Another street fair?

October 10, 2009 by

I will say this about Nyack. These people love their street fairs. We’ve been here two months, and this weekend is literally the third or fourth street fair since we got here, not including the relatively lackluster parade I wrote about a few months ago. And that’s not counting the big Halloween parade coming up. (If you’re curious, my company puts out a list of suburban events here.)

These are fun. Indeed, the street fairs in Nyack are like a million times better than the ubiquitous street fairs in the city. It seems like every weekend from April through September, some area of Manhattan is enduring a street fair that’s really an excuse for half-assed vendors to sell bonsai trees, sausage and peppers, corn arepas, and socks. When you first come to Manhattan, you love them because of the novelty of walking down the middle of an avenue without dodging cars. But eventually you realize that (a) the merchandise stinks, (b) the merchandise is the same at EVERY street fair, and (c) you have to walk four blocks out of your way to get a cab, because all the blocks are closed off. It’s annoying.

The Nyack street fairs are a lot more integrated into the merchant community. There are a few generic vendors, but a lot of booths are localized, including the food. Much more fun.

This weekend is antiques. Since we’ve moved from 2000 square feet to 4,000 square feet, we have a lot of empty space. Off to check it out.

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Filed Under: Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs, SUMA Lifestyle Tagged With: , ,

Sorry, Harry….

September 28, 2009 by

One of the great discoveries of my new suburban neighborhood was Harry’s Burritos, a Nyack branch of the Manhattan-based chain of yummy, cheap Mexican food. I’ve been eating Harry’s Burritos, particularly the chicken Bay Burrito, for about 15 years.

Indeed, one of my first Manhattan memories is getting together with my friend the Schloem-dog on a beautiful Friday early evening after work for Bay Burritos back when (a) it was all we could afford, and (b) we actually had jobs where we could get out of work at 5PM on a Friday and have an early dinner, back before we both exercised the poor judgment of getting jobs that require more of our time and he exercised the appalling judgment of moving to California.

So I was excited to have a taste of Manhattan here in the suburbs, particularly since Harry’s is one of the few Nyack restaurants that delivers. Even with the delivery, though, I got into the habit of calling ahead on the way home and picking it up. Takes a little less time, and avoids one of the problems in the new apartment — namely, that my buzzer doesn’t work and I have to go down to the street to pick stuff up anyway.

But I kept having a problem with Harry’s. I’d call them up, place an order, and get there to find that they had no record of the order. It happened like three times. I call in, make the order, pull up, park, go inside, and then have to wait while they make a new burrito because they didn’t get the order. And I was getting a little sick of it. Bad enough people keep stealing my paper, but now I have to deal with incompetent Harry’s staff that can’t even take a phone in order.

So the third time it happens, I was completely getting fed up. I’d been understanding the first two times, but this was nuts. And I was about to go off on the person at the counter, and it occurred to me that I should check my phone. So I pull out the blackberry, check the address book, and find that this whole time I’ve been calling my OLD Harry’s on the upper west side. I thought I’d put the new number in, but apparently I either had a false memory of doing so, or didn’t save the new number, or something.

This whole time, then, I’ve been calling the Upper West Side Harry’s placing an order, and then going into the Nyack Harry’s to pick it up, only to get annoyed at the staff for not having my order. Meanwhile, there’s some counter person at the Harry’s in Manhattan wondering why this “Joe” jackass keeps ordering bay burritos and not picking them up.

I felt a little — what’s the word — stupid.

So I apologized profusely to the Nyack Harry’s staff for blaming them. And I now hereby apologize to the nice people over on Columbus Avenue for leaving them hanging. I hope they’re not still holding my order.

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The Joys of Elevators, Garbage Edition

September 19, 2009 by

I wrote recently about the joys of elevators, particularly coupled with the nifty-if-battered-and-stolen shopping cart that I use to take groceries or other bags from my car to my condo unit.

But the joy doesn’t stop there. The elevator not only goes up, it goes down. Which means I can use it to take out the garbage.

I hate garbage. I particularly hate modern garbage. Old timey traditional garbage was nice and simple. You take anything you want to throw out, you put it in a bag, and three or four times a week you take the garbage to the curb and nice men take it away for you.

Modern garbage is different. Now, you have to separate out certain types of garbage from other types of garbage, with the delineation between garbage types often seemingly arbitrary. Some paper goes into the clear garbage bags, other paper into the black garbage bags. And if you get it wrong, the mean people from some sort of enforcement division give you a ticket.

Not only that, but in my old apartment on the UWS, garbage was even worse.
First of all, my apartment was a walkup, three flights to the street. So I’d come home at night, climb those stairs, and have to pick up garbage to walk down the stairs, only to have to walk back up if I wanted to sleep in my apartment. I hated climbing those stairs.

Second, they only picked up the clear garbage once a week, so you had to live with the clutter and stink of old cans and bottles for days and days until you could get rid of it. And if you forgot to drop them off Tuesday night, as I often did, you lived with them another week.

(Which reminds me of the time that I forgot, despite much nagging reminding from the wife, to bring the regular garbage down. And this wasn’t regular garbage, but three or four days worth of stinky garbage. So I oversleep a little the next morning, realize I forgot to put out the garbage, look out the window, and realize that the nice men have already come, and I’ve got two more days of stinky garbage and unhappy wife in front of me. Without telling her, I took the garbage down to the street, and nonchalantly (as nonchalantly as you can be carrying two bags of stinky garbage) carried it to the street, where I blatantly and illegally dumped them in the garbage can on the corner. I then slinked (slunk?) away, hoping no one saw me, and then cheerily went to work with the airy feeling of a man who has gotten away with something. That night, my wife sees me, and says, “was that OUR garbage in the can on the corner?” I still don’t know how she caught me).

And third, I hated the tying. I don’t know why this in particular bothered me, but I hated collecting all the newspapers — and I read a lot of newspapers — and tying them with twine. I hated doing that.

So one of the GREAT things about living in the suburbs is the joy of putting out the garbage. I still have the clear and the opaque, but here are the differences:

1. The elevator
Instead of walking up and down stairs, I take the garbage down in the elevator. I may not have mentioned this, but I hate stairs.

2. The shopping cart
My stolen shopping cart — stolen not by me, mind you — means I don’t even have to carry the garbage. I load it in the cart, and just roll it. Whoever invented wheels, I salute you.

3. The garbage room
I’ve never had a garbage room before. It’s a room, a very very very stinky room, in which we put the garbage. And we can put it there anytime we want, any day of the week. No more forgetting when the pickups are.

4. No twine
This is the best. No more twine. The nice guys who pick up the recycleables just want you to dump the newspapers into one of the bins — no bags, no twine. By itself, this change in my life has improved my daily mood by 8.5%.

So although I miss certain things about living in the city, my suburban garbage experience kicks ass.

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

The Joys of Elevators

September 7, 2009 by

The Joys of Elevators

I haven’t had an elevator in about 17 years. When I first moved to Manhattan, lived in a 20-story prewar on 34th street and 9th avenue. It was a lousy neighborhood back then, and is a lot better now, but I needed to be within walking distance of the LIRR to get to work every morning. That was the first of many homes I had in urban neighborhoods, since I always loved living in the city (NYC, SF) even though my work career later confounded me with a long line of suburban jobs (Long Island, Palo Alto, Brooklyn, Hudson Valley).

But I had an elevator, which was glorious. And a doorman, which was less necessary for a strapping 25 year old who had tip-ophobia and would have traded a simply keyed entry for the anxiety of figuring out the complex holiday gratuity ettiquette. (I’m apparently not alone in that.)

For the last 15 years, though, I had a walk up. I loved the apartment, hated the walkup. For the first ten years, it was four full flights. After we bought the apartment below us and did a combination, we lowered the entrance by one flight, which seemed like heaven.

But still, every trip to the grocery carried with it the dread of three or four trips up the stairs with heavy bags straining my increasingly weak and out-of-shape arms and shoulders. (My wife, who is otherwise pretty liberated, draws the line on carrying bags, having explained that it is one of the perks of the ring). And every holiday getaway was wonderful, except that toward the end of the trip I’d start thinking about carrying those bags back up the stairs.

So now, finally, I have an elevator in my new condo in the suburbs. And now just any elevator. We have the whole top floor of the building, so we’re the only ones who use the elevator for that floor, and have that cool keyed access — no one can take the elevator to our floor but us, and the elevator opens up into a private hallway leading to our unit. Pretty neat. Impressive when people come to visit. Not that anyone has visited, but theoretically impressive.

And on top of that, the prior owner left us with a simple but magical gift — an old shopping cart that she apparently stole from a supermarket. You wouldn’t think this was a big deal, but it’s like manna from heaven to me. I come home from the market, pull into one of my parking spaces in the basement garage, roll the shopping cart over (it sits unmolested in one of our parking spaces), fill it up with groceries, roll it into the elevator, take out my nifty key, take the elevator upstairs, roll the car into my hallway, unlock my front door, and just roll it into right into my kitchen. It’s like my favorite part of the condo, being able to roll groceries into my kitchen.

It’s the simple things.

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Someone is STILL Stealing My Newspaper

August 24, 2009 by

Someone is STILL stealing my newspaper.

I’m starting to wonder if I’ve moved into a scary netherworld, whether all the stories you hear about how wonderful the suburbs are because of their safety and security is just a lie, a scam. That really the suburbs are filled with cheap people who steal your newspaper.

So no New York Times again this morning, second time this week. We seemed to be doing well the last few weeks, but now my paper thief has returned. Maybe, like in all those Law and Order episodes, what’s happened is that he was in jail for the past few weeks, and has been thereby unable to steal my paper. But now he’s been released, and he needs his Frank Rich fix. I wonder if I can get my local police department to do a search of people who’ve been in jail for just the past month or so, and were recently released, and live in my building. That’s probably a lot of bother.

What’s worse is that they keep stealing the SUNDAY paper, not the weekday. Maybe they’re a big (and deeply ironic) fan of the “Ethicist” in the Sunday magazine. But as much as I hate someone stealing my weekday paper, it’s worse on the weekend because you have to go buy the replacement paper at retail and get all the Sunday sections, even those sections that came in the Saturday paper the day before. So I have to go pay $4 for a paper that I’ve already half-read. And on top of that, the Times will only reimburse me for like $2, which is the prorated value of the Sunday paper.

You would think that this wouldn’t bother me so much, but, well, things apparently bother me a lot. I should talk to someone about that. But, man, there’s nothing worse than throwing on some shorts, getting your coffee, and walking downstairs to get your paper only to find an empty table.

I’ll keep you updated, because I know this is just as important to you.

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Someone is stealing my newspaper

August 3, 2009 by

I think someone is stealing my newspaper.

I can’t be sure. The New York Times delivery department might be lying to me when I call them every morning to yell at them for not delivering my paper. They keep telling me they’re delivering it, so every morning I schlep downstairs to get the paper, and no paper. So then I call and yell at them. And they tell me they’re delivering it, and the vicious cycle starts again.

In the most recent call, I got the distinct impression that the nice woman from Omaha or Bengladesh or wherever was insinuating that I was being a little unreasonable. Something about the “oh, I see you’ve been calling multiple times every day” comment that she made. I then pointed out to her that maybe it wasn’t the best idea for the Times to get me too used to reading the online version for free, what with the death of newspapers and all.

So I’m not sure what’s happening. Either the New York Times is lying to me — and who can imagine such a thing after, you know, Jayson Blair and Judith Warner– or one of my new neighbors is stealing my paper.

Which is funny, because for 15 years the Times delivered its paper to my front door in big bad Manhattan, leaving it right on the front stoop out there on the street. And in 15 years, I didn’t get the paper maybe 5 times. Even though all someone had to do to steal it was walk up about 6 stairs, grab it, and then saunter off. So now I’ve lived in the suburbs for about a week, and my paper has disappeared every day.

My conclusion: people in the suburbs are crooks.

Alternate conclusion: the people in my building are excited about the new “free paper” they find every day in the lobby, and don’t realize its mine.

Alternate conclusion #2: Jayson Blair has been moved to the home delivery department.

I’ll keep you updated.

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A Great Day for a “Parade”

July 26, 2009 by

Okay, so I’m trying to be really positive and upbeat about my move to the suburbs, about trying to capture my own little slice of Suma. We had the move yesterday, which was just horrible, but we at least had a bed to sleep in and food in the refrigerator.

And today, in our first day in our new home, there was a parade. I’d like to say that the local municipality is a big, big fan, but the parade was actually in honor of a children’s circus that’s been set up in Memorial Park, a few blocks from my home. To celebrate the circus, the village threw a parade down Main Street, a parade that was extensively advertised as including a LIVE ELEPHANT. Indeed, it was pointed out that it had been like 80 years since an elephant walked down the streets of Nyack, which seems impressive for those of you who track those sorts of thing. At the very least, I now have an interesting question for a bar bet.

But, as positive as I’m trying to be, I have to confess that the parade was a wee bit disappointing. Here’s how the parade went:

1. Two fire trucks.
2. A group of children, whom I later found out were the children performing in the circus, walking. Not doing anything, just walking.
3. A clown.
4. A juggler
5. An elephant, followed by a guy with a scooper, a backpack (you don’t want to know what’s in the backpack), and a shirt saying “What? And leave show business.” Which I thought was funny.

And then it was over. It was the shortest parade I ever saw. If I’d gone in to get a coffee, I would have missed it.

So, again, I’m happy to be in my new home, I’m excited to be part of a new community, and I love a parade. And it was a children’s thing, so I don’t want to be a curmudgeon. But, well, would it have killed them to maybe do another walk around the block, and pretend that the parade was twice as long?

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Moving In

July 25, 2009 by

Moving is heinous.

Real estate people (and I’m a real estate person) never tell you that. We focus on all the happy parts of the move — meeting the new neighbors and planting a new tree and setting up the area in the pantry where you’re going to put “junior’s growth chart.” We don’t talk much about the actual moving date itself.

I guess it’s like having a kid. When people picture having a kid, they picture all the fun stuff: little league games, story time, “junior’s growth chart,” etc. We don’t focus on the actual birth date itself, with the pain and the screaming and the gore and something called a placentia that I understand is extremely unpleasant (I should point out that, yes, I am as yet childless).

So moving is like having a child: lots of fun once that actual event (i.e., the move, or the birth) is actually over. But the move itself is no fun.

The worst part of our move is that we did it in two parts. We moved out of our place in the city a month ago, going through a horrible day (days, really) of packing and packing and packing and cleaning and watching guys struggle with our furniture while they went up and down the stairs (okay, that last part was probably tougher for them than for me). And then we had the joy of spending three hours trying to get one couch down the stairs, convinced that it HAD to be able to get down if it got up, and then finally taking parts of it off to get it to fit, all the time wondering if we could amend our sales contract to include the couch in the sale, maybe affixing it to the wall or something so we could pretend it’s a fixture.

So now we did the move in, and it was just as horrible. To get the day started great, we overslept, and the movers showed up at my parent’s place to pick up the stuff we’d stored there (including ourselves). So what was going to be a stressful day started even more stressfully, without time for a shower or breakfast and a hurried stuffing of our everyday things into suitcases so we could move them into the new place.

At least this time, we had an elevator. After 20 minutes of trying to figure out how to cover the elevator with the blankets that we luckily found in a utility closet, we started the move.

And, again, the couch. I’m not sure why anyone (in this case Henredon) sells couches that can neither get down apartment stairs or fit in apartment building elevators. The couch should be specially marked in the catalog with some sort of description like “Only buy this couch if you live on a single-story dwelling with a big door.” Another two hours trying to get the couch up the elevator or, in a potential solution that made the movers none too thrilled, up eight flights of stairs. It didn’t matter. The couch couldn’t fit in the elevator OR the stairs.

So we figured that maybe this was the end of the road for this couch, that even if we somehow got it out we’d just have the prospective horror of dealing with this stupid freaking couch 10 years from now when we moved out of this building. But a quick internet search found a service that actually comes to your home and takes apart your furniture, something we probably should have discovered years ago. It was great. Guy came over, I gave him an astounding wad of cash, and he took apart the couch so we could get it in the elevator. It was a little disconcerting watching him pull apart the couch, it felt a little like he was pulling apart a person. I was flashing to the flying monkeys tearing apart Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz.

So now we still have this couch, even though I try to sit in it a little gingerly so as not to have it collapse underneath me.

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Filed Under: Moving to the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: , ,

Advice for People Moving to the Suburbs: How We Found Our New Home

July 23, 2009 by

We just closed on our new place yesterday.

I haven’t written about our new home because (a) I didn’t want to jinx it, and (b) I didn’t want to sit here and reveal how much I love my new place while there were still little issues to work out with the seller.  Nothing undermines whatever bargaining position you might like to maintain than a public blog that explains how much you love the new place and will pay ANYTHING to get into it.

So now that we’ve closed, I can talk about the process.  The first thing you need to know, if you don’t already know it, is that I’m in the real estate business. I’m one of the owners of Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty, one of the largest real estate companies in New York City’s northern suburbs.  It’s a family company, started by my mother Marsha about 25 years ago, and now owned by Marsha, me, and two of my brothers (Greg and Matt).  In fact, the reason I’m moving from the city is that I’ve been commuting to our offices for the past 9 years, and I’m finally tired of it. As much as I love living in the city, when you work 10 hours a day and commute for 2, it doesn’t leave a lot of time to enjoy what the city has to offer.

So in moving to the suburbs, I was really going home.  Going home to the area that I grew up in, that I lived in until I went off to Georgetown for college and law school. And going home to the area where I’ve worked — IN REAL ESTATE — every day for the past nine years.  (Okay, not exactly every day, or even every work day, since I took any excuse to stay in the city and work from home whenever I could).

The second thing you need to know is that I was pretty much locked into Rockland County, the smallest county in New York, on the Western side of the Tappan Zee bridge.  It’s where most of my family lives, where our headquarters is, and where I’m most familiar.  In retrospect, I probably could have spent more time looking in Westchester, but the types of places I wanted were a little out of my budget in Westchester.

All that is by way of saying that I had a bit of an advantage in buying in the suburbs: I knew the area, knew local real estate, and had about 800 agents that would help me buy a home if I asked. My mother is a Realtor, my brothers are all Realtors, I’m a Realtor, and my wife is a Realtor.

And it was still a pain in the ass.  Physician, heal thyself.  No matter how much you know about real estate, it’s still tough buying a house for yourself.

We had certain ideas about what we wanted.  We wanted to be within 30 minutes of Manhattan, since my wife will still be commuting to her job in the city.  And we wanted something interesting.  If that seems vague, it’s because it is.  We really just wanted some sort of home that would be distinctive, that when we brought people out from the city they would nod their heads and say, “ahh, I can see why you moved from your place in the city.

So what were the kinds of things we thought were “interesting”:

  • We loved this house on a cliff in Upper Grandview, this great architecturally interesting house with amazing panoramic views of the Hudson River.  We went to see it about eight or nine times, driving my friend and colleague Margo Bohlin, the top agent in our company and the region, crazy. But ultimately, our friends with kids, knowing that we’d like to have kids someday, explained the fundamental concerns about owning a home on a cliff.
  • I loved a house in Valley Cottage, this big giant huge enormous house with 10,000 square feet, 25 acres, a pool, and a full basement that I would have turned into essentially a commercial pub complete with the DirecTV football package. I loved it, but my wife was concerned with moving into a house on the top of a mountain, surrounded by 25 empty acres, in an area where she knows no one except me.  She thought it would be isolating.
  • My wife loved this house in Sparkill that was big, comfy, beautifully done up, and only about 15 minutes from the GW Bridge.  I liked the house too, particularly that it was about 5 minutes from a private golf course I play on, but didn’t love the lot. Or the price.

We saw lots of other houses, most of them nice but not interesting, or interesting but not practical.

Then something funny happened.  We had looked exclusively at houses, houses on big lots. Then my mother, who has had a real estate license for about 35 years and was known as an absolutely killer buyer agent before she opened up her own brokerage, suggested we look at this condo in Nyack.  Nyack is this charming old village on the Hudson River, the one really walkable community in Rockland County. It’s got restaurants, bars, shops, all in a very small compact area.  People sometimes say it’s “city-like,” but that’s not it.  What it mostly reminds me of is my old neighborhood in Noe Valley, San Francisco — charming, cute old buildings, a strong but small commercial district, and a couple of hills.

We hadn’t really looked in Nyack, mostly because the houses were outside our price range.  But my mother knew about this condo in a complex right on the water, two blocks from the Nyack downtown. It had been on the market for three or four years, chasing the market down on price for most of that time.  It also had a lot of trouble selling because (1) the taxes are outrageous (I’m not even going to tell you what they are, and (2) the place was done up a bit in a very specific style, which a lot of people can’t see through.  So it had been on the market for a while.

A condo, but 4,000 square feet, four or five bedrooms, and unbelievable views of the river. With a lot of great touches: three refrigerators, two giant wine fridges, six or seven terraces, high end sound system, etc.
I was resistant to looking at a condo at first, but she made me go look at it.  And when I saw it, I realized that it was the right place for us.  My wife was concerned about moving to an area where she didn’t know anyone, so moving into a condo complex with other people, and two blocks from the one true downtown in Rockland, made sense.  We both wanted something interesting, and what’s more interesting than the biggest and coolest condo in the region.  Plus, I don’t need to learn how to cut grass.

So we made our offer, worked it out, and got into contract. Closed yesterday. It’s ours.

Our first night in the place, there was a massive thunderstorm that came through the Hudson Valley.  We stood at the windows with the lights out drinking wine watching the lightning strike the Hudson River, outlining the Tappan Zee Bridge in silhouette.  Very cool.

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Filed Under: Advice, Moving to the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: ,

Date Night in Nyack

July 11, 2009 by

Last night was our first “date night” in the suburbs. We’re still living with my parents while we wait to close on our new place (that’s a whole different post), so we’re not yet really “living” here yet. More like an extended vacation. But we decided to go out Friday night to our new neighborhood in Nyack, one of the classic “rivertowns” in the Hudson Valley, on the Rockland County side. Right on the water near the entrance to the Tappan Zee Bridge. A great little town, lots of restaurants and bars and antique shops and stuff like that.

So we drove down, actually got a parking spot on the street, and went to LuShane’s for dinner. As is the new custom, we of course ran into someone I know from working in the area for the past eight years. My wife is a little concerned that we can’t go anywhere in our new neighborhood without running into someone who knows me (I grew up here, too,) my mom (lived here like 30 years and started a business here), and my dad (doctor at Nyack Hospital for years). We have sort of lost the anonymity of Manhattan, where we lived 15 years but never, ever, ran into anyone we knew in the neighborhood — even the other people who lived in the neighborhood with us.

Dinner was good.  Great little place (we’d been there before) with a lot of atmosphere: old-fashioned tile floors, copper bar, tin ceiling.  Appetizers were great (short ribs were fantastic), entrees were okay (her fish was cold, my pasta was a little bland).  A little pricey ($100 with tip, no alcohol), but great service and generally tasty.  Would go back.  We were going to get ice cream at Temptations, a cute ice cream shop on Main Street, afterwards, but it was hugely crowded. Indeed, the wait outside Temptations kind of reminded me why I like Nyack — it has a little bit of a feel of one of those Jersey short or Hamptons summer towns, with a small but vibrant town center that is filled with locals on weekends, even though it’s a year-round residence.

Afterwards, it was off to the Palisades Mall for a movie — big giant mall, big giant movie theater, classic suburban experience.  The one lowlight of the trip was finding out that the Fox Sports Grill has closed there, so I don’t know where I’m going to get my Sunday football ten-games-at-a-time fix this fall.  Working on it.

Filed Under: Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs, SUMA Lifestyle Tagged With: , ,
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