Best. Staycation. EVER!

If the word “staycation” (“staying home” + “vacation”) were a person? By now it would probably be a chalk-outlined stain and peculiar odor on the doorstep of a NYC apartment building where the neighbors didn’t see or hear nothing. And if you happen to be one of the 36% of New Yorkers forced to postpone or cancel this summer's travel plans due to high gas prices and the weak dollar, I wouldn't be surprised if the suspicious stain trail lead straight from the crime scene right to your NYC apartment door.

But even if it was you who bumped off that cutesy term for “summer of suck”, Americans work longer hours (New Yorkers, the longest) and get far fewer vacation days than the citizens of any other industrialized nation. What jury of your peers would convict you of lexi-cide?

So maybe there never was a word more lucky not to be a person than “staycation.” But then just maybe, there never was a person luckier to be a “staycationer” than you. See, all you had to do was fall out of bed in your NYC apartment, and you’ve already landed in the Number One Vacation destination in the US! Sure people are falling out of bed in Orlando and Las Vegas, but since last year, they’ve been landing in Number Two (or Three, whatever that is).

Yep, in 2007, New York City beat out the Mouse and the House for the top spot and NYC will probably eat both cities' Velveeta this year as well. With an estimated 12.5 million fanny-packers swarming our shores this summer alone, even New Yorkers who left Manhattan apartments to live in Brooklyn apartments and to be smug about things like the tourists in Manhattan can no longer escape the slow-walking hoards. It's important to remember however, not matter what neighborhood you live in that the tourists will eventually go home, leaving billions of their dollars behind in our fair city...

Still, most New Yorkers would prefer a refreshing water-boarding to staycationing with record numbers of tourists in their neighborhoods. We've all been there: the minute you step outside of your Brooklyn condo and you are cursed in a foreign tongue by a family in matching track suits who don't believe you don't know where Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. is. Nevermind they almost punched you in the face when carelessly unfurling their map in the middle of a busy sidewalk... But remember, they're off to Times Square tourist traps, but not you.

Nope, you're clever enough to find an NYC apartment, so you're clever enough to find fun stuff on NYC's funkier To-Do lists like Flavorpill and FreeNYC, social sites like Yelp, MetroMix, and Going, and even off-the-beaten-path day trips in NYC, upstate NY, New Jersey, and Connecticut. And, the city estimates that the local economy will take in an additional $1,365,000 for every 1000 New Yorkers who take a one-week stacation.

REAL WORLD, RED HOOK: Let the Shooting Begin!

Few NYC apartment dwellers can probably recollect being more nostalgic for the “bad old days” of the violence- and vice-ridden Brooklyn waterfront than when they heard MTV would be installing the The Real World’s ragtag cast of equal opportunity racist, sexist, and homophobic moppets in a renovated luxury apartment on Red Hook’s Pier 41. But walling off the drunken twenty-somethings in a relatively isolated NYC neighborhood and on a concrete slab jutting a hundred feet into the East River, is also acceptable—though less sporting—than seeing how they would fare as the most dangerous game of all.

Back in May, when MTV announced that the 21st season of The Real World’s cast would be unleashing their “meaningful conflict and powerful stories” upon an unspecified Brooklyn neighborhood, the ever-frisky Brooklyn blog-o-sphere just about seized from a heady mixture of joy, contempt, and sweet, sweet speculation. Executive producer, Jim Johnston tells the Times:

“Generally we don’t like to announce where we are. We like to work in complete anonymity when we can.”

The Smart Money had Williamsburg, where the neighborhood’s population of skinny-jeaned hipsters celebrate their own "meaningful conflicts" and "powerful stories" every day in the unending, unflatteringly edited episode of The Real World that is their real world. But the Smart Money would have lost. Like most NYC apartment hunters, however, not even MTV probably could have predicted exactly where they'd finally end up.

The first Brooklyn apartment show producers contracted for was a two-story, five bedroom, 6,000-square-foot penthouse in the 27-story art deco-style BellTel Lofts in Downtown Brooklyn. MTV’s Remote Control Blog refers to BelTel’s Downtown location as their “original Fort Green-ish digs,” but according to the Times, BelTel is Downtown, Old Skool:

“Not near downtown, like Brooklyn Heights, but downtown-downtown, hard by the state and federal courthouses, the city’s emergency-response command center and the rows of barber shops, check-cashing services, fast-food joints and vendors selling counterfeit DVDs, religious statues and floor soaps that promise to remove jinxes.”

But a spokesman for BellTel Lofts tells the Times that MTV can help rescue Downtown Brooklyn from all that:

“It’s a chance to market the kind of MTV lifestyle to people who want to live like this. People have a chance to live an MTV lifestyle. People who buy apartments in the building. We think this building will continue to gentrify Brooklyn, and certainly having MTV there will only accelerate that. We expect that it will increase property values.”

MTV lifestyle, indeed… According to the Brooklyn Paper, other than the addition of a Jacuzzi, many of the major renovations planned for the $6 million dollar Brooklyn apartment were intended to prevent cast members from interacting with and irritating the 100 families who already call BellTel home, such as a separate elevator for accessing their retro-fitted aerie.

But then came word from the Brownstoner that BellTel was unable to complete the necessary renovations on the duplex penthouse in time for cast members to move in and to begin shooting the show by mid-August, and later that day, the Real Deal reported that MTV packed up all of it’s film equipment and moved it to 116 Third Place, a beautiful, six-floor, five-unit brick building on a quiet leafy street in Carroll Gardens. According to Curbed:

“The real question is: will cranky Carroll Gardens residents greet Real World with pitchforks & torches if they try to set up shop on one of their quiet ‘place streets’?”

Yeeesss. Yes, they would.

And so, Children, under threat of fork and fire, the cast members of The Real World: Brooklyn now find themselves out on Pier 41 in Red Hook. And while most renters and buyers would be happy to find themselves in a luxury Brooklyn apartment in Red Hook at the end of the exhaustive NYC apartment search, it might be a little tough on our seven Real World exhibitionists. In their new palatial but isolated digs, only Ikea and the camera crew will hear them drunkenly scream about hook-ups in real time. Everyone else will have to wait for the 13 cruelly edited episodes that will begin airing in January, 2009.

Better the Thermometer Than the RENT-O-Meter!

Yep, a New York City heat wave’s truly amazing ability to turn all forms of matter—animal, vegetable, mineral, gaseous (I’m looking right at YOU, gaseous!)—sticky, stinky, and angry should have earned it an honorary Law of Thermodynamics all its own by now. But until that day when every physics textbook is rewritten, only those who’ve experienced soaring temperatures in virtually any NYC neighborhood really get what the Lovin Spoonful meant when they sang:

Hot town, summer in the city
Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty
Been down, isn't it a pity
Doesn't seem to be a shadow in the city

All around, people looking half dead
Walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head

The good news is that heat waves are only a few days out of the year—not so the monthly rent you agree to pay when you sign a lease on an apartment. So how do you know whether the amount of rent you’re locking into for a year or more is the dollar equivalent of an NYC heat wave? According to the New York Sun—the newspaper, not the gaseous fireball that has unleashed its brutal wrath on NYC this week—just consult the Rentometer.

To see how the rent you are being charged for your studio, one-bedroom, or multi-bedroom apartment compares to what your neighbors are paying for similar apartments in similar buildings, just enter your address, apartment size, number of units in your building, and voilá! The Rentometer will read low, median, or high.

Keep in mind, however, that while the Rentometer bases its readings on actual rents being charged in any NYC neighborhood you enter, it’s still a fairly blunt instrument. For example, the Rentometer doesn’t consider whether or not an apartment is in a doorman building, has appliances and luxury amenities or if it has bullet holes, rat turds, and free-standing toilet in the kitchen.

The Rentometer also cannot gauge what you might personally value in an apartment, so if that free-standing toilet in the kitchen is your one must-have, than you might be happy to pay way over the neighborhood's average rent for the comfort and convenience of washing dishes while you pee (at least happier than your dinner guests will be). Also, rent stabilized and controlled apartments in many neighborhoods may skew the median far below market rate for newly rented, renovated apartments.

The Rentometer is brought to you by Rentomatic.com, a company designed to bring greater transparency to navigating the real estate market for renters and buyers as well as landlords and sellers. Rentomatic also offers services—not all of which are available in NYC yet—designed to facilitate communication, financial transactions, and “feeling the love” between tenants and landlords. It’s a San Francisco-based company so we’ll have to let that last one slide…

Still sticky? Stinky?! ANGRY?! Hang in there! Here's more of the Lovin Spoonful for you:

Cool town, evening in the city
Dressing so fine and looking so pretty
Cool cat, looking for a kitty
Gonna look in every corner of the city
Till I'm wheezing like a bus stop
Running up the stairs, gonna meet you on the rooftop

But at night it's a different world
Go out and find a girl
Come-on come-on and dance all night
Despite the heat it'll be alright

Lyrics: The Lovin Spoonful, “Summer in the City” (1966)
Image: NASA, Multiple solar flares on the surface of the sun

Noise Will Be Noise!

Jonathan Prager is a funny guy—“ha-ha” and “strange.” A professional comedian and singer, Prager admits to the New York Times:

“I’m sensitive to noise, emotions, electromagnetic vibrations. You name it, I’m sensitive to it.”

And while navigating the NYC real estate market is never easy, and any single horse in Prager’s personal trifecta of pathos could make finding the downtown Manhattan apartment he sought tough, you'd reckon the severity of his noise allergy would make living in almost any NYC neighborhood an unending nightmare of acoustical anaphylactic shock. He tells the Times:

“[Y]ou know how they use [white noise machines] in therapists’ offices? I have to ask the therapist to turn them off, along with their computers — there’s a little fan inside most computers that goes on and that’s annoying — and their air-conditioners. And then I can’t concentrate because there is always construction noise. […]

"Music playing in the house or a car makes me agitated. […] I have to leave the house if my girlfriend blow-dries her hair.”

Sorry, Ladies, apparently he's off the market. For now.

But professional soundproofers hardly need to rely on such rare acoustic canaries as Prager who insist on living in the noisiest coal mines in New York to keep eggs on their tables. The soundproofing biz is ka-booming. Even seasoned New Yorkers who know to expect a certain amount of noise and/or can easily adapt to different sounds in the urban environment have their limits. And once that threshold—be it high or low—is breached, acoustic engineer Anthony Grimani tells the Times, anxiety sets in:

“You hear something, and flight or fight kicks in and you wonder what or who is creeping up behind you. You think, ‘Is it going to eat me, should I run?’

Eat you! I vote for "eat you!" Don't run, you big baby.

"Sound is putting you in an evaluating condition all the time, and I would say that’s no way to live.”

Noise issues don't seem to dampen the blazing NYC real estate market very much, but trends in the NYC real estate market can help to explain the increase in noise around town. The incessant demand for housing has brought major construction sites and renovation and conversion projects into otherwise quiet residential neighborhoods. The Department of Environmental Protection enacted a new stricter noise code for construction projects in July of 2007, but no one can seriously expect any power tool in the pneumatic family to suddenly become neighborly. [I'm looking at you, Jackhammer—grrrrr!]

The good news is, the Times reports in another article on noise in the city, that the intrusion of construction and most other noises from the street—car horns, sirens, garbage trucks, voices, etc.—can be reduced by 95% by the installing laminated windows.

Another trend in NYC real estate that has affected noise polution in the city is the increasing number of families with small children who are moving to NYC in general, but who are seeking out "quieter" neighborhoods in specific and effectively destroying the peace of other residents with the thudding racket of little feet, the clatter of hurled toys, boo-boo-related screeches, and the ever-popular combo package: the temper tantrum. Complaints of child-related noise have even eclipsed complaints related to music in recent years.

For parents averse to incurring the resentment of their neighbors—although that wouldn't be an accurate description of any of the parents interviewed for the Times article that reported on the child-noise trend—the Times also published this related article on how parents can minimize the transfer of the clamor of their little darlings' good times to their neighbors' bedrooms and private spaces.

But fear not! There are lots of fixes for noise issues in any of the articles linked to above, but here's yet another Times article with excellent suggestions on how to avoid a noisy apartment, condo, co-op, or brownstone in any NYC neighborhood to begin with!


The Dream of Absolute Quiet [NYT]
The Noise Children Make [NYT]
Laminated Windows Keep Out the Din [NYT]
Getting a Handle on Apartment Noise [NYT]
A Place to Play the Piano Forte [NYT]
Checking Out the Noise Level [NYT]

New York City Summertime Festival-Fest!

If you’re relocating to New York City for the first time or simply moving from one NYC neighborhood to another, you might find yourself wondering whether you will be leaving the good times behind you forever…

But fear not! You can’t throw a rock in any NYC neighborhood without having an even bigger rock hurled right back at you! And, if that’s not your idea of a good time, then you’ll be glad to know that you are highly likely to have hit a festival of the fun variety with that initial pebble you lobbed, so follow that "ping". While this is true year round, summertime in NYC is especially one big, non-stop festival-fest and fun-fair.

So while your apartment hunt might sometimes be a drag, there's nothing in the NYC real estate play book that says you can't check out different boroughs and 'hoods when they are at their most festive. Here is a teeny-weeny fraction of some of the fêtes going on this summer:

MANHATTAN
Downtown NYC River to River Festival, May 28 to September 15
World class performing arts festival with free performances throughout lower Manhattan.

New York Shakespeare Festival/Plays in the Park, May 27 to August 31
Pack the right picnic, blanket, friends, and waiting in line for tickets in Central Park is half the fun.

New York International Fringe Festival 2008, August 8 to 24
Fringe Jr., Fringe for families.

BROOKLYN
Celebrate Brooklyn! June 12 to August 9
Celebrating 30 Summers of Free Performances at the Prospect Park Bandshell

Afro-Punk Festival, July 2008 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM)
Celebrating black revolution and change through music, film, art, and a temporary skate park.

Coney Island Film Festival 2008, September 26 to 28

QUEENS

Hong Kong Dragon Boat Festival, August 2 to August 3

NYC Food Film Festival (2nd Annual), June 14 to 20
Watch movies about food on Water Taxi Beach then eat the stars.

Colombian Independence Day Festival, July 20

BRONX
Festival Popular Duartiano, July 18 to 27
Music and Carnival Rides and Attractions

17th Annual Bronx Day, July 14
Music and family entertainment at the New York Botanical Gardens.

STATEN ISLAND
First Annual Staten Island Comedy Festival—The Grand Finale, August 7
[I love Staten Island, but isn't this just waaay too easy?]

Richmond County Fair, September 5, 6, and 7
Staten Island Historical Society

Let’s Face It: You’ll Find Your NYC Apartment Faster If You’re WIRED!

If you’ve been playing the blood sport that is NYC real estate for more than a nanosecond, you’ve probably already learned—the painful way—that the most indispensable piece of protective equipment you’ll need to stay upright in the field is a big, steel-reinforced cup. But once you’ve got that essential bit of armor strapped snugly over your tender emotions, you can calibrate your priorities to those of many professional athletes and make your highest priority staying wired all the time!

Traditionally, cafés with free Wi-Fi were the popular destinations for top Brooklyn condo and SoHo loft draft picks out to sate their voracious appetites for both caffeine and internet access. Recently, however—perhaps in response to the public's increasing disgust with performance enhancing drugs in general, or wait staff’s increasing exasperation with the dwindling tips due to slow table turn-over by the laptop set—cafés offering free internet access are increasingly restricting the hours during which you can troll your broker’s site for apartments.

That said, as one might imagine, staying wired in most NYC neighborhoods is easy—if you know where to go... Cafés may be changing their ways, but many bars are all too happy to pick up the slack and to be your home hunting “hot spot.” Lolita on the Lower East Side is comfortable and quiet during the late afternoons and even has coffee so that you won’t have to alter your performance enhancing drug regimen too drastically. Eater.com recently published this map of bars that offer free Wi-Fi and they are updating it as per readers’ nominations of deserving places to add.

Tawk, Gawk, and Order Cawffee Like a Native

If you’re doing it right, your search for a new home should take you through NYC neighborhoods you probably never visited before. If the very thought of the ground you’ll be covering exhausts you, just be glad you’ll be slogging your way through a city as rich in sounds and sights as New York.

Depending on the neighborhood, you’re likely to hear a wide array of accented English. Keep an ear out for the homegrown variety. You never know, you just might find your dream apartment in a neighborhood where everyone speaks the same musically lilting version of Brooklynese that Bugs Bunny made famous throughout the English-speaking world. Follow the link beneath this map that was published in amNew York for an acoustical tour of NYC neighborhoods’ dialects. Wordorigin.org offers a brief survival guide for the local lingo that's definitely worth a quick scroll through. If you're dying for caffeine, knowing how to order a "regular" coffee anywhere outside of a chain store, might just save your life.

And why not make your travels even more interesting with a scavenger hunt for public art? NYC has long been known to nurture the talents of artistic outlaws deep within its dark underbelly. Although you're unlikely to ever see them plying their trade--unless you, yourself are up to no good--shadowy graffiti artists' signature pieces can be spotted throughout the city. Sure, “artist” doesn’t apply to the vast majority of narcissistic jerks who scratch up subway windows or tag surface imaginable, but some have generated a fan base and even parlayed their property crimes into professional art careers. Gridskipper has published a field guide to some of New York’s best known guerrilla scribblers dodging the law today.

Gossip Girl = Death

“Is Gossip Girl Dangerous?” queried the New York Observer’s Tom Acitelli of the CW television program, a mere nano-second before supplying his own foam-flecked “Yes” to the deceptively rhetorical-appearing question.

I didn't want to write this about the CW show Gossip Girl, but I feel I have to before it's too late.

Yikes! Does it preach hatred and intolerance? Does it encourage violence, drug use, and promiscuity? Well, yes, but none of those are the insidious threat that keeps Mr. Acitelli’s duvet pulled up over his head at night.

…Gossip Girl is giving the impression to Suzy in Nebraska and Mandy in Alabama that real estate in New York is as affordable as anywhere and that poor in New York means living in a $2 million Williamsburg loft.

Wait, he thinks that’s not “poor in New York”?

We must dash these notions quickly, lest a fresh wave of flyover country folk flock to neighborhoods like Williamsburg (just like they did in the 1990's) to waste some of the choicest years of their life coming to grips with the reality that $1,000 in this city is like $100 elsewhere.

Mr. Acitelli would see those dashed notions replaced with more attainable goals for feeble-minded flocks of flyover folk. The humane Mr. Acitelli laments:

The television networks long ago did away with most vestiges of working-class reality in their prime-time programming…

Wouldn’t they would be so much more contented if only they knew their place wasn’t here?

...Gossip Girl seems silly and trite and stupid in places. You get the joke. Others may not. They're banking on that $2 million loft and they'll take the mortgage to get it.

It’s all fun and games until the flyover folk flock! Then they’ll brazenly walk among us undetected—riding our L train, eating our Batali-franchise food, maybe even mingling their flyover bloodlines with our own!—don’t say Mr. Acitelli didn’t warn you.

Don't sweat it, FFFs, real NY loves you.

CONGRATULATIONS NEW YORK GIANTS!!!

Now that your Super Bowl party is going to last all year long, it’s never been more important to consider the impact of all those wings-sauce stained paper napkins and red plastic beer cups on the great planet that brought you the great NY Giants: yep, Mother Earth!

Some websites have really super tips on how you can throw an eco-friendly Super Bowl party that your friends will think is on the steroids, like using reusable cloth napkins, china, and glassware.

Oh, stop cringing… It’s not that hard to have all of the football you want with less of the carbon footprint and smashy-smashy you don’t want. After all, green Philadelphia has had the greenest stadium and the Eagles have been the greenest team in the NFL since the early ‘90s, and you can be sure there’d be no eco-assault their Super Bowl parties. But probably no championship for the Eagles either.

Ok, back to your year-long Super Bowl party. What could be greener than letting nature take its course? Forget about the landfill-bound disposables. You can even forget about the cloth napkins and the smashy-smashies—they need to be washed and washing costs water. Why not just let your friends wipe their greasy hands on their shirts and take turns suckling straight from the beer tap? It was probably what they were doing by that magical 4th quarter anyway.