Oliver Haydock

As job creation slowed in Manhattan, it picked up quite a bit in the outer-boroughs. That's according to a new report from the Center for an Urban Future that tracked employment changes between 1997 and 2007 in 175 city zip codes

The report covers a turbulent decalogue, marked by the pop of the dot-com bubble and the attacks on the World Trade Center; and the data indicates a major reshuffling of office space in Manhattan.

Five of the bottom 10 zip codes for absolute job gains were clustered around the World Trade Center and the Financial District. The total sum of job losses among these five zip codes was a staggering 83,169.  read more »

In 2007, the median household income in New York City was $48,631, according to the American Community Survey released last week by the Census Bureau. This, of course, means that about half the city’s households are getting by on less than $50,000 annually, including paying astronomical fees to rent or buy an apartment. Herewith are three fictional scenarios!

First, the recent college graduate, fresh to New York and eager to start his or her successful career in business or media or law or medicine. Opportunities abound and the future looks bright! And then it comes time to find a place to live.  read more »

Location: Does Craigslist scare brokers, in the sense that it opens up access to real estate information?

Mr. Baum: No, Craigslist doesn’t scare me; in fact, I think that Craigslist is fantastic, if used properly. The problem with Craigslist is that it lends itself to ridicule because there are many posts that are either false or absolutely untrue, and there are scams where people have lost thousands of dollars because they think they are renting something when they are not. So Craigslist has its flaws in that respect, but at the same time, the opening up of information I personally think is a great thing.  read more »

Poverty rates in New York City have declined by around 0.7 percentage points from 2006 to 2007, according to the American Community Survey released yesterday by the Census Bureau. It seems that the city’s poverty rate, which dropped from 19.2 percent in 2006 to 18.5 percent in 2007, is following the downward trend in national poverty numbers, which dropped from 13.3 percent in 2006 to 13 percent in 2007.

Poverty rates also declined in Manhattan, falling from 18.3 percent in 2006 to 17.6 in 2007, perhaps indicative of widespread gentrification and a then-healthy local economy. However, all is not well on Manhattan Island, as the borough's children's poverty rate increased to 27.  read more »

The 2007 poverty rate for the Northeast (11.4 percent) was unchanged from 2006. The poverty rate for the Northeast was identical to those of the Midwest or West, according to Census data out today.

Location: Let’s talk about the Summer Streets program. Has it gone as good as you would have hoped?

Mr. White: You know, when the city first announced Summer Streets, we were thrilled. The indications from other cities are that when streets are given over to biking and walking on weekends, it’s been a huge success, but skeptics here in New York thought that not enough people would come out; but we have just had throngs of people coming out walking and biking, and it has really just exceeded our expectations for success. We are calling the summer of 2008 the ‘Summer of Car-Free Streets,’ and a few years from now we might look back at this summer as the summer when car-free streets hit the big time and people woke up to the enormous latent demand for car-free living and walking.  read more »

On the second-to-last Sunday in August, an open house for a four-bedroom, $11,000-a-month apartment in Chelsea was canceled and two Upper West Side open houses, also for rentals, were largely empty, barring the presence of nervous brokers.

Steven T. Little, a Halstead Properties sales associate, was showing one of the Upper West Side apartments, a two-bedroom prewar on 72nd Street. Just one couple came to see it that day. The previous weekend, only a handful of prospective renters visited the apartment. One block south, another Halstead broker was showing a two-bedroom that has problems of its own: The price, originally listed at $6,000, now stands at $5,600.  read more »

From an interview in tomorrow's print Observer with Paul Steely White, executive director of Transportation Alternatives:

Last question: mayoral race. Are there any candidates that you guys are supporting?
First, let me say that the 2009 elections are going to be extremely important, and we are looking at the 2009 elections as the make-or-break year for sustainability solutions being expanded or being rolled back. Right now, we are talking to a number of candidates and educating them about not just continuing Mayor Bloomberg’s legacy but also expanding it. We like what we see from some of the candidates, but in the coming months we are going to ask them to be much more specific about what they are going to do to ensure that our transit system is brought to a state of repair, and that necessary expansion programs are done and done on time, and that the city’s investment in the M.

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Laura Tomasko, a 24-year-old nonprofit employee, spent her first year out of college living in a bedroom with no windows. Ms. Tomasko and her roommate lived in a home office studio in the Financial District, and in order to create two separate living quarters, certain sacrifices had to be made.

First, they erected a temporary wall bisecting the spacious living area and creating the second bedroom. What they were left with were two bedrooms of about equal size (roughly 10 by 11 feet) that each lacked amenities most New Yorkers take for granted. The walled-off bedroom siphoned the apartment’s only window, but had no closet and was only separated from the noisy living room and kitchen area by a thin fake wall.  read more »

July was a tough month for the borough of Queens. Not only did Queens lead all other boroughs in first-time home foreclosures, with a total of 178 (Brooklyn was next with a distant 63), but the borough also has some of the most foreclosure-prone neighborhoods in the city.

According to a report by research firm PropertyShark, the five New York City ZIP codes with the most July foreclosures were all in Queens, with the top four all in the neighborhoods of Jamaica, South Jamaica, Hollis and St. Albans. A total of 56 homes entered foreclosure last month in those neighborhoods.

Of the 15 ZIP codes with the most foreclosures, nine are in Queens and three are in Brooklyn, basically following a crescent-shaped corridor running roughly along the neighborhoods of Bedford Stuyvesant, Brownsville, Ocean Hill and Flatbush.  read more »

Fewer $1 million Manhattan apartments traded in the first half of 2008 than in the first half of 2007. Though the difference wasn’t titanic, it signals another hurrah for a housing market in full adjectival decline.

The total number of closings on $1 million-plus apartments fell from 3,569 in the first half of 2007 to 3,347 during the first half of this year, a 6.22 percent drop. Still, almost one out of every two Manhattan apartments sold in the first half of 2008 traded for at least $1 million. The numbers are based on analysis by research firm StreetEasy.

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Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School
By Philip Delves Broughton
The Penguin Press, 288 pages, $25.95

Most of the graduates of the Harvard Business School go on to lucrative careers in banking or management. Not Philip Delves Broughton, author of Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School; his big postgraduate move was penning a tell-all account of his experience at HBS. The fruit of his labors is simultaneously invigorating and infuriating—and finally pointless.

His most surprising revelation is the utter banality of the aspiring millionaires and billionaires: The author’s HBS class consists almost entirely of students fed to the school through the so-called "three Ms" —Mormons, Military, and McKinsey (the consulting firm).  read more »

Grab your light sabers, folks! The four-day schedule for San Diego Comic-Con 2008 was rolled out over the weekend. The 2008 convention, held from Thursday, July 24 to Sunday, July 27, offers a familiar mix of Hollywood star power (Keanu Reeves! Mark Wahlberg!), comic book showcases and industry workshops that cater to the odd mélange of Hollywood types and comic book nerds who tend to flock to the friendly environs of San Diego every summer. Although it appears this year’s crop of buzz-seeking blockbusters may not live up to last year’s stable of box-office winners like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Iron Man and Beowulf, there are still plenty of events to capture the hearts and minds of casual observers and comic book enthusiasts alike.  read more »

GAMEBOYS: PROFESSIONAL VIDEOGAMING'S RISE FROM THE BASEMENT TO THE BIG TIME
By Michael Kane
Viking Books, 288 pages, $24.95

Having read Michael Kane's Gameboys, I now know almost all there is to know about professional videogaming, certainly more than the average American and definitely more than I ever cared to know. Example: College dropouts can make up to $40,000 a year playing video games. That fact, depending on your disposition, is either a sure sign of America’s imminent demise or the advent of a technological golden age. Mr. Kane warmly endorses the latter view, and lays out a fairly persuasive argument over nearly 300 pages.  read more »

Starting on Saturday, June 7, the 2008 European Championship – co-hosted by Switzerland and Austria – kicks off in Basel, Switzerland with a noon game between the Swiss and the Czech Republic.

The Euro is an international soccer tournament fashioned much like the World Cup, but with half the teams. The field of sixteen is first divided into four groups (A, B, C and D) and the two top teams in each group advance to the knockout stages. All games past the group stage are single-elimination and ties are broken by penalty kicks.  read more »

Last Friday evening, Dodger manager Joe Torre was sitting in the visitors' dugout at Shea Stadium, fielding questions from about a dozen reporters about his struggling team. The Dodgers, who limped into a New York fresh off a three game sweep at the hands of the Chicago Cubs, had lost the series opener against the Mets by a score of eight to four, stretching their losing streak to four games.  read more »

According to Mark Bowden, the 1958 NFL Championship game between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants was more than a great game; it was a watershed moment that ushered in a new era of professional sports in America. The game, a thrilling overtime victory for the Colts, led by quarterback Johnny Unitas, marked the beginning of professional football’s advance from the dregs of American sport to its current position as the most popular and financially lucrative game in the richest country in the world.

In the early and mid-’50s kids wanted to be Mickey Mantle, but by the late ’50s and early ’60s, everyone was trying to be like “Johnny U,” the man with the “Golden Arm.” And nothing, Mr. Bowden notes, is more responsible for football’s surge than television: “Baseball,” he writes, “seemed made for radio,” while football “seemed made for television.”  read more »

“I related most to Batman,” said 56-year-old movie producer Michael Uslan of his childhood comic-book tastes, “because Batman’s greatest superpower was humanity.” Mr. Uslan, like many baby boomers, grew up an avid comic-book reader. But his fandom didn’t stop at 18. As an adult, he parlayed his love of Batman into a successful career in the movie business, producing all five of the most recent Batman movies. His sixth, The Dark Knight, staring Christian Bale and the late Heath Ledger, opens this July.

But Mr. Uslan has a comic-related side career, too, as a comic-art collector. Forget those Cindy Sherman prints, or combing Chelsea walls in search of the next Kara Walker: wealthy ex-nerds looking to make an arty purchase are snubbing the mainstream art world, throwing their bucks at their childhood heros and creating an investment market where there wasn’t one before.  read more »

More from Oliver Haydock at the New York Comic Con.

A panel composed of some of the most celebrated artists in Comic Book history, including Marvel Comics luminary Stan Lee and Captain America creator Joe Simon, gathered for a forum at New York Comic Con on Friday afternoon. The nine artists fielded questions from movie producer and comic historian Michael Uslan about their artistic inspirations and their experiences in the industry. The affection and friendship between the artists was palpable, and they often interrupted each other’s answers with vaudevillian wisecracks, mostly about aging, hairlines, or mustaches.  read more »

The Observer's research editor Oliver Haydock pings in this update from the New York Comic Con at the Javits Center.

Scott Adsit, who plays producer Pete Hornberger on NBC’s 30 Rock, is a comic nerd. Mr. Adsit was spotted by the Culture Czar looking a little bit lost in the main exhibition hall at the New York Comic Con, which is running from today until Sunday, April 20. Mr. Adsit was on his way to find his “hero,” Walt Simonson, a comic artist who worked at Marvel during the 1980s and 90’s, best known for his drawings of The Mighty Thor and X-Factor.

When asked if he collected comic art, Mr. Adsit responded, “Not yet, I have never been able to afford it.” He does, however, have an extensive collection of comic books at home, which he claims takes up “a lot of wasted space.” In addition to his work on 30 Rock, Adsit is working on Moral Orel, his stop-animation show on Adult Swim, which is currently in post-production and should air sometime in the fall.

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Ever since Obama declared his candidacy for president in early 2007, news organizations have been busy trying to piece together the significant moments in his life, especially those left unaddressed in Obama's surprisingly candid autobiography, Dreams of My Father.

And so, the young Barack Obama has become a character in the campaign. And Roger Boesche, a professor of political philosophy at Occidental College who taught two classes to the young Barry Obama almost 30 years ago, is mystified at the sudden interest of political reporters in what he has to say.  read more »

David Slone was hard to miss walking into the Blackbird Parlour, a small cafe in Williamsburg. A man of considerable girth, with wild black hair and a bushy beard, he was wearing purple velvet pants, a long black trench coat (also velvet) and spit-shined black loafers. Around his neck he wore a silver necklace with an outsize Star of David.

Mr. Slone, who lives in a slovenly loft and says he gets “ornery when he’s hungry,” has one quality most New Yorkers lack: He likes having total strangers stay overnight. In the past three years, over 100 such visitors have spent at least one night, and occasionally more, in a small corner room in his apartment. A 39-year old actor with philosophy and law degrees from Cornell, Mr. Slone is not running a stealth hotel; the guests pay nothing. And most have gone away happy: “Great guy, great place,” wrote a visitor from Villeurbanne, France. “We spent three days surfing David’s place, which is the perfect spot to go and discover New York City.”  read more »