’s a lot of blindness,” Coch lamented. “There are too many people refusing to face the reality of the situation.”

Ross Dickman, the meteorologist-in-charge at the National Weather Service’s New York office in Upton, agreed that New Yorkers, like all East Coasters, have a dangerously complacent mindset when it comes to the risk of natural disasters.

“People have a mentality that they’ve lived through this before,” he said. “There is this ‘home’ mentality that needs to be overcome.”

Dickman noted that his team predicted Sandy’s severity well in advance, and gave presentations to emergency managers that detailed the storm’s anticipated behavior and effects. “From an outreach perspective, we did everything that we possibly could,” he said.

Professor Coch and Naparstek both acknowledged that the city’s immediate emergency response certainly went better than it could have, applauding evacuation notices and subway closures. It was the city’s big-picture infrastructural and planning decisions, though, that both questioned.

“Our defenses against flooding are abysmal,” Coch pointed out.

Local politicians also have identified numerous flaws in the city’s preparedness for severe storms, and have begun suggesting changes that need to be made.

“The construction of this city did not anticipate these kinds of situations,” said New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in a recent radio interview. “We are only a few feet above sea level. As soon as you breach the sides of Manhattan, you now have a whole infrastructure under the city that fills.”

Congressman Jerry Nadler has been outspoken about the city’s need to invest in more comprehensive protection from extreme weather conditions. He supports “looking into barriers, levees and other infrastructure and making the necessary federal investments to ensure that cities and communities are protected,” a rep from Nadler’s office told Our Town. “And we should do such a review keeping in mind the effects of climate change, rising sea levels and the growing frequency of intense storms, as well as other areas of the country that are vulnerable.”

Coch and Dickman asserted that money spent on storm preparation would not be wasted.

“With expected climate change over time, we definitely need to prepare for events like these,” Dickman said.

Coch was more direct. When asked if New Yorkers should expect more frequent storms of Sandy’s intensity, he turned the question around. “The sea levels are rising, and parts of the city are sinking. What do you think?”

Click below for the predictions:

Margaret Chin, City Council member

Andrew Berman, Executive Director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation

Nancy Shafer, Executive Director of the Tribeca Film Festival

Gene Russianoff, Staff Attorney for the Straphangers Campaign

Elizabeth H. Berger, President of the Alliance for Downtown New York

Daniel Squadron, New York State senator

Sean Sweeney, Director of the SoHo Alliance

Alicia Salzer, M.D. & Leslie Miller, M.D., Co-Founders of Medhattan

Mark Miller, President of the LES Business Improvement District

Adam Lisberg, Editor of City and State (a Manhattan Media publication)

Gary Malin, President of Citi Habitats

Julie Menin, Chair of Community Board 1

Susie Lupert, Vice President of Housing Works

Sam Miller, President of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council

Jessica Chao, Interim Director of the Museum of Chinese in America

Michele Thompson, Director of the 92YTribeca

Vallejo Gantner, Artistic Director of P.S. 122