Ms. Morin, founder of HelloBrit.com.

One of my roommates periodically gets a very crafty idea when it comes to the maintenance of our apartment—he’ll stay up all night and bleach the counters, then pull old wine bottles out of the recycling bin and fill them with olive oil or tap water. The sparkling counters or the shiny glass bottles are refreshing additions to the space; they are also ironic reminders that the floor is covered with little pieces of … something, and the baseboards are grimy, and the sink is full of dishes. The one way to regain control of our lives, given our overall apathy, was through performing a chore that was fun.

That roommate was a frequent reader of Jolie Kerr’s “Ask a Clean Person” column on the women’s interest site The Hairpin, which provides advice to novice homemakers. The advice is, at once, delightfully voicey (“Bleachie,” Ms. Kerr’s term for her favorite cleaning solvent, is a recurring character to whom the author and readers express their “<3”) and useful (bleach really does clean up surfaces like counters). And Ms. Kerr, with her column teaching millennial, gen-Y and gen-X readers how to remove personal fluids from leather or upholstery, is at the forefront of an online movement that’s taking homemaking from the stodgy, didactic world of Martha Stewart et al. to the cluttered homes of youngsters who apparently have no idea how to perform even the most basic task. “How to clean up vomit is a topic you’ll see on Heloise, on Martha,” Ms. Kerr said, “but you won’t find them in a context of people being honest about why they were vomiting on their party clothes.”

It was easy, in the days of Martha’s dominance, to look up to Ms. Stewart while sensing her looking down on you. Ms. Stewart’s business model is based upon marketing the unattainable life. All those lemon centerpieces and deep-fried turkeys and carefully groomed horses add up to a consistent message: you’ll never be this good (prison’s softened her up, but not much). Ms. Kerr and other lifestyle bloggers make cleaning and decorating and cooking seem as easy as, well, blogging.

“Ask a Clean Person,” for instance, takes as its thesis that its reader will know literally nothing about cleaning. Ms. Kerr passes along the knowledge our mothers might have imparted in decades prior: “Hey ladies, do you polish your shoes?” read a column last year. “No? You should!” While Ms. Kerr studiously avoids making fun of those who write in for advice, one question does shock her: “People who don’t understand how to use a sponge … You wonder—has someone else been washing your dishes your whole life?”

Since its inception in March 2011, the column has drawn more than a million unique pageviews, making it one of the most popular features on the site; comments on each post generally number in the hundreds.

While Ms. Kerr’s advice takes into account basic needs, Brit Morin provides the answers to questions never asked. The California-based former Google employee has created a company, named Brit, that aims to share ways to hack the homemaking process. She has shown readers how to convert used laptop chargers into jump ropes and how to make a homemade pizza entirely from canned goods. “If you look at Pinterest and Etsy and Food Network exploding,” said Ms. Morin, “people are enjoying learning to create.”

Ms. Kerr sees it as an “outgrowth of the economy tanking,” she said. “All of a sudden, people couldn’t afford to be eating out as much so they started cooking at home. And all of a sudden they’re in their home and noticing messes.”

“What’s so amazing generationally is that my mother knew everything,” Martha Stewart Living editor-in-chief Pilar Guzmán told The Observer at a recent event for the website Apartment Therapy. “My generation—gen X—we were sort of pushed not to know those things as a sort of feminist reaction. Now I feel like gen Y and the millennials are more excited about the home arts.”

Ms. Morin’s PB&J sushi rolls are perhaps especially appetizing to a young apartment dweller who can’t eat out every night, doesn’t know how to sauté and won’t learn, and, having clicked through Pinterest all day, finds a regular old sandwich disconcertingly plain.

The popularity of sites like Pinterest—where urbanites and Mormon housewives swap notes on cool and attainable home décor—and Etsy—where you can pick up an iron whisk or a “hedge witch whisk” made from real birch and rabbit fur—would seem to indicate that quirk has supplanted aspiration. Spoonfuls of pixelated sugar help the medicine of making your living space presentable go down.

Ms. Morin’s site gets its unschooled quality from the author’s own lack of pretension about her home. “My mom worked all the time,” she said, “so I never really learned how to do things what was considered the proper way. So I would lay over the side of my bed and try criss-crossing strands of my hair until I figured out how to French braid. And I’d put food in the toaster oven and try to make unusual recipes because I wasn’t allowed to use the real oven.” She went on to describe the manner by which she knit Capri Sun packages into a beach tote at age 16. As an origin story, this is not exactly Martha’s catering company.

Fanciful though her methods may be—a recent recipe on the site proposed topping pretzel sticks with pretzel dough for “pretzel pops”—Ms. Morin sees herself as the next homemaking doyenne. Her inspirations include “Rachael Ray for craft and home” as well as Google’s Marissa Mayer and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg.

That Ms. Morin would cite Ms. Ray—the Food Network cook (not chef!)—as a guiding light makes sense; the ambitious Google alumna wanted to start a company, rather than coming up through the food-service or decorating industry. Why should one take her advice? Why not?

Another star of the post-expertise how-to landscape is Jordan Reid, a petite lifestyle blogger who was recently given a show on the Meredith Corporation’s YouTube channel DIGS, in which she goes antiquing to pick out gems for her new Westchester home. “I would never call myself an expert,” she told The Observer. “The most important thing you do is show people how you screw up. It’s saying if I can do this, you can do this.” Her website, created after an aborted partnership with Julia Allison’s blogging network NonSociety and an earlier go at an acting career, is called Ramshackle Glam.

Ms. Reid’s apartment on the Upper East Side suits her project: far from aspirational, her digs are merely just-above-average enough to grant her the leeway to bestow advice. There’s a hubby-appropriate bookcase of comic books, decoupaged with images of superheroes, wallpaper depicting grim black trees, and a pair of small white dogs who seem to have found a diversion under a sofa. “Oh, thank you for dragging me a huge fluffball out from under the couch!” she tells one, scoffing at herself. “Home décor expert! I am barely holding this apartment together.” She’s been much busier since the birth of her infant, a few months ago—though she has it together enough to offer us a Mason jar of water.

“I write about Mason jars a lot,” she told us. “It’s embarrassing. They’re easy to do a lot with.”

Ms. Reid’s site makes overt that which Ms. Morin’s keeps as subtext—that housekeeping is a skill perhaps unmasterable by anyone who hopes to maintain a real life. Ms. Morin presents workarounds that answer questions no one asked (painting scissors with nail polish, for instance, to brighten the workspace), while Ms. Reid confronts the existential chasm that opens when one contemplates the home. Her pictures of inedible quiche fails would never make the pages of Bon Appétit, but failure is all part of the process.

Ms. Reid’s site has seen traffic bumps, she said, tied to major life events—including the announcement of her pregnancy and the birth of her son. A recent post acknowledged the mommy-blogging corner into which she’d painted her site—and the mommy track she’d chosen for herself. “Like many others I know of my generation, I was raised by parents who encouraged me to think that I had all the choices in the world, and all the time in the world to make them,” she wrote. (Her Harvard degree in cognitive neuroscience and decision to pursue acting, then lifestyle blogging, bear this out.)

Needless to say, reality intervened, and the resulting anxiety may help explain Martha’s sudden lack of relevance. Ms. Stewart’s approach presumes a settled manse, a cabinet full of supplies and a house in which one feels a sense of pride. “I love Martha,” said Ms. Kerr, the Hairpin’s Clean Person, noting, however, that “in many ways her approach is kind of a relic of a past time, when people really strove for perfection and to outdo one another. Martha’s whole thing is that she’s so much better than everyone else.”

More than making a new jump rope or decoupaging an end table, the questions that my roommates and I urgently sought to solve were the basic ones. They had criticized me for leaving my bed unmade and my door flung open every day—my room was an unsightly maelstrom of linens. After speaking to Ms. Kerr, my linens are now freshly laundered and tucked in nicely. As for the bigger challenges, we hired a cleaning lady. Our apartment looks perfect.

daddario@observer.com

Mr. Lewis, like the rest, had been persuaded by Harold Camping, an 89-year-old West Coast radio personality, that recent advances in the field of amateur biblical scholarship confirmed beyond doubt that on May 21 a chosen few would float elegantly skyward as a massive earthquake began a five-month period of destruction leading to human extinction. (Mr. Camping had predicted the same thing would happen on Sept. 6, 1994, but the complete annihilation of the species disappointingly failed to arrive as scheduled.)

Mr. Lewis's winding, 10-minute monologue moved from discovering Camping's prophecy on Family Radio--"between NPR and WPLJ"--to subletting his Park Slope apartment ("for various reasons"), to the numerical peculiarities of the Tribe of Levi's Egyptian exile, to reoccupying his Park Slope apartment, to his recent release from a job teaching ESL and the unemployment benefits that have financed his recent studies into the hidden truths of ocean sedimentation that, he noted, have succeeded in "completely validating the 13,000-plus-year-old history of this planet."

"You're gonna lead us, right?" asked one woman, and Matt Lewis nodded that yes, he would. He really had no choice--as a lifelong New Yorker he was one of the only apocalyptic evangelicals remotely familiar with the streets of Sodom. And so the shepherd, such as he was, looked down 59th Street at his flock, such as it was. There was a hard-nosed, self-made telecom millionaire recently estranged from his wife of 35 years, a Ghanaian Bible-beater hugely rouged beneath a big straw hat, a withdrawn New Jersey housewife with skin like cream from an angry cow. There was a trio of sullen teens and a pair of hyper toddlers, all dragged here by parents against their will. There was even a large Rodrigues family, seven in total. The youngest, Raquel, 10, wore bushy pigtails beneath the purple baseball hat on which she had written "MAY 21st" using glittery acrylic, in the bouncy letters of happy childhood.

 It got better: The Times had sent a stringer, Juliet Linderman, who completed the parade of absurd forms as the token postmillennial Brooklyn writer. She carried a Tumblr tote bag, had a George Saunders quote ("Everyone you've ever loved you've treated like gold") tattooed above her foot, and wore an Nixon-Agnew pin on the plaid overcoat whose rough wool suggested huge faith misplaced in the healing power of art. She didn't not live in Greenpoint.

But even Ms. Linderman had nothing on Carlos Sanchez, 50. He wore all black, his eyes howled when he spoke, and his uncanny resemblance to a darkly famous 20th-century figure would, given the circumstances, demand delicate treatment.

"Have you ever been told that you bear a resemblance to someone?"

"Me? Somebody?" he replied, in the voice of a toothless Tony Montana.

"I can't quite put my finger o-"

"Charlie Manson!" he boomed, offering a low-five. "I knew you were going to say that because many people say that! 'You look like Charlie Manson!'" he added, noting the resemblance was even stronger before a recent haircut, proving that any identity, however grisly, however apocalyptic, is better than none at all. He had recently achieved minor YouTube stardom when he was found living in an Amtrak tunnel beneath the city. As a Charles Manson-lookalike, Tony Montana-soundalike mole-person, his eschatological pedigree was so formidable that he was naturally asked to lead all in a prayer made only more inspiring by its broad unintelligibility.

Thus blessed, they strapped on backpacks retrofitted to carry signboards proclaiming Judgment Day May 21, showing a shadow-figure man cowering before a blazing sun, "Cry mightily unto God ... " written just beneath him, and "The Bible Guarantees It" written on a golden seal of approval, stopping just shy of "As Seen on TV." Then the men-made-billboards maundered east, away from the river, through the cool spring morning to proclaim the really, really bad news.

 Most were strangers to Manhattan. They stared up at the tall buildings in muted wonder and hugged the sidewalk for fear of clipping. A notable exception was Bo Young Park, an officious sixtysomething Korean woman with FBI contacts and hair like a Vegas Elvis. She had been an opera singer, performed Il Travatore, sang at Carnegie Hall and lived by Lincoln Center. A Pucci scarf was tied around her neck and her hot pink painted toenails matched the trim on the black-pocketed apron she had stuffed with a highly ambitious quantity of May 21 pamphlets.

"I went to my church and my church pastor was telling me, ah, Mr. Camping is Satan!" She explained her conversion to Mr. Camping's cause as we crossed Ninth Avenue. "I cannot believe he's calling Mr. Camping Satan because he never get onto anybody personally, okay? And then next Sunday, I went to First Presbyterian Church on Fifth Avenue and three woman pastor came up, one woman preaching she was a lesbian. I said, 'What's going on in this church? You know?' And then I was so, wow!"

We all come to God in our own way.

She was optimistic about the prospect of being raptured into heaven a week later and had contributed money to Harold Camping's cause, but when asked how much, she grew press-weary; "I no want you interview me!" she told The Observer, and with finality, "I no want to be interview!"

Weariness would be a major theme for the day. It quickly became clear that the apocalyptic proselytizers lacked the mad ebullience so essential to their trade. As they approached Columbus Circle a stately couple emerged from 60 West 59th, and the heirs to the end paused to marvel at the heirs to the past. As they stood in aimless wonder, a group of Burberried theatergoers began taking iPhone pictures of their Judgment Day T-shirts and their backpack billboards, marveling as if this could only be a troupe of accomplished ironists discovered by Bloomberg in Berlin.

"You can pee in the Starbucks," said Matt Lewis, delivering his tribe to Columbus Circle, then watched the Promise of Urination thin the flock by half.

People who dream of the world ending have usually been treated poorly by it. Here, in the Valley of Those for Whom Things Have Basically Worked Out, they died in a desert of Ivy League mating pairs and families united by fashion, people who had profitably traded Yahweh for Pfizer.

They were mocked and ignored and soon clung together in uncertain groups, weakly sloganeering, and so fiery preaching became cheerless loitering. Soon even imminent destruction couldn't hold them to their purpose: the toddlers began singing "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" with the three sullen teens who presently gave them piggy-back rides. "I've had a rough marriage," the hard-nosed, self-made telecom millionaire told a Rodrigues sister, sadly, as if she might heal him.

"Isn't there another event in the Bronx?" asked the Times' Ms. Linderman.

Soon only Charles Manson was really in the game, drawing inspiration from whatever was being piped into his mind through a pair of earphones connected to an RCA Discman, bravely probing the ever-fuzzy boundary between soul-saving and assault, accosting Chinese retail tourists and Greenwich housewives with equal abandon. He chased a frightened businessman through traffic as Matt Lewis declared God's work in Columbus Circle complete.

The hipster prophet had originally planned on leading the group up to the Met steps, then into Harlem, but now he received somewhat more hipsterly instructions from his hipster God: Matt Lewis would lead all unto the Ninth Avenue Food Festival, where they were serving artisanal soda and $5 roast pig sandwiches.

Thus did they leave Gethsemane for Golgotha.

The festival stretched from 57th street to 42nd, 16 city blocks filled with heirs to every immigrant wave moving through clouds of barbecue smoke. It must have seemed a wonderful opportunity, so many possible converts. But here Matt Lewis overlooked a basic rule of cult-maintenance, that cult members are natural lovers of communal belonging, easily swayed, happily lost in a crowd.

They began disappearing almost upon arrival.

Some traded latter-day evangelism for the cult of the $5 gyro. Others simply disappeared amid the throng of humanity, bright signs lost among so many larger and louder ones proclaiming excellent crepes, quesadillas and falafel.

Soon you could not see any of them, and it seemed as though the May 21 movement, like so many other bad ideas, had been corrected by history's great steadying rudders, the shortness of the human attention span and the ineffable pleasure of just hanging around.

It seemed things could not get worse, but they did.

First they came for Charles Manson.

He had entered the Food Festival late, triumphant, unbreakable, earphones firmly in place. He tried to save a woman selling calzones, then, rejected, turned to a group of acne-plagued, braces-suffering high school seniors who, he could never have known, had yesterday checked into a nearby Days Inn on a class trip from Raleigh. They were Born Agains from North Carolina's Wake Christian Academy, and they didn't just want to talk apocalypse--they wanted to own it.

They agreed with him that God would destroy humanity after floating the faithful to heaven. However, they believed that only faith in Jesus Christ could ensure one's place among the elect. Here they differed from Manson, who felt that faith-based salvation was vanity. But the Born Agains were far better read and soon set about questioning his scholarship, casting doubts confirmed when he opened his RCA Discman to show the source from which he had been drawing his awesome power all day long: James Earl Jones Reads the Bible, disc 6, John 2:15.

"Yeah, mang!" said Manson as Montana, "That's the Whirl Ga!"

And if there is a soul, one felt it there as he said this, because he meant the Word of God.

Who, if he does exist, had gifted the long-suffering Carlos Sanchez with sufficient barriers of language, culture and class to protect him from the ensuing teenage laughter, which he took as cheers, beamingly escaping with his faith intact.

Others were not so lucky.

The group possessed a lone fashionista. He wore Ray Bannish sunglasses and John Varvatosesque booties and, down on 42nd Street, was surrounded and outnumbered by the main force of Wake Christian's Christians. They combined the awesome derisive powers of adolescence with blind faith to achieve the wild ferocity of child soldiers everywhere: "Romans 3:33," said the corn-silk blonde MacKenzie Hathaway, mercilessly correcting the man's scriptural quotations; "You wanna go? Let's go."

Nicole Smith was lately experimenting with silver eye-glitter, and grinned as in a single voice they mocked the ridiculous logical shortcomings of his apocalypse in comparison to theirs. The Rapture could never be random, they couldn't make him understand. God hated randomness, and it was very obvious that everyone who had accepted Jesus would naturally fly up through the sky.

The fashionista-apocalyptic huffed-off to find refuge by a sausage stand. There he flipped madly through his Bible, searching for something with which to avenge himself against the Born Agains.

Logan Porter, 17, looked on. "Childish," he said.

editorial@observer.com

Mr. Ikeda said he maps out concepts in his mind as he is working on a piece, but that these are discarded when the piece is complete; he said he "doesn't remember much." Whether this is true or just something he claims in order to evade playing his own critic hardly matters--Mr. Ikeda's work is, objectively, difficult. His sound compositions often deal with the highest or lowest frequencies that the human ear is capable of hearing. His installations combine these audio limits with harsh visual stimuli--a digital chart, for instance, of the first seven million digits of a prime number so large it is beyond human comprehension, the numbers endlessly flashing and changing, responding to the music. He discovered at a certain point in his career that numerical systems were a way to visualize sound and has carried on, for years now, running philosophical conversations with mathematicians about the nature of numbers. His piece "V≠L," inspired by a discussion with Harvard mathematician Benedict Gross about the definition of infinity, is an aesthetic representation of the titular mathematical equation, which posits that not every set of numbers is constructible, that there are limits to what can be perceived by the human mind. The piece involves snapshots of infinite numbers taken out of context. Mr. Ikeda believes this theory on infinity can lead to transcendence.

The installation "the transfinite" is his largest and most ambitious work to date. He has blacked out the windows of the drill hall--paradoxically, given the sophistication of the technology in Mr. Ikeda's work, with construction paper--the better to display a screen the size of a small house that projects, on one side, binary code and, on the other, a series of infinite numbers culled from the human genome and the astronomical coordinates of the universe. The numbers respond to a score by Mr. Ikeda, composed characteristically of high and low frequencies, sounding less like music and more like an electronic device having a nervous breakdown. It is the culmination of Mr. Ikeda's themes--transcendence through the incomprehensible, number systems as art objects, abrasive sound composition testing the threshold of perception; "the transfinite" situates him as one of the most original living visual (and sound) artists, even if he doesn't feel much like talking about it.

Before I sat down with Mr. Ikeda, Rebecca Robertson, the president of the Park Avenue Armory, walked me around the drill hall, where a few dozen union workmen were running about frantically, holding power tools and tape measures. An enormous white screen ran nearly from floor to ceiling; beneath it was an even larger mat that covered a good portion of the 50,000-square-foot floor, one half of it white and the other black. Along the edges of the hall rested six black speakers, only a fraction of what will eventually be used in the performance. (The others hadn't arrived yet.) Ms. Robertson and I were standing next to a giant crane that had been brought in for set-up and that rested next to two smaller cranes.

"I don't frankly understand it," Ms. Robertson said with a laugh. "Well I do, but it's so abstract. You're in this sea of data and numbers and sounds. You feel like you're in infinity." The sound of power tools reverberated through the hall, intermittently mixed with preliminary soundchecking of Mr. Ikeda's composition--an ear-piercing, pulsating noise with no tone or melody that overpowered everything else in the space. Before leading me into the conference room, Ms. Robertson added ominously, "I hope he talks to you. He doesn't like to talk."

Mr. Ikeda greeted me wordlessly wearing a pair of sunglasses and a slight frown. His face was smooth and boyish aside from the thin layer of stubble over his top lip and along his chin. His body was rail-thin, but his arms were awkwardly muscular from years of steady installation work. He had a patch of thinning hair at the back of his head, the rest of it arranged in a small black tuft that pointed, ever so slightly, toward the ceiling. He was dressed in a white T-shirt, cuffed jeans and black boots. Still frowning, he poured me a cup of black coffee, his hand shaking with caffeine jitters, then splashed the remainder of the pot into his own cup. He slumped into a swiveling chair at the head of the room's large wooden table, sighed deeply and rubbed his face.

"So many interviews," he murmured. "It's really tiring." He mumbled at first before reiterating he didn't want to discuss any of the concepts in his work.

"My approach is very practical," he said, "not conceptual."

Mr. Ikeda was born in the Japanese countryside. He played guitar in a rock band when he was 13, which is how he first became interested in music, but he was not skilled with the instrument. At 18, he left for the city to attend the University of Tokyo. When I asked him what he studied his face grew stern and he said, "I studied nothing." He could not remember what the program he went to school for was called ("economics or something"). He claims the only reason he graduated was because he gave a professor a large bottle of sake. After this small miracle, he spent most nights D.J.'ing in clubs in Tokyo.

"I learned everything in the clubs," he said. "Nothing intellectual, just, 'boom boom boom.' Twenty years ago the club scene was completely different from now. It was all like this scale," he gestured to his work in progress, "really extreme. I don't see me as having really progressed from clubs to here." He threw his gaze around the room. "I mean, I'm 44 years old. I can't play clubs anymore. I'm a middle-aged man and I do installations but it feels the same as when I was a 25-year-old D.J. Technically, my artistic method has become really sophisticated, but I think at the core, it's the same as it always was."

He became warm and friendly as we talked about music, something he said art critics rarely want to discuss. This is understandable. Like the incomprehensibly vast numbers Mr. Ikeda displays in his work, his music is remarkably abstract. He disregards rhythm, melody, tone and scale in favor of mapping out the limitations of the equipment he uses, as well as how these extremes register physiologically with the listener. "Test Pattern," for instance, a work from 2008 that lays some of the groundwork for "the transfinite," converts data into binary code and projects it onto a large screen while a composition made up of the lowest and highest perceptible frequencies plays, the code responding to the audio cues. It is, according to Mr. Ikeda, "as much a test for the electronic devices" as it is for the audience's senses.

His most accessible work, the ethereal album Op. (the abbreviation for "opus"), provides the easiest entry point into his style--or really his absolute lack of one. The work is the exception in Mr. Ikeda's oeuvre: as the liner notes state with daunting bluntness, there are "no electronic sounds used." Instead, Mr. Ikeda first recorded each part for piano, flute, violin and viola onto a computer, a formless kind of symphony that was written, more or less, spontaneously. He then hired copyists to transcribe the piece onto sheet music, then guided an acoustic orchestra in playing it, creating a kind of translation, twice removed, of the music in Mr. Ikeda's head. It is the closest thing listeners have to an Ikeda manifesto--a strange combination of organic sounds playing toneless music, sounding pretty in spite of themselves, constructing order out of Mr. Ikeda's chaos and droning with such tension that it seems like the notes, each fighting against the context of any conventional theoretical understanding of music, are calling out in pain.

"There's no message to what I do," he said. "It's very pure. It's like a Lego." He locked together his fingers. "Lights and sound, the music and the visual, they melt together. You see, tomorrow I'll do the soundcheck, but until then, I don't even know how it will fit."

A few days later I returned to the Armory to see the nearly finished work. At the entrance, the 40-foot-tall, 60-foot-wide screen projected binary code in quick, fluid patterns, a collage of black and white flashes that looked something like white lines moving dizzyingly past a car speeding down the highway. On the other side of the screen, the room was comparably dark and even a bit frightening. The floor was painted black. On view was the equally hypnotic movement of numbers and data, racing just as fast along the screen, with literally millions of tiny digits arising and then disappearing in fast motions, looking from a distance like television static or a swell of gnats buzzing against a white wall. The glow from the screens reflected onto the steel trusses of the Armory's mammoth shell. Mr. Ikeda, adorned in all black now, sat at a table, silent and stonelike, both illuminated and obscured by his work, the shadows of numbers falling across his face. He was back to not talking as he stared at the endless data whizzing by on the screen. I remembered his parting words to me in our interview in the conference room.

"Compared to our planet or our universe," Mr. Ikeda said, "I can maybe contribute some interesting thing for a New York audience, and absolutely I try my best each time, but it's very little. And that's nice, especially as a Japanese, because that's part of my philosophy of no interviews or no portraits. I want to disappear. 'Myself' is not important. The thing, I made it, but it is everything. So this feeling, maybe you can see that in the experience of the work. The installation speaks better than me. I'm inconsistent. Tomorrow, I'll say something completely different."

"Artists," he sighed. "It's better to not say anything."

mmiller@observer.com

He was joined by the Oregon Symphony, part of the new Spring for Music festival that brought to Carnegie Hall a series of North American orchestras that had won their slots based on the quality of their proposed programs. There was a patronizing edge to some of the richly deserved praise surrounding the festival, of the "I can't believe the Albany Symphony plays so well!" variety. Mr. Sylvan, now 57, had that same perspective when he was young, but now it only amuses him: "This festival--and I grew up here, I can say this--it's like New Yorkers think there's New York and there's nothing else. There is much else."

With his warm, resonant voice and communicative authority, his grasp of early-music style and his tireless advocacy of new work, and his eloquence and generosity as a performer, Mr. Sylvan is one of the most respected artists of his generation. In addition to "The Wound-Dresser," he was also the first Chou En-lai in Mr. Adams's Nixon in China and the first Leon Klinghoffer in the composer's Death of Klinghoffer. He starred in Peter Sellars's landmark, modern-dress Mozart productions in the 1980's. He is a renowned recitalist.

But when you talk about him with people in the New York classical music industry, they often express puzzlement. Sanford Sylvan is wonderful, they say in so many words, but why hasn't he had more of a career?

By which they mean, of course, more of a career in New York. The fact is, Mr. Sylvan has appeared many times in the city. Just a few weeks before the Oregon concert, he was at Carnegie as a noble Moses in Paul Dessau's 1930s oratorio Haggadah shel Pesach, and through the 80's and 90's he was a frequent recitalist here. But recitals hardly ever get real attention, and when he wasn't singing art songs Mr. Sylvan's focus was on early music, which isn't the way to win the hearts of the New York audience.

While he has performed a few times with the New York City Opera, he's never appeared at the Met, which may be the main reason that some doubt his impact. But in "Wound-Dresser" he showed an artistry that remains special and rare: the singing elegant and clear, the emotions utterly honest and never overplayed. The piece premiered at the height of the AIDS epidemic, when Whitman's narrative of his time as a Civil War nurse was painfully vivid.

"It was terrifying and thrilling and impossible to sing it for people who knew every day of their lives what that was," Mr. Sylvan said. "I think the piece now is more about itself. I used to start well into the emotional range, but this time we started in a memory, really distant, so that the heat happens a bit later. I'm old enough now to see the ruminative nature of Whitman in the experience of John's music."

A clip of Leontyne Price singing Aida inspired the young Mr. Sylvan, who didn't grow up much of a music lover, to become a singer. When he was 13, he began studying at Juilliard Prep, the school's precollege program, and went on to the Manhattan School of Music. During summers at Tanglewood, he studied with the great soprano Phyllis Curtin, who taught him the importance of clarity and communication: "What are you saying, what are you saying, what are you saying," he remembers her asking him, over and over, as he sang.

"In those days it was heresy to leave New York City if you wanted a career," he said. "But I went to Boston in 1977 and it was the best thing I ever did. It's hard to describe what Boston was like in the 70's, 80's and 90's. There was a real relationship with the audience. People knew what I was, so we could look at something new together. At Emmanuel Church"_--the home of Craig Smith's celebrated early music ensemble--"we did a cantata every week. When you look at the Figaro video, that's our church choir."

Mr. Sylvan played the title role in that Figaro, whose action Peter Sellars had moved to New York's Trump Tower. For the Cosi, set in a roadside Massachusetts diner, Mr. Sellars reimagined Don Alfonso, who guides the opera's male leads in a test of their girlfriends' fidelity, as a Vietnam veteran. The concept could have been gimmicky, but Mr. Sylvan played the character as haunted and bitter, self-pitying but with a core of warmth in his sure, steady voice.

He took breaks even from this nurturing Boston scene, appearing frequently in Europe and taking regular sabbaticals from singing. At one point, he spent a year and a half at a small farming community in Scotland; more recently, he has explored his practices of Buddhism and Judaism.

This approach to a career sounds absurd in our overscheduled era, the kind of luxury that ambitious young singers might think they can't possibly afford, but Mr. Sylvan says he has always valued the quality of his engagements more than their quantity.

"I just did what I wanted," he said. "I didn't live like a prince. To sing the St. Matthew Passion with a great conductor, that's the bottom line for me. You don't get rich singing the St. Matthew Passion, you just get happy."

He became so closely associated with Boston that the Globe's headline was "Sanford Sylvan Uproots Himself" when the singer moved to Montreal in 2007 to take a teaching position at McGill. Unlike many teachers with prominent solo careers, he has radically curtailed his schedule to concentrate on his students, doing virtually no performances in the fall. "When they're 17 or 18," he said, "you just have to be there, week in and week out."

In March one of Mr. Sylvan's students, the bass-baritone Philippe Sly, was one of the winners of the Met's National Council Auditions. And Mr. Sylvan says that teaching has improved his own singing. His career is by no means over. His voice lies a bit lower now, but is otherwise largely intact; he has no retirement plans. He still wants to get to the few works for baritone that he hasn't yet touched: Lutoslawski's "Les Espaces du Sommeil," for one, and, even more tantalizingly, the title role in Berg's Wozzeck.

That last one would be perfect for City Opera, if it ever manages to right itself financially. Until then, Mr. Sylvan is characteristically good-humored and straightforward about the idea that he's somehow ignored New York, or that New York has ignored him.

"I've sung thousands of concerts," he said simply, "and some of them have been here, and many of them haven't." All we can hope for is more.

editorial@observer.com

Their hero had weeks ago stepped into the center ring by refusing one of the grander frauds of the Late American circus--the redemption racket that TV quietly borrowed from religion sometime in the waning decades of the 20th century. But the cunning Mr. Sheen floundered the moment the morning-show interviewers left his mansion, depriving him of their precious and practiced outrage.

He seemed to mistake himself for a tiger-blooded cultural revolutionary, and his devourers for followers. His U-Stream talk show was scattered and bizarre; his Funny or Die cooking show wasn't funny at all. His Violent Torpedo of Truth tour was an opening-night disaster in Detroit, an ill-christened tabloid basket-case.

By the time Mr. Sheen washed up in Manhattan, he was all out of charm and flair, quite entirely down to freak appeal, the dark matter of Octomoms, Humanzees and casual Austrian cannibalism. But this stuff is no match for casual American cannibalism: The throng came to poke at his living corpse, to see if vodka would run from its side, if Mr. Sheen possessed any death-defying magic or was, more ideally, just an historically entertaining end-stage addict destined to self-destruct in some uniquely amusing way, ideally right before their eyes, within the next hour or so.

"Fuck Carnegie Hall!" one man yelled as Mr. Sheen walked onstage.

The modern Rome is self-sacking. The barbarian drew massive cheers and was soon on to greater hate-targets.

"Fuck Detroit!" bellowed the little Alaric next, and he was hailed mightily.

"Cocaine!" he boomed, a simian belch that evoked the whole Sheenian ideal of vice and impunity to bind all as one. Well, all except one.

"I quit cocaine," said Mr. Sheen, and so things were rocky from the start between the man and his mob.

From the upper decks, the holders of $25 tickets booed sobriety. It diminished, after all, the chances of their hero dying unnaturally and hilariously right before their eyes.

In dark sunglasses, he sat at center stage, sating the dark appetite with Wallenda tales of empty sex with a pregnant Juarez hooker whose torso was marked with Caesarian scars, of flooding hotel rooms while cracked-out in Hong Kong, of hiding their beloved cocaine in his crotch on a humid day, then finding that his ball sweat had turned it to paste.

The nameless Everymook serving as interviewer mistook the mob for an audience and himself for James Lipton. An attempt to discuss the making of Wall Street triggered the first wave of heckling: "Boring! Boring! Boring!"

"Early showbiz memories, I imagine you have some pretty interesting stories over ..."

"Boring!"

"Anything in particular that stands out over the course of your showbiz ..."

"Boring!"

Mr. Sheen appealed to the mass mind's palsied centers of identity: They'd boo his failure to contract gonorrhea before them, and he'd win them back with shared hatred of all bosses. Back and forth it went, boring and predictable and sad.

Mr. Sheen appeared to believe that his father had once actually killed a man named Kurtz in the Philippines, that he himself had suffered for the national honor and interest in distant lands under Oliver Stone: "I survived the fucking jungles of Platoon."

"People wonder where all this shit came from," he said. "I watched hot chicks for years swoon over my pop. He always had cash in his pockets, and he was always surrounded by hot chicks: 'Let's see: Hot chicks, cash in his pockets. Fuck exploring the arts. Fuck finding my craft.'"

But here he confused what people pay to see with what they are paid to listen to: Radio City wanted real sickness, not forced-catharsis. Soon the aisles moved with early-exiters.

Finally came the Trotting Out of the Goddesses, the live-in concubines so essential to the Sheen legend.

"Whattup, New York!" said the Goddess whose air of deathliness suggested shoplifting and landfills.

"New York's my favorite city, love y'all!" said the Goddess whose air of doomedness suggested casual incest and fetal alcohol syndrome.

The y'all was the thing: This was no siren, they realized, no carnal wonder at all, only a hick who'd ridden a Greyhound to Hollywood. She was lower than even the holders of the cheapest tickets, and as such, according to the night's primate code, must be devoured.

The boos grew deafening, and talk turned to death proper.

The non-Lipton asked if the crowd would like to hear Mr. Sheen's Bucket List, and to the extent that 5,000 people can impatiently say, "Fine," they did.

Mr. Sheen said he wanted to drive a cab dressed like Travis Bickle, to take people far from where they wanted to go and not care, to crash into the stock exchange, evoking antisocial darkness insofar as a multimillionaire can.

But talk of death is no substitute for death itself. And Mr. Sheen's job was not to explore his own darkest appetites but to sate the mob's.

More boredom, more booing.

Then Mr. Sheen said that before dying, he'd like to perform on a Friday night at Radio City Music Hall, which, over the past 54 minutes, in the most marginal and half-hearted sense imaginable, he'd done.

With that, the sick man took the dark people's money, and was gone.

 editorial@observer.com

Back at Sarah Lawrence later that year, Ms. Roiphe drove alone--alone!--to the West End bar across from the gates of Columbia University at 114th and Broadway. Now a Havana Central, it was then the dive bar, one where Ginsberg and Kerouac had hung out just a few years before. So alone Ms. Roiphe went. "If you're 21 and you want to be a part of something and you're not and you don't know how to get there," she told The Observer, "you have to do something. You can't just wait."

"Were you going with friends or were you actually just going alone?" asked Ms. Roiphe's daughter, the 40-something cultural critic and novelist Katie Roiphe. The Observer was eating Saturday brunch with mother and daughter at Maialino in the Gramercy Park Hotel, a convenient meeting point between Anne's Riverside Drive apartment and her daughter's place in Brooklyn.

"I was going alone," said mother.

"I can't picture that as something I would do," said daughter. "Or have ever done in my life."

"Well, I can't say I did it constantly in my life. I did it that time."

"But you were meeting people you knew, kind of," Katie insisted.

"No!"

There Anne met--or re-met, to be precise--her future husband, Jack Richardson, an extremely eloquent--and we can now say failed--playwright. Night after night, she picked up his bar tab and drove him home to Queens. His late mother had told him to marry rich, and so in Paris the following summer, he married Anne, the woman who could pay for his Paris and for his prostitutes. When his nerves spun, he would sometimes lock himself in a closet and shake a hanger in front of his eyes for hours on end. Then he'd empty Anne's purse and go out on the town. Back in New York, living in a Park Avenue apartment purchased and appointed by Anne's mother, Anne gave birth to their daughter. His highly anticipated Broadway play, the bit of brilliance that was supposed to justify Anne's misery, came to the stage and flopped; he disappeared for weeks and then announced he was leaving for good. 

The challenges of single mothering turned Anne into a feminist, but one--it's clear from Fruitful, her searching 1997 melding of memoir and psychology--more interested in respect and equal opportunity than in joining the female factions seeking vengeance and forswearing their fertility. Anne didn't wear lipstick, which horrified her mother, but she had nice legs and knew it. She liked the male gaze. Remember that clenched closed gate? Throughout her 20s it swung open--partly out of loneliness, partly out of rebellion--to most of the New York literary giants who knocked. "The insanity about sex in the artist world was that every taboo should be broken. Find me a taboo and I'll rush toward it," Anne told The Observer. "The society was so controlling."

The increasingly delusional novelist and Paris Review founder Doc Humes, then a father of three, might ring up at any hour. Even as Anne watched him spin theories about the F.B.I., "it was," she writes, "the bulk of him I wanted: the way he seemed to know everything or maybe it was everyone." At the boozy Friday nights at George Plimpton's house, Anne might smile at Humes' wife. In 1963, or 1964, deep into one of these notorious nights, Anne writes, the novelist William Styron leaned over to her: "I want to go to bed with you, he says. Why not, I say. Why not anything." Mr. Plimpton made a similar overture in '64, and when he put his hands up her skirt in the taxi, she writes, she wasn't sorry. In the morning, Anne's oldest child, a toddler, crawled into bed and asked if Mr. Plimpton had a penis. What did Mom say? Let's look. After showering and carefully shaving, Mr. Plimpton said to Anne, "If I see you in a few years, I might have forgotten I slept with you." But at 75, Anne certainly hasn't.

It is said that certain amiable features are selected for domestication. Anne has all of them: button nose, wide eyes, round face. The amiability of her face--her appealing cuteness--probably helped get her into some trouble, and her slight regret is the bottom line of her new book. Never would she so readily say yes to being a fragile man's muse again. "Artists," she writes, "were permitted to do the unthinkable." Insanity was confused with art. But art is work, and it shouldn't be deified. The problem with worshiping stars on their way up is that any star with momentum is shooting toward its own oblivion--the bad review, the big mistake or simply the fact that fames go in and out of fashion.

"You do come out against this kind of madness in this book," Katie said. "But it might be necessary that the William Styron is gonna be also a crazy person."

"You know, I wouldn't come out against artists, or say, 'No, no, you shouldn't be slightly crazy,'" Anne said. "You should be whatever you are. ... My only point would be that the romanticizing of art and madness together can make for a lot of ... collateral pain. ... Frankly, I think it's bathing the baby that's much more important."

Katie wasn't the toddler who took a peep at Mr. Plimpton's penis. She's Anne's biological eldest from her 39-year-long marriage to the psychoanalyst Herman Roiphe, whose passing was the subject of Anne's 2008 memoir, Epilogue. Mr. Roiphe famously demonstrated that the psychosexual development of children began earlier than Freud supposed, and in 1985 he collaborated with Anne on Your Child's Mind, about a variety of issues, from the effects of divorce to toilet training.

Katie's parents' interests begot her own preoccupation with sex and power--namely, her thoughts that women and men should seize more of both while enjoying the costumes of their respective roles. When she was 23 and a Ph.D candidate in English at Princeton, she argued in The New York Times that women were at least partially responsible in instances of date rape, and in 1994, an expansion of that argument was published as The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism. In a 2007 essay for New York, "The Great Escape," she shared her relief at being divorced, attending parties single and dating new men. And in 2009 she charged contemporary male novelists with literary impotence on the cover of The New York Times Book Review. Her last book, Uncommon Arrangements, was about literary marriages in London between 1910 and 1939 and she is currently working on a book about how authors confront mortality. Her curiosity about her mother's 20s was the impetus for Art and Madness, to which she contributed the introduction.

The world really was very different in the 1950s. Consider periods: Those were shameful. When Anne first got hers, her mother slapped her. Now, on the other hand, "I know this with my daughter: If there was a menstrual spot on something, they said, 'Ugh, there's a menstrual spot.' Whereas--don't look so upset!" Anne said to Katie.

"I just think--"

"This is not a subject to discuss? I only mean that physical things, all physical things, were shameful: that you did have breasts, that you didn't have breasts--"

"I think you should spea
k for yourself," said Katie.

"I am sure. I am absolutely sure," Anne said. "This was the old way in which this culture treated physicality."

To go out without lipstick, Anne said, was like "walking outside without your shirt on. It made my mother furious." Now, Anne said, "a lot of people--Katie, including you--enjoy this again, which to me is such a sign of slavery!" (Matte red is all the rage.) What about marriage then? Fluid. Now? Penis pumps behind closed doors. Alcoholism then? "How interesting!" Anne said. Liquor, she thought, was the lube for words. Now? "Unhealthy," Katie said. Enemy of art then? All that was "bourgeois." Now? All that is "banker."

"Politically, communism was supposed to save the world. Look what happened to the gulags," Anne said. "It was very hard to believe in that saving hand of God, given what we're looking at. So, what is it that matters? It's art, and it's art for art's sake. And you don't say, 'What good is it, what's it going to do for the world?' You say, 'This carries everything that means anything to me.'"

"Maybe that was better!" Katie said.

"I'm not saying it was better or it was worse, but--"

"You are: You're saying it was worse."

"No, I'm not saying it was worse. I'm saying that was the way it was. I must say, I still feel that way, and I know that, to some extent, a lot of people of my generation still feel that way. Human nature is going to destroy anything that is made. That is obvious post-1945. ... Somebody might release the atomic bomb over our heads."

Art--the decision to make it or value it--was, in that way, inherently political, and its Village congregants wore a uniform: eyeliner, blue jeans and black leotard, holey sweaters and Fred Braun sandals. Fred Braun's store of leather T-straps was on Eighth Street. "Everybody had a pair," Anne said. And the Met Costume Institute has a pair on display now. "If I saw a woman [then] my age--we weren't women, we were girls--wearing blue jeans and a black shirt across the street, I would know exactly who she was and what was she doing there. And she would see me and recognize me. It wasn't so much a uniform as a social statement. And then I blinked and suddenly this beatnik style was the style."

"Tell her about the tour bus!" Katie said.

"I was walking in the Village," Anne said, "and a tour bus came up to the corner and the door opened, and there's a guy on the microphone and he says, 'AND THERE'S ONE NOW! STANDING ON THE CURB!'"

But the emphasis on art wasn't just the style; it was also the way of the academic institution. In all of Anne's English classes at the conservative Smith College and the arty Sarah Lawrence, where she transferred after her first year, every poem was interpreted as being about the importance of art. "A few years ago," Anne said, "I thought to myself, 'Is every Auden poem about the importance of art? Is every Yeats poem about the importance of art? Did T.S. Eliot really just write about the importance of art?'"

"I try to teach my students that!" Katie, who teaches classes with a literary flavor at the N.Y.U. journalism school, said.

But is there anything to be missed about the old admiration of genius?

"No," Anne said.

"She thinks no," Katie said. "But I think in the seriousness with which people took their reading and their art, there is something to be missed."

"You don't think people take the writing and the writers seriously?

"Not as seriously!" Katie said.

"I don't know," Anne said.

"The fantasy we have of the artist is," Katie says, "Sarah Jessica Parker in Sex and the City. ... It's the novelist who sells his screenplay to Hollywood."

But mother and daughter are in agreement about one thing: Mental state of artist then? Crazy. Now? Crazy. So does that make it daunting to know that both mother and daughter are artists? Craziness aside, is it daunting to be in the same field?

"I'm daunted by her," Anne said.

"No," Katie said. "It's like the family business."

The artists studios in Florence, Anne pointed out, were historically family-run. That was the family profession. "Those people were not crazy artists," Anne said. "It's when the artists come to be by themselves that they tend to be compromised."

Later that evening, The Observer attended the birthday party of a 27-year-old writer where a few people kept mentioning something compromising about Katie. At a book party in February for the memoirist Jon-Jon Goulian at the Wooly, across from City Hall, there was an open bar for two hours, and sometime during that period, Katie fell across the lap of a seated guest. At 9 p.m., after it became a cash bar, it is rumored that Katie puked all over someone's sweater and the table displaying the author's publicity materials. "Is this amateur hour?" said someone passing by the vomit-drenched table. Hey, it happens! "What is this, spring break 2009?" the person continued. No, it's a literary party 2011! "That's a lie," Katie said to The Observer. "Crazy rumors! I don't know how that got around."(It was the editor Lauren Bans who tweeted, "The world must know: Katie Roiphe barfed all over my friend's sweater at Jon Jon's [sic] book party at 9pm on a Wednesday.") But who cares whose puke it was. There was puke! At a literary party on a Wednesday night! Katie is living the literary life--one not so dissimilar from her mother's.

editorial@observer.com

"Coming from Germany where there's so much modern stuff happening," she said in gently accented English, her dark, wavy hair framing her face and falling over a T-shirt emblazoned with a big pink flamingo, "and seeing something so realistic, it takes me back to when I was a little girl going to the opera and just totally mesmerized by it. I remember coming to Lincoln Center when I was in high school, and this was like a different planet for me. Like, 'People sing here? They're so lucky.' And here I am."

The 31-year-old soprano is at City Opera rehearsing the role of Adina in Donizetti's classic comedy The Elixir of Love, which opens March 22. It's her return to the company after her triumph in Christopher Alden's production of Don Giovanni in 2009.

In that stylized production, the polar opposite of the lush Zeffirelli Bohème, Ms. Dovhan burned her way through the role of Donna Anna, singing and acting with passionate commitment. It didn't hurt that she looked gorgeous, with sensuous features and curves. She's part of a generation of singers well aware that their acting abilities and photogenic faces are almost as crucial as their voices. "Some people listen with their eyes," as she put it. "It's a fact of life."

This is Ms. Dovhan's breakout moment. For six years she's been a member of the small opera company in out-of-the-way Hagen, Germany, where she's gotten to do the big, varied parts she would have had to wait years for at larger houses or in a young-artists program. It's the old-fashioned, increasingly rare way of starting a career: getting her sea legs and honing her performances in a stable, supportive environment.

Hagen was the first job she ever auditioned for, and she's now leaving it behind for regular work at a bigger German company in Karlsruhe and the chance to try out the truly unmoored existence of a modern opera singer.

"I'm right now very eager to travel and see other countries and work with other people," she said. "I don't need to have a home right now. I'm ready to be freelance. The contract in Karlsruhe is very flexible, and they really want me to go out into the world and sing."

Ms. Dovhan was born in 1979, in Kyiv, Ukraine, into a creative family, but one devoted more to the visual arts than to music: Her mother is an art conservator, her grandfather a sculptor and her father a ceramicist. Her parents divorced when she was young, and when her mother married an American, they moved to the United States. Stefania attended the Baltimore School for the Arts and the University of Maryland, graduating in 2002, and in 2005 got the job in Hagen, where she's since spent almost all her time.

It won't be easy for Ms. Dovhan to leave that familial environment, where everyone knows everyone and she can host post-premiere parties in her kitchen. She's still learning to balance having stable relationships with the independence her schedule will soon demand. Things have been on-again, off-again with her boyfriend, a German engineering student she met at a dance party, but it's going well at the moment, and he'll be flying to New York for the Elixir premiere.

In Adina, she couldn't have chosen a more different character than the despondent Donna Anna. "Adina is supposed to be bossy," Ms. Dovhan said, "but inside of her, there is a true romantic and a woman who can love with a lot of passion. I'm enjoying doing the comedy because I've done a lot of tragedy. I get to be goofy and jump around a bit and laugh and move my body, so that's a lot of fun. And at the end, she opens up and you see what she really is, this warm, beautiful person."

Ms. Dovhan plays, in other words, the contemporary opera diva: a little imperious--she's got to keep up appearances, after all--but ultimately friendly, a sweetheart.

"To be a diva has this negative aura around it right now," she said. "I think when I'm onstage, I do need to be a diva, because that's what people want to see. You stand in a certain way, there's a certain confidence. It's freedom also: For me, a diva is a person who is not afraid to be funny or tragic. And why do people go to the opera? To experience emotions, to be moved."

She most admires fearlessly dramatic singers like Aprile Millo. "She's so honest," she said, "so true. There's selflessness. I mean, Callas, she was a diva, but she was selfless in her singing. She was giving it, giving truth. With someone like Renée Fleming, it's very beautiful but"--tapping her chest--"it sometimes doesn't go inside."

Ms. Dovhan is taking it slow, but with her rich voice and smoldering presence, she could follow in the footsteps of singers like Renata Scotto and gradually transition from lyric roles like Adina to the great roles of Puccini and Verdi. No matter what course it takes, hers is a career it will be a pleasure to watch grow.

"I love roles that have a lot of temperament in them," she said. "I love dramatic things. I would love to go in that direction. I'm not in a rush, and I'm enjoying very much singing Mozart and Donizetti. I'm lucky because I've never been offered anything outside of my capability. You hear a lot of singers say, 'Someone wants me to do Tosca.' I've always had a very gradual, step-by-step program. I did Giulio Cesare, then I did Adina, then I did Rigoletto, then I did Traviata. Every year is a building block to something bigger, bigger, bigger."

editorial@observer.com

At noon sharp, in the rectory next door, the Rev. Raymond Rafferty, the church's pastor, leaned forward, checked his watch and told The Observer gently, "Now, I really have to go." He had to prepare for the 12:10 Mass. The church holds services at least once daily during the week, and four times on Sunday. But the nave, which holds 400 people, is rarely full.

Once, Corpus Christi would have towered over the neighboring apartment buildings. But now it sits literally in the shadows of Columbia's Teachers' College across 121st Street, yet another totem of the university's swallowing of its upper Manhattan neighborhood.

Columbia, in fact, owns every building on both sides of the street, save for one co-op and the church. And several blocks to the northwest, the university is undertaking a massive 17-acre expansion into West Harlem that will inevitably mean years of demolitions and noisy construction. When it's finished, Columbia will have transformed an area once filled with auto mechanics and small manufacturers into a modern day "piazza," as its architect, the Italian Renzo Piano, describes it.

SLIDESHOW: E=MC Awesome: An Exclusive Look at Columbia's New Manhattanville Science Center

According to the most recent tax assessment rolls, provided by the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance and analyzed by The Observer, Columbia and N.Y.U. have amassed valuable properties rivaling the Catholic Church's long-held portfolio. The market value of city property owned by each of the three institutions appears to hover around $1.5 billion, based on the assessment rolls. The Catholic Church still claims a slight lead, but N.Y.U. and Columbia trail by only a couple of hundred million dollars each, and will almost certainly eclipse the church soon.

Though exact numbers are impossible to attain (the universities and the church own numerous properties under different registered names, and there are in total more than 11,000 registered property owners in the city), they clearly show that the gap has narrowed. Moreover, given the downward trends for membership in major religious organizations in the United States, time is on the universities' side.

New York City, which even a decade ago boasted a strong (and strongly religious) manufacturing working class, has rapidly become a wonkhub of nearly 600,000 post-high school students, according to the last census. The academic expansion in the city has come at the same time that the Catholic Church-once New York's largest private landlord and community presence-has confronted decline. In neighborhoods like Father Rafferty's, the role reversal is startling, with colleges starting to elbow out the church for space and influence. "New York is an intellectual city," said Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban planning at New York University (and an Observer contributor). "People want to study in New York. You have to recognize how much this has really changed."

While the Catholic Church, like other major religious organizations, struggles with declining resources and attendance, universities are scrambling to find room to grow. Father Rafferty, who before Corpus Christi was a New York University chaplain for almost a decade, smiles kindly when he talks about Columbia's reign over the neighborhood. "I understand the need for expansion," he said. "But you also need to think about the community you're expanding into."

He does not blame the university for any decline in church membership. "It's not their direct intention to cause that," Father Rafferty said. "Some of this is driven by society changing, and the failure of churches to evangelize, welcome newcomers, and scandals within the church."

For decades, Corpus Christi has, in fact, enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with its Ivy League neighbor. While a student at Columbia in the 1930s, for instance, Thomas Merton, later to become one of the 20th century's most famous Catholics as an author and lecturer, was baptized there, and young people still approach Father Rafferty asking to be christened after reading Merton's memoir, The Seven Storey Mountain. But starting in the '60s and '70s, partly because of its neighbor's growing population of students and faculty, Corpus Christi watched its membership drop (though it has climbed slightly in the past decade). Apartment buildings once filled with strongly Catholic Irish and Hispanic immigrants have become housing for undergrads and their TAs, who may or may not see the need for Catholic theology or organized religion in general.

The church still controls some of the city's most valuable real estate. Amid the anxious consumerism of Fifth Avenue, St. Patrick's Cathedral rises largely unchanged over the past 150 years. When the church bought this land in 1810, in what was then the countrified city limits, "People thought it was a folly," said Paul Moses, a journalism professor at Brooklyn College, who's reported on the Catholic Church for decades. But the church's understanding of demographics, its insight into the rhythms of birth, marriage and death in New York, was unmatched. The cathedral cost about $4 million to build, and now St. Patrick's, which is also the seat of the archbishop of New York, has more than $191 million in assets, making it one of the 150 biggest landowners on the city's assessment rolls.    

But even as the value of St. Patrick's and other church properties has skyrocketed, many other Catholic parishes are in dire financial straits. "The church is land-rich and cash-poor," said one person familiar with its holdings. "There is no question many of the properties are an economic drain." Many of the buildings should be demolished, the source added, but a lot still enjoy "prime, prime locations."

Though baptized Catholics still make up roughly 40 percent of the New York City population, according to researchers, church attendance is down locally 20 percent over the past decade (a challenge faced by many other mainstream Christian denominations), and the church has also faced diminishing enrollment in parochial schools. The archdiocese of New York, which includes Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island as well as several upstate counties, announced in 2007 that it would close two parishes and merge six with others-although a spokesman noted that the situation is ongoing and all are being used as worship sites.

The archdiocese also recently announced that 27 of 185 schools will close this year-the biggest reorganization in its history-including five schools that will close or merge in Manhattan. Since the closing of St. Vincent's in early 2010, no Catholic hospitals are left in any of the five boroughs.
"Within the church," Mr. Moses said, "there's a real effort being made to use real estate as an asset. They're facing such financial difficulties, and [real estate] will help them develop a solid financial base."

The decisions can be heartbreaking, and sometimes deeply divisive. Closing a school or church is "like a death," said Timothy King, a real estate agent at CPEX Realty, who has helped the church manage some of its assets. "The cardinal and bishop give a lot of prayerful consideration to all of these matters," he said, "to have an outcome that's going to assure the long-term benefit for everyone."

On Sunday, The Brooklyn Paper reported that the Brooklyn diocese, which includes Queens as well, called in three squad cars to oversee the last Mass at Our Lady of Montserrat in Bedford-Stuyvesant, which was closed, as scheduled, a day later. Its pastor, the Rev. Jim O'Shea, had vocally opposed the closing, backed by a number of parishioners. "It's a complete shame that instead of making an appearance and thanking the community, Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio sent the police in fear that people would protest because they know the truth behind the closure is political," one worshiper told The Paper.

Meanwhile, Bishop DiMarzio put out a statement saying he was "deeply aware of the sacrifice that these changes mean for those who worship in these churches."
Even after closing parishes or schools, the church usually chooses to hold on to its assets, sometimes leasing them to other institutions such as charter schools. The demographics could still change, and the church has also perhaps learned from the tragic example of St. Vincent's Hospital, a Village institution run by the Sisters of Charity that the church sold off ward by ward until it was forced to close the entire hospital. A plan by the hospital and developer Rudin Management to build condos that would help support St. Vincent's buckled under community opposition.

As the case of St. Vincent's illustrates, finding new uses for the buildings is also not easy: What good is a church as anything other than a church? "Unless at some point we're in need of a leper colony, prison or mental asylum," a source said, the buildings are "functionally obsolete."

The church's decline affects us all. For nearly a century, religious institutions stood between many New Yorkers and desperation. "The church was extremely important in helping in the rebuilding of New York City," said former mayor Ed Koch, who recognized early on in his political career the importance of reaching out to Catholic voters, especially the so-called white ethnic ones in the outer boroughs. "And it remains extremely important in delivering services. The Catholic Church is No. 1 in the delivery of social services, better than what the civil service can do."  

As N.Y.U. and Columbia rise to dominance, will their presence be as benign?

The universities have both embarked on their biggest expansion plans in over 100 years, and their respective neighborhoods' opposition has been closely chronicled. N.Y.U plans to grow its campus by more than 40 percent, adding 3 million-plus square feet in Greenwich Village, an engineering school in Brooklyn and a satellite campus on Governors Island. The main campus of the school-at more than 22,000 undergraduates, the largest private college in the U.S.-is already situated in one of the most densely populated areas of the city.
Stone churches once rose a couple of stories above their neighbors; N.Y.U. plans to build space equaling the Empire State Building in Greenwich Village, which critics say will dwarf its surroundings.

Columbia has also announced a $6.3 billion expansion plan that will add 6.8 million square feet of additional classrooms and other facilities, including the 17-acre West Harlem campus. The new campus will almost certainly drive up property values and make it more difficult for members of the working-class neighborhood to continue living there. Some clergy have raised objections that the plans do not include affordable housing on the site of the campus.

Even as Columbia grows and the church's influence wanes, it is hardly a neatly plotted story of the university triumphing at the expense of the church. It's more like two stories running parallel in the same setting. Columbia even met with local clergy when beginning its expansion efforts nearly a decade ago, but it did not go well: Some clergy stopped attending. "The situation has been compared to David and Goliath," said the Rev. Earl Kooperkamp of St. Mary's Episcopal Church on 126th Street and Amsterdam. "All David had to do was take Goliath off the field. ... How do you get Goliath to sit down, make peace and be a good neighbor?"

New Yorkers will have to make peace with the new Goliaths rising in their midst. Universities and colleges already control more than 22 percent of office space in New York City, according to Cassidy Turley, including 72 million square feet in Manhattan. Columbia's holdings totaled 19.6 million square feet, and N.Y.U. owns 15 million feet, according to the report. "These universities have become powerhouses financially," Mr. Moses, the journalism professor at Brooklyn College, said. "The churches don't seem to command that kind of influence. They're begging foundations to keep their schools alive.

"You are talking about money," he added. "Universities have lots of money and the churches don't."

The question remains: Can universities step in to fill the gap left by a declining church, providing education, hospitals and a sense of community, given the relentless hustle in this city?

"Universities help add to the city's quality of life," Mr. Moss, of N.Y.U., said. "Within the university, you have seminars, theater groups, lectures. They become an important part of the city's fabric."

Much like the role the Catholic Church once filled? "Yes, exactly like that."

But when The Observer floated the same idea to the Rev. Thomas Shelley, a professor of Catholic history at Fordham, he laughed gently. "The main business of the church is religion," he said. "Universities don't do that and aren't expected to do it."  

lkusisto@observer.com

According to founder Dennis Crowley, users are already uploading close to one photo every second, and that's not even counting the Android users who will start taking photos today.

As Mark Zuckerberg has discussed, and as the success of apps like Instagram and PicPlz have demonstrated, photos are really the killer app when it comes to social on the web. 

The big question is how Foursquare will deal with this surge in data intensive activity by its users. The site had an major outage back in October, which Crowley attributed to "too many check ins". 

For the next year at least, Foursquare plans to stay focused on growth, not profit. These new features should supercharge user adoption, and hopefully the site can stay one step ahead of this growth and avoid lengthy downtime. 

UPDATE: Dens replies to our concerns about the traffic spike from photos and comments - 

Check Out The Brooklyn Super Nerds Who Accidently Invited All Of Foursquare To Their NYE Party >>

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper