New York Evolving Into the Global One-Percent's "Safety Deposit Box"

My wife and I visited two native New Yorkers who moved to the outside arc of occasionally commutable distance from Gotham. They live an entirely agreeable life, with views of hills and farmers' fields from their first floor windows. Neither the husband nor the wife regretted their departure from permanent residence in New York. In their view, it was time to go.

We jointly noted how Whole Foods Brooklyn, where they lived before the wild real estate rush into the borough, was rapidly approaching Manhattan-level rent rates and ownership prices. A recent New York Times article observed how aspirational couples and individuals can no longer hope to live in "commutable" Brooklyn. They now are supposedly eyeing Queens and selected New Jersey suburbs. That sounds like retreat for those who imagined New York life consisted of living on Manhattan Island or the portion of Long Island called Brooklyn.

Part of the real estate squeeze comes from the rush of wealthy international buyers purchasing apartments and townhouses. Why should anyone care? Well, these buyers are using New York real estate as their tangible rainy day fund. A BBC report quoted real estate executive Jonathan Miller as characterizing the buying and construction frenzy this way:

I like to describe the phenomenon as: we're building the world's most expensive bank safe deposit boxes.

So how does your rainy day fund look, eh?

Queens Reimagined: A Day at CitiField

Today's New York Times included an article extolling the virtues of living in the borough of Queens. The piece walked a line between "successful" new apartment developments, depressingly defined as a $2,000 per month studio, and "bargain" residences that included working fireplaces and enough elbow room to manageably raise a one-child family. In my lifetime, I have lived in two of the neighborhoods the journalist cited: Astoria and Sunnyside. One advantage each area offered residents was its affordability relative to Manhattan's zillionaires playground and the concept known as "Brooklyn".

Florent Morellet,
in front of his eponynous and long-closed restaurant
(Image: blogs.villagevoice.com)

In the same Times issue, a front-page piece talked about Florent Morellet's move to Brooklyn's freshly spawned "it" enclave, Bushwick. The Frenchman used to own a diner in the Meatpacking District that was fun to visit. He finally closed when the neighborhood denizens were fashionistas instead of transvestites and the rent on his establishment escalated beyond any reasonable sum. What became evident in the piece was how selective the notion of "Brooklyn" had become. The former Bushwick of food stamps, gangs, and bad schools was rapidly transforming into a hipster heaven, with wine bars, tablet-armed graduate students, and art walks. Morellet insightfully called this classist dreamscape New York's "East Bank," and he's right about that. (He's not always on the money: Morellet's reverie about the Cypress Hills neighborhood, one of the city's deepest, dreariest Siberian outposts, as resembling San Francisco has to be read to be believed.) Alas, there remains plenty of the Brooklyn the Times routinely ignores, especially the residents chained to foreclosure anxieties, underreported crime, and substandard services.

CitiField, home of the NY Mets baseball team
(Image: nycgovparks.org)

Queens rarely resembles Brooklyn, as I observed earlier this week during a business event at the CitiField baseball stadium. The conference focused on public school librarians' professional development; I attended as a book company sales representative promoting my firm's products. The gathering took place in a large dining/banquet room that included floor to ceiling windows overlooking my former home borough and, in the distance, midtown Manhattan. While the three-hundred-strong librarians listened to a prolonged James Patterson address, my attention drifted to CitiField itself and to the view beyond the ballpark.

Joan Payson Whitney with Casey Stengel (left)
Opening Day, Shea Stadium 1962
(image: artnet.com
original photo: Louis Requena)

This was my first visit to CitiField, and my first to a baseball stadium of any kind this year. (I usually make it a point to see one major league game in person during the season. This year was an exception.) The event's participants walked through the Seaver VIP entrance, named after a New York Mets' pitcher whose best years were nearly a half-century ago. (I can legitimately brag about how I saw Tom Seaver pitch a nearly perfect game in the searing heat of a pennant race against the Chicago Cubs in 1969.) The area featured other nostalgic reminders of a franchise leveraging its past to burnish its Madoff-tarnished present. One of my relatives was general manager of the Mets during their 1969 World Series championship season. (Yes, I did get free tickets and passes to the luxury dining area.) It was a different era, when a Whitney could own a baseball team because it was a sporting thing to do, like owning a race horse. Joan Whitney Payson took more than a sporting interest on which players stayed, played, or sat. Well, it was her team. She also brought Willie Mays back to New York, something my mother, who was raised in a baseball household, deeply appreciated.


Of course, those days are long gone. Looking out toward Flushing Bay, I could see a hint of the World's Fair Marina. It's not exactly anyone's dream getaway, with its proximity to LaGuardia Airport runways, scuzzy water, and a cheerless parkscape bounded by expressways and service roads. Yet, I knew a billiionaire (when there were precious few in the world at the time) who kept his yacht there. My first wife prepared meals for the money man, his wife, and their guests, onboard during the warm weather months. Sometimes, I got to sail on the vessel. Yes, it was nice. Those days are long gone, too.

Main Street, Flushing
(Image: nytimes.com)

A glance to the south showed the outline of the apartment tower where my teen years were spent; to the east, a Flushing where Caucasians enjoy Chinese food and Asians enjoy living. I considered dining there after the library event with my colleague, who had briefly lived in China. However, the grim reality of Queens' late-afternoon traffic created a sense of urgency to get out while we could.

I drove straight home, and wondered how the world had changed to the extent that public school librarians held a meeting at a baseball stadium during the World Series.

A Brooklyn Restaurant Deconstructs Regional Dishes to Create "Stateless" Cuisine

My wife Amy and I recently dined at a Brooklyn restaurant in tune with the establishment's hipster neighborhood's atmosphere. The Mexican-Thai hybrid, small plate menu included some excellent, imaginative dishes and a roster of sipping tequilas and mezcals. However, while we were dining, a question kept gnawing at me. The various offerings were concepts based upon an independent approach to ingredients rather than one anchored in national, regional, or local cooking. In effect, the restaurant provided stateless cuisine, in which its Mexican and Thai elements were deconstructed and transformed into something quite different from preparations one could reasonably expect to find in, say, Oaxaca or Chiang Mai.

Why stateless? Well, the restaurant's food was disengaged from the psychological and practical motivations that form the foundations of those countries' respective cuisines. What my wife and I enjoyed at the Brooklyn restaurant struck us as unconnected to either country's homestyle cooking, vendor food, or even their internationalized dishes. The people in those nations are disinclined to fiddle with their traditional fare. Their food is the equivalent of their culinary passport, with the name of their country proudly embossed in gold on the document's front cover.

Stateless cuisine, on the other hand, abhors passports. It demands an identity that defies borders and appeals to worldly tastes. In that way, the kitchen wizards at the Brooklyn restaurant share the perspective of those super-rich characterized as "stateless." The term, in this case, means these golden few simply live where they please, have assets where needed, and feel disinclined to anchor their outlook and preferences to a particular region.

Like it or not, we now live in a world where soulless data is often the ultimate, border-free currency. The super-rich are among those riding this conceptual wave. Unconsciously, our tastes (and those of the super-rich) drift into tangible manifestations of this reality. It's not difficult to  envision how the shifting of formerly anchored culinary choices into a suggestion of those sensibilities leads to the development of a supra-national dish --"stateless" cuisine. This food, and its reflection of an unarticulated zeitgeist, seems a smooth fit for the self-conscious hipster community where the Brooklyn restaurant was located. You didn't have to be super-rich to dine there; you just had to engage with an outlook that is at once curious, borderless, confidently self-contained, and disconnected from historical and social context.

Canadian Geese "Cleansed" from Prospect Park

Today's New York Times includes a story on the city's roundup and euthenizing of 400 Canadian geese inhabiting Brooklyn's Prospect Park.

The story has some interesting angles, such as animal rights, air passenger safety, feeding the needy, as well as insight into how reality is, or is not, perceived.

Let me start with the last point, and connect it with a statement from someone quoted in the story: "It's a horrible end," said Anne-Katrin Titze, who went to the park nearly every morning to feed the geese. "It's eerie to see a whole population gone. There's not one goose on this lake. It looks as though they've been Photoshopped out."

New York officials intend to dump the 400 gassed geese in a landfill. Other states, which have conducted similar goose hunts, don't bury the dead animals. Instead, geese are turned into animal feed.

The Feds get in on the act, too. According to the Times story, the Agriculture Department donated 900 pounds of euthenized goose breast to Pennsylvania food pantries.

All that bureaucratically-sanctioned slaughter doesn't make the prospect of having a cooked goose an appealing one. And I certainly don't foresee a rush of goose recipes appearing in the Times' dining section anytime soon.