The New York Observer, August 22nd, 2006
Hard out here for the Orthodox
NYU says Borough Park is the most crowded neighborhood in New York, on account of big Orthodox families squeezing into small houses. Meanwhile, prices are so high in Williamsburg that hundreds of local Hassidim are fleeing for the greener pastures of upstate Scranton (an area known eerily as The Hill). And, sadly: brokers do not like "tough customer" observant Jews. (New York Post)
Paul Goldberger disses architect Daniel Libeskind's plans for Ground Zero: "he cloaked his familiar angular shapes in patriotic rhetoric," the critic writes, before pointing out that anyway the plan "has been compromised almost out of existence." And then, for shame, he calls New York "supposedly sophisticated." (New Yorker)
Macy's goes high-tech, building a 35,000-square-foot J&R Express store within its Herald Square flagship. The Alliance for Downtown New York has sighted the expansion at the big J&R Music & Computer World (on Park Row north of Fulton) as evidence of Lower Manhattan's rebirth. Does that mean Herald Square is hot now too? (NY Post)
Andrew Rasiej aims to hook up New Yorkers with 25,000 free wireless routers, a campaign that took off last week with 25 gratis set-ups in the East Village. "This is a people-powered effort," he says--which means that free (or cheap) citywide Internet is a long, long way off. (Citi Limits)
Pulitzer Prize-winning Novelist Richard Ford on realty and fiction: "I was writing a paragraph about what it feels like to live in a town where housing prices are falling. And, in the process of thinking about that, I just expanded my frame of reference to include the larger human condition... We calculate our spiritual condition, in part, in terms of how and where we live. I don't think it's peculiarly American to feel that way, and yet it is American." (New Yorker)
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Max Abelson
