Odds and Ends

Happy New Year! I hope everybody had a happy and safe celebration! Mine was pretty low key: movies at Doug and 'Stina's place on the West Side (Godfather I and II, accompanied by chianti and lasagna), with a break to watch the ball drop on TV. I'll get a year-end summary posting up soon. Really.

New York is large: I might have mentioned this before, but New York City is friggin' huge. Manhattan is 13 miles from tip to tip: that's basically from downtown Boston out to Peabody, past 128. And remember, Manhattan is geographically the smallest of the five boroughs. As another presentation, here's Central Park's footprint (4% of Manhattan's area: 3.41 km2 on 85 km2) superimposed on Boston.



Tourists suck:. One of my trips in the city required catching a 2 or 3 (Express) train: instead of getting a 1 or 9 Local and switching to an Express, I decided to walk down to Times Square. Yuck. Mistake. The sidewalks in Times Square were completely packed with bovine, slow-moving, directionless, gawking, stop-in-the-middle-of-the intersection tourists. Yeah, I guess that should be expected given the holidays. It's still annoying. The statistics (from "If the Sidewalks Feel Jammed, Well, They Are") say:

E-mail messages from the Times Square Alliance on Thursday, which detailed the latest pedestrian counts, were prefaced by words like "outrageous" and "insane." The group's researchers, which clicked off mechanical counters, said that from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday 9,226 pedestrians made their way along the sidewalk, at 1501 Broadway between 43rd and 44th Streets - 57 percent more than at the same time on Dec. 18, 2004.

Some of the city's businesses and cultural institutions were prepared for the crush. The Museum of Modern Art, which is usually closed Tuesdays, decided to open the Tuesday after Christmas to capitalize on its "Pixar: 20 Years of Animation" exhibit, which it had expected would draw families with children during the holiday week.

It was a relative relief to wander around the East Village (which was not tourist saturated) on my Quest for Frites. Also, I am happy with my plan to go to relatively obscure museums (Noguchi, Transit) instead of the big names, which were mobbed (MoMA, MMA, Natural History).

I live for cheap: Another New York Times article was about the Greenpoint Hotel , a crack addict and hooker fleabag hotel in Brooklyn:

The Greenpoint Hotel is still listed in a few tourist guides, which promise cheap rooms and warn of the brusque if efficient staff. But few map carrying bargain-hunters stay there these days. The hallways stink of marijuana and urine; the bathrooms - one per floor - are caked in dirt, and hot water is rare. The front desk is barricaded shut with sheets of plywood. Theft and violence are a constant threat.

It was rated the 'most dangerous single room occupancy hotel' in New York City (weird… Expedia Travel doesn't include that metric…).

Anyway, the reason I'm writing about it (besides an ill-formed desire to dwell on the tawdry aspects of the city) is that the rent there is $450 a month. My rent in college-town Canada is $525 CAD/month, or $448 US/month. It was just amusing to note the equivalency between the two (i.e., "Man… I could be living in a crack hotel in Brooklyn instead! Classy...").