The most glorious of views—or at least the most expensive (Brown Harris Stevens).

Ever wonder what a Central Park view—that most coveted of coveted features, that most desirable of desirable details—actually translates to in terms of cold, hard cash?

Quite a lot, in fact. Apartments with Central Park views fetch more than twice as much as surrounding apartments, The Wall Street Journal reports. And if you just look at co-ops it's three times as much!

Forget the waterfront. All New Yorkers care about is tree line, tree line, tree line.

The big premium buyers are willing to pay for Park is at its highest level since 2008, according to The Journal. Yet another sign of the cash-flush luxury market these days? It seems that buyers are all too happy to swoop in and pick up a pricey pad. As long as it's on the Park!

"For being such an outgoing and outspoken culture here, we are very inward looking," Jonathan Miller commented to The Journal, noting the difference between New York and water-loving cities.

Some brokers are hopeful that the wealthy New Yorkers will learn to love the waterfront in coming years, where the air is fresh and pure? as one sales manager notes hopefully.

Most likely, buyers on the hunt for the most luxurious of pads will simply be looking for both waterfront and park views.

kvelsey@observer.com

Hipsters love high/low, right? (angela n., flickr)

It’s not like Melanie Malkin ever pictured herself living on the Upper East Side, a neighborhood that has, over the past 50 years, all but disappeared from the dreams of the young and the hip.

“I mean, when I first moved up here, I didn’t want to move up here. Never, never, never,” Ms. Malkin said, who grudgingly took a cheap sublet in the neighborhood seven years ago when she was 23 years old and working for MoMA. “Nobody wants to move here. When I tell people I live here, they’re, like, eww.”

But loath as Ms. Malkin was to leave her first apartment on 29th Street, she wasn’t making a lot of money working in the museum world and she found a rent-stabilized one-bedroom on 87th Street between Lexington and Third Avenue that cost $775 a month (it’s now $938 a month). In the early days, she kept telling herself that it was convenient and cheap, but then something unexpected happened.

She started to love the Upper East Side.

It’s close to Central Park, a quick walk to some of the city’s best museums, the little side streets are filled with quirky mom-and-pop shops and after some exploring, she found a handful of downtown-style restaurants and bars. She likes the neighborhood so much that she even held her 30th birthday at Carl Schurz Park, the oddly quiet gem on the East River that is home to Gracie Mansion.

“The posh/frat boy stigma of the Upper East Side kind of dominates people’s thoughts, but actually, 29th Street, where I used to live, was really fratty and it was pretty bland. I love where I am now. It’s more of a neighborhood, it’s kept its history and roots, it’s genuine,” said Ms. Malkin. “Maybe people are just lazy, they just want to live someplace that’s already cool, not to have to seek out and explore.”

“I have a friend who teases me that I’m a pioneer, that it’s going to blow up and become the next Williamsburg,” she added. “But I don’t think so. It’s a great place to live, but I can’t even get people to visit me here to prove it to them.”

Williamsburg it is not, but then, neither is Williamsburg anymore. And starving artist aesthetic be damned, the young and hungry would be better advised to find a place near the fat cats of the Upper East Side, where the rents are cheaper, provided you steer clear of the tony avenues near the park. The Upper East Side may well be one of the last outposts of old Manhattan that the young in Manhattan can actually afford. Besides, it’s the neighborhood that everyone who lives in Astoria brags they can see from their rooftops.

Auction house

ON A RECENT warm Saturday night, Second Avenue was filled with the young and old and not many people in between. Prosperous-looking older couples sipped white wine at the outdoor tables, looking tolerantly at the tides of teenagers drifting by, the girls clutching each other in the tipsy, excited way that made drunkenness seem almost sweet, like a kitten tangled in a ball of yarn.

It turned out all the in-betweens were hiding in Auction House, a comfortable bar on 89th Street. Inside, people chatted quietly on plush red velvet Victorian couches, relaxing under the gaze of somewhat naughty old-fashioned oil paintings in gilt frames.

Almost like Brooklyn, but there were no Urban Outfitted-collegiates (talk about exclusive: there’s a 25-and-older policy on Friday and Saturday nights), no taxidermy on the walls (in fact, the owner, a longtime vegetarian, has a no fur policy) and the bartender was refreshingly clean-shaven.

Auction House dates back to 1992—the year that New York magazine ran a Williamsburg cover story, calling it “The New Bohemia.”

“Back then, having antique furniture was really unique,” said owner Johnny Barounis, who also owns the Back Room on the Lower East Side. “At the time, I thought, ‘The style has been around for 100 years. It’s not going anywhere anytime soon.’”

A little something like the Upper East Side, maybe?

“I think it’s coming back. It’s very cyclical. I’ve been seeing an artsier crowd coming in to the bar. Back in the 1970s, it was a really cool place, there were clubs and it used to be fun to hang out up there,” said Mr. Barounis, who blamed the cabaret laws for killing the area’s nightlife.

Don’t believe it? Remember: Andy Warhol lived in a townhouse on Lexington and 89th between 1959 and 1974 in what is regarded as the first Warhol factory—it’s where he painted his soup cans. (Warhol, apparently unafraid of the negative stereotypes, moved in his mother and had 25 cats named Sam in the house).

This is where Joan Didion, “that consummate bard of cool,” spent much of her 20s living and roaming, drinking early in the mornings and pondering the “monochromatic flatness of Second Avenue, the fire escapes and the grilled storefronts peculiar and empty in their perspective.” Where writers and filmmakers like Woody Allen gathered to see and be seen at the nightly salon that was Elaine’s—a place where, as Jay McInerney told The Guardian, “You’d go to drink, have fights and make out with someone’s girlfriend in the bathroom.”

Mr. Barounis grew up in Queens and started out in the nightlife and entertainment business by working as a “pick and choose guy” at clubs. He’s lived in Manhattan for the past 30 years—he’s seen every variety of cool.  “I always thought cool was an intrinsic quality. I’ve had kids tell me, ‘I don’t hang out above 14th Street,” he laughed. “Hey, you’re from Columbus, Ohio, and you’re telling me about cool? I find that comical.”

And Mr. Barounis is not alone. Among the desirable establishments, new and old, in the neighborhood are breweries like Jones Wood Foundry and City Swiggers, the Lexington Candy Shop luncheonette, JG Melon, and on the upper edges of Lexington and Park, ABV, Earl and the Guthrie Inn. There’s also the 75-year-old butcher shop Schaller & Weber (which is keeping its head above water during subway construction thanks to orders from the beer gardens and artisanal-food-obsessed denizens of Queens and Brooklyn who would never dream of living on the Upper East Side). The newest addition is the Pony Bar, a popular Hell’s Kitchen craft-beer bar that opened its second spot yesterday on First and 75th.

“I think people will say, ‘I’m paying this for Jersey City and I could be paying the same thing for the Upper East Side?’” Mr. Barounis opined. “There’s a value up here if you can get over the stigma.”

Your New Neighbor? (ThomasThomas, flickr)

WITH ITS REPUTATION for stuffiness and snootiness, the Upper East Side may not be the most obvious frontier of affordability, but it is one of the few left in Manhattan (alongside Manhattan Valley and Harlem, Washington Heights and Inwood), and it’s also surprisingly young, with 36.4 percent of its population between 20 and 39.

Between Lexington and the East River, 59th to 99th Streets, the median rent for a studio apartment is $1,900 (median size of 500 square feet), according to data from StreetEasy.com. In Williamsburg, the median studio is going for $2,800 a month, although it will get you a slightly larger space of 602 square feet. (More expensive even than the East Village, where the median studio runs $1,940, with a median size of 452 square feet).

With rents in the city hitting record highs—last month, the average monthly rental for a Manhattan studio was $2,025, a 3 percent increase from the year before, according to Citi Habitats—rental brokers are increasingly advising those without trust funds to consider a place that is seen as the traditional stomping ground of those with trust funds.

“Young people say, ‘I need to live in Union Square for $1,200 a month,’ and that’s just not going to happen,” said Mark Menendez, the director of rentals at Prudential Douglas Elliman. “For a while that alternative neighborhood was Williamsburg, but we’ve actually had transplants back to Manhattan because they’ve been priced out of Williamsburg.

Where does one go? “You can still find good value on the Upper East Side,” Mr. Menendez said.

It’s not that the Upper East Side is some vast, empty expanse waiting to be populated (neither is any other place in New York)—Community Board 8 presides over some of the most densely-packed space in the city. But unlike historically industrial neighborhoods like Soho or the Meatpacking District, it has a lot of units in a wide variety of housing types.

The downtown housing stock is simply not as robust, said Citi Habitats president Gary Malin. “People might not want to live on the Upper East Side, they don’t think it’s cool or young or hip. But if you want to live in the West Village, it’s expensive."

It also helps that for years, the far East side was snubbed because of the lack of train lines east of Lexington, a fact that almost seems quaint given the increasingly “acceptable” treks of outer borough residents.

In fact, cost has been driving creative, penurious types to Yorkville for decades. Linda Rizutto, the owner of the very Villagey coffee shop Java Girl on E. 66^th Street, moved to the neighborhood some 30 years ago.

“I would have preferred living in the Village, but it was cheaper to live up here,” said Ms. Rizutto. She turned briefly wistful, musing on what Soho was like before it became like an outdoor shopping mall, then shrugged. “This is my home home now."

And although on average the Upper East Side is among the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city (an average twisted out of proportion by the spectacular wealth of Fifth and Park and Madison Avenues), it’s also more socially and economically-diverse than anyone gives it credit for, and has been for a long time.

Hunter Armstrong, the director of local group Civitas noted that there are hundreds of thousands of people living on the Upper East Side.

“There’s not one prevailing character, it’s so diverse,” said Mr. Armstrong. “There’s every kind of person.”

Still, it can be a hard sell.

Citi Habitats broker Morgan Turkewitz persuaded two clients, who happened to be friends, to consider moving Uptown. “If that was the first apartment that we went into and they liked it, I knew they’d say, ‘O.K., but what about Downtown?’” said Ms. Turkewitz. “So, I waited until they saw Downtown and got frustrated with it, then I took them to the Upper East Side.” They wound up in a two-bedroom apartment on 60th Street between First and Second Avenues for just under $2,000.

Ms. Turkewitz's client Kathleen Clark, who graduated from the University of Delaware in 2009, admits that she didn’t look at the Upper East Side and think Oh, that’s my ideal neighborhood. But the other apartments she saw just couldn’t compare to the small, but charming and newly-renovated two-bedroom in a fourth-floor walkup with stainless steel fixtures and granite countertops.

“I love some places in the West Village and Gramercy, but that’s sort of a dream,” said Ms. Clark, who works as a designer at Levi’s. “As much as you want to be hip and live on the Lower East Side, you can’t afford it on a base salary.”

Asked if she had considered Brooklyn, Ms. Clark said that she was sure she would love the vintage shopping and the beer gardens if she lived there, but it wasn’t great for her commute.“And that’s why I came here—for my work.”

Not that she’s been able to convince any of her friends to take up residence.

“Once people are set on not wanting to live on the Upper East Side, they do pretty much all they can to try to find an apartment somewhere else,” she said. “It has kind of a bad rap. I think it might be the most uncool neighborhood in Manhattan.”

Nor are all of its residents converts.

“Young people don’t want to live here, but they end up getting funneled in,” said Matthew Smith, a Yale law student who looked at more than 30 apartments before settling on his current place, a spacious one-bedroom with exposed brick on 93rd Street between First and Second Avenues that costs $1,500 a month.

“I would rather be in Hell’s Kitchen, there’s a lot more going on,” Mr. Smith admitted, noting that Yorkville could be kind of “frat-tastic.” But while his friends’ Hell’s Kitchen rent had gone up by $400 last year, his had gone up just by the price of inflation.

Even though he’d seen more young people moving Uptown, he didn’t think that the neighborhood would be transformed by waves of hipsters desperate to remain in Manhattan. Not that Greenpoint or Bushwick are all that cheap anymore, but the next place, wherever it was, would be.

A muck house: pretty gritty (Hobo Matt, flickr)

SAFE. QUIET. CONVENIENT. AFFORDABLE. The descriptions came up again and again in conversations with younger residents, who were always eager to point out these excellent, but oddly parental praises. Then, they would let something slip. Actually, they loved that the Met was open until 9 p.m. on Friday and Saturdays and was admission by donation. It was one of the most democratic institutions in the city, when they thought about it. (Why trudge out to some gallery in Bushwick for mediocre art when you can see the best in the world in your own neighborhood?). Or they really liked Cascabel Tacos, the place that serves street-food style Mexican on Second Avenue, or reading the paper at a coffee ship like Little Brown, or a great piano bar that their friend always took them to with the weirdest mix of people, or the inventive programming at the Museum of the City of New York.

And at least the Upper East Side used to be a place people dreamed of moving. Does anyone dream of moving to Queens, Hoboken or Jersey City?

Perhaps the best argument for the Upper East Side’s rise is that its inevitable fall is already looming on the horizon in the specter of the Second Avenue subway, sure to drive up property values. Besides, for the time being, for those obsessed with the old, gritty New York, what’s grittier than displaced rats and muck houses?

Why not get in while the getting is good—especially if you moved to New York to get out in the first place?

“Who comes to New York to just hang out in one neighborhood anyway?” asked Tiffany Sakato, who lives in a one-bedroom on 86th and Second Avenue (rent is about $1,600). Spending all your time eating, sleeping, socializing and working in one place? Wasn’t that the kind of provincialism people came to New York to escape?

Ms. Sakato liked her apartment she assured us, the neighborhood, the price, but really, in the end, “it’s just a place where you can put your head down and get ready for the next day.”

“I really like exploring the city,” she explained. “Most of the time, you’re out and about, not sitting at home. That’s why you move to New York.”

kvelsey@observer.com

The deal, and view, that almost was. (Brown Harris Stevens)

The two apartments spanning the eighth floor of 907 Fifth Avenue will retain their lost-in-time, Butterfield 8 style for a little while longer. A bid on reclusive copper heiress Huguette Clark's neighboring co-ops was rejected by the board.

A single buyer had planned to combine 8W and 8E, creating a massive full-floor apartment that would have been one of largest floor-through homes on the park, a source familiar with the deal said, but the co-op board nixed the plan to combine the units.

The apartments were reportedly in contract for close to their $19 million and $12 million asking prices, but the board reportedly felt that the two apartments, which had never been combined, should remain individual units. The rebuffed buyer is said to be Qatari prime minister, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, reports MSNBC.com.

Clark, who died in May 2011 at age 104, owned the penthouse at 907 Fifth Avenue, which is currently in contract (reportedly for close to the $24 million ask) and the two 8th-floor apartments. But Clark hadn't lived in the penthouse apartment for decades, preferring to spend her time in a hospital suite where her mysterious, imaginary ailments could be best attended to. All three apartments are listed with Brown Harris Stevens brokers Mary Rutherfurd and Leslie Coleman.

Besides the buyer who made the bids, a handful of other buyers were also interested in combining the two apartments, said an insider.

It's easy to imagine why: the two apartments have a total of 22 rooms (see floor plans bel0w). Not that much of the original layout is expected to stay, as the apartments have been sparingly updated since Clark purchased them in the 1920s. Combined, the two would have been a knock-out, with 8W offering 9 enormous windows looking out over 100 feet of Fifth Avenue frontage right above Central Park's treeline. And while it lacks park views, several brokers have said that 8E is the more charming of the two, with a windowed gallery, a 29-foot cornered living room and herringbone wood floors.

"A full-floor large space running Fifth Avenue is a hot commodity," said real estate appraisal guru Jonathan Miller.

Mr. Miller said that he was surprised to hear that the board had rejected a combined apartment. It would have raised prices for all the shareholders in the c0-op because of what he calls the 1 +1 = 2.5 phenomenon—combined apartments almost always sell for more per square-foot than the original apartments would have, and the value-add comes even before the adjoining apartments are renovated.

"The turndown doesn't make any sense to me financially," said Mr. Miller. "It seems awfully simplistic. I've never  heard of a board turning down a combination in a building with full floors."

Mr. Miller said that the only possible downside he could see for a co-op board would be fewer shareholders in the building, and thus more exposure if an owner wasn't paying maintenance. Although, he added, this probably wouldn't be an issue for someone who could buy $31 million worth of space and also prove finance a major renovation.

In any event, the apartments are on the market once again, asking $19 million and $12 million. The apartments are being sold by the New York County public administrator, who is managing the estate after Clark died leaving no direct heirs and a fortune of $400 million. Her distant relatives have sued, alleging that her old attorney and accountant mishandled her fortune.

kvelsey@observer.com

And the floorplan for 8E

The floorplan for 8W

Rhododendron Mile, ca. 1910 (William Hale Kirk, Museum of the City of New York)

New York's streets offer one straight line after another, but in Central Park such direct thoroughfares are vigorously frowned upon. After, all the park is meant to be a leafy oasis from the hustle and bustle of city streets, the consummate garden, which through careful use of design and artifice manages to look more natural than nature itself.

But the park does have two perfectly straight lines, and they have caused the Central Park Conservancy no small amount of worry over the years. In fact, the park's original designers even feared that the half-mile stretch of East River drive between 85th and 96th Streets might become a favorite spot for horse carriage racing. Egads!

“On the east of the new reservoir, the park is diminished to a mere passage-way for connection, and it will be difficult to obtain an agreeable effect in this part of the design,” Frederick Law Olmsted despaired in 1858.

Fortunately, such debasement of the drive did not come to pass, quite possibly due to the precedent set by the stretch's flower-dotted landscape, courtesy of a Mrs. Russell Sage, who donated thousands of rhododendrons in the early 20th Century.

Known as Rhododendron Mile, the stretch simulating a country road is finally being restored to its former self. This is the Central Park Conservancy's first attempt to bring back the park's early landscaping—the first batch of rhododendrons withered away after only a few years—but other turn-of-the-century landscaping projects are also in the works. Another neo-historical effort was a new fence around the reservoir, mimicking one from the original design.

The $2.5 million project will involve re-planting the section with pink, purple, white and red rhododendrons and azaleas in "undulating drifts," (doesn't that sound lovely?) as well as reconstructing the pedestrian path between the reservoir and the drive, replacing the paved margin with greenery and planting new canopy trees along the way.

"We're excited to transform what, today, looks like a race track into a beautiful, blossoming landscape," Central Park Conservancy president Doug Blonsky said.

The flowers, which have already started making their colorful debut, will be tended to with more care than the last time, the conservancy promises. (Its methods are also a superior to those at the turn of the century). Plus, their roadside location will likely protect the blossoms a little bit from the trampling toes of tourists.

kvelsey@observer.com

I'm on top of the city, ma! (Streeteasy)

Of course, the view of Central Park from the southern ends are mind-blowing and dream-esque, but have you ever considered the views from the north side of the park?

Apartments with views overlooking the park sell for as much as $88 million and the penthouse at One57 is projected (read: hoping) to be sell for $115 million. But The Times raised an interesting question: What about the residence at the north end?

The development 111 Central Park North, located on 110th Street, overlooks all of the hustle and bustle of Midtown for cheap. A three-bedroom three-bath condo—roughly 2,000 square feet—on the 18th floor is only listed at $2.39 million.

The penthouse didn't even break double digits:

In 2008, as the financial crisis took hold, a buyer sold a penthouse in the building for $8 million, $500,000 less than he had paid, after trying to flip it for $12 million, said Jill Sloane of Halstead, a broker on the deal.

Don't be turned off by the low price tags, either. The area is gentrifying: a white collar criminal recently moved into a correctional facility around the block and a new organic grocery store is opening nearby. It just happens to be next to some "low-slung residential buildings":

Walking east along Central Park North I passed low-slung residential buildings of no more than six stories, a correctional facility that houses the disgraced Tyco executive Dennis Kozlowski, and a church on the corner of Fifth Avenue. A small organic-food store is expected to open soon on the block, a sign, real estate brokers say, of the area’s gentrification.

How home-y and welcoming!

About half of the buyers in the building so far have been foreign, and have predominantly been all-cash buyers, according to Kathleen Corton, a principal of Brickman, the developer.

Someone needs to tell those foreign buyers that they can't carry around that much cash on those streets.

But let's face it: who wants a view of where they should be living? In New York, the term "north" has a negative connotation. It means the suburbs, the Bronx, and the disenfranchisement of being a New Yorker. No matter how you spin it, 110th Street is just another way to say Siberia.

mewing@observer.com

One57

Well, that didn't take long. One57, that prime slab of midtown real estate, is already attracting top foreign-dollar, The Post reports. Apparently both Chinese and Russian tycoons are in contract to buy eight figure units in thee building, which comes as little surprise. Extell, the developers behind One57, have been unabashedly courting foreign buyers for months.

One Chinese buyer has signed on to buy four separate condos in the building, each worth more than $20 million. Unless he has a very odd sense of feng shui, preferring four separate living spaces to one giant home for practically the same price, it seems likely that the units will be used for investment of business purposes.

Separately, a Russian oil magnate (in all likelihood another post-USSR oligarch of dubious repute) is buying a $28 million place in the building.

All we can say is Thank god for the post co-op luxury market! Heaven knows these fellows would have a tough time passing the passing the boards.

The girl didn’t have long to respond. After observing the interaction, a carriage driver finally swooped in. “Let me give our side of the story now,” he said before leading the family to his brown horse and extravagant carriage, explaining that the horse used to work in Amish country. The driver set the girl up with a carrot to feed his horse and before long the family climbed in for their twenty-minute ride through Central Park. 

“It’s time for us to educate back,” explained the driver, Erez Ziv, before leading his horse down the street.

And so went most of Sunday afternoon as volunteers with New Yorkers for Clean, Livable & Safes Streets (NYCLASS) educated passersby—mostly tourists—on how the animals “suffer from injury, abuse and neglect.” Just a week after one horse fell, and two months since the on-the-job death of another, Charlie, the gathering was part of four holiday “Teach the Tourists” events this month where volunteers distribute anti-horse carriage flyers, triggering steely looks and curt comments from drivers.

“We’re not in your face,” Allie Feldman, the group’s lead organizer, told The Transom. “It would be counter-productive to scream.”

Before sending out volunteers, Ms. Feldman explained that their strategy should be creating a conversation with people. Talking points should include the abuse of the horses, as well as the group’s solution: a City Council bill, Intro. 86A, which would increase restrictions on horse carriages and eventually replace them with electric, antique cars or  “horseless carriages.”

While most drivers managed to ignore the public relations nightmare happening not three feet from their customers, a few shouted or grumbled in the volunteers’ direction. We heard a few “Fuck you”s—at least one shouted in a thick Irish brogue.

Ashley Arias, a student at Fordham University, said that a driver called her a “lying little bitch” on Saturday. But Ms. Arias didn’t seem to mind their comments or being a harasser herself—the holiday season was the best time to get the group’s message across. “This is when they want to ride the horses the most,” she said.

About ten volunteers showed up on Sunday, but pedicab solicitors soon joined their ranks. “This guy’s an entrepreneur,” said volunteer Erika Mansourian, pointing at one. “He’s working the abuse into his pitch.”

(Stephen Malone, president of the Horse and Carriage Association of New York City said, "NYCLASS is getting in the faces of our customers and interfering with our business, claiming that our horses are 'abused and suffering."' If we try to correct them on their so-called facts, I'm labeled an 'animal abuser' as are my customers.  No New York City carriage driver, owner or stable has ever been cited for cruelty.  Pulling a carriage through Central Park does not constitute abuse.")

One carriage driver stood a few feet from a cluster of volunteers, rolling his eyes. Did he think the flyers were going to hurt his business? “Look around,” he said with a gruff chuckle. As for the accusations of abuse, the driver said he takes such good care of his horse, Cosmo, that he’s overweight. “It’s convenient for them to have other facts,” the driver said.

Cosmo’s owner wouldn’t give us his name because he wasn’t so sure we weren’t part of an undercover anti-carriage operation, rather than a reporter. If we weren’t distracted by the earthy smell of horse dung, we’d probably have been more offended.

The above article has been updated to include a comment from Stephen Malone of the Horse and Carriage Association of New York as it appears in the print edition of The New York Observer.

Igloos and Occupiers

We are very serious here: The Occupy Wall Street movement's biggest resource drain right now is trying to keep up the habitation of Zuccotti Park. Whatever message OWS may or may not have had has, in the past week or so, become a secondary concern to just keeping people alive, fed, warm, and un-raped. The media has also switched its attention to the more salacious stories about criminals and crazies slipping in amongst the protesters instead to what people were protesting to begin with.

So you know what wouldn't help with this issue, now that the winter months are at our heels? Moving people to Central Park and building them igloos to live in, as has been suggested with this weekend's upcoming Park march as well as the remarks of one entirely delusional person who spoke to Gothamist today.

Here's why this would be a terrible idea:

1) If you are trying to get away from the drug addicts, sexual assaulters, and homeless, Central Park would be the last place in the world you'd want to overnight it in.

2) General Assembly has been very good about using people with different resources and skills to create things like power-generating bikes and waste-disposal systems. However, we know for a fact that Oberlin did not have a class on how to build an igloo. The closest we ever came was that time we read Into the Wild and some of us talked about working on a salmon boat in Alaska for a summer, which we never did. Same goes for Wesleyan, Bard, Reed, Hampshire, and Sarah Lawrence.

3) The Occupation would be better served if it was figurative, not literal. The problems OWS faces in Zuccotti Park are only going to amplify in the Winter. Why not just disband one night, clean the park, and then organize protests on social networking sites? Flash mobs are effective because of the element of surprise. Human microphones...less so.

4) Central Park is not privately owned. Policemen on horses will be beating down your snowfort with rubber clubs before you can say "Mic Check!"

5) Horizontal Democracy has no authority in The Rambles. That's just a fact.

“We got really excited and said, ‘Let’s do free weddings, it’s the least we can do,’” Bex Schwartz, one of the creators of Pop-Up Chapel, told The Observer. She was still bubbling with excitement when we spoke to her a few days before the big day on Saturday July 30.

The group established and executed the whole project from scratch. They coordinated a competition to design the pop-up chapels in which the couples would be married and got permission from Central Park authorities to hold the event there.

The competition was launched only 9 days before the deadline, but even in that short time there were 56 entries for the two winning spots.

“There were a couple of chapel designs that we really liked but they seemed too dangerous for weather contingency,” Schwartz laughed. “The winners really rose to the top on the first look round; we really liked the theory behind them.”

The Observer arrived at Central Park’s Merchants Gate on Saturday just as the ICRAVE chapel’s colored ribbons were let down and the roof of the Kiss chapel by Guy Zucker at Z-A was hoisted up – albeit with some debate as to which way round it went.

Mr. Zucker described the idea behind his arch-shaped chapel. “Both sides are made from cardboard panels so they have the same DNA, but it’s layered differently to create two individuals. They come together in a kiss at top that gives the chapel structural stability, just like two people in a marriage.”

An image of wild poppies growing amongst long grass constituted the chapel floor.

The ribbons of the ICRAVE chapel – which weren’t actually ribbons but strips of plastic – rustled like leaves in the wind and glittered like the stained-glass windows of the nearby Church of St. Paul the Apostle.

 “We wanted to create a traditional cathedral on the outside to represent the normality of gay marriage,” designer Robert del Pozzo told us. “But then the chapel is also vibrant and special,” he continued, “just as today is.”

24 weddings took place to reflect the special date, June 24, when the same-sex marriage legislation was passed. Because there were many more than 24 couples wanting to be married at the event, they were selected on a first come, first serve basis.

Ken Lindley, one half of the first couple to be married, spoke to us as his chaperone for the day pinned a flower to his shirt: “We feel our relationship is the strongest out of all our friends, gay and straight. We’ve been together 22 years so this is a renewal of our vows. It’s so nice to be showered with love by so many people, by strangers.”

That love were very much in the air. Or in the hair, in the case of the Rev. Lainie Love Dolby, a volunteer for the day, who had the word ‘love’ shaved on her head.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who recently officiated the marriage of his two aides, John Feinblatt and Jonathan Mintz, sent a few words to be read out in his absence: “I was honored to preside over the first gay wedding last weekend,” he said, and pronounced New York the “freest, most dynamic city in the world.”

His message, which opened the ceremonies, was met with hugs and with the ringing of bells.

As Mr. Lindley noted, it was a bit of political theater. But there was intimacy at the ceremonies and it was apposite that we, the audience, couldn’t quite hear the vows of the couples from our position at the back of the outdoor chapel.

That said, there is much to be wary of in a new plan to allow cyclists in Central Park to use paths designated for pedestrians. The Parks Department and the Central Park Conservancy argue that cyclists trying to get across the park are now forced to pedal miles out of their way because they are barred from using two pedestrian paths, one near 97th Street and the other near 102nd Street. The cyclists will be required to pedal slowly—no more than 5 miles an hour—in deference to the walkers.

Cycling enthusiasts on the Upper West Side are delighted. The older, more-traditional residents of the Upper East Side are angry and frightened. And the park, rather than serve as a D.M.Z. between these two neighborhoods, has become a battleground.

The East Side’s worries are legitimate. The plan is predicated on the idea that cyclists will defer to pedestrians and will keep to the very slow speed limit. That may be unrealistic—unless, that is, the city rigorously patrols the area and hands out tickets by the handful when cyclists endanger walkers.

If the plan moves forward, the city has to protect pedestrians. Otherwise, there surely will be a tragedy.