Category: Linked

Yet another crony resigns. Of course not for his work presiding over the largest housing meltdown in over 70 years; nor for politicizing his office. Just run of the mill corruption and cronyism.

Nice job, Al.

(In related news, the Mine Safety and Health Agency is apparently a little too cozy with the mine companies it regulates:

The federal agency charged with overseeing mine safety was negligent in protecting workers at the Crandall Canyon Mine, the Labor Department’s own Inspector General says in a new report.

Combine Bloomberg’s money with Obama’s ability to raise money, and, well…

Two killed and five injured at a 40-story construction site in Miami. The GC on the site was Bovis Lend Lease, who was the GC at Deutsche Bank and Trump Soho when fatal accidents occurred at those sites. It not said what caused the crash. Florida does not require crane operators to be licensed or regulated.

I suppose one of the benefits of being appointed rather than elected is that you can be a lot more honest about stuff. No parsing, no caveats about not inhaling, just an honest answer.

Presumably three years from now when it comes time for reelection, no one will care about this. We will judge whether or not David Paterson has been a good governor. Not whether something he did 25 years ago showed “good judgement”.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has postponed a $30 million package of service improvements that it had promised to riders as a way to sweeten the pill of a fare increase, which went into effect at the beginning of this month.

The MTA taketh away, and the MTA taketh away. Last month, it was our money, in the form of a fare hike. This month, its the service improvements that were promised when they announced the fare hike. This includes improvements to service on the G line.

Its hard to express a complete and utter lack of surprise in a blog post.

Via Gothamist, yet another creative use of the attic rule (and the dormer rule).

In gentrification bingo – NYSHitty’s latest innovation – “Thai restaurants” get a square alongside pile drivers and $2 cups of coffee. Thing is, Thai restaurants have been a north Brooklyn staple for ages. Once upon a time (and it was not too long ago), Williamsburg had about two bars and three restaurants. And one of the restaurants was Planet Thai (when it was on Bedford and worth eating at – in fact, people came from Manhattan to eat there. For the food. Really.). Up in Greenpoint, Thai Cafe (probably the mother ship of North Brooklyn Thai food) was serving food twice as good as they do today (in half the space). For a Southsider, Amarin was one of the few restaurants anywhere that would deliver south of Grand Street. I have no idea why Williamsburg and Greenpoint became the Thai food capital of the world, but its not a recent phenomenon.

All of this was years before what for many was the watershed moment for Williamsburg – getting called out by Utne Reader as the third hippest neighborhood in America (that was in December, 1997). From there, it was a quick ride downhill to gentrification.

So enjoy gentrification bingo, but just remember that the Thai restaurants were probably here before you were.

Elsewhere in the country, the housing crisis is starting to take down small and medium developers. We haven’t been hit with the full brunt of the shitpile (yet?), but its worth remembering that Toll Brothers and the like are the exception – most of the development in Williamsburg and Greenpoint is being done by smaller developers.

Synchronicity.

Within 24 hours or so, the inventor of Thorazine and the inventor of the anti-anxiety drug Miltown (precursor to Valium and Prozac) both passed away. Frank Berger developed the first mass-marketed anti-anxiety drug in the 1950s, and its success ushered in the era of “big-time psychopharmacology”. Frank Ayd also “helped give birth to and nurture the field of psychopharmacology” through his invention of the antipsychotic Thorazine.

Remember that crane inspector who swore up and down that he didn’t inspect the East 51st Street crane following a complaint on 4 March? Turns out he was right – unfortunately, it also turns out that he told DOB that he had inspected the crane. Rather than actually show up and do his job, he simply signed off on the complaint, noting “crane is erected according to approved CN. #39/08, CD#3774”.

This certainly inspires great confidence in the integrity of the inspection process. If an inspector can’t be bothered to look at a crane that is allegedly not braced to a building, a bona fide life safety issue, what can we expect from DOB inspectors when it comes to the more mundane quality of life complaints that are lodged with great regularity? Exactly how many “unsubstantiated” complaints were really just plain uninspected?

Fubar indeed.

[Just to be clear, at this point the inspectors actions (or lack thereof) do not appear to have played a role in the tragedy that befell Turtle Bay. The accident last Saturday occurred when the crane operators were extending the superstructure of the crane itself, and there was at least one actual inspection after the 4 March uninspection.]