Reasons Why You’ll Hate Living in the Suburbs: You Don’t Get to See Celebrities Out in the Wild

October 12, 2012 by

You know what you’re going to lose when you move to the suburbs?  Celebrities. You’re going to miss that moment when you’re on line at your local Starbucks and realize that —  HEY, the guy trying to order a coffee while corralling a couple of kids is John McEnroe!  Hi John! You’re getting a cinnamon latte?  Really?  YOU CAN’T BE SERIOUS!  HAR!  See what I did there?

If you live in Manhattan, you can’t help but run into celebrities.  The city is lousy with them. Unlike LA, where celebrities live in upscale enclaves, Manhattan is incredibly dense and integrated, so even if you live in a 500 square foot studio walkup, you can still live on the same block with some zillionaire movie star. You don’t have to be a star-effer to feel a certain validation – “I might be a total loser, but I live right next door to Howard Stern.  I must be doing SOMETHING right.”

Now, I’m not talking about when you’re at some hot club and see Chris Brown and Drake throwing glasses at each other or Plaxico Burress shooting himself in the leg.  Or when press up against the rope line at some move premiere like  star-struck out-of-towner at Rock Center waving a sign at Matt Lauer so your cousin from Des Moine can DVR you.  No, it doesn’t count when you actually TRY to go see a celebrity, or when you run into them in their natural habitat.

Rather, the fun celebrity sightings are when you see them out in the wild, doing the same everyday crap that you have to do.  For example, I once saw Jerry Seinfeld walking down 83rd street toward Broadway.  That wasn’t particularly unusual, since he lived in the neighborhood (as did the “Jerry” of the Seinfeld show – COINCIDENCE?).  What was interesting was that he was carrying a Banana Republic bag, and there’s a Banana Republic store on 86th and Broadway. But he wasn’t coming back from the store, he was going TO the store.

In other words, JERRY SEINFELD WAS SCHLEPPING OVER TO BANANA REPUBLIC TO RETURN A SWEATER. I love that. I mean, seriously, wouldn’t you think that Jerry Seinfeld, when he gets a sweater that doesn’t fit, would just toss it in the garbage?  It’s like the old joke about whether it makes sense for Bill Gates to take the time to stop and bend down to pick up a hundred dollar bill.  You would think that it wouldn’t be worth 45 minutes of his life to save a few buck, but there he was hoofing it over to beg for his money back..  Good for him!

That’s one of the great things about living in the city. I used to live next door to Bobby Cannavale, who would sit out on his stoop chatting with the neighbors and couldn’t have been a nicer guy.  On the day after 9/11, I shared some hard-to-find copies of the NY Post with Billy Baldwin.  I once asked Barbra Streisand to move down a seat at the movie theater so I could sit next to my date (Streisand was NOT happy).  I hit on Jane Krakowski, back before she got Ally McBeal and got even further out of my league.  All very cool.

So I sort of miss that stuff now that I’m in the suburbs. Not to say that we don’t have our celebrities.  After all, I’ve made it my mission to catalogue the various celebrities who are rumored to joining me in suburban idyll, like Tom Cruise and Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Jay Z.  And just in my village of Nyack, we proudly count Rosie O’Donnell, Jonathan Demme, and Stephen Baldwin, who has been working very hard to keep my village free from porn. I’ve actually run into Bill Irwin on the streets and William Hurt on a golf course, where he thought I’d stolen his friend’s golf bag (I admit NOTHING!).

But it’s not the same. Really, it’s just because you don’t run into people as easily in the suburbs – whether those people are celebrities or commoners.  You’re in your car all day, you park in a lot, you come in and out of stores. You don’t really wlak the streets. And on top of that, you don’t go out as much at night. After all, I’m very unlikely to run into a celebrity when sitting on the couch in my family room, which is where I spend most of my time now.

So that’s one of the things that you’re going to hate about living in the suburbs. Unless, of course, you’re a celebrity, where you can relax in your suburban anonymity behind the blacked-out windows of your SUV and return a stupid sweater without some jackass writing all about it…..

 

Filed Under: Humor, Living in Manhattan, Living in the Suburbs, Reasons You'll Hate Living in the Suburbs Tagged With: , ,

Reasons You’ll Love Living in the Suburbs: Your Life Becomes Much Less Garbage-Intensive

October 5, 2012 by

I miss a lot of things about living in the city.  The energy of the streets.  The restaurants. The take out food.

But you know what I don’t miss? The garbage.

Garbage in the city is a nightmare.  First, there’s the smell.  Oh, Sweet Jesus, that smell.  I forgot all about that smell until I spent a night in the city a few weeks ago.  Woke up bright and early to get some coffee, walked out of the midtown hotel, and it hit me.  The smell of 1.6 million people crammed into about three square miles, of dumpsters in alleys, of overflowing garbage cans on ever corner, of storekeepers with dirty mops splashing water around on the pavement, doing nothing more than just re-animating the stink. It’s everywhere, and when you live in the city, you just kind of get used to it, the way you get used to the noise and the crowds and everything else that comes from urban living.  But, boy, if you’ve been away for a while, it’s like a slap in the face. A big smelly slap.

And it’s not just the garbage on the streets.  Dealing with garbage in your home is one of the worst parts of living in the city.  As usual, it’s all about the small spaces.  When you live in 700, or 1,000, or even 2,000 square feet, every inch of your home is precious.  So it’s just simply appalling how much of that space gets given over to garbage.

To start with, you got your garbage can, sitting in the corner of your kitchen and blocking your access to your cabinets.  And if that’s not bad enough, you’ve got ANOTHER can for your recycleables, because God Forbid you mix bottles in with your more pedestrian garbage and kill all the dolphins, or whatever.  On top of that, you’ve got your pile of newspapers piling up in a corner.  All of that stuff, taking up your precious real estate.

But that’s not all, because at some point you end up with more garbage than can fit in the cans.  Alas, it’s not yet garbage pickup day, and you’re not allowed to just put your garbage out on the street any old time you want because that would be URBAN CHAOS, so you have to pull out the bag and store it on the floor for a few days, where various moist discarded products seep through that thin layer of polypropylene to add a little urban ambiance to your apartment.

So now you’ve got your garbage can, recycling can, a pile of newspapers, and a seeping bag of filthy garbage cluttering up your small apartment.  Think of how expensive that is.  Manhattan real estate is about $1,200 per square foot.  A standard garbage can is maybe 2’x2’, which is four square feet (disclaimer – not good at math).  So one  garbage can is worth about $4,800 in space.  Add another one for recycleables, and then a few feet for the pile of newspapers, and another spot for that decomposing bag of refuse in the corner, and you’re talking about over ten grand just to keep the garbage in your home.

But it doesn’t end there.  Bad enough you have all this garbage in your home, you now have to get it down to the street.  Now, maybe that’s not so bad if you live in an elevator building, or if you’re blessed with one of those garbage chutes.  I was lucky enough to live for two years in a garbage chute building, and I miss it to this day.  Walk down the hall, open the hatch, fling the garbage down, and listen for the clunkety-clunk-clunk as it careens down 15 flights.  Just awesome.  I loved throwing stuff down that chute. I looked for things to throw out just to hear what it would sound like when they hit bottom.

But for most of my years in the city, I lived in a walk-up.  Which is also a walk-down.  Which means walking down laden with garbage – the seeping bags, clanking bottles, the bundles of newspapers that I had to tie up with twine in one of the worst chores of my week.

Here’s how it typically went:

  • Come home after a long day.
  • Realize that the apartment was filled with garbage and that the pickup is the next morning.
  • Explain to wife that I’m too tired to carry it down, promising to do it first thing in the morning.
  • Wake up to the sound of the garbage truck pulling away from my building.
  • Run down in my boxers and sandals carrying fistfuls of garbage.
  • Chase truck down the street.
  • Throw garbage directly into truck.
  • Endure disapproving stares from sanitation workers.
  • Walk back to apartment.
  • Endure disapproving stares of neighbors.
  • Get back to apartment.
  • Realize I forgot my keys.
  • Buzz up to my wife to let me in.
  • More disapproving stares.

This happened a lot.

In fact, I remember one time that I promised to bring the garbage down in the morning, woke up too late, and rather than admit to the wife that I had failed in what is a fundamental husbandly duty, I pretended to take the garbage down when I left for the morning.  But since the truck had already come, I instead carried the garbage to the corner and stealthily dumped it into a public trash can, looking nervously around for the garbage cops to come take me away.  Walking away from that trash can, having gotten away with dumping my personal trash in the public can, I felt like I was one of Ocean’s Eleven. OUTLAW!

I rode that high all day.  Then I come home, and my wife immediately confronts me with, “Did you throw our garbage in the can on the corner?”  To this day, I don’t know how she caught me.  Women are sneaky.

So that’s another reason you’ll love living in the suburbs – your life becomes much less garbage intensive.  No more garbage cans cluttering up your limited space, because the spacious kitchens all have built in refuse cabinets.  No more garbage bags in your hallway, because everyone has garages with trash cans all your own where you can dump the bags, then joyfully roll them out to the street for pickup.

And, of course, no more garbage stink on the streets, the smell of teeming, anxious masses who partied too late and too hard. No, instead you smell…nothing.  Nothing bad, nothing particularly good, just the faint scent of, well, blandness — the distinctive fragrance of the suburbs.  But in this case, bland is a LOT better than the alternative……

 

Filed Under: Humor, Living in Manhattan, Living in the Suburbs, Reasons You'll Love Living in the Suburbs Tagged With: ,

Reasons You’ll Hate Living in the Suburbs: Losing Your Urban Identity

October 4, 2012 by

Everyone who moves from the city to the suburbs makes the same promise to themselves: I won’t become a suburban person, I’ll keep my urban sensibility, I’ll come into the city all the time.

 

Take, for example, this jackass writing about his decision to move from the city to the suburbs:

So I’ve convinced myself that I’m not leaving.  No, not me!  I’m just moving to a new section of Manhattan, a hot new neighborhood like Dumbo and Nolita and all those other acronymic (is that a word?) Manhattan neighborhoods that magazine writers or real estate brokers are always discovering.

I’m just moving to “Suma,” the “SUburbs of MAnhattan.”  Just like “Tribeca” is the “TRIangle BElow CAnal” or “Nolita” is “NOrth of LIttle ITaly.”   Just another neighborhod of Manhattan!  Really!

Suma is not a neighborhood per se, of course, but it’s a state of mind, the state of mind that I might be moving to the suburbs, but I’m going to retain my Manhattan sensibilities, pretentious though they may be.

I’m not going to give in.

I’m not going to get a cookie-cutter house.

I’m not going to become the organization man.

I’m not going to eat every meal at a franchise restaurant.

I’m not going to stay in on weekends.

I’m going to find my Suma.

That was three years ago, when I first contemplated my move to the suburbs.  And, of course, I’ve totally sold out.

Going into Manhattan.  I promised myself that I’d come into Manhattan often, at least once a month.  I’ve probably been to the city three or four times a year, at best.  Why?  It’s tough to explain.  We want to go into the city, check out a new restaurant, go see a show, hit a few lounges, but then the simple mechanics get in the way — the 45 minute drive, the potential traffic, finding parking, worrying about drinking when I need to drive us home. We think about it, and then it just seems so much easier to drive ten minutes to the mall to watch Liam Nisson growl and kill bad people. What amazes me is that I did that same drive every day for about eight years, when I was living in the city but working in the suburbs, but somehow what was once my daily commute now seems like an endless death march when I contemplate schlepping in for a night on the town.

Staying a city person. I promised myself that I wouldn’t become a suburbanite, that I’d stay a “city person.”  But strange things are happening.  The last few times I went to the city, I got disoriented by the little things. I walk uptown when I’m going downtown. I forget the order of the avenues — “is Park before or after Madison?”.  I forget which way the one way streets go.  Even worse, the last time I was in the city, I was walking to get a cup of coffee and I kept getting passed by people.  I became one of those people who clog up the sidewalks, walking too slowly for the rush of pedestrians trying to get where they’re going.  That was humiliating.

Keeping my “sophisticated urban sensibility.” This may be the worst realization of all.  You’d think that in the information age, you’d be able to stay in touch with what’s happening in the city. I read the Times every day. I surf the city lifestyle blogs.  But it’s not enough.  You just can’t stay in touch when you’re not actually there.  Reading about it isn’t the same.  In just three years, the city has changed.  Food trucks?  Really?  And what’s with these Vietnamese sandwiches everyone was talking about last year.  Are they still hot, or did I totally miss it?  Honestly, I have NO IDEA WHAT’S GOING ON ANYMORE!

Now, of course it’s easy to simply blame this on the suburbs.  Certainly, I like having something to blame besides the fact that I’m simply getting old and unhip.  Indeed, one could argue that it’s almost a little undignified for someone of my advancing years to bemoan the loss of an urban sensibility, when really I’m just getting cranky that I’m not 35 anymore.  Even if I was living in the city, it’s arguable whether I’d be any more tuned in than I am now, particularly since I’m now a father.  But it still hurts.

And here’s the worst part.  Slowly but surely, I’m starting to feel myself becoming a suburbanite.  I’m fighting it, but it’s insidiously working my way into my psyche.  I drive my new crossover into the city, and feel that twinge of superiority when I pick up my city friends who don’t own a car.  On those rare occasions when urbanites visit us in the suburbs, I silently bask in the sense of awe they have when they see my closet.  SO BIG!

It scares me how easily I’m being seduced by big closets and affordable restaurants and my guest bedrooms, how I find myself going weeks without even thinking about taking a trip into the city.  I’m getting — I can’t believe I’m saying this — used to it.

So that’s another one of the reasons that you’ll hate living in the suburbs.  No matter how much you might want it right now, and regardless of how many promises you’ll make to yourself, you’re going to find yourself going over to the bland side.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you….

 

Filed Under: Humor, Living in Manhattan, Living in the Suburbs, Reasons You'll Hate Living in the Suburbs Tagged With: , ,

Reasons You’ll Love Living in the Suburbs: The Pressure is Off!

October 3, 2012 by

One of the great things about living in the suburbs is that the pressure is off.  What pressure?  That unrelentingly guilty feeling that you’re always missing out on something, that you should be going to more concerts and theater and museums and clubs, and bars, and hot new restaurants.  That nagging voice in your head saying that if you’re living in the city you should be taking advantage of living in the city:

What?  You’re going to stay home and watch The Voice? What’s wrong with you?  Artcat just posted that a series of Sara Swaty portraits exploring gender identity and the body is opening this weekend at the Leslie-Lohman Museum!  The 37th Annual Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival is in previews on Theater Row!  And you’re going to watch TV?  What a plebian! What a vulgarian!

Sometimes, living in Manhattan can be mentally exhausting.  There’s just TOO MUCH to do, too many choices, too many decisions to make, and you’ll never get to everything.  Even if you go out every night, you’ll never even scrape the surface of all the shows you should be seeing, art you should be appreciating, food you should be trying.  Think of it this way — New York City has 24,000 restaurants.  Even if you eliminate the half of them that are the various warring Ray’s Pizza chains, that’s still 12,000 places to eat.  365 days a year, 3 meals a day, it would take you almost 12 years to try them all.  That’s a lot of miso-glazed cod.

Another example: right now, at this moment, there are about 25 shows playing on Broadway, and almost 60 off-broadway.  That’s 85 shows.  Go see one a day, and you might get through them in three months, at which time about a third of those shows will have closed and been replaced.  And that’s not even counting off-off-broadway.

It’s a cultural treadmill, and the guilt trip never ends.  Just pick up a copy of the Times, and you’ll see pictures of society events you never have the time to go to, reviews of restaurants you’ll never try, profiles of bands you’ll never hear.  And, even worse, it seems like EVERYONE ELSE is somehow finding the time to get more out of the city than you ever will.  You finally get out to a club, only to be told that you REALLY should go there on Tuesday nights.  Tuesday nights?  People go out Tuesday nights?  Seriously?  What do they do all day?

That’s what’s nice about the suburbs.  Yes, like everyone says, there’s not a lot to do.  But in a lot of ways, that’s a blessing.  Fewer choices, fewer decisions, easier to focus.  Rather than trying to stay afloat in an unrelenting cultural stream, you have to actually seek out opportunities for interesting theater, art openings, new restaurants.  They’re out there – even in the suburbs, there are some good restaurants and galleries and concert halls. Not as many, of course, but that’s the point.  Because the choices are fewer and further between, you don’t have that pressure to ALWAYS BE DOING SOMETHING.

So you get to give yourself a break.  It’s not your fault.  You’re living in the boring old suburbs!  So what else are you going to do but sit on your couch, put your feet up, and guiltlessly watch some lowbrow reality tv?

Filed Under: Humor, Living in Manhattan, Living in the Suburbs, Reasons You'll Love Living in the Suburbs Tagged With: , , , ,

Who’s Moving to the Suburbs? Tom Cruise, That’s Who!

October 1, 2012 by

As part of my never-ending and desperate quest to validate my move to the suburbs, I’d delighted to report that we have yet another A-list celebrity who is thinking of making the move to the land of big lawns, chain restaurants, and SUVs:

Tom Cruise is house hunting in the New York suburbs. Or rather, mansion and estate hunting, according to both tabloids. He’s got Bedford, NY and Greenwich, CT to comb through–that’s where the celebs live. Ron Howard, who directed him “Far and Away,” is a long time Greenwich resident. “ER” star Anthony Edwards is up there, too.

This is a big one, ladies and gentlemen.  Regardless of the reasons — and apparently Mr. Cruise is going through some relationship issues that might bring him to the area — it’s quite the “get” for us to welcome the star of one of the great suburban movies of all time (talking about, of course, Mission Impossible 3 Risky Business).

So, as the self-appointed head of the Celebrity Suburban Welcome Wagon, let me be the first to say: “Tom Cruise!  Welcome to the Suburbs!”

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Reasons You’ll Hate Living in the Suburbs: Property Taxes

September 13, 2012 by

No one who’s trying to get you to move to the suburbs tells you about the property taxes.  Oh, it’s so great living out here in the suburbs!  Look at the trees!  Look at my big house! Look at my closet!  Look at how my kid isn’t sleeping in that closet!  ALL THIS SPACE!

And all that’s true.  Pound for pound, living in the suburbs is a lot cheaper than living in the city.  Food is cheaper.  Clothes are cheaper. The dry cleaning is cheaper.  In particular, the housing is cheaper – generally running about $300-$400 a square foot, when pricing in the city is more like $1,200 a square foot.  So from a raw pricing perspective, housing in the suburbs is way cheaper than the city.

Except for the property taxes.  Property taxes in the suburbs are MURDER.  And the problem is that you don’t really pay attention to that when you’re looking for a new home in the suburbs. You’re looking at houses online, and all you see are these high-res pictures of giant houses with big lawns and actual foyeurs and humongous kitchens and OMIGOD LOOK AT THAT WALK IN CLOSET!  And then you realize that for the same price as your tiny 1,000 square foot two bedroom in the city, you could get a 4,000 square foot colonial in some tony Westchester suburb.  You figure out the down payment, you figure out your monthly mortgage payment, and you’re ready to go make an offer.

Not so fast.  Check out the taxes.  They’re on that listing somewhere, not all that prominent, buried deep in the fine print, and sometimes the real estate agent doesn’t even list them.  So keep looking…..looking……and….

WHAT THE EFF!  FIFTY EFFING THOUSAND DOLLARS IN TAXES!!!!  CAN THAT BE RIGHT????

It’s right.  Lucky you, if you’re looking to move to the New York City suburbs, you’re going to be paying the highest property taxes anywhere in the country.  Indeed, the local suburbs make up like three of the top ten highest-taxed counties in the nation.

Here’s the weird thing about property taxes in the suburbs. It’s not that they’re so high, it’s that property taxes in the city are ridiculously cheap.  I don’t actually know why, but it’s probably based on the density – there are so many people living vertically on every square plot of Manhattan soil that the property taxes don’t need to be high in order to fund what is, after all, a pretty expensive local government.

Put it this way – I used to live in a two-bedroom brownstone apartment on the upper west side, in a building that had four total apartments totaling probably about 6,000 total square feet of living space. All four apartments together are probably worth about $7 million today.  And the taxes on the building?  About $30,000.  Now, I live in a condo, about 4,500 square feet, worth probably about $1 million in today’s market, and I’m paying that same $30,000 in taxes.  It’s crazy.

In fact, I’d argue that housing prices in Manhattan are so ridiculously high precisely because the taxes are so low.  Think of it this way.  At today’s rates, you can borrow $100,000 for about $400 per month, or $4,800 per year.  If we round that up to $5,000, you can figure that for every $5,000 in taxes, you lose about $100,000 in property value.  So if you have a Manhattan apartment that costs $1.5 million, and has $25,000 in yearly property taxes, and on the other side you have a Westchester home that costs $1,000,000, but has $50,000 in property taxes, the yearly cost of owning those homes is roughly comparable.

That said, before you decide that your kid is fine sleeping in a doggie bed in your hall closet, let’s remember a few things.

First, even with the property taxes, you still get a lot more space for the money.  That apartment in the city costing $1.5 million?  It’s got about 1,200 square feet.  The house in the suburbs? More like 3,000 square feet. So you’re getting about three times the living space for the price.

Second, property taxes are deductible, so about a third of those taxes are coming back to you in tax savings.  That evens the playing field a little.

Third, you have to THINK OF THE CHILDREN!  Don’t forget that one of the reasons you’re probably moving to the suburbs is that you have kids, and you want them to go to good schools, and those good schools, with all the fancy computers and well-paid teachers and massive educational bureaucracy – all that costs money.  So maybe if you have school-age kids you can take comfort in knowing that your property taxes are going toward their fancy Ivy-League baiting education.

That said, when you’re like me, and you don’t have kids in school yet, it does make you wonder.  Like, can’t those little snots can get by with whatever text books they’ve been using all those year?   I mean, seriously, have there been so many advances in the arts and sciences that ten- or twenty-year old textbooks aren’t good enough for these kids?  What, has Nathanial Hawthorne come out with some new books recently?

Take history, for example.  History hasn’t changed much, and you never get to modern history anyway.  Ten year old history books are just fine.  When I was a kid, we’d start American History every year with about a month on the explorers – “Ponce de Leon was looking for the fountain of youth” is among the useless facts that I can never forget.  Then we’d idle along so that we’d get to the colonial era around November, so we could have a reenactment of the First Thanksgiving and wear funny hats. But if you spend three months on the explorers and Pilgrims, you end up compacting about 300 years of history into five months – by the end of the year, we’d be lucky to get to World War I, much less the modern era. To this day, I feel much more comfortable with my knowledge about Pocahontas then I do about Harry Truman.  So I don’t see why these kids need new history books so long as the books they have get them through, say, the Korean War.

Of course, when my kids are old enough to go to school, it’s entirely possible I might be singing a different tune.  WE NEED NEW MACS!  That does sound like me.

Until that point, though, I’m going to continue hating that tax bill I get every year.

And so will you.

Filed Under: Humor, Living in Manhattan, Living in the Suburbs, Reasons You'll Hate Living in the Suburbs Tagged With: ,

Memories of 9/11

September 11, 2012 by

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A few years ago, I wrote a piece memorializing my memories of that day, back when I still lived on the upper west side of Manhattan.  I thought it was a good day to republish it

Everyone has memories of that day. Here are three of mine:

1.  Sending Tom Off on the Plane

Early on that Tuesday morning in September, I sent one of my best friends off in a cab to JFK to send him back to LA.  Tom had come to visit for a college reunion we were having up in Maine, so he’d come in about a week earlier so that we could drive up together.  While we were there, he broke his wrist badly diving for a softball, and spent most of Monday seeing doctors while I traveled around trying to get him some medication for the pain.  His intention had been to stay for the week for a job interview, but the doctors recommended he have surgery as soon as possible, and he wanted to do the surgery back in LA.

So that Tuesday morning, he got in a cab bound for JFK.  About two hours later, I watched as the second of two planes hit the World Trade Center, and heard of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania.  It wasn’t until early afternoon that I found out that he wasn’t on any of them. His flight was diverted to St. Louis, where he sat with that broken wrist for most of the next week while the air traffic was shut down.  But for most of that day, I assumed he was gone.

2.  Walking the Streets

Once the enormity of the tragedy became clear, a mass exodus started out of the city.  The streets were closed to traffic, so people just simply walked. My wife, then my girlfriend, worked in midtown, but we got in touch with each other through AOL Instant Messenger and worked out that we’d meet in Columbus Circle and I’d walk her to my place.

So I left my apartment and started walking south, mostly against a massing crowd of people who were all going north, away from Ground Zero.  Some of them were Manhattanites, on what would be a two or three mile hike, and some of them were from points even further north — the Bronx, even Westchester.  What else could they do?  Some of them had no place to stay, many of them just wanted to get as far away as they could, and there were no cars, no cabs, no transit.  So they walked, all of them quiet, some of them crying, some of them covered in the ashes of the fallen buildings.

As I walked south, getting on 11AM or so, two hours after the first tower fell, I could see stores shutting down for the day, maybe the week.  The local Starbucks was closed, a hand-drawn “sad face” making the announcement.  The open stores were mostly empty, because who would be shopping?  The only people doing any business were the grocery stores, bulging with people stocking up on supplies for what they expected might be a near siege of the city.

But as I walked, I came across the peculiar sight of one retail store doing a booming business, with people lined up out the door.  It was a shoe store, and I was momentarily puzzled wondering why people would be buying shoes at a time like this.  Then I realized that all the people on line were women.  Women who had already walked miles on their high heels, and were desperate to get some comfortable shoes for the long road ahead.

3.  The Friday Vigil

I remember that first week after in kind of a blur.  Looking back, it’s almost like it happened in a dream. I remember getting back to work on Thursday, following the mayor’s encouragement that we should all get back to our lives.  It was ridiculously too early to be back at work. At the time, I was teaching at Fordham Law School, and I got maybe 10 minutes into the class before I simply stopped, seeing the looks on the faces of students who were simply not prepared to discuss property law.  So we just talked about how everyone was feeling, how we were holding up.

That Friday, I remember that people started a spontaneous movement to hold a candlelight vigil at sunset throughout the country in memory of the lost.  My now-wife and I joined the vigil, going down to the front steps of our brownstone and then walking the two blocks, holding our candles, to the fire station on 83rd street, which had lost one of its firemen.

When we arrived, there was already a crowd up front. It was an electic crowd, a mix of the Upper West Side residents of the area and what seemed like a group of friends and family of the fallen firefighter, most of whom probably lived outside Manhattan.  As we got there, a man with a guitar was playing a folk tune, many in the crowd singing along. But not the whole crowd. What he was singing was “If I had a Hammer,” a Pete Seeger progressive anthem about the “hammer of justice” and the “bell of freedom,” first sung in support of political protestors. And the people singing along were a group of residents, reconstructed lefties, stereotypically former hippies, seemingly oblivious to the glaringly inappropriate gesture of singing a 60s protest song at the vigil for a firefighter killed in a terrorist attack.

The rest of the people, there because of a personal loss, not because they read something on the internet about walking around with a candle, seemed puzzled, not because they knew the historic implications of the song, but more just a reaction to its cheery tempo.  But they clearly felt something was amiss, so when the song ended, up started a very different type of anthem started ringing out — chants of “USA, USA, USA” started by a little boy, maybe eight or nine.  So now it was the residents’ turn to feel a little uncomfortable, as the sound of what seemed like a martial chant, perhaps equally as inappropriate as a 60s protest song, filled the streets.

I remember thinking in that moment about how people could have such remarkably divergent reactions to the same tragedy.  And I thought about that moment many times in the years that followed, as we saw those two perspectives become increasingly polarized in the governmental response to what happened that day.

 

Filed Under: Living in Manhattan Tagged With: ,

Reasons You’ll Love Living in the Suburbs: Cuter Vermin

August 13, 2012 by

One of the nicest things about living in the suburbs is that you get a better class of vermin.  In the city, you got your three basic types of vermin: rats, mice, and cockroaches.  They’re all horrible.  And no matter where you live, or how nice your place, you end up dealing with them at some point.

Rats, of course, are the worst, but unless you’re living in a hovel, you probably don’t have them in your home.  It’s just that they’re everywhere else, hiding out and just waiting until you’re staggering your way home after a long day at work or a long night of drinking, just biding their time until they JUMP OUT FROM BEHIND THE GARBAGE CANS GAHHHHHHHH.  Just the worst.  I’ve seen rats the size of cats, bigger than most dogs people have in the city, pacing around on the subway tracks, in alleys — they’re everywhere in the city.  Now, I guess we must have rats in the suburbs, too, but I just don’t see them as much.  I think rats like the city better.  They’re very sophisticated, those rats.

I had mice in my apartment, of course, pretty much every apartment I ever had in Manhattan. The only good thing about having mice was that I could pretend that I was their MOUSE GOD.  Like a real God, I had the power of life or death over them.  I could be a beneficent God, getting lazy and leaving food on a dirty plate in the sink, creating a bountiful harvest.  Or I could be a vengeful God, smiting them with the Plague of the Trays of Glue.  When you’re 25, living alone in the city, no money, working for The Man, you take your opportunities to be ALL-POWERFUL where you can get them.

But I wasn’t really cut out to be Mouse God.  I’m too much of a softie, definitely more of a New Testament Mouse God.  Mouse traps are horrible things.  Have you ever heard a mouse scream when he realizes that he’s stuck in a glue trap.  It’s a horrible sound.  And then what are you supposed to do with a glue trap that has a mouse stuck to it, the poor mouse terrified, struggling to get away, looking at his Mouse God and begging for mercy?  Horrible.  I never knew what to do — the kind thing would be to kill it quickly, but I don’t quite have it in me to take a hammer and beat a mouse to death with it.  And if you throw it away, you’re consigning that mouse to a miserable starvation death in the garbage.  No good option.

Now, cockroaches are a different story.  When I’m retired, I’ll happily take a part-time job hammering cockroaches to death, if someone was willing to pay me to do it.  DIE COCKROACH DIE.  No problems there. Very satisfying work.  I’d hammer away all day long.  So would you.  Nothing worse than coming home, turning on the light, and seeing a bunch of cockroaches scurrying away from your kitchen sink.  And then you also have those “water bugs,” which are giant mutant cockroaches that sneak into bathrooms.  Every time they did construction on our block, we’d get an infusion of those water bugs everywhere we had a faucet.

So if you were to ask me what I love about the suburbs, I’d have to say that I love the better class of vermin we have out here. Three years, I’ve yet to see a mouse, a rat, or a cockroach.  Instead, we have really cute vermin, like deer.  Seriously.  Deer.  That’s our biggest problem.  Because, you know, they eat stuff from the gardens.  Isn’t that awful!  And instead of rats, we have squirrels.  Cute little squirrels, big bushy tails, scampering joyfully from tree to tree, saving up those nuts for winter.  Awwwwwww.

Of course, once in a while, a bear comes down from the local state park and tries to eat us or our dogs.  That’s not good.  And one more reason why I live in a condo, because most bears have trouble navigating elevators.

But that’s unusual.  And, anyway, what’s worse — dealing with rats and mice and cockroaches in the city every single day, or taking a very small chance of someday getting eaten by a bear in the suburbs?

I thought so.

 

Filed Under: Humor, Living in Manhattan, Living in the Suburbs, Reasons You'll Love Living in the Suburbs Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Message to People in the Hamptons: You Do Realize You’re Spending Thousands of Dollars for a Weekend in the Suburbs, Right?

July 19, 2012 by

The Hamptons are the worst.

I mean, seriously.  What an amazing marketing job they’ve done out there to convince Manhattanites to spend thousands of dollars and a five-hour schlep in traffic to visit what is essentially — and I hate to break this to you — JUST ANOTHER SUBURB.

Because that’s all it is.  The Hamptons are just the east end of Long Island, the original Manhattan suburb.  Think about it:

  • Five bedroom colonials and high-ranches?  Check.
  • One acre lots?  Check.
  • You have to drive everywhere?  Check.

That, my friends, is a suburb.  S-U-B-U-R-B.  The Hamptons are a beautiful place to live, probably one of the nicest suburbs in the region, but they are still a suburb.

And it amazes me that the same people who will sneer at me for my suburban exile in Nyack will happily spend half my yearly mortgage payment for a half-share so they can spend a few weekends in a five-bedroom high-ranch in Water Mill. Yes, okay, there’s a beach.  You claim that you pay all that money so you can be “at the beach.”  But are you really?  I did Hamptons shares a few times when I was living in the city, and I can remember going to the beach maybe three times. So don’t tell me about the beach.

Now, I’m not talking about the Hamptons experience that the uber-rich have, the Billy Joels and Alec Baldwins and Howard Sterns and David Kochs or whoever.  That’s a whole different world of ridiculous houses and star-studded parties and caviar and champagne and feasting on the flesh of sacrificial virgins in secret underground temples to Mammon. But you’re probably not having that kind of Hamptons experience.

No, here’s the experience you’re having.  You have a friend-of-a-friend, some sort of hyper-organized Tracy Flick type, who sent you an email blast six months ago inviting you to grab a summer share of some amazing “beach house” she found in Sag Harbor or wherever. So in the middle of some dreary January day, you plunked down a few thousand dollars for a quarter-share.

And now it’s one of your weekends, so you pack a bag and start on the great Hamptons Weekend Forced Death March. Maybe you took the train, fervently hoping that you get one of those three-seat benches and that you don’t have to sit next to someone else.  Or maybe you hop on the Jitney, so you’re stuffed into a bus — because who doesn’t love the luxury of riding in a BUS — for what would be a three hour trip if you’re in some glorious parallel universe in which there isn’t any traffic, but in your universe will end up taking like five hours.  Or maybe you splurge and rent a car for the weekend, because nothing says “relaxing” like sitting behind the wheel in traffic on a Friday night for a couple of hours.

But now you’ve arrived, and you find out that you’re sharing five bedrooms with about a dozen people, none of whom are your friends because you all screwed up and took different weekends for your share.  Hopefully, there’s at least a pool, because you now find out that the “beach house,” isn’t actually on the beach. Or near the beach.  It’s maybe in the same zip code as the beach — a fifteen minute drive, which would be manageable except that there’s no place to park your car without a permit, and although Tracy Flick got hers three months ago, you didn’t.

But the fun doesn’t end there. Not only have you shelled out thousands of dollars for your share, but now you arrive to find that you owe another hundred bucks or so for your contribution to the food and drink that Tracy picked up for the weekend. Except that you got there too late for Friday night’s dinner, and half the beer is already gone, so you’re basically paying for everyone else to eat and drink.

It gets better the next morning, which is spent in a three-hour group conversation about whether you should all try to go to the beach.  Chances are, of course, that if it’s not raining, it’s really, really hot, so everyone agrees it’s not a good idea to pile ten people into the one parking-permitted car to go to the beach where you’re not legally allowed to drink anyway.  So you all end up by the pool, which would be fine, except that the whole day is spent with people texting their “real friends” in a desperate search for the “good house parties” to go to that night.  And the women that you thought might be good hook-up possibilities back when you scanned Tracy’s “signed up!” list in January are totally not interested, instead passing back-and-forth their dog-eared copy of the Hamptons Magazine’s Annual 50 Hottest Bachelors list, a list that you’re almost certainly not on.

Even if you actually do find something to do that night, it’s probably a schlep from one part of the Hamptons to the other, so someone has to stay sober to drive. That would be you.  Then you get there, and it’s a sausage fest, so you all pile back into the car to go to some crappy bar that  — I hate to break it to you — is basically a suburban hangout for nine months of the year.

You wake up Sunday morning, and there’s nothing left to eat, because the people who stayed behind when your group went bar- and party- hopping ended up inviting some friends over and they ate all your food.  So you hang out for about a few hours, listlessly watching some Wimbledon on the teevee machine, before heading back for the five-hour trip home.

That, my friend, is your weekend in the Hamptons suburbs!  You spent it in a nice big suburban house with a suburban yard and a suburban pool where you needed a suburban car to get around, and the only thing that differentiated your “Hamptons Beach House” from those stultifying high-ranches you would never live in over in Westbury or Pleasantville or Park Ridge is that you were a fifteen minute drive from a beach that you never visited. And it only cost you a month’s pay so you can spend four more weekends there. Well-done!

And not only that, it’s a BAD suburb, an unholy alchemy of suburb and city that perfectly synthesizes:

  1. all the inconveniences of living in the city (expensive and crowded living space, annoying strivers, $15 sandwiches) with
  2. all the irritations of living in the suburbs (the need for a car, sprawl, lousy bars), and then adds
  3. the final secret ingredient of a glorious five-hour trip to get there.

That emperor?  He’s naked, my friends. He’s buck naked!

Maybe you disagree. Maybe that’s not been your experience. Maybe I’m just a bitter middle-aged man with hazy recollections of uniquely awful Hamptons weekends.  Fine.  But if you’re having a good time out there, and not because you’re some total desperate striver who likes to send his weekends trying to find the perfect party where THERE MIGHT BE MODELS, it’s probably because you’ve actually managed to put together a group of people you actually like, and you’re just basically hanging out with them. But if that’s the case, then it’s not the Hamptons you like, but your friends.  And you could be having a good time with them ANYWHERE, and save yourself a lot of trouble and money.

That’s really the bottom line.  The more I think about the differences between living in the city and living in the suburbs, the more I realize that the only real distinction is the people, the fact that urban environments uniquely attract interesting, bright, and challenging people who choose to live there primarily during the most sociable and vibrant time of their lives — when they’re young, single, and childless, looking for other young, single, and childless  people to hook up with and befriend.  The city doesn’t make them that way.  Theres nothing inherently interesting or special about the city, other than the people who live there.

The Hamptons are the proof of that.  There’s nothing inherently “hip” or trendy or even distinctive about the Hamptons, other than the people who choose to relocate there for part of their summers. Take away the people, and you have just another suburb, one that’s as close to Manhattan as Albany, and just about as interesting.

So, as the self-appointed driver of the Suburban Welcome Wagon, I have a message for all of you Hamptons-goers that you might not want to hear, but I think it’s for your own good — “Welcome to the Suburbs!”

 

Filed Under: Humor, Living in Manhattan, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: , , ,

What Do You Do When Your Birthday is on Friday the 13th? Nothing.

July 12, 2012 by

Tomorrow is my birthday. My 45th birthday. 45 years. Halfway to 90.

That’s a pretty hard number, actually.  90 is pretty old. Not a lot of people live to 90.  In fact, a quick internet search shows that only about 1% of people in this country live to be over 90.  So the odds say that I am halfway to dead.

The more immediate concern is that I can no longer say that I’m in my early 40s.  I’ve been saying that since the moment I turned 40, and I’ve gotten as much mileage out of it as I can.  But I can’t resist the dreaded “mid-40s” anymore, although I expect to stay in my mid-40s for another five full years, until I hit the next big milestone.

So I’m in my mid-40s.  It’s a little weird for me, because much of my life I’ve kind of defined myself by being “the young one.”  When I was a kid, all my friends were older than me, which wasn’t strange because I hit puberty early and always looked a lot older than I was.  When I was in my mid-teens, I looked over 21, and was actually the best candidate among my friends to be able to buy beer. Which is why they probably hung out with me.

(I’m assuming, by the way, that the statute of limitations on illegally buying beer has long since passed, but if it hasn’t I want to make clear that I just made all that up).

Being the “young” one carried with me for a long time. I was one of the younger students in law school, since I came straight out of college. In my jobs out of law school — clerking, then at a big law firm — I was generally a lot younger than the other people I worked with.  Then I started teaching, the “young professor,” much closer in age to the students than the other professors.  Even when I started working at my real estate company in my early 30s (I was in my early 30s, by the way, until the minute I turned 35), I was one of the “young guns” — usually a lot younger than other broker-owners, or even most of the agents in my company.

So that’s kind of ended. I’m not the “young” guy anymore. My friends are all now younger than me, all people I met back when I didn’t have a kid and would go out more.  And even my new friends, the ones I’m generally making because we both have kids, are a lot younger, since they weren’t stupid enough to wait until their mid-40s to have them.

All that said, I’m coping okay. 45 is not a big landmark number.  The big birthdays are 18 (old enough to vote), 21 (old enough to drink), 30 (no longer a “young person”), 40 (starting mid-life), 65 (old enough to get social security),  90 (“I beat out 99% of the rest of you!”), and 100 (you get mentioned on the Today show by Willard Scott).

But anytime you hit a fairly round number you sort of think about where you are and where you’re going. By the time you’re 45, and have put more birthdays behind you than you’re likely to have in front of you, you realize that you’ve also probably experienced most of the big moments of your life: your graduation, getting married, having a kid, buying your first home.  Now, most of those big moments, those landmark milestones, are going to be experienced vicariously, through the people you love. You want to live long enough to see your kid graduate, your kid get married, your kid having a kid and making you a grandparent.

The consolation is that you get to take stock of where you are, and, hopefully, feel good about what you’ve already put in the book. I have a great wife, a beautiful kid, a a wonderful family, some great friends (who hopefully forgive me for pimping the BRAND NEW MOVE TO SUMA FACEBOOK PAGE), a good business, and a nice home.  So I have nothing really to complain about, other than the normal grousing about the flipping of the calendar.

So what am I doing to celebrate?  Absolutely nothing.  It doesn’t help that my birthday falls on Friday the 13th, which can’t be good.  But I don’t expect that we’re doing much of anything. My wife threw me a great surprise party for my 40th — a great dinner, then she got a bunch of tables in this great Meatpacking District club where we had about 40-50 come out to celebrate.  So my 40th birthday was basically a drunken bacchanal.

Now, a move to the suburbs, one dog, one kid, two SUVs later?  Nothing. If my wife is throwing me another surprise party, it would honestly be an ENORMOUS surprise, because all indications are that we’re both just too tired to do much of anything.  In fact, any actual party would be more of a big passive aggressive move by the wife, since we barely acknowledge her birthday two weeks ago, spending it, at all places, at a business conference of mine.  So if she throws me a party, I’m in trouble, because it would be more of a “see how much MORE I LOVE YOU than you love me” move than anything else.

And I don’t know that I could handle that, not when there’s a 99% chance that I’m halfway to the grave.

Filed Under: Humor, My Life in the Suburbs
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