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Kit Dillon

By Kit Dillon 12/17/12 5:52pm

Brain Storming

2012-12-13 15.42.32

MoMath No Problems: North America’s Only Math Museum Now Open in Madison Square

For North American math museums, like so much, in the beginning there was nothing.  Then, for a moment, there was one. A good start, but it didn’t last long. Soon, there was nothing again. But on Saturday, The National Museum of Mathematics—or MoMath, as the founders like to call it—opened it’s doors to the public and the intangible becomes tangible once more. Zero becomes one, mathematicians rejoice.

MoMath, the mad dream of founder and executive director Glen Whitney, faces out onto the north side of Madison Square Park with 19,000-square-feet of exhibition space and 30 odd exhibits.  Exhibits like The Hyper Hyperboloid, a spinning swivel chair surrounded by a circle of floor-to-ceiling ropes, which, when turned, allows you to construct and surround yourself in the elegant contours of a quadratic equation. It’s more fun than it may sound. Or, go to the Mathenaeum, the seven-sided, geometric sculpture studio, and transform basic shapes into—sometimes never-before-seen—original objects. It’s something that The Observer, to our surprise, found fun. (We promptly hid our lunch money for fear of the nerd vibes we might put out, though.)

While walking through the exhibits, it’s not hard to see their appeal for all children and not just the mathematically inclined ones either, things light up, lasers shoot out of walls, sometimes when you hit stuff it makes music. Oh, to be a kid again. Read More

By Kit Dillon 12/17/12 12:10pm

Tales of Retail

A city in chains. (CUF)

New Generic City: 172 New Chain Stores Opened in Five Boroughs Last Year

James Joyce once puzzled whether it would be possible to cross Dublin without passing a pub. As it turns out, despite having more than 22 pubs per square mile, with the help of a computer algorithm, it just barely is. Today, after The Center for an Urban Future released its fifth annual study ranking the national retailers popping up all over in New York City, it might have found a harder puzzle to solve. With a reported 24 locations per square mile, is it possible to cross New York without passing a chain store?

The report showed a 2.4 percent increase in the total number of chains over the past year, despite prominent retailers like Filene’s Basement and Betsey Johnson closing their doors. It is boom maintained by trusty stalwarts like Dunkin Donuts, which opened 18 stores in the last year for a total of 484 citywide, followed closely by Subways, with 454 locations, and despite seeming to be on every street corner, Starbucks, with a mere 272 locations. Read More

By Kit Dillon 12/14/12 4:07pm

landfill

Piling up.

That’s Garbage: New York City Is Less Trashy Thanks to Refuse Recession

One mans trash is another mans treasure. A nice idiom, one my grandmother, a child of the Great Depression, liked to repeat.  She also liked, “waste not, want not.” Keeping both in mind, she strove to throw out nothing, expecting, that it would one day become treasure again. Thus the stack of Life magazines from 1957 to 1960 currently propping up our dining room table.

In the modern data driven world, the idiom has changed. Now, it seems, one mans trash is another mans consumer trend index. At least for the Independent Budget Office (IBO), who released a report yesterday, compiling numbers from the Mayors Management Report showing that the amount of waste produced by New Yorkers has dropped progressively from it’s high in 2004 of about 4 pounds a day per person to just under 3 pounds now.

But, why? Read More

By Kit Dillon 12/12/12 2:19pm

The Neverending Story

Round and round she goes. (Kit Dillon)

A Spire! After 11 Years, 1 World Trade Center Gets to the Point

Crane-lifts up the side of any building are a delicate affair, let alone up the side of 104-story glassy tower with sloping sides at the center of the most-watched construction site in the world. That is why it seemed like the Port Authority was taking its time this morning as its construction workers carefully hoisted up the first crowning piece of 1 World Trade Center’s spire. After all, the media, as always, were watching.

A small cohort of workers in high-vis jackets went about the work of checking the heavy lift sling and talking back and forth through the crackle of radio static. There was a quick speech for the cameras, and then without much more ceremony than that, honeycombed steel circle edged up into the air. Nothing more complicated than any of the tens of thousands of lifts the north crane has made in the construction of this building, if only important now in its symbolism: the final pieces. Read More

By Kit Dillon 12/10/12 4:13pm

Planes Trains & Automobiles

2012-12-10 12.05.17

City Council Tackles Our Last Existential Quandary: Countdown Clocks for Bus Stops

The bus stop is a lonely place, made lonelier without the reassurances of time. Like Estragon said, “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful.” Much better to wait underground for the subway where your time is allotted to you by little digital clocks hanging from the ceiling.  No more leaning out and staring into the endlessness of a dark tunnel looking for light. Your train is 4 minutes away, at least on those lines fortunate enough to have the timers.

New York City is not a place for waiting. We’re terrible at it, and the City Council knows it. Today, joined by transit advocates and riders, a group of council members introduced a resolution calling on city agencies to install “bus clocks” in all of the 3,300 shelters across the city. Clocks that would display real-time bus arrival information, not simply those flimsy timetables many bus poles now unreliably, even flagrantly, post. It’s a move that will finally see the city catching up with such other metropolitan innovators as Albany, Syracuse, and Champaign, Ill. They’ve even got an online version in Boston—Boston! Read More

By Kit Dillon 11/27/12 6:34pm

Bicycles

Council to pedicabs: fall in line!

Perfidious Pedicabs! City Council Cracks Down on Pedal-powered Taxis

The city council is working to bring a shred of consistency to the wild west of pedicab taxis with new (likely-to-pass) legislation that would mandate fixed rates based on time.  The tricycled menace, whose customer hailing bike ring is a fixture in the city’s nightspots and tourist traps, has been known to sometimes push the limits of commercial decency.

One of the most famous incidents happened this August, when pedicab operator Savas Avci charged a Texas family $442.54 for a twelve minute ride from Times Square.  A ride that otherwise would have cost by usual yellow cab somewhere in the range of $8-$10. What he did at the time, by pointing out hidden fees and only explaining the per person charge after the ride was, incredible as it sounds, perfectly legal. Read More

By Kit Dillon 11/26/12 5:47pm

After Sandy

The One57 crane.

Vicarious Vertigo: Up Close and Personal with the Collapsed One57 Crane

It’s a time-honored tradition for men doing ballsy, ridiculous and risky things to photograph their exploits.  Thankfully the steel workers over at One57 are no exception. They recently yielded to this impulse, taking a series of shots of their work  securing the now- famous crane destroyed during Hurricane Sandy.  The removal of which is, according to Curbed, slated to begin the week of December 3rd.  It’s a difficult job. A new crane has to be built to lower the old one down to the ground and there are legal actions to be settled, of course. But in the meantime we can all look at these pictures the workers took and feel relief that’s it’s not us out there. Read More

By Kit Dillon 11/26/12 5:15pm

Atlantic Yards

The profits.

Barclays Center Sells almost $50 Million in Tickets in Six Months, Decides Devaluation is a Mistake

While searching around the Municipal Bond Database (as is our wont)The Observer stumbled upon the quarterly cash receipts of ArenaCo, subsidiary of Forest City Ratner Corporation and the owner operator of Barclays Center.  The reports revealed a whopping $46,866,337.14 in sales from tickets, suites and sponsor installments between April 1st, 2012 and September 30th, 2012.

All of which amounts to just a drop in the bucket of the total $510,999,996.50 PILOT Revenue Bond issue currently being paid off by ArenaCo in payments in lieu of taxes to the city or state. This is good news for the bond holders, who presumably need all the help they can get. After all, their bond holdings are currently being given a BBB- rating, the lowest rating a bond issue can have while still being considered investment grade and one which ranks Arena Co and Barclays Center in the same investment strata as the Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority. Read More

By Kit Dillon 5:38pm

An Arena Grows in Brooklyn

That's one big loop hole. (Getty)

Bruce Ratner Thinks His Billion-Dollar Barclays Center Is Only Worth $111 M.

When Bruce Ratner said, in a press release issued by the arena, that Barclays Center made “the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues…one of the greatest crossroads in New York.” He was speaking metaphorically, because great as it may be, it’s not actually worth much at all. Not in cash money, anyway.

It turns out Brooklyn Events Center, a subsidiary of Forest City Ratner, filed a petition on October 22nd to challenge the arena’s current $741 million valuation by the city’s Department of Finance, according to DNAinfo. Instead, Fores City argues that, by its own estimates, the Barclays Center was worth a paltry $111 million—a $630 million difference in opinion, for those keeping score, with millions of dollars in tax revenue in the balance as a result. Read More