Last night, Janna and I were rushing home after teaching in New York City, and in the middle of Times Square, I had a moment I hope I never get to repeat. I tripped — over my own two feet, or the curb, or a break in the sidewalk — and instantly fell long and hard on the sidewalk. I was stunned for a moment and didn’t quite know where I was. Janna was behind me somewhere and I remember one woman bending down to ask me if I was okay.
A sad bit of history was made this week when New York City finally passed a law that requires businesses with at least 15 employees to provide five paid sick days a year. Five. Days. Five days are not enough days to be out sick in a single year, especially in a living space jam-packed-with-people New York City — but at least its a start in a City that clearly has cared more about your cigarettes and sugar consumption and your Big Gulps than ever it did about actually giving you a few days off to heal while still being able to make the rent.
I spent some time in New York City this weekend, and at some point between pushing past slow tourists and instinctively dodging comedy show promoters, I couldn’t help thinking about the oddness of city life and the East coast in general. Having grown up in New Jersey and spending plenty of time in New York, I usually follow the unspoken rule of, well, not speaking.
Continue reading → Trusting My New Jersey Gut in New York City
On Thursday, Janna and I shared a lovely lunch at the Bryant Park Grill. I, of course, filled up on bread and made no apologies. The parsnip soup starter was delicious. The Vegan Organic entree was truly awful. If you’re going to offer a Vegan choice on the menu, you need to provide massive chunks of lots and lots of hearty root vegetables, not a chiffonade of greens with a sprinkling of quinoa and a few, limp, tiny pieces of eggplant; and you certainly don’t put the main dish star — the portobello mushroom — in a side cup chopped up like a disrespected, diced, carrot!
Continue reading → Yes, I am Filling Up on Bread at the Bryant Park Grill
Ed Koch died this morning at 2:00am in New York City. He was 88. All the Manhattan television stations are plastered, pixel-to-pixel, with memories and videos from their vast archives memorializing his large life. Ed was my first New York City major, and he embodied everything you wanted in a public leader: He was brash and brilliant and caring and tough and brutal when he had to be.
Today, I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of the Boles Books Tribute to Howard Stein, Volume 1 (1948-2013) from Boles Books Writing & Publishing and published on Amazon Kindle Direct!
Three hours ago, news broke there was a murder on the streets of Manhattan near the Empire State Building — and shots were fired right across the avenue from the CUNY Graduate Center:
A gunman was fatally shot by police after opening fire near the Empire State Building in midtown Manhattan. Nine people were injured and one of the victims was declared dead at the scene.
The shooting occurred at 9:03 a.m., and began near the intersection of 33th Street and 5th Avenue. NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly identified the shooter as 53-year-old Jeffrey Johnson. He was armed with a .45-caliber handgun that was concealed in a black plastic bag.
Johnson was a disgruntled employee, who had been fired a year ago from his job as a designer of womens accessories for Hazan Imports, located at 10 West 33rd Street. He confronted a former co-worker, a 41-year-old woman, and fatally shot at her three times, including once in the head.
Continue reading → Murder in Manhattan: A Collateral Empire Shooting
There are a lot of things going wrong in New York Public schools — there is overcrowding and a lack of funding, teachers that get shipped off to rubber rooms and too many children that find a lack of reason to pay attention in class. Now on top of all that, teachers have to be careful how they write their tests because they now have to avoid using certain words that are deemed to be unpleasant to students.
NYU is a big bully of a university with over 45,000 students and no real campus. Well, it has a sort-of campus as in “The Entire New York City Bohunk Neighborhood Called Greenwich Village” — and it isn’t folly to argue NYU not only wants to own all of Greenwich Village, it wants to be Greenwich Village… and probably re-brand the area, “The NYU Green.”
As you can imagine, the non-NYU students who currently reside in Greenwich Village despise the school’s ongoing and aggressive attempts over the last couple of decades to undermine the status of their lives by buying up and tearing down the real estate that makes up their little corner of the world:
New York University says it needs more dormitories, classrooms, athletic and performance spaces and a hotel to accommodate its burgeoning student body and compete with national universities, and it wants to erect four buildings amid two sprawling apartment complexes north of Houston Street.
The square footage of the four buildings, the tallest of which would be 25 floors, would nearly equal that of the Empire State Building.
The local community board recommended unanimously last month that the Council reject the university’s plan — known as NYU 2031 — and the zoning changes it would require. The board said that the proposed buildings were too dense and tall and that the addition of thousands of students and workers would erode the character of a still quaint and offbeat city quarter.
This month, the Bloomberg mayoralty took a stumble on a massive morality blunder with the release of an absolutely incredible public health campaign aimed at the heart of healthy people; and it was perpetuated in a fake amputation of a man’s leg in order to make some sort of warped point in print advertising about the perils if Type 2 Diabetes:
Continue reading → Faking Diabetes Amputation to Scare Healthy People
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