Tuesday, February 27, 2007

So You Backed That Thing Up


Our Town downtown
February 26, 2007

You’re not alone. NYC may be country’s clog capital

“I don’t get why it clogged,” my roommate moans, her head in her hands and her elbows on her knees, doubled over in misery on our futon.
Last weekend was an eventful one at our three-bedroom East Village apartment. Saturday night saw my normally conscientious, slightly built roommate vomiting and apologizing profusely and vomiting some more after pounding hard liquor until 3 a.m. at a house party in Brooklyn.
When I opened the door to the apartment on Sunday afternoon, after being out all morning, my poor hung-over half-to-death roommate called out from her supine position on the futon, in the loudest voice she could muster: “Don’t use the bathroom. The toilet’s clogged. I’ll fix it when I feel better.”
That evening, my other roommate and I returned with takeout dinner to find a mayday situation. Our pathetic roommate was in dire straits in the bathroom. She was holding onto the toilet’s float ball to stop the water from running, she yelled to us, and if she let go, it would flood.
We sighed and continued into the living room. I called our super while unwrapping my shawafel sandwich. “We have a problem with our toilet,” I told him. He said he’d be right up. “Diakuiu,” I said. It’s the only Ukranian word in my vocabulary; he taught it to me just the other day. Usually he gets a kick out of it when I use that word. Not this time.
Up he came, our stoic and ever-smiling landlord, armed with a plunger. But not smiling.
After a request for Tupperware containers that made us cringe, and many splattering and sucking noises, we heard a flush. Half an hour later, success. (Although now our sink is clogged… with sewage.)
So what happened? Maybe the products of my wretched roommate’s drunkenness and subsequent hung-over-ness were too much for the plumbing system in our aging tenement. Or it might just be that she had the misfortune of being the one to use it when it gave up flushing.
Whatever the cause of the cease-function, it seems that toilet clogging may happen more in New York City than elsewhere. According to a survey by SCOTT Tissue (one of those phoners where they call a hundred people in each city and ask them a series of questions), 68 percent of New Yorkers have had a clog in their home, which makes us the cloggiest of the 25 major cities they surveyed.
The survey may, of course, be bunk. The Plumbing Foundation City of New York, Inc., had never heard of it, and the guy who answered the phone there couldn’t think of any reason that New York City’s toilets would be especially clog-prone. It didn’t seem like he was trying very hard, though. I mean, I could at least make some educated guesses.
I still thought the public relations people trying to sell SCOTT’s fast-dissolving toilet paper may have stumbled onto something. So I called Henry Gifford, a pioneering engineer and former East Village landlord who knows a lot about a lot. He warned that this survey could be “baloney,” then came up with a few theories as to why it might not.
First there’s the obvious one: density. We live packed together and use fewer toilets per capita, taxing the drain pipes. “You go in the suburbs, and they build a three-bedroom house, and they have three bathrooms, or two full and one half,” says Gifford.
Then there’s the problem that some older tenements don’t have separate vent pipes, which run parallel to the drainpipe to accommodate the air that gets pushed ahead of a full plug or pulled behind it.
But there’s another issue that affects buildings old and new, big and bigger. New York has always got to be different, and that holds true for the material we use for our drain pipes: cast iron, not plastic.
“The whole country, the whole world uses plastic drains – PVC, the white plastic – and New York still uses cast iron,” says Gifford. “You’re allowed PVC under three families, under three stories, which we don’t actually build much more of in New York.”
That material is more expensive, which benefits the plumbing unions, but other than that, it has some characteristics that are problematic: a rough surface inside, and a high thermal mass, which takes heat out of the waste and causes it to condense, forming a coating of gook on the pipe’s inside surface.
So what is there to do? Plunge that thing and cross your fingers, because you’re stuck with the crapper you’ve got, no matter how crappy.
“If I owned the building I would just go change the toilet, but I guess that’s why I don’t own buildings,” says Gifford. “The smart thing to do is let it keep clogging until they get sick of it and move out, then you can raise the rent. Then when you renovate, you can put in new toilets.”

Posted by Tucker at 2:40 PM | | Comments

'May I Barge In?'


Our Town downtown
February 19, 2007

Suitors line up to dance with Lady Liberty

Last Thursday was one of those days you don’t go out unless you have to, you get your lunch from the deli in your building or you get it delivered, your cell phone goes from two battery bars to dead in the course of a two-minute conversation. There was an announcement in the subway that the MTA was enacting some sort of “cold weather plan,” which involved storing all their equipment underground, and meant that the express would be running on the local track. It was 22 degrees out but felt like 8, with gusts up to 25 miles an hour.
Not, in other words, a day for sightseeing, boating, or being up on high, exposed monuments. Not if you’re a New Yorker.
“Where you from?” a security guard at the screening checkpoint underneath a big white tent at Battery Park asks me as I shed coat, scarf, hat, gloves (thankfully, they weren’t asking for shoes, a concession possibly due to the wetness of the floor) in preparation to proceed through a metal detector. “Westchester, originally. Now the East Village.”
“What are you doing here?” he asks.
My answer – “I’ve always wanted to see it” – rings hollow. We both know that New Yorkers don’t go to the Statue of Liberty, ever, and definitely not today.
Tourists, on the other hand, flock to the monument like Muslims to Mecca. It seems to have been written in a guidebook implanted in their deep collective subconscious; they appear to have no choice but to make the pilgrimage.
The threat of frostbite? A young German man buttons the hood of his girlfriend’s parka tight under her chin, then pats her on the head. They both grin. They’re into it, man.
Two rounds of airport-tight security, no liquids or backpacks allowed? They rent storage lockers and march on, re-buckling the belts that hold up their fantastic Italian jeans.
Oh, the statue itself is closed? They climb a narrow staircase to the top of the pedestal, recording for all posterity the posterior of the person in front of them, then fire rounds of digital photos up under Lady Liberty’s skirt.
In 2005, 4.2 million people rode the Circle Line Ferry, which loops from Battery Park to Liberty Island to Ellis Island and back to Battery Park – and it wasn’t because the 1950’s and 60’s vessels were super-fast or the hot dogs and nachos particularly good (although when you’re fending off hypothermia, a relish laden hot dog does hit the spot). At $11.50 for an adult ticket, that amounts to a big fat chunk of easy change: $35 million of revenue in 2005.
So when the National Park Service announced on December 28, 2006 that the contract to run the ferry was up for grabs after 50 years of operation by Circle Line, it’s easy to imagine mouths frothing, even taking into account that the winning bidder would have to hand over 18 percent of its revenue to the Park Service.
Representatives from sixteen companies, including New York Waterway, New York Water Taxi and McAllister Towing, showed up for a tour of the ferry operations on January 9. The Times reports that some of the potential bidders for the 10-year contract weren’t all that impressed with the seven-boat fleet.
The company spokespeople wouldn’t talk to me about what they liked and what they didn’t over the phone. One spokeswoman finally clued me into the fact that none of these companies were going to reveal their “special sauce” before their bids were due.
The companies are limited, though, in how innovative they can be, because the winning bidder, if it’s not Circle Line, would be required to buy the fleet from Circle Line.
One can anticipate, and understand, the desire to replace the clunkers with faster, more modern vessels, but here’s the thing: the tourists didn’t seem the least bit bothered by the ferry’s lack of amenities or speed. The fat pigeons strutting amongst passengers’ feet, the shortage of seats and the stained, outdated emergency instructions made the ferry ride as legitimate a New York experience as taking the subway.
“I like this kind of chairs,” said a Chinese high school girl, pointing to the wooden slat benches bolted into the floor around the periphery of the upper deck – a set-up that actually does create a communal feeling, a sort of central plaza of Babel.
But even if they can’t do much with the fleet, bidders are being encouraged by public representatives and activists to add stops to their route, like Governor’s Island, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Hudson River Park, Jacob Riis Park and the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. Proposals are due February 26.
On the subway back from my death-defying visit to the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal, I noticed a middle-aged father and twenty-or-so-year-old son pair I’d seen on the ferry.
“How’d you like the Statue of Liberty?” I asked the dad.
“Very nice,” he said in a thick accent, I think Italian.
“How come you decided to go see it?” I asked, then rephrased it three different ways in an attempt to break through the puzzled mask that had clamped down on his face.
He clearly wished I would stop harassing him. “It’s the holidays,” he shrugged.
The train stopped. He and his shaggy-haired son jumped up simultaneously. “Okay, bye!” he grinned, suddenly ecstatic. “We going to Ground Zero now!”

Posted by Tucker at 2:33 PM | | Comments

Friday, February 09, 2007

The Floating Pool Lady in Waiting


Our Town downtown
February 12, 2007

Brooklynites may be first to swim in the pool on a barge; Manhattanites, rotten eggs

“Can I come aboard?” I yell, although it’s clear there’s no point yelling. The trucks rumbling by on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway drown out my words, and the wind coming off the water sweeps them away.
The bundled man aboard the barge puts a hand to his hooded ear and shrugs: the universal sign for “There’s no way I could possibly hear you!”
I point to myself, then to the makeshift ramp leading from the pier to the barge. He shrugs again, thinks about it for a second, then nods, hesitantly.
Four construction men gather on deck, curious, as I clamber aboard The Floating Pool Lady, an approximately 280-foot barge impressively, almost miraculously parallel parked (parallel docked?) at Pier 2 in Brooklyn Heights.
Can I take a look around? I ask no one in particular.
Fine by me, one of them tells me. But if the general contractor comes around, he’ll deny he let me onboard.
Fair enough. Despite an abundance of No Trespassing signs, security seems pretty lax here, a few piers away from the cruise ship terminal. The security booth is empty. Piles of two-by-fours and plywood are probably not worth securing. And if he does come around I’ll just drop the name Ann Buttenweiser, the woman behind this operation, to whom the general contractor reports.
It is an odd sight, a swimming pool in the deck of a barge, although of course it’s standard on cruise ships. But in its previous incarnation this vessel had been a serious no-frills cargo carrier, and a coat of fresh blue paint has not exactly disguised its industrial character – but it’s clearly not meant to. “THE FLOATING POOL LADY” is stenciled in white capital letters on the stern, and underneath, “NEW YORK, NEW YORK.” The spaces between the letters are slightly irregular.
So even though I’m expecting it, it takes me a moment to realize that the rectangle recessed four feet in the deck, whose bottom is covered by an uneven layer of ice, is not some sort of storage area, but an honest to god pool. Or at least, it will be.
“Right now the pool is just a container,” explains Buttenweiser. “It’s a rectangle that holds water, but we have to put in the filters, and the things around the edges where the water spills over, and those kinds of things.”
The other work that remains to be done is putting roofs on the dressing rooms, laying down pavers around the pool that people will walk on, and building a spray pool on the upper deck.
When the pool will open depends in part on when the construction is completed, but the major hurdle is finding the right spot to moor the giant barge. It is, in fact, a bureaucratic nightmare that would be impossible to get through if Buttenweiser didn’t have an “in”: she’s a former Parks Department official.
She still alternates between “they” and “we” when talking about working with the Parks Department. “They didn’t believe I was actually going to do this. They didn’t push it, then when we finally saw it was going to come to New York, then all of a sudden we’re working to try to find a site, which should have been done… possibly could have been done earlier.”
“If I hadn’t worked in these city agencies, I never would have started something like this,” she says. “At least I know where to go.”
Where The Floating Pool Lady will go is another question, and one that remains unanswered for the time being. It looks like she’ll stay put in her present location at Pier 2 this summer, and might possibly be open for swimming. Next summer, she will likely head to the Bronx.
Like a lot of New Yorkers, The Floating Pool Lady is finding it impossible to get a place in Manhattan.
“We certainly have talked with the Hudson River Park Conservancy time and time and time again,” says Buttenweiser. “They don’t have any site on the waterfront. We need water, we need sewage disposal, and we need electricity. And they don’t have a place in the park where they have hook-ups on the waterfront.”
But The Floating Pool Lady is meant to move every six months, so maybe we’ll see her float by.

Posted by Tucker at 1:04 PM | | Comments

Friday, February 02, 2007

Fields, Ho!


Our Town downtown
February 10, 2007


A 63-field sports complex is coming to Randall’s Island. (People are pissed.)

It’s a balmy summer weeknight. A women’s Ultimate Frisbee team is running a warm-up drill in the outfield of a semi-lit baseball field in East River Park. Twenty yards away, a boys’ Little League team fields balls hit by their female coach. Errant baseballs drop in the Frisbee players’ midst like grenades, followed each time by a kid with an open mitt expecting his ball to be thrown back to him.
An Ultimate player nearly gets hit by a pop fly. She holds the offending ball and tells the kid who has come to retrieve it: "Next time, say 'Heads.'"
“Gimme the ball,” the boy demands.
“It’s common courtesy,” replies the woman, her voice rising along with her temper. “You could hurt someone.”
Like gangs that smell a disturbance, the two teams perk up; two knots of people begin to form where there had been two drills a minute before.
“You’re on our field!” the Little League coach yells, making the accusation general and bringing all of us into the melee.
“All we’re asking is for some respect,” says the Ultimate player, using the kid’s baseball to gesticulate angrily.
“You want me to call the cops?” the coach threatens. “Because you’re trespassing on our field.”
I glance at my watch. She’s right, it’s 8:55 p.m. We had gotten here half an hour early to warm up, so that we could get a halfway decent practice in before the lights turned off at 10:30, but our permit did not officially begin until 9 p.m.
Nevertheless, my blood is beginning to roil. As the captain of the Ultimate team, I decide it’s time for me to intervene. “Go ahead!” I yell back at her. “By the time they get here, it’ll be our field.”
It was, in retrospect, ridiculous. A group of professional and college-aged women out here to play a sport whose main tenet is “Spirit of the Game,” and a Little League team coached by a volunteer whose goal is to keep Lower East Side kids off the streets and teach them baseball – and we’re threatening to call the cops on each other.
Why can’t we all just get along? Because there’s not enough space. We’ve exchanged looks, if not angry words, with practitioners of rugby, soccer, baseball, Capoeira, touch football – even the Brooklyn men’s Ultimate team, whose ranks include spouses of the women’s team. All I can do is shrug my shoulders and apologize to our recruits fresh out of Stanford: “This is New York Ultimate,” I smile ingratiatingly, throwing girls’ bags over the chain link fence to a forgotten slip of a field where the lawn may be a foot high, but at least we can do plyos.
But there’s a buzz going around the athletic community: more fields are on the way. The Randall’s Island Sports Foundation has been plugging away on a three-phase plan for over fifteen years. The first phase, completed in 2006, was $42 million Icahn Stadium and a soccer field.
The second phase will be the largest addition of playing fields in the city in over three decades. It will include renovations of the existing 36 fields on Randall’s Island, many of which are dusty and un-lined, and the addition of 27 new fields, for a total of 63 playing fields. If all goes according to plan, phase two should begin in early 2007.
Not everyone is psyched. The field renovations will be footed, in part, by the 20 private schools that currently use the majority of the fields. They’ll be chipping in $52.4 million over 20 years, and the city will cover the rest (more than $90 million of city money has been earmarked so far). In return, those 20 schools will have exclusive use of at least 42 of the new fields from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. for the prime twenty weeks of the year. Next in line for prime time on the remaining 21 fields are public school kids, then community and adult leagues. (It’s easier for adults to play at night, but not until the fields are lit. So for now, everyone’s vying for the same time.)
At a hearing of the City Council’s Parks Committee last week, the normal attendees were joined by athletes and coaches wedged in standing room, waiting their turn to explain why their club needs and deserves access to these fields. After a long hour and a half, a dad with a baby girl in a stroller had to go; he handed his presentation on CYO Baseball to someone else, to be delivered to the powers that be.
“I’m disappointed in you. To do something like this…” Councilman Charles Barron lectured Adrian Benepe, the Parks Commissioner, after inquiring rhetorically about the ethnic breakdown of the 20 private schools. “No pun intended, but you’re way out of the ballpark.”
The anger in that room is justified – it isn’t fair that private school kids should have better fields, in addition to better everything else – but the thing is, you need money to make things happen.
Going to the private schools for that money was “a no-brainer,” said Aimee Boden, executive director of the Randall’s Island Sports Foundation, because they’re the ones who currently use the fields, who’ll be displaced by construction, and who would, by the Parks Department’s own “grandfathering” clause, get first dibs on the renovated fields even if they hadn’t chipped in.
Public-private partnership is how Icahn Stadium got built. It seems to me to be how the world works.




Posted by Tucker at 12:49 PM | | Comments