Metropolitan Walker

Cars turning left are three times more likely to hit a pedestrian that cars turning right.

That’s one of several surprising (among many completely expected) findings from a massive study of pedestrian accidents in New York. Among the other results that New Yorkers would least expect was the finding that taxi drivers are involved in far fewer accidents per mile as regular drivers.

Observers expect Mayor Michael Bloomberg to use the report to justify far more restrictive regulations on driving and parking, even though the report actually shows that accidents have dropped sharply without the mayor’s totalitarian nannism firm-but-loving discipline.

Over all, New York’s roadways have become markedly safer in the past decade, with pedestrian deaths down about 20 percent since 2001.

The city recorded 256 traffic fatalities last year, which officials described as the lowest number since 1910, the earliest year that the records were kept. New York is now far safer to travel within than most other American cities, with half the per-capita fatality rate of Atlanta, Detroit or Los Angeles.

New Yorkers are angry that the MTA is cutting subway service to close budget deficits, but MTA critics (including me) should remember that whatever problems we find with today’s subway service (and there are many), the MTA does an infinitely better job that it did 30 years ago. It’s hard to believe the pictures in the New York Subway photoessay from 24flinching. It is even harder to imagine that the blog’s owner celebrates the subway of this era in what sounds like non-ironic prose:

As a kid growing up in the eightees’ who naturally gravitated towards GrandMaster Flash, The RockSteady Crew and writing graffiti, I always had an affinity for the New York City subway during the late 70′ and early 80’s. It represented the blood-filled arteries of a city pumping with organic, authentic, city-brewed culture. It was covered with tags and pieces while filled with people of every size, shape, age and color. It was reckless and untamed and most importantly, it was New York City.

New York came amazingly close to the sort of total failure that precluded recovery. It’s almost impossible to imagine that town when you visit Manhattan today.

Life in the city seems so safe today that people can vocalize support for this anarchy — and support vandalism — as a safe way to signal to others that they are edgy dissenters from bourgeoise society. I’m not sure the blogger who wrote that would celebrate the vital and untamed energy of the subway so much if he was regularly mugged and beaten underground. I don’t think these pro-graffiti forces would think it such a vital art form if people did it all over their property.

You could look for the new grades from the city health department and avoid any restaurant that posts any letter grade aside from an “A”. But what about restaurants with signs that say “Grade Pending”?

The wording sounds like the health department hasn’t gotten around to the restaurant yet. In fact, it means the health department has given the restaurant a B or a C, and the restaurant has asked for time to clean up before a second inspection.

Restaurants are desperate to avoid posting any grade other than A, though only about half of the first 250 restaurants graded by the new criteria earned them. 31 percent got a B. 12 percent got a c. And 8 percent of all restaurants were shut down until they could clean up. How scary is that?

Some restaurant owners say that many violations under the new system have nothing whatever to do with customer health. Instead, they say, the goal is to make restaurants as systematized as factories and to make as much money as possible from silly fines and second inspections.

If those arguments fail to convince you and you’d like to stick to the restaurants that do best in the health inspections, stick to chain restaurants. They easily fare the best.

What about restaurants that still have an old certificate that says they passed inspection but lacks a letter grade? They probably haven’t been inspected under the new system. The city says it will take 14 months for it to inspect all 14,000 of the establishments subject to the new grades.

Yes, you can get to either ballpark from Manhattan via the subway system, but if you’re near one of the train stations, it’s often faster to take Metro-North to Yankee Stadium or the LIRR to Citi Field. Metro-North trains leave from Grand Central Terminal. LIRR trains leave from Penn Station.

If you’re not near the right train station, however, it’s almost always faster to take the subway. The 4 train goes to Yankee Stadium. The 7 train goes to Citi Field.

If you’re going to watch some tennis rather than baseball, use the same station (either subway or train) that you’d use for Citi Field to visit the U.S. Open.

New York’s buildings grew taller and taller from the advent of the skyscraper around 1890 until the completion of the 1,250-foot Empire State Building in 1931. But then the race to the skies virtually stopped.

Only the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers ever topped the Empire State Building. (They were 1,368 feet at the roof and over 1,700 if you count the radio antenna on the north tower as a spire.) Hell, only two other structures built since the ESB top 1,000 feet — the Bank of America Tower and The New York Times Building — and they only manage it with more spires that are really nothing but poles designed to make the buildings seem far taller than they actually are.

But now, 80 years after the completion of the ESB, several real skyscrapers are on the way. There are six buildings on the list that legitimately top 1,000 feet and two more that top 900 feet. Granted, only two of these projects are under construction right now and banks are still cautious about construction loans. That said, the New York real estate market has felt the downturn less than most, so I’d expect to see work on at least a couple of the other buildings soon.

What if they break ground and the projects stall? Not a problem. Developers are learning how to make construction pits look pretty while they await funding.

Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel argues that actual trips never live up to expectations for two inescapable reasons:

1. Real places abound with the sort of boring details your imagination edits out. You don’t just step off the plane and onto the deserted beach. You first hit the airport, which is annoying and ugly, before traveling through the worst part of town — etc.
2. Vacations allow you to escape from your place of residence but not from yourself. When you see the travel poster of the deserted beach, it evokes more than warm weather and the soft sound of surf. It evokes a carefree life of relaxation — the life of a person who is (probably) quite unlike you. But when you hit the beach, your cares come with you and you worry about the mortgage payment (or whatever).

You’ll face both those problems when you come to New York, of course, but I’d argue that you’ll face them far less than your friends who vacation on tropical islands.

First, no one imagines New York as a minimalist paradise, where every sight pleases. They imagine it as a busy, crowded place – dilapidated in some parts, luxurious in others. And it is.

Second, a trip to New York (or any other type of active vacation) allows you to escape yourself far more than any relaxation-oriented vacation. If you have worries, your mind will naturally gravitate toward them when you’re sitting on that beach with nothing else to occupy your attention. If you’re constantly seeing and doing new things, on the other hand, you can actually vacation from yourself — at least for a little while.

That’s why so many people come back from activity vacations far more rested than folks who come back from relaxation vacations.

People who take my Grand Central & Times Square Walking Tour often laugh when I tell them about the problems with the old Metropolitan Opera House, the one that opened in 1883 on Broadway, between 39th and 40th streets.

The seats were positioned so that the rich people in the audience could easily see one another — but not so they could easily see the stage. The majority of seats required that people who wished to see the stage either sit “sidesaddle” or crane their necks. Worse, almost a quarter of the house had severely obstructed stage views, no matter how they sat.

The new opera house, which opened at Lincoln Center in 1966, has lovely sight lines. That said, it’s nowhere near as attractive from the outside as the old opera house, pictured here.

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

Spend any time walking the streets of New York and you’ll see two very different types of rats. In addition to the live ones that come out at night, inflatable rubber rats appear during sunlight hours, usually next to construction sites. Labor unions exhibit these rubber rats to protest against employers who hire non-union labor, which is generally cheaper and, because of fewer work rules, more productive than union labor. The rats also insult the non-union workers who betrayed their comrades by finding work for themselves rather than starving so a more senior union man could have the job instead.

But where did the rat come from? Fast Company explains:

Twelve years ago (in 1991), Mike O’Connor, owner of Big Sky Balloons & Searchlights in Plainfield, Illinois, created the first rat at the request of a union member in nearby Chicago. Said the union man of O’Connor’s first sketch: “It’s not mean enough.” O’Connor added bigger fangs and a pink belly with “festering nipples.” “I love it,” the man said. So did other unions. Today, Big Sky sells between 100 and 200 rats a year–even though it is a nonunion shop itself.

The Rat comes in several sizes, from the squat-looking 6-footer ($2,000) to the towering 30-footer ($7,700). Because many communities have ordinances limiting the height of inflatable displays, the most popular size is the 12-footer, small enough to stand upright in the bed of a pickup truck, yet big enough to attract attention.

Does the Rat work? “Usually, employers go bonkers when they see it across from their property,” says Randy Mayhew, organizing director of Laborers International Union of North America, which employs about 20 rats. “It’s an effective piece of street theater,” says Peter Jones, executive director of the Labor Heritage Foundation.

Building owners, naturally, dislike the rats. Many have tried to fight the rat by calling police and proclaiming harassment or slander or worse. But much like live rats, inflatable rats have withstood all challenges. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that America’s free speech guarantees prevented towns from outlawing union rats.

As you learn on my Wall Street & Ground Zero Walking Tour, radical Muslims attacked the complex not once, but twice. An interesting Slate article speculates about why Osama Bin Laden hated the World Trade Center.

We all know the basic reasons why Osama Bin Laden chose to attack the World Trade Center, out of all the buildings in New York. Its towers were the two tallest in the city, synonymous with its skyline. They were richly stocked with potential victims. And as the complex’s name declared, it was designed to be a center of American and global commerce. But Bin Laden may have had another, more personal motivation. The World Trade Center’s architect, Minoru Yamasaki, was a favorite designer of the Binladin family’s patrons—the Saudi royal family—and a leading practitioner of an architectural style that merged modernism with Islamic influences…

Yamasaki received the World Trade Center commission the year after the Dhahran Airport was completed. Yamasaki described its plaza as “a mecca, a great relief from the narrow streets and sidewalks of the surrounding Wall Street area.” True to his word, Yamasaki replicated the plan of Mecca’s courtyard by creating a vast delineated square, isolated from the city’s bustle by low colonnaded structures and capped by two enormous, perfectly square towers—minarets, really. Yamasaki’s courtyard mimicked Mecca’s assemblage of holy sites—the Qa’ba (a cube) containing the sacred stone, what some believe is the burial site of Hagar and Ishmael, and the holy spring—by including several sculptural features, including a fountain, and he anchored the composition in a radial circular pattern, similar to Mecca’s.

Very interesting all the way through. HT: Marginal Revolution.

If you admit any exposure to this urban blight, then you, too, may fall victim to the bedbug stigma:

Jeremy Sparig spent months fighting bedbugs. Now, to some people, he is like a mattress left on the street, something best avoided in these times.

“They don’t want to hug you anymore; they don’t want you coming over,” said Mr. Sparig, of East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “You’re like a leper.”
Even Steven Smollens, a housing lawyer who has helped many tenants with bedbugs, has his guard up. Those clients are barred from his office. “I meet outside,” he said. “There’s a Starbucks across the street.”

Beyond the bites and the itching, the bother and the expense, victims of the nation’s most recent plague are finding that an invisible scourge awaits them in the form of bedbug stigma. Friends begin to keep their distance. Invitations are rescinded. For months, one woman said, her mother was afraid to tell her that she had an infestation. When she found out and went to clean her mother’s apartment, she said, “Nobody wanted to help me.”