Tag Archives: nyc

Survival Stories from Zone C – A First Look at the Aftermath of Hurricane Irene

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“You’re in Zone C,” a special Hurricane Irene version of Google Maps told me. “And you’ll maybe experience major flooding if the storm somehow gets a lot worse than it already is. But probably not.” Like the rest of Manhattan’s residents, it was time to panic/blow things out of proportion. Rushing past apocalyptically long-lined Duane Reades and empty city bakeries toward Target on 116th street, I prayed the droves of people cleaning out flashlight/water bottle aisles from Battery Park to Central Park hadn’t made it up to 116th st yet. I was wrong.

The flashlights (flashlight aisle pictured above) were nowhere to be found. In fact, it seemed almost everything in the store was gone, save for those Pringles, which no one seemed to be interested in. They’re way, way overpriced, after all. Nowhere near as good as regular potato chips. Still, we managed to stock our “emergency rations bunker closet” with everything we thought we would need.

With enough water to last us years and years, Hello Panda cookies from Chinatown, a medium-sized watermelon, and extra soy sauce, just in case something happened to the soy sauce I already had in the cupboard, we were ready. We taped the windows, said one last thoughtful compliment to each other (just in case they were our last words on earth. I was told I had nice calves), and began waiting it out.

Minutes turned to hours, and after unsuccessfully trying to find an english version of True Grit again and again for what seemed like days, it was finally morning. And it was time to survey the damage. In fact, as a self-titled “Hurricane Overreaction Correspondent” in my neighborhood of East Harlem, it was my duty to.


East Harlem, though visibly bruised and battered, is eventually going to be okay. The trash cans uprooted can probably just be stood back up by people walking by who have an extra second or two, while the branches down may require two people (as per the OSHA regulations I remember from working at Target) to remove them from the sidewalk.

A rough estimate of the damages in East Harlem due to Irene run, at this point, about $14 – $16, depending on how many issues of “El Especialito” were contained in the El Especialito newspaper machine pictured above. That number could have easily reached $2014, if that branch had hit that car.

The real fallen “heroes” of East Harlem, however, are the cheap deli-bought black umbrellas. Though these $7-$10 items don’t normally make it through a regular rainstorm in New York, anyway, we found an unseasonably high number of them within a few blocks this morning. They did the best they could, and we’re proud of their sacrifices.

Perhaps the strangest and most alarming piece(s) of debris found is pictured above. Whether it was one person who lost a relatively decent looking Nike shoe, bottom jaw dentures and leather mask, or three separate people, it should be noted that these items appear to be okay. To the owner(s): if you’re out there, and if you’re looking for these things, they’re just past the 110th street 6 train stop going west. By the dumpsters. Hurry, because the looters’ll grab these up so quick if you don’t.

Though the hurricane was not nearly as bad in New York City as Bloomberg yelled to us on the television, there’s still a lot of damage elsewhere and a good amount of people who didn’t make it. My heart goes out to their families.

Notes on the Everyday Trials and Tribulations of Spending Winter in NYC

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Most of us would agree that winter isn’t much fun in most cities and towns in the cold portion of the world, ski resort towns and mountain villages excluded. If there isn’t any real form of winter entertainment in a given place, the freezing cold air and the angry people it creates aren’t much fun to deal with. If you live in New York City and you either aren’t that graceful at outdoor ice skating or don’t have anyone to do it with (check and check), there isn’t a day of winter to look forward to after Christmas. I love living here, and I can’t see myself anywhere else at this stage of my life, but I’m still allowed to complain.

You see, over the past 4 weeks (in which I’ve slept on a couch every single night… nice), I’ve noticed a few patterns of winter terribleness that are making my life a lot harder, and I want to bring them out into the light (which, unfortunately, is not bright enough or warm enough to make them go away). There are 4 altogether, and they make maneuvering a wintry New York City not only a daunting task, but an impossible one. They wipe the smiles straight off those who consider themselves smilers, and bring us right home into our beds at night instead of out with friends. I don’t have the evidence to back this up (I never really do though), but they also increase the viewership of terrible shows like “Skins” and “King of Queens” exponentially, as people who are hiding at home have nothing else to do. These 4 recurrences are a plague, and something needs to be done about them before our world is destroyed a la the black death hundreds of years ago. Let’s explore. (Pictures taken with Instagram for iPhone!)

1. Camouflaged Lakes of Slush

My daily commute to work is the same every day…. charging down the streets of NYC as fast as I can, desperately trying to get around larger, slower individuals whose walks are more crooked than the Nazca lines in Peru. Unfortunately, it’s not a consistent charge. You see, every time I get to a cross street that I have to, well, cross, I have to stop and assess one of the most difficult situations I’ve ever faced… slush lakes. Every single corner of every single street in New York has them… giant puddles of dirty, icy street water that infiltrate even the most formidable shoes and keep your feet wet for days and days and days. Most of these lakes are manageable… they’re generally easy to spot if you know what you’re looking for and, if you’re 6’4”, are very easy to leap over. Shorter people have more trouble, but I’m not concerned with them, because I’m not one.

Every day, I brave the slush lakes in courageous fashion, leaping and stretching over them more gracefully than the greatest olympic hurdlers you’ve ever watched. However, things change when I get closer to work. You see, the closer and closer I get, the less I concentrate on where I’m walking. Unfortunately, at the same time, the lakes become more and more camouflaged. A block away from work, it happens. I take a bold step into what looks like street gravel (see above), and then I sink… not just a mere few inches, but several feet down into the coldest puddle in the entire city. My lightning fast reflexes (I’m very good at a lot of things) get my foot out immediately, but it’s too late. My sock has already been soaked and my toes are already purple with hypothermia. I get to work and can’t take my shoes off, because it’s a respectable business, and end up having the worst day ever. And it never ends.

2. Trash Mountains

I don’t know how much “sanitation engineers” make in New York, but it’s apparently not even close to enough to make them do their jobs after a snow storm. Maybe they don’t want to get their hands cold, or maybe their frozen fingers can’t grip the outside of the truck as it drives down the street, causing them to fall and break parts of their bodies, leaving them physically unable and ineligible to work. Whatever it is, the consequences are severe… trash mountains. They’re on every street in New York, and they grow every day. The one you see here is a pretty modest sized one (taken in Midtown Manhattan… where they care a little more about these things, so they don’t let them get too big). It’s still impressive though – if you planned on having a picnic lunch at the top, this mountain right here would probably take a full day to hike. If you’re lucky, you’d get to the bottom by sundown, before all of the horrible trash animals come out to feed.

Others are bigger – some of the trash mountains in Brooklyn rival the ancient Appalachian mountains of Pennsylvania, and may take 3 or 4 days to climb if you’re in the required physical shape to do it. There’s really nothing we can do about it – people just tend to create giant amounts of trash. It’s in our blood. Until spring comes and the sanitation workers decide it’s time to get a paycheck again, we’re pretty much at the mercy of these mountains. If you have a day off to climb them, the views on top can be incredible. If you work, like most of us here in NYC, you have the wonderful privilege of only getting to walk past an ever-growing, ever-smelling pile of rotten waste every day. What a life.

3. Never-ending Construction Projects

I don’t want to go into a huge rant on this, because I could go for days, but 90% of New York City (and every other city I’ve ever been to) is constantly under construction. And there’s never anyone actually working. The stick man on the orange sign does more work than the construction workers who put him up. I understand it’s snowy and it’s winter, but you chose the profession. Please, fix this road. It’s making taxi drivers angry, which makes the whole world dangerous for the rest of us. Not a healthy situation.

4. Irony

Now, I don’t really know how to describe this to you in words, so I’m going to let the pictures explain this one, because the kind of ironies you experience every day in New York city are confounding, and, a lot of times, very sad. Here:

Imagine this scenario: you’ve just picked up April, a cute, free-spirited girl you met through a friend who set you two up on a first date… which is starting right now. You’re sitting in the back of a taxi getting to know each other as the taxi driver sings along to that LeAnn Rimes song everyone would never admit they used to like. All of the sudden, the collision occurs. The taxi driver had taken his hands off the wheel for a few seconds to air drum, and now the car is on fire in the middle of a snow bank. You don’t panic yet, though. After all, you’re surrounded by the very substance that stops fires! All you have to do is wait for it to melt…. fire melts ice, right?

Not in New York City. You wait and wait, but the ice holds strong as the fire gets bigger. When the soles of your feet begin to melt, you decide it’s time to get out. You all burst out of the car and run screaming down the street. After a night in the ER, you decide  to walk back to the location, only to find that the car is now completely burned out, and the snow has never melted. The irony is palpable… and very, very sad. Fred (the taxi man) probably lost his job. What’ll he do now? Better question, what do we do?

The answer is, unfortunately, to wait. Spring is coming friends. Spring is coming.

A Day Without Pants: Notes on the 2011 No Pants Subway Ride

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A few days ago I mentioned that, in the New Year, I was going to take every single opportunity that came my way in hopes of having as much luck doing it as Jim Carrey did in Yes, Man (Zooey Deschanel being the end game, of course). Well, my first opportunity came in the form of a Facebook event invitation to something that I had heard of before but never really knew much about: the no pants subway ride.

Now, I’ve always had a pretty neutral stance on pants. I don’t mind wearing them, especially in public. However, every once in a while it’s nice to sit at home without them  (without anyone else judging you or, especially and more particularly, your nearly transparent upper thighs). The pants-less portions of my life have very consistently taken place within the comfort of the private homes I’ve lived and hung out in my whole life. There simply aren’t many other opportunities to… not wear pants anywhere else.

However, once a year in New York City (and now in 50 cities around the world), thousands of people who have historically worn trousers much of their lives plan and execute a subway ride where they can finally ride in public without the immense burden of pants. You might not think that a lot of people would be into doing this (male or female), but the numbers don’t lie. We met at Foley Park just north of City Hall:

There were 6 meeting places around the city in all (2 in Manhattan, 4 in surrounding boroughs), an incredible turnout. And a whole lot of leg.

Anyway, we split up into groups, picked our subway trains and our subway cars, and headed underground (pants still on at this point). Moments later we were in the subway cars, on our way to Canal street, where the first group of people shed their pants to the horror of others on board (one old woman asking, “wait… so you’re just going to take those off then?”) and got off the next stop.

Over the next few stops, all of the pants were slowly taken off and put away, and we all got off at our assigned stops and waited for the next train, whose unsuspecting passengers were unknowingly getting closer and closer to seeing a lot more of us than they probably ever anticipated. The wait was freezing, but we forged through it.

Our aim was to portray ourselves exactly the way we normally would on the subway, sans pants. If you typically read a magazine, then that’s exactly what you do. If you normally just slump down on a seat, fall asleep and slobber all over angry passengers next to you like so many do, then that’s your prerogative on the no subway pants ride. For me, it was a marathon game of Angry Birds.

Our train finally came, and the invasion of the sometimes skinny and long, but more often flabby and stubby (it is America after all) legs began. I was one of the first on the train, wearing my probably too-skinny legs proud:

We rode to 59th street, got off and headed right to the downtown 6 train, where we back-tracked to Union Square station, our endgame.

One of Morgan Freeman’s most famous quotes from The Shawshank Redemption goes something like “But really… how often do you look at a man’s shoes?” The line was in reference to Tim Robbins having worn the warden’s shoes the night of his prison escape without notice. It’s an interesting line, certainly food for thought. The same can be said for pants. How often do you take the time to look at the pants of those around you? You probably wouldn’t be able to do it without them noticing and immediately wanting to move away from you. Still, looking at somebody’s pants is not something you typically do…

Take your pants off, however, and the whole world turns upside down. People crowd around with simple questions (the most popular being “…why.” A quick story about how your laundry simply wasn’t ready in time for you to leave shuts most people up pretty quickly. Others strain to get a picture to send to their friends back wherever they came from “look at this guy! no pants! whattttt.” It’s an interesting position to be in, and is something you should definitely try someday…. next January’s no pants subway ride perhaps? If nothing else, the photo opportunities are priceless:

The point of this story? I guess it’s that if you ever get on a subway car and the majority of the passengers aren’t wearing any pants, unbuckle your belt. Life’s too short to not take those pants off. Even if it’s the middle of winter, and the temperature is a cool 20 degrees Fahrenheit. The feeling in your legs that you lose almost immediately will always come back. Well, almost always. If not, there’s always a hospital around the corner. See you next year! Bring pants, but don’t get too comfortable in them.