Is Liberty Bagels that terrific?
We can’t help but note that every Sunday morning, and some other mornings, a long, long snake-of-a-line forms outside Liberty Bagels. The eatery is located on 58th Street between Madison and Fifth.
We asked a couple at the end of the line, “What is the reason for this line.” A German tourist observing the scene said she was also curious. The man answered, “It is a famous bagel store.”
I pointed out that there were a lot of bagel places nearby that they could walk right into. Didn’t matter.
Nothing against Liberty Bagel’s bagels. The place happens to be a few steps from the Apple Store, Central Park, hotels and other places tourists congregate. That, we guess, explains it.
Hochul is Misery
She couldn’t just honor the hard work city officials put in to ease the gridlock that has made pedestrian life in Midtown a misery. If it worked according to plan, congestion pricing would have reduced the number of vehicles passing below 60th Street while providing desperately needed funds for the subways.
But no. Hochul had to insert herself into a highly thought-out plan and muck it up. She “temporarily” froze its start planned for June. Most read the move as an effort to curry favor with New Yorkers in the suburb. The argument was that the $15 charge was a tax on drivers already paying stiff tolls on the bridges and tunnels to enter Manhattan. Funny, but despite those “stiff tolls,” Manhattan is perpetually clogged with traffic drawn to near standstills.
The video clip below shows what happens every single day. Note how the crosswalks are totally blocked while the “Walk” signs are lit. (Sometimes pedestrians can’t even see the walks signs due to blockage by by trucks.) Pedestrians having to squeeze between fenders to get across the street are a normal occurrence.
One of the dumber objections to congestion pricing was made by United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew. He held that congestion pricing was cooked up to benefit allegedly rich white Manhattanites at the expense of “people of color” elsewhere in the city. I suggest that Mulgrew compare the racial makeup of people driving cars in Midtown with that of the subway riders. By the way, only one in a hundred travelers into the congestion zone come via car.
The original congestion pricing plan was intended to provide the Metropolitan Transportation Authority with $15 billion in bonds to improve the city’s decrepit bus and subway system. The upgrades would have also created thousands of jobs.
And what about the psychic and physical costs gridlock forces on those crossing streets in Midtown? Could subjecting residents, shoppers and workers to this experience be good for business? Leading city-based business groups don’t think so. They have been backing congestion pricing, according to Politico.
Now Hochul has returned to the mess she created and given a green light for congestion pricing. She’s lowered the fee for cars to $9 a day from $15.
Had the original $15 fee gone into effect as previously planned, everyone would be used to it by now. If it did seem to hurt midtown businesses, the fee could have then been lowered.
And so congestion pricing should start early next month, just in time for the start of Donald Trump’s second presidential term. Trump has vowed to kill the program. Good work, Kathy!
December tipping season is here
This year, as every year, we must confront the matter of tipping supers, doormen, cleaning people, waiters and dog walkers who have served us through the year. We know this is a subject of anxiety. What do you give? CityRealty offers good guidance. We do want to emphasize the importance of being generous, not forgetting that inflation has made life more expensive for all of us.
One of our correspondents, Craig McLaughlin, recalls a former life as a waiter at the 21 Club in the 1980s and the importance of tips.
“For a waiter, the money at 21 Club was exceptional,” Craig recalls, “But you had to move. You had to really work hard.” And the tips were phenomenal especially during the December holiday season. To the servers, Christmas tips represented both a pat on the back and an essential part of their pay package. The management figured them into the workers’ compensation.
The guy who ran the coatroom concession told Craig that he could make $50,000 in December, though the rest of the year the pay wasn’t great. “The doormen would also make a lot of money. Those guys were getting limousines for people,” Craig recalls.
“My first year there I was handed envelopes with ‘Craig’ written on front. The first one I opened was 200 bucks. I said, ‘Holy shit!’”
Adjusted for inflation, $200 in 1981 would equal more $655 in 2024 dollars. Corporate customers would give $400. The fancy people in the triple-A section would typically gave the waiters $150 or $200.
December tipping season is upon us: Time to raid the cash machines.
If you spill coffee on your keyboard at 3 a.m.
The Apple Store on Fifth Avenue, between 58th and 59th, has become a major tourist destination, understandably so. It’s right across the street from the Plaza and near a main entrance to Central Park. You see lots of rolling luggage. You hear languages that, admittedly, could be heard elsewhere in the city but not necessarily in the same place.
We asked one of the salespeople, “Who comes here at 3 a.m., 4 a.m.?” That crowd is mostly New Yorkers, the Apple guy explains, night people who spilled coffee on their keyboards in the wee hours and need an emergency replacement.
According to Wikipedia, “The store is always open to customers, with no hours or days closed, an acknowledgement that after-hours New York is still going strong. It is the only Apple Store in the universe that is open 24/7.
Can we call a 34-year-old woman a ‘matron’?
The New York Times published a news item on December 9, 1946, about a “Park Avenue matron” who died suddenly. She was 34. Back in those days, “matron” was often paired with “Park Avenue.”
It connotes white glove, the right clubs, that sort of thing. And Mrs. Evelyn Morgan would seem to qualify.
Mrs. Morgan and her husband had apparently spent the evening at the Stork Club. Club goers back then tended not to hold back the drink, and it’s possible that a full night ending at 1:30 a.m., followed by sleeping pills to be not a healthy combination.
Starting as a speakeasy during Prohibition, the Stork Club was the place for celebrities, soignée socialites and other connected New Yorkers to be seen and talked about in the next day’s papers. It was there that Count Basie and Guy Lombardo performed with their orchestras.
“It was a shrine of sophistication in the minds of thousands who had never seen it, the fabric and pattern of legend,” wrote Lucius Beebe, a top-hatted bon-vivant who chronicled “high society” in mid-century Manhattan.
The Stork Club became victim of the go-go 60s. Dress codes had collapsed, and refinement had crumbled in an implosion of hippie slobdom. The swaying ballroom dancing of yore had morphed into couples free-form rocking on the clubs’ dance floor.
The original Stork Club closed in 1965 and the building was leveled. The site is now a Midtown pocket park, Paley Park.
As for the Morgans’ apartment at 277 Park Avenue, the building between 47th and 48th Streets was raised and is now an office tower.