Coach Vivian Stringer

A picture of Coach Vivian Stringer hangs high in the Rutgers basketball arena, the only face in the RAC rafters, looming near the ceiling like some stained-glass window of a saint in a church. It adorns a banner honoring her 2009 induction into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in a class that included Michael Jordan—and his infamous, testy acceptance speech. But like MJ, this saint has a potty mouth. And the shiny wood floor below has reflected fewer smiles from that flesh-and-blood face on the sidelines this season.

Saturday afternoon, Ms. Stringer will try for the fourth time for her 900^th victory when her Lady Knights visit St. John’s. With a record of 5-7 in the Big East and 14-11 overall, this highly accomplished and much-acclaimed coach is enduring her annus horribilis.

Earlier this season, her Lady Knights stunned their fans by losing to both Seton Hall and Princeton, an unthinkable embarrassment that Jersey outsiders might not fully grasp (imagine losing to your kid sister on a backyard hoop—on television, in your underpants). Her team might not make the N.C.A.A. tournament for the first time since 2002 and the tension is showing.

In a recent outburst strident even by Ms. Stringer’s stinging standards, she criticized the skills of her players, disparaged the success of other sports on campus and seemed to challenge Athletic Director Tim Pernetti for a vote of confidence that did not come. She also called some critical fans “crazies.”

Black History month and the impending milestone should have made this February a triumphant time for Ms. Stringer, the working personification of success, a soon-to-be 65-year-old survivor raised in an era when coaching opportunities were not easily available for blacks and women and girls played a limited-zoned game of six-player teams with less running. And yet...

“It’s not supposed to be like this,” Ms. Stringer said late last week after a practice. “I want to sigh.”  As she said it, she released a long, slow breath, as if forcing herself to try to relax.

Only six other Division I coaches, people like Bobby Knight and Pat Summitt, have crossed the 900-win threshold. But Rutgers home crowds have fallen to below 2,000, on average, less than half of what they used to be when Ms. Stringer took her team as far as the 2007 national championship game.

At a Feb. 8 news conference, a question about her critics ignited the bitter rant.

“If I fall to these crazies—and that’s what I say they are—then I’m losing my mind,” Ms. Stringer said.  “That’s how people are: What have you done for me lately?” And she said much more.

Eight days after her diatribe, Mr. Pernetti spoke with Ms. Stringer at length by the team bench before a defeat against Connecticut at home. After dodging reporters for more than a week, Mr. Pernetti was persuaded to do a brief presser at halftime.

He acknowledged that he called Ms. Stringer on the phone the day after her outburst.

“It was a good, productive discussion and we’ll leave it at that,” Mr. Pernetti said. Hardly a ringing endorsement of his coach, and Mr. Pernetti was asked to assess the women’s basketball program overall.

“I don’t want to talk about the program until the season is over,” he said.

What about Ms. Stringer’s desire for a contract extension?

“I’m not having a discussion about contracts,” Mr. Pernetti said, referring to the media, adding only that contract dialogue with Ms. Stringer’s advisers has been “ongoing for an extended period of time.”

At slightly more than $1 million per year, she is said to be New Jersey’s highest-paid state employee, something frequently mentioned in the Star-Ledger. Speaking to the newspaper before Ms. Stringer’s harsh words, Mr. Pernetti said: “Vivian has built a national program and that’s what we expect—a national champion.”

When asked last week if the situation with Ms. Stringer is “sensitive or delicate,” Mr. Pernetti played dumb and said he didn’t understand the question. Perhaps comprehending the overall situation most clearly was Geno Ariemma, the legendary UConn coach.

“Coaches are human, they are subject to the same frustrations and disappointments as anyone else,” Mr. Auriemma said. “I’m sure what ‘C. Viv’ said was out of frustration. She’s usually very good at keeping everything in perspective.”

One perspective shows the loss to Connecticut was the 10^th straight for Rutgers in what used to be one of the great rivalries in women’s college basketball.

Ms. Stringer—speaking of the 900-win milestone as just that—said: “I’ll be glad to get it over. I can’t even begin to share with you the stress. I don’t even want my sister to talk about it.”

One account of her verbal explosion early this month reported that Ms. Stringer clapped her hands twice for emphasis while shouting at reporters, “We’ve got people who cannot dribble to the left or to the right.”

She broke out the cuss words and even tried deflection, emphasizing how the football team has not won a championship while she has been successful at Rutgers.

“This program has been the star of this university in athletics for the past 15 years,” Mrs. Stringer said of her basketball team.

Her boss, Mr. Pernetti, is a 42-year-old former Rutgers football player who is finishing his fourth year as athletic director as the university turns toward football with an expanded stadium and a move to the Big Ten.

“Pernetti needs to be who he is supposed to be,” Ms. Stringer said. “Step up. Declare who you are. I don’t care about anybody else . . . And he knows—he should know—what time it is, and he does.”

Ms. Stringer has a flair for the melodramatic and hyperbolic, which you may have picked up on, but it’s often with good reason. She has compared herself to Sisyphus, the king in Greek mythology who was doomed to push a big boulder up a hill, only to have it fall back to renew the struggle.

Such a moment hit like a metaphoric meteor in Ms. Stringer’s best-remembered and most contentious moment in the spotlight, after she took her 2007 team to the NCAA championship game but lost, 59-46, to Tennessee.

It was her second Final Four team at Rutgers after one each from Cheyney State and Iowa before she moved to Rutgers in 1995.

But even before the 2007 players returned to campus, New York-based radio host Don Imus described them the next morning as “nappy-headed hos,” a concise blend of racism and sexism that got Mr. Imus fired by WFAN and Ms. Stringer mad.

“I couldn’t help but wonder if the fact that I was black had made our team seem blacker and therefore more open to ridicule and hatred,” Ms. Stringer wrote in her memoir, Standing Tall.

Ms. Stringer and her players landed on Oprah and Mr. Imus soon landed at WABC, where he provides a comic edge and lots of Fox News guests to the Right Wing Entertainment complex that dominates that powerful spot on the dial.

Ms. Stringer felt that Mr. Imus robbed her players of the praise they had earned and wrote in her book that his words were “vile, venomous, sexist, racist and hurtful . . . those words had stirred up a lot of old, unresolved feelings.”

Ms. Stringer rebounded with a season of 27-7 and an NCAA regional final; the next season slipped to 21-13 and three games deep into the tournament. And in the three seasons since, Ms. Stringer’s teams have won just one of four NCAA tournament games.

Just trying to make the tourney this season is the latest of her public struggles that began when she was a high-school student from Edenborn, in Western Pennsylvania, in 1964.

With the backing of the NAACP, she protested to the school board that her exclusion from the cheerleading squad was based on race. She won her case.

However, in her Hall of Fame acceptance speech, Ms. Stringer insisted she’s really not one for pom-poms and jazz fingers. “I’m not a cheerleader,” she said. “You know, ‘2-4-6-8, who do we appreciate?’ That’s not my thing.”

Aside from the fight against racial discrimination, she had a personal motive to battle the school board: so she would stand near the sidelines and tell the boys how to play.

“I would say, you know, ‘Make that extra pass!’” she recalled. “’Don’t you see guys free underneath?”

As a freshman at Slippery Rock, C. Vivian Stoner—her name then—met the love of her life, Bill Stringer. They married and had three children but their infant daughter, Nina, turned out to have spinal meningitis and would need constant care.

The next challenge came when her husband died of a heart attack on Thankgiving of 1992.  Her oldest son, David, a football player, was peripherally involved in a shooting by someone else at North Carolina State in 1998 that left a man dead.

Her younger son, Justin, suffered but recovered from a brain injury in a serious car crash in 2000. Her book, a lively read, recounts all of this and much more and makes it clear that she remembers every slight, every hurt. She writes and talks often of how much she cries and of “earth angels” who buoy her. She speaks of miracles and omens. She is a breast cancer survivor.

Ms. Stringer has deep brown eyes that lock in while she talks or listens. Sometimes, she speaks in a stream-of-consciousness with free association. When angry, these statements can exceed 30 minutes. But most people in her presence pick up her personal charisma.

With long, flowing hair, well-tailored suits and tasteful jewelry, Ms. Stringer exudes the energy and style of a much younger person. “I like spunky people,” she said. She follows political news and opinion shows on cable TV because “Life is kind of boring if you don’t have an opinion.”

And she has many. Ms. Stringer said a Republican woman in Iowa recently suggested

Ms. Stringer run for office there. “I’ve thought about it,” Ms. Stringer said, of politics in general. Had she not coached, Ms. Stringer said, “I would’ve been a lawyer. I’d’ve taken care of the poor people.”

But her tongue might be a bit too tart for political correctness. After the Connecticut game, discussing her shorter players, Ms. Stringer said: “No disrespect to midgets, we call our little people ‘midgets.’” Think Maxine Waters with a dash of Joe Biden.

A better comparison might be with her future peers in the 900 Club of Division 1 coaches. There are only six in history, a sign of how elite a club it is. The retired Ms. Summitt leads all with 1,098. The other women are Silvia Hatchell of North Carolina, at 902 and counting, and the retired Jody Conradt of Texas, at exactly 900.

The men are Mike Krzyekwiski of Duke at 950 as of Thursday afternoon and Jim Boeheim of Syracuse at 912, both still active. The retired Mr. Knight won 902.

In the past, in a different context, Ms. Stringer once said: “It’s one thing when you are hunting it’s another thing when you are hunted.” Perhaps now she feels a bit of both.

Twin peaks. (Jason Barr)

Among the reasons New York has the finest skyline in the world—consider that a statement of fact, not opinion—is not simply the skyscrapers bounding up the island of Manhattan but also their unusual arrangement. Like a great mountain range, the city is arrayed around the twin peaks of Downtown and Midtown.

Perhaps the appeal is Freudian.

It has long been believed that New Yorkers could thank God for their unusual agglomeration of buildings (or, for those on the Upper West Side not believing in His good work, eons of geological development). It turns out that Manhattan has a bedrock unusually suited to the construction of very tall buildings, in many cases just a few meters below the surface. But that solid land drops away in the gooey middle of the island, long limiting the heights of buildings in the city.

Or so the aphocraphists have been passing down for decades, at least since noted geologist Christopher J. Schuberth released his seminal The Geology of New York City and Environs in 1968. Therein, he posited his belief in a correlation between bedrock and big buildings, and like the Empire State Building, it has stood the test of time. But like a bad retaining wall, it all came tumbling down last month.

“Everybody is looking at this backwards,” Jason Barr, an economics professor at Rutgers, told The Observer in a phone interview. “It’s not an issue of supply, of where you can build. It’s an issue of demand, or where you want to build.”

Location of Manhattan skyscraper, 1890-1915.

Mr. Barr, along with two colleagues from Fordham, published a study in December issue of The Journal of Economic History debunking what he calls the Manhattan bedrock myth. Using 173 random core samples from the Battery to Central Park South, Mr. Barr, Troy Tassier and Rossen Trendafilov were able to show that there was no correlation between the depth of bedrock and the likelihood of a skyscrapers construction—in the case of their study, a building at or above 18 stories, which was tall for the time when the city’s two business districts developed between 1890 and 1915.

What the economists found was that some of the tallest buildings of their day were built around City Hall, where the bedrock reaches its deepest point in the city, about 45 meters down, between there and Canal Street, at which point the bedrock begins to rise again toward the middle of the island. Indeed, Joseph Pullitzer built his record-setting New York World Building, a 349-foot colossus, at 99 Park Row, near the nadir, as did Frank Woolworth a decade later.

By studying historical construction data, the researchers were also able to determine that at the extreme, the most a deep bedrock could add to the costs of a building is about 7 percent, and therefore negligible when it comes to the economics of construction. “Compared to the cost of land in Manhattan, that amount is miniscule,” Mr. Barr said.

Probability of skyscraper locations.

Mr. Barr has carved out a niche as a skyscraper economist, studying issues such as the economic determinants of a skyscraper’s height in Manhattan—often bigger than they should be—and whether the world’s tallest buildings can be used to predict a coming economic calamity. “These things tend to get built, and then people go looking for the crisis,” Mr. Barr.

Growing up on Long Island in the 1970s, Mr. Barr said he used to be scared of the big city, but after he started hanging out here on weekends, coming down from Cornell to visit a friend at Columbia, he fell in love. Still, he stumbled onto his specialty the way most of his colleagues do. “As an economist, you’re trained to seek out unusual data sets," Mr. Barr said. "No one else was really doing this, so I decided to.”

So why the Midtown migration? Like cavemen following mammoth across the Bering Strait, early developers were following their prey. “Who’s moving north?” Mr. Barr said. “It’s the wealthy and the middle class. If you’re an insurance salesman, do you really want to be traipsing through the slums of Five Points or the factories of Soho to get to work? That land was cheap, but the location was worthless.”

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Deen, who is simultaneously something of an unlikely gay icon and a heroine to Bible-Belt housewives, tackled the issue at her 'Down Home Cookin' Gospel Brunch yesterday in New York. The densely crowded event at the Plaza Hotel featured inspirational talk, spiritual songs and an elaborate church-supper-like theme.

"I definitely have my thoughts on this. These people at Rutgers were cruel, and I think they should be charged," the Food TV personality told The Observer. While their student status may seem to mark them as children, she said, "these were adults. You don't treat your fellow man that way."

So far, the  two Rutgers freshman who allegedly filmed a classmate in his dorm room having sex with a man and then posted it to the Internet have been charged only with invasion of privacy.

Deen's brunch was one of the final events of the third annual New York Wine & Food Festival. Deen and organizers announced at the brunch that the four-day event raised about $1 million for charities Share Our Strength and the Food Bank for New York City.

In a moment of Carl Paladino, Mel Gibson and Tea Party madness, we are living in angry times. A patron outside a Brooklyn bar last week kills a man whose little dog is tied too close to his little dog. An 82-year-old theater producer on the Queen Mary 2 doesn't like being told by a man at her dinner table to shut up or to hear him say there are too many Jews onboard, so she tells him to fuck himself and ends up locked in her cabin. "She tends to get belligerent," a passenger told the Post.

Last week, demonstrators angry about a gay student's suicide at Rutgers (where, ironically, a Civility Project for teaching courtesy and respect was in progress) had to be physically separated from other students. This week, anti-gay attacks were reported in Chelsea and the West Village. Congress is a war zone. Anti-Muslim militias are on the rise around the country. Sarah Palin is, too, of course, and likens herself and her fans to fiercely protective "mama grizzlies."

Never mind that she doesn't say what's actually threatening her children. The anger gives everyone a reason to get worked up and bare some teeth. YouTube is a national archive of celebrity tantrums and meltdown, from Bill O'Reilly to Christian Bale and Michael Cera.

You'd think that in an age when everything can go viral, the famous would practice some self-control. Yet rage seems to work for all the cable pundits these days. The angrier you are on a reality show, the higher your ratings, even if you're Gordon Ramsay and your vitriol has been linked to two suicides.

So where is all this anger coming from? It could be the economy, or perhaps it's the tinderbox of the world right now. Yelling gives people a voice and a sense of control, even when they have none. Thomas Friedman of The Times suggests the Tea Party is more a tea kettle because it's about spouting off steam more than anything else. If not blood, people want revenge. Perhaps that's why Angry Birds, which gives power to the injured and wingless, has become such a popular video game right now. It recently inspired a Times Magazine columnist to gleefully declare, "I hate everything!"

I'm only slightly more selective than that in my hatred.

Let's see. Street fairs that give nothing back to the city but traffic jams and fried dough. Idling Fresh Direct trucks blocking streets in Manhattan, where markets and gourmet shops are within walking distance. Texting pedestrians you have to step around on sidewalks. The ones coming at you with umbrellas. Loudmouth parties at expensive restaurants. Impossibly arrogant doormen like the ones at the Rose Bar at the Gramercy Park Hotel. Slow drivers in the left lane.

And, of course, the criminally inept. The other day, after my Long Island Railroad train was canceled, the next train to arrive an hour later was listed on the wrong track. I missed it and ended up delayed two hours.

I complained to a station employee. Instead of being defensive, she was apologetic and conciliatory. It didn't get me home on time, but it made me feel better.

It also made me think that there's hope, even in these mad-as-hell times.

Look at Pete Rouse, Rahm Emanuel's successor. He's known for his gentle cool, not his bluster. "He puts out fires," Tom Daschle told The Times. "He reduces friction."

But does he hold doors open for people without expecting a thank-you?