I was not an original-Pilot user. My first Palm product was the Pilot Professional, the updated version of the original, after Palm became a U. S. Robotics brand, on its way to becoming a 3Com brand.  That Palm Pilot served nicely, dying (sort of; it was a dirty-switch problem; cleaned, it worked fine) on the day my M500 arrived. It was in the middle of PCExpo and I spent the night getting everything moved into the new device.

I only got interested in changing when I started using my M500 as my e-book reader of choice.  The T5′s bigger screen was attractive and Palm was finally about to make good on WiFi connection.  When they did and included the needed card in a bundle, I ordered a T5 so fast my head was spinning.

What a disappointment!  Charged, loaded once, died.  Called Palm; they took it back.  Not very clever customer-relations people; they didn’t offer to swap me a new one that worked; they just took it back and didn’t charge me.

Not much later, along comes the T|X.  It had everything I wanted, including built-in WiFi.  Memory was short, but I could (despite Palm claims to the contrary) stick a 4gb SD card in the thing.  Found a good price and placed the order; I had lots of fun.  I bought the — not included — cradle kit and extra styli and screen savers and extended warranty and so on. I was again an active Palm Pilot user.

My joy declined at the same time I noticed the touch screen was failing.  I called Palm support; that crew is a complete waste of space.  They could fix nothing; they could read a list of did-you-try-this stuff, period.  I bitched to Palm HQ; I got the corporate-user support number (a U. S. firm, but I think still an outsource deal…).  I called, we chatted, they agreed things were not working very well and I was covered for a replacement — refurbished… — Palm T|X.  I had to send mine back first, and they’d then send the replacement.  It took forever, and the Palm what’s-happening site never correctly reported status.

The replacement Palm T|X arrived. I set it up.  A week later, the screen died.  Not slowly went bad; dead.  Nothing on it.  So much for the — outsourced… — factory-refurb.  I called corporate support again; this time the embarrassment was sufficient that I was promised a fast replacement; they’d send theirs first, with a return-it bag for the dead one.

T|X number 3 arrived.  Palm actually said they’d sent two by mistake; maybe, but I only saw the one promised.  It worked well for about nine or ten months.  Oh, the touchscreen decayed again just like the first one, but this time I did some ‘net-surfing and came across a program called PowerDigi from Palm Powerups fixed the wandering and decaying calibration.  [Interesting company; its only flaw is that the guy who runs it is not always on top of answering e-mail.  The expression, "painfully slow", covers it — especially a problem when one is waiting for an unlock code.  Great programmer, crummy businessperson; has yet to understand that "fast correspondence makes lasting friendship" is a bilateral notion.]  The cause of T|X#3′s demise: The power switch failed.

I am now on T|X number four.  I rely on it.  I carry a library of current books for casual reading and scholarly work in progress (at the moment, David Hume and Adam Smith on Moral Sentiment theory.  I use some ancient PalmOS software to keep notes on diet and time-keeping and so on.  The WAP-type browser is not perfect, but is generally adequate for things I need to do when not in my study.  The mail program is also what I need when not at home.  The idea that I will be out of my (doubled) warranty period in a month or so is scary, given the replacements I have needed.

It is not just crummy QA on the T|X (also commonly claimed by heavy-duty Treo users, so this is not just a tier-two PDA-only issue).  Other Palm products fail regularly.

Consider: With a keyboard for use when possible — in an hotel room, e. g. — my T|X would give me all the touted benefits of these new “netbooks” without the size and weight issues.  The older IR keyboards weren’t all that interesting, but two companies — one of them, Palm — had bluetooth keyboards.  I bought the other one first (it had a metal shell…); I encountered driver issues.  I took it back, got a Palm-branded (but apparently, Freedom Input made) bluetooth keyboard.

It lasted weeks — about three.  In fact, it never quite worked right; it seems that, although touted for the PalmOS generally and the T|X specifically, it really was intended for use with the Treo phones — but even then, apparently was not all that robust a match.

There are two problems with this keyboard: First encountered: The drivers don’t really work all that well with PalmOS.  If the bluetooth keyboard is activated as one goes along, as needed, there is a very good chance PalmOS will execute a reset in an unpredictable way. So, if one wants a fairly reliable session, one learns to load the keyboard driver before other applications, and then to manually disconnect when one is finished, if one wants to avoid an unpredicted crash.  When I bought my keyboard, Palm tech support (such as it is) had not even seen the keyboard and hadn’t a clue to how to make the thing work with any reliability.  Their comment about this Palm-brand product: Oh yeah, there is a problem with bluetooth in the T|X (not really; works fine for somethings, but these are Computer Guys — and not of the best, either).

Anyway, I found the workaround Palm techies couldn’t figure out on their own.  That could not compensate for the flimsy construction.  I folded open the keyboard — carefully; I understood this was not brick outhouse equipment — and the hinge pin broke.  I called Palm customer service: Sorry, we don’t think so.  I called again when, because the hinge was broken, and the keyboard would not open correctly, the connection between the two leaves of the folding device was damaged, and the thing failed completely: Sorry, we don’t think so.

Crummy QA — products that work unreliably and are, frankly, of shoddy manufacture.  Crummy tech support — unfamiliar with the products the company sells (in short, outsourced to one or another non-Palm company).  Crummy customer service — I had to escalate to corporate level to get barely adequate support, and even then I had some interesting conversations that were not very productive, despite having paid for extended coverage; some products were not supported at all.

Palm appears to be trying to run as a virtual company:  It has an HQ and design center, but manufacturing and support services are outsourced.  These do not receive adequate management supervision from Palm.  Consequently, a company which produced rock-solid goods — my M500 works just fine and is set up as my backup Palm (not a simple thing, since the file formats are different) and my Pilot Pro was working fine, last time I looked (it’s buried in the history drawer, I think) — cannot now be trusted to deliver a reliable product even to save the company’s life.  My story is not mine alone; a little surfing will prove that conclusively.  Simply hiring an ex-Apple guy (not a winning scenario anyway; many of us remember just how crummy a company Apple was when Jobs was not at the helm and Woz had taken a powder) to do something glitzy will not save this company, I suspect.

My problem was simple: I wanted — needed — to learn the skills necessary to do a relatively narrow range of lab tests on our pets and on animals brought in for treatment and return (“wildlife rehabilitation”). This entailed relearning long-forgotten lab and especially microscopy skills, and most especially meant getting a microscope. I had a nice one as a child, but I had long since given it away; every other microscope I’d used had been in a school lab; I had never bought one.

Add to this: It seems that between one thing and another, there are no “instrument stores” in Manhattan — no place to go, kick the tires, get an education. On the other hand, the number of firms selling microscopes on the ‘net is substantial. All the old names in scientific apparatus (Edmund, Ward, &c.) are there; lots of specialty companies are there. The cost and the variety are substantial enough that making a decision about a brand, and a quality level and a company is not trivial. After agonizing, I had more or less fixed on a good German name brand, from a fairly close-by specialty dealer, a “demo” unit that was selling well below new price. It did not seem to me likely that it would be beat-up, and so on. I called, ready to order; the folks weren’t home that day.

OK, so I could call back, and I could do some more shopping on the ‘net in the meantime. Quite by chance, I navigated to Great Scopes, Inc.. The first thing I saw was a buyer’s guide. BRILLIANT! I might actually know what I was doing after reading all this. This proved the case, and led me to look further.

What I found, looking at the product offering, was a comprehensive line of microscopes and related products. Each was carefully illustrated with a click-for-larger image (surprisingly, that is not always the case). Each was comprehensively described, along with variants within the model line. The prices were competitive with other offerings; in fact, subsequent checking confirms that Great Scopes generally has the best prices for the particular brands and models it offers. If that isn’t enough, Great Scopes has a price-match policy.

The Big Question now reduced to which model. I wanted binocular viewing and I needed a 100x objective, and generally I wanted the features of an entry-level clinical microscope. Since I am used to looking at the center of the field anyway, fancier plan objectives weren’t a high priority. Great Scopes offered me two attractive choices: the M1 top-of-the-line student model or the Revelation III entry-level clinical model. The M1 is a wee bit smaller; it costs $100 less, but otherwise these microscopes have comparable features. I thought the M1 would do for me nicely. I confirmed my choice with Great Scopes “scopemaster” John Lind, and he made it easy to do the deal, even upgrading the basic accessories kit — slides — at no extra charge. So I was set. Then I get a call from John saying, whoops, we goofed and the scope you ordered is not in stock; we’ll upgrade you to the Revelation III at no extra cost. Not a problem, thought I. But just to keep things interesting, it appears that the M1 was in stock, and the next day, there it was. I unboxed it, put it up on the desk, checked to make sure all the bits and pieces were there and worked and waited to see what would happen next.Next was a call from John Lind saying, well there you are, but we’ll still upgrade you if you want it. Talk about making sure I was a happy customer. In fact, I was very happy to have what I ordered; I find lighter is a good thing as I get older. Then too, what the picture doesn’t show is some slightly better (in my view) control placement for the light intensity. I also like the reversed nosepiece (the place where the objectives are). [Don't what an “objective” is? Go to the Great Scopes site and read the buyer's guide....] Nor did the deal end there. John Lind has done some additional above-and-beyond hand-holding, and so has LW Scientific. This is a deep relationship, which means I can have confidence that any problems I have will be solved.

The M1

The Revelation III

I’ve had the microscope in place for several weeks. I have been using it extensively. I have found it everything I expected to be and more. I like the company that makes it; I like the dealer that sold it. I can confidently recommend Great Scopes as a place that will provide top products at a competitive price and will keep the customer happy. This is the finest kind of business relationship.

Partly, this is because I have had a number of students from Ecuador, and I have found them to be very solid (and the women students remarkably pretty — not a bad thing). Other Ecuadoreans I’ve run across have been remarkably competent and very pleasant people to deal with — in a range of circumstances.

Partly, this is because I rather like a certain in-your-face attitude that seems to be one of the Ecuadorean nationale Eigentumlichkeiten.

But mostly, I like Ecuador because it produces excellent summer hats.

I wear hats because if I don’t, I get a sunburn on my balding pate. I have several, including two [update: make that three; the new one has a very broad brim and is just super] modestly priced Genuine Panama Straw hats. I do not, sadly, boast ownership of a Montecristi. One I bought here in New York; a replacement is hard to find, and beyond my budget. My new one came from panamahatsdirect.com, and is the firm’s “$48 Cuenca” — with shipping, about $65, therefore very competitively priced (about $10-$15 lower than anything even vaguely comparable in New York shops).

Why choose a Genuine Panama hat from Ecuador, rather than a look-alike from the Far East? Why order it from Panama, rather than buying it locally in New York (a town that still has a few hat shops — and legions of stores where hats of less distinction are sold along with miscellaneous other things?

Quite simply, these are The Real Thing. This is a matter of craftsmanship and materials, and just plain looks.

Go to a hat store; look at what’s offered. Pick up the hat; most have a nice solid, stiff cardboard-like feeling. Even most of the real straw hats have this over-starched feeling; the ones marked “Shantung Straw” — made from a paper yarn originally produced in Japan — will certainly feel like that. Go to the local clothing store; pick up the various “planter style” hats offered — some of them real straw, some hard to tell… — and you’ll find the same thing. You might as well wear a hard hat.

Genuine Panama hats are softer. The bodies are very solidly made, and the palm fibers used hold a shape remarkably well, without additional stiffener. The weave is remarkably fine. Many have the nice finishing touch of a back-woven edge, rather than one cut and sewn. [This is more work, and I suspect, just harder to pull off without getting an uneven edge.] This means, among other things, they have some characteristics in common with the felt from which other hats are made. They are durable, they can be shaped, they have a certain liveliness those hard-as-cardboard hats don’t have.

This softness and flexibility means, first, the hat will mold to your head as you wear it. It will be your hat, and no one else’s. Second, it means the initial shape can be changed. Look at the picture:

The left side shows the hat I ordered. The right side shows what I could do with it with 20 or 30 minutes work.

The hat arrived in the standard Panama Hats Direct box — so well sealed I had to call the company to get instructions on opening it. (I saved the box; I fashioned a lid for it; it is as well made as my old Brooks Brothers hat boxes; getting good hat boxes is one tough chore, let me tell you.) It looked just like the picture — a well-ironed, flat brim and a nicely shaped crown. I had ordered the black grosgrain ribbon (this is a hat for business occasions…); the band was nice, with a bow not flattened and the “knot” properly pleated. This was just one fine hat.

But: I like less-well defined dimples; better: I prefer the dimples to arise from such events as “tipping my hat” — a matter of pinching the crown slightly to take it off as a gesture of respectful greeting. I prefer a rather fatter teardrop than Panama Hats Direct offers in its Cuenca models. I am fussy about the way my hat’s brim curls and shapes. So I spritzed with a bit of water, massaged a bit here and there; the result was a hat with a shape that might well pass for something in a 1940′s ad.

In short, I got my look, and my fit, my way.

I get compliments on my elegant chapeaux — this one and others.

Super-starched hats from China and elsewhere (interestingly, Mexico) don’t allow you to do this. (This is also largely true of the fur-felt hats now coming from China as a less costly replacement for the lovely hats of Italy and the — somewhat over-stiff, cowboy-hat-like — items from Hatco. It takes a lot of work and a lot of steam to make those hats work.)

In my view — a person who has worn hats for decades (I like them even when not the mode), whose hats get attention (drawing away from my less than ideal figure…) and compliments — a real Panama hat, direct from Ecuador is a good choice. Of the companies offering “direct from Panama” sales, Panama Hats Direct offers the best combination of price and company performance. Their prices, even with shipping, are very competitive. The quality is very high at all levels. The after-market support is, if anything, better than the ordering process — this is a small firm that makes a fetish of customer satisfaction (what a nice thing!).

I am a very satisfied customer.

Neighborhood Park Club Admits Impotence

It was an interesting meeting, the January 9^th meeting of Community Board 1′s Tribeca Committee. We learned lots of things about the neighborhood, some of which had been sort of apparent, but not so well defined. We learned more about our neighbors; we learned more about what is happening to community boards; we learned who runs what, and what can be expected as things go merrily forward.

It was an evening in which Change was dominant. Change is surely inevitable, but it is not inevitably good, as became clear in the course of this meeting. In this case, I am saddened to report, a neighborhood gasped its last.

It All Comes Down to Demographics

The term, Tribeca, is a bit misleading. One chronicler reports that the name actually refers to a block along Lispenard Street, from Church to Broadway — the third leg of which is Canal Street. This dates to the days when Carl Weisbrod and others were giving residents in loft buildings a miserable time; Tribeca was the name of the block association formed by some of those residents. Another commentator notes that with Canal Street as one leg of the triangle, the Hudson River and the East River demark a sort of triangular shape Lower Manhattan.

What Real Estate salespeople call “Tribeca” is that part of lower Manhattan that was called by those of us who’ve been here awhile “Washington Market”. It starts somewhere just below Canal Street, ends somewhere short of Murray Street, and extends from West Street more or less to West Broadway — Church Street if one is feeling charitable.

What made the Washington Market district interesting was a neighborhood character. The residents were a mix of middle class folks with kids living in middle-income housing, artists and adventuresome sorts of other stripes living in converted hundred or hundred-fifty year old commercial buildings and a sprinkling of folks who could live anywhere and came here because it was just plain nice to be here. The neighborhood was active in a lot of different ways. A school opened here got splendid support — enough that it became a special school, eventually housed in a special building. The merchants here and around were special. We had small but interesting restaurants — most of them are gone now, and the few left from heyday are under siege by trendy places with high prices and mediocre wine lists (their menus are forgettable too). We had splendid housewares stores and hardware stores and just-plain-junk stores and one could get all sorts of interesting things at affordable middle class prices.

When did it change? My own watershed-moment is probably the realization that a whole lot of people from the Far West — motion picture people, television people, people from Arizona and California, Republicans… — started bidding up the price of living here. I have no idea why they came here, but they brought things with them that were to the Washington Market neighborhood what I am told rabbits have proven to be in Australia. The Tribeca Grill (or whatever it’s called) is a case in point — noisy people with no panache eating food that might have been interesting in a smaller quieter place, but is now just chi-chi; it has replaced friendly neighborhood spots like Riverrun — simpler (and cheaper) with better beer.

Then there is the follow-along crowd — the thirty-somethings and forty-somethings-trying-desperately-to-stay-thirty-something, the kind of people who confuse life with that old TV sitcom, “Friends”. These people maxed out their credit cards, signed away their bonuses and bought the $2 millions to $4 millions converted loft in the old cold storage plant (or whatever…). They’ve spent their packet to move here, claiming that they can send their children to the wonderful school — which is now so over-enrolled the place has to have classes in the janitorial closet, and the overflow schools in the area are also packed to, well, overflowing. [One wonders what would have happened had these people stayed in New Jersey or Tuscon or wherever they were before, and spent that money on sending their children to really good country day schools. Certainly the kids would be healthier; lower Manhattan air quality is notoriously poor, especially in the area nearest the Holland Tunnel, where the priciest condos are.] This group is arrogant in the extreme; they live “on the Park Avenue of Tribeca” as one rather strangely dressed chap put it the evening of January 9^th (someone should explain to people from out of town that a brown suit is very hard to wear in New York; it takes a great deal more panache and taste than most of these poor souls have). They are the very type of “arriviste”.

These are the folks who have litters, not children. One mommy admitted to running two strollers at once — a two-seater and a single-seater. These are the folks who have translated their barhopping, “Friends”-style dating routine into child-rearing patterns — featuring “play dates” (Heaven forfend the children should form their own friendships; Heaven forfend they should do what mommy and significant-other did on their dates…).

These are the folks — not a majority, I think, of old residents or new, but very noisy, even whiney — who insisted they needed a potty in the park, so the wee lambs (and apparently, their parents) wouldn’t need to widdle in the bushes. The available facilities — about half a minute away up the stairs in the college adjacent to the park — was too far for their kiddies’ defective potty training.

In short, the death knell of Washington Market, gauged by what may be the end of its neighborhood part, as it is metamorphosed into a kiddie-land, was rung by the rise of a New Class ruling the neighborhood. It is a class that saw what it liked, and in appropriating it, trashed it.

Throttling the Old Guard

The despoliation of Washington Market Park is led by the Parks Department, in the person of their — well, not clear what his gig is: troubleshooter? Pacifier? Community Relations Flack? He shows up at every community event, listens patiently then explains that the Parks Department will do what it wants. He has been doing this for many years, throughout lower Manhattan. Chap name of Robert Redmond, with the title of Capital Projects Director for Manhattan. Lean, WASPy, usually in a Parks-logo golf shirt. [One wonders where he went to school. I know he wasn't at mine; perhaps it was one of those more popular day schools here in the city, the ones for the poor children whose parents cannot afford to send them away to school.] One has the distinct sense he is a Parks Dept. manager in the mold of Robert Moses (and Henry Stern and Adrian Benepe and…); he knows what’s best for us, and for our neighborhood. More to the point, if an idea originates anywhere but in his office, it’s simply not a good idea. The evidence for this is in his various other outings — the imposition of astroturf in Columbus Park, along with a design that has nothing to do with how people use the place. There is his decision to throw out seven years of community involvement in redesigning the Allen Street mall, in favor of some diddly design of his own.

Complicit in this despoliation of the only neighborhood space around is Nelle Fortenberry. This is a sufficiently uncommon name that I assume this is the same person whose major claim to fame is having worked for Michael J. Fox, who relocated to our part of the world after leaving his service in Los Angeles, and is now looking desperately for some sort of TV show to produce. A graduate of the UCLA film school, she is clever enough in a left-coast sort of way, but has sort of confused notions about her role in the neighborhood. The confusion is evident in the assumption that, having revived the moribund Friends of Washington Market Park with some of her fellow career-woman-cum-soccer-mom-wannabes (of both sexes…), that the resulting club was “the Washington Market Park board”. [This, of course, was not the case: The board was comprised of neighborhood-elected directors of the Washington Market Park Corp., which operated the park and had a seat on the Park Maintenance Corp. responsible for funding the park. That board went away when the corporation was dissolved and the park became Parks Dept. property. The successor organization died of neglect — apparently even failing to dissolve itself properly, which has led to Mrs. Fortenberry's organization having some difficulties establishing its 501(c)3 status.] Mrs. Fortenberry and her crew have worked closely with Redmond and his crew — in practice, meaning that the Parks Dept. has cooperated in the operation of some family events Mrs. Fortenberry’s club has sponsored, and has been willing to explain to Mrs. Fortenberry’s club at length the projects the Parks Dept. was undertaking.

In fact, the Parks Department has done a pretty poor job with Washington Market Park. Trees have been so ill-cared-for that one urban arborist, consulted privately by a neighbor, considers that most of the trees are diseased. Most trees are severely overgrown; when in leaf, much of the park is dark and foreboding. Such pruning as has been done has been done with no regard to the beauty of the trees. Clean-up is haphazard, and on occasion, staff assigned to the park have left early, without regard to closing the park at the proper time. Recent “repairs” to the automatic irrigation system placed two concrete boxes, and the elimination of public-use gardener accessible water taps. Briefly: The park is clearly a step-child, both for the local supervisor (who hangs over in Battery Park City, along that esplanade) and Parks Dept. manager Redmond — whose every second line is about some aspect of the park that is not designed the way his team would have done it.

So, the Redmond & Fortenberry team brought their plan for Redmond’s new park jakes to the Community Board. It got a nice hearing — mainly because no one knew about it coming up. Surprise is a useful political tactic, and who want. It then hit the obstacle of the one completely adult group with a definable stake in the park — the community gardeners. They love their plots and they love their gardening and they have managed to keep the mommy-and-nanny brigade at bay. Larry Wasser, who leads this group, and is the only Friends of Washington Market Park member with a well-defined constituency, moved to question this whole business. What had seemed a shoe-in was all of a sudden faced with a line drawn in the sand. The issue came back to the Community Board for a vote — and was sent back to committee! Carol DeSaram — long time leader in the community — led that first Tribeca Committee meeting; she could not get a resolution passed. Her committee members (mostly long term residents) didn’t want the potty-as-planned. Absent a positive vote, DeSaram postponed a decision — and didn’t come to that next meeting. Her co-chair, more in tune with Fortenberry crew, rammed the motion through by refusing to hear argumentation of any kind.

Even so, there were some revelations:

1. Mrs. Fortenberry finally admitted she and her crew are not “the park board” and that they have no say in what goes on in the park, that any connection they have is subject to the Parks Dept.’s good graces.
2. The co-chair, having rammed things through, pretty much, called for a stipulation from the Parks Dept. that the garden area would be restored to use and without diminished status. To this Parks Dept. manager Redmond responded, “Well, we’ll see.” That non-committal response was sufficient for the political needs of this WOG (“the WOGs begin at, er, the Battery”…), and he forced the carrying of a resolution to approve of what the Parks Dept. was gonna do anyway.

So finally, the Parks Dept. can claim it has community approval for doing what it wants to do. Effectively, a small group of mommies and new-residents have gotten a plan passed that will close a third of the park for a year, will reduce the one adult-oriented park area by 25 percent, will restrict access the whole of the park while dismantling the only generally accessible entrance, and will conclusively and finally change the neighborhood in yet new and unpredictable ways.

What the Parks Department Is Up To

[Aerial image of Washington Market Park. Red shading: Area to be given over to new toilet. Includes three trees, about 20%-25% of present public-use garden plot area. Blue shading: Area to be closed for at least one year and to be substantially destroyed; includes park entrance, landscaped juniper hill and the rest of the public gardening area. Yellow shading: Proposed temporary entrance where BMCC entry ramp is at grade with the park's southwest corner.

[Note: This picture shows the park with the trees in leaf, revealing some of the scope of Parks Dept. neglect. All these trees, especially along the right side and bottom-central parts of the mage are severely overgrown, according to one independent urban arborist. As one resident and long-time park user observed, the result is a part that is very dark even to the point of being sinister.]

The main objections to the whole potty business has always rested on the site the Parks Nazis have chosen, with agreement from their “yes men” in the Friends of Washington Market Park. The area at the western end of the park, shaded red, is the area that will be taken up for this new jakes. We can reliably plot this area based on the predicted loss of trees and garden plots; when mapped out, the loss is about 25 percent of the area now given over to public-use gardening. Interestingly, this is presented as also using some of the space behind the stairs going from the park to Borough of Manhattan Community College; the evidence presented by the Parks Dept.’s staff led by Redmond makes clear that this area will remain more or less intact, and that the new jakes building will be sited so as to screen that area, but afford access to it for both its legitimate and less-than-legitimate uses.

The new john needs water and sewer (and one assumes, electric) connections. The area shaded in blue shows what will be destroyed in order that the Parks Dept.’s contractors can bring in a back-hoe. Starting at the main entrance (which will be closed for the duration — at least a year, according to Redmond) a swath at least half the width of the public-use garden area will be closed off and dug up. This will mean that the landscaped entrance, long since allowed to decay under Parks Dept. mismanagment, will be ripped out. Most of the garden plots will be ripped out. The only safe seating area for older park users will be ripped out. The area where birds and squirrels gather will be ripped out. The trees shading the northern side of the park — these are not Parks Dept. trees, but belong to Independence Plaza — will have their root systems compromised and probably ripped out. In short, areas important to the park as a neighborhood amenity, serving all of us, will be destroyed, along with private property not even under Parks Dept. control, will be destroyed to bolster the egoism of the Parks Dept. Manhattan Capital Projects team and their collective master, Adrian Benepe, and to preserve the legacy of Robert Moses for meddling in things not understood.

Since the only grade-level entrance to the park must be torn down to accommodate the year-long construction and new landscaping plan and so on, the Parks Dept. needs to find a new entryway. Washington Market Park’s north side butts up against the garden fronting Independence Plaza. The ramped entrance to Borough of Manhattan Community College forms the wall of the park’s west side. The long stretch of park along Greenwich Street is at street grade — but the Current Parks Dept. Doctrine makes this sacrosanct — it is where former Parks Commissioner Henry Stern spent a million dollars of maintenance endowment on a new kiddie-playground area. Most of the park’s southern line, along Chambers Street, is several feet above grade. The only spot where the park comes close to level with public access is right at the beginning of BMCC’s ramp — shaded yellow on the aerial view. Redmond thinks the college should let him cut a temporary entrance from its ramp to his park.

I will be most surprised if the college does this. That part of the ramp made narrow by the signing tower island; it’s barely six feet wide at that point — if that. It is also the most heavily used part of the entrance ramp, as students come up to the college from the various Chambers Street subway and bus stops. To create a park entry there, designed to accommodate SUV-size multiple-child strollers and nannies pushing them — the heavy traffic that normally enters the park from Greenwich Street — would nearly double the traffic at that relatively narrow point. The congestion would be significant — I believe it would be significantly greater than the trivial impact of increased student use of the main park entrance when the college was rebuilding the ramp (among other things, the college minimized its impact by encouraging the use of other access points; the park would not offer that option). Neither are the security implications, for college and park, trivial. In short, Redmond’s current best-guess alternate-entrance idea should be a non-starter, unless a whole lot of people are not paying attention.

A Truly Potty Outcome —
Including Some History of Public Jakes

My friend & neighbor Bob Gluckstadt notes the following:

• The bathroom at St John’s Park located on Leroy Street was demolished by the Parks Department. Reason: migratory sexual predators.
• The bathroom at the Jefferson Market Library has been sealed shut. Reason: migratory sexual predators.
• The bathroom at Washington Square Park and all three bathrooms of the Hudson River park Trust have problems with migratory sexual predators.
• Police at City Hall Park refer bathroom seekers to the New Amsterdam Branch Library. A homeless colony presently exists on Murray Street under a sidewalk shed to use the facilities at the New Amsterdam Branch Library.

In short, the recent history of public toilets is pretty poor.

Can we expect better for the new jakes at Washington Market Park? A couple things suggest not. Washington Market Park’s manager is not really much in evidence; his main responsibility is the long stretch along the Hudson River in Battery Park City. Washington Market Park is sort of an ugly stepsister in this Parks Dept. management schema. Onsite staff is adequate for day-to-day chores, perhaps, but has (as noted above) taken off at its convenience, without properly securing the park. Park maintenance is at best haphazard; the overgrown condition of the trees, the ad lib pruning of branches without regard to shape or beauty, the decaying condition of the little wrought-iron folly at the park’s southern side, the poor conditions of lawn and other general-use areas, the poor supervision of reconstruction after the new irrigation system was installed (already showing signs of failure, by the bye) — all this suggests the Parks Dept. will not be all that clever in dealing with the added strain on the already strained-to-breaking Parks Dept. management of Washington Market Park.

So why is this being done? We finally know the answer: Nelle Fortenberry (and others of her ilk) perceive this as a legacy. Mrs. Fortenberry actually said this at the meeting of the CB1/Tribeca Committee when the resolution was being considered: Vote for this, said she; you will create a legacy for years, even decades to come.

Ah. An “ædifice complex”. How very Left Coast. Let’s build a theatre and stick some singers/dancers/musicians in it; we will have opera/ballet/symphony forever. A very Angeleno view of things. Not realistic, of course, but that is the land of fantasy.

The reality of this legacy may prove otherwise. One wonders if the first to prove the legacy may be the very children of Mrs. Fortenberry and Mrs. Menin and so many others of that ilk; will they be the first to experience predation?

Will Redmond restore the gardens? “We’ll see.”

Will the reconstructed entrance to the park have the charm of the entrance before Parks Dept. neglect and now, demolition. “We’ll see.”

Will the park remain an amenity for all, or continue to become more and more the preserve of an arriviste few? “We’ll see.”

Will this be the last stroke, whereby the philistines — the failed artists become real estate brokers, the financial gin-&-jag set, the motion picture and TV crowd, the folks with the supersize mortgages and litters of children — finally do to death the very thing they hoped to gain in moving to this neighborhood? Most likely.

People claim to know things, but they mean different things by that. What is really irksome: People often assert a stronger claim for something being so, than they have any business doing. When these are people who have authority of one kind or another, that can become more than just irksome. So, this is an essay about evidence and belief and explanation. The bottom line: There’s far too much evidence and belief going around masquerading as scientific explanation.

Basic definitions first:

Evidence is information we have. It might be straightforward sensory intuition — I saw or smelled or tasted (whatever) something. It might be a collection of such events. I might take them as they appear to me; I might deal with them in some critical way. Such things are mostly qualitative experiences, but I can quantify them — this wine has a more fruity flavor than that; this student is clearly brighter than that. I can do fairly complex measurements in this way and plot the results and measure the amounts of change from one to another — the fruitiness of various wines across a spectrum, the acidity of those wines across a spectrum (we will leave the similar ways of dealing with pupils out of it — kindness, you know).

Some evidence goes beyond what I myself gather. Other people, we assume go through similar processes, and their evidence is available to me in one or another way. My parents made the evidence that constituted their experience available to me. Authors of books and papers do the same. I credit that information in different ways, depending on a variety of things; part of that assessment is based on the way the evidence is presented to me in explanation, about which more in a moment.

Belief is the integration and interpretation of evidence. I come to believe certain things about the constellation of events that is expressed in the evidence I have — in the elegant expression of Stephen Pepper: “world hypotheses”. That is, the sum of my evidence, taken together, underlies my understanding of my situation. This is fine, but can come acropper in at least two pretty obvious ways: On the one hand, I might very well extend my beliefs about the world in which I am situated beyond the limits of what my evidence supports. On the other hand, I may have explicit or implicit difficulties in accepting the evidence that others have compiled; this might arise from the way I have ordered my own evidence, anent the nature of those others. For example, if I don’t think you are as full able as I am, to experience and to compile your experience into coherent and meaningful evidence, I may dismiss that explanation. I may be right in doing so, or I may be very mistaken.

An extreme form of this kind of mistake shows up as totalitarianism. The beliefs I formulate, expressed as values, take on an objective character in a hierarchy that is conceived as a totality. Everything that fits, is just fine; everything that doesn’t fit, to the extent it doesn’t fit, slides toward unmitigated evil or non-existence. Those people who may be the source of such evidence as doesn’t fit, are also unmitigated evil, or not really extant and can be purged, one way or t’other.

Beliefs come in “flavors”. Some beliefs are carefully problematic; they express what one thinks is possibly so. Some beliefs are asserted as so, but the claim is not stringent. There are things of which one is certain; the claim is that such a belief is necessarily so. The last is the most demanding form, obviously. Equally, there is a real problem when merely problematic beliefs are presented as necessarily so.

To the extent we live together with others, and need to function together to mitigate the very real challenges that confront us, I have to explain my beliefs to you and you have to explain yours to me. One of us must persuade the other — a kind of violence involved in this, even if not the sort that entails bruises, or I have to ignore your view (or, you may choose to ignore mine — both of these sort of a “proto-totalitarianism”, perhaps, or we need to come to some agreement about the common world, a constellation of events that both of us recognize and to which both of us respond.

Explanation entails the test of belief, ultimately. I have a view of how things are, based on such evidence as I have. Does the evidence match the “real world”? It the image coherent? Does it allow me to project from what I believe to be the case to some future events with which I expect to be concerned?

It seems to me, to make this test, I have to be able to say with a high degree of certainty that things took just this form, for just this reason, through just this agency — and that in like circs., will do so again. I test this two ways: Can I set up the circs. to see if the predicted change takes place? If the change takes place, there is some indication I am justified in my beliefs (all the way back — that bit about coherence…); if the change fails, then to the extent it has done so, my beliefs are not robust and are subject to change. This is to say, the model of explanation is scientific explanation — causal (including all four Aristotelian causes), predictive and testable.

I would expect, in the normal course of events, that a system of beliefs would have to change, because the evidence available to me changes. If my beliefs don’t change — if I ignore the changing foundation of evidence — those beliefs will quickly diverge from their cognitive foundation. To the extent I act from such beliefs, my actions would be increasingly eccentric vis-à-vis whatever it is, external to myself, that is the source of the evidence appearing to me. That is, quite simply, a recipe for insanity.I started being concerned with this when I attended a so-ya-wanna-be-an-audiologist promotional “do” at Bellevue Hospital. Two CUNY dons (real ones, with research degrees) were introducing the new clinical doctorate (a non-research diplomate); the idea was, the new “evidence-based” approach to various kinds of medical practice, as well as general upgrading of the professional status of this particular specialty, justified the new degree. But, “evidence-based medicine”? “Now what the devil is that?” says I to myself.

A month or so later, my physician (nice lady, but giving up her cheap downtown practice to focus on her very posh Sutton Place clientèle) tells me she thinks I should start taking high blood-pressure medication. I do my due-diligence reading and come to the conclusion it can’t hurt, though the meaningful reports are actually very unclear. So I says to her, “OK, there are five or six categories of blood-pressure meds, and seven or eight players in each category. Which one and why?” Says she, “This one, because I like it.” Not “your high blood-pressure results from these factors and this med addresses them.”Nor is this really surprising; apparently, there is no good explanation of causative factors for high blood-pressure. Neither are there any good tests for more likely proximate causes of the problems for which high blood-pressure is commonly an antecedent condition. All there is, is lots and lots of case-histories, collated and counted and graphed in as neutral a way as can be. Evidence, it seems, is just this. What is puzzling, though: When this is presented to me, as explanation, it does not seem to stand up all that well to the tests I listed before:

• In this instance, the most convincing evidence (a study done in Massachusetts, tracking a population over several decades) lists blood pressure as one of several causative factors, in conjunction with others. It is not at all clear — from the evidence as explained — which of these secondary causes is more significant, or whether any of them by itself is more commonly proximate. Moreover, the study looked at only one blood pressure related problem (heart attack).
• Because these are understood only as secondary causes, there is no clear coherence among the data and with links to more primary causes which may not be proximate.
• One accepts that elevated blood pressure is probably not a good thing but: It is not clear from the explanation that just controlling blood pressure symptoms will do more than stave off the eventual heart attack or stroke, eventuating from a primary cause not well understood.
• The predictive character of such evidence is limited, at best. The explanation is not easily verified; criteria for falsification are almost too easy to discover and show to be the case.

This sort of evidence is not really convincing, and I am reduced to taking my physician’s advice on faith. Medicine is reduced to shamanism, or witchcraft. It has rituals and silly costumes and so on. There is even a litany (I have been hearing it chanted for the last 40 years).

[This is not a criticism of my physician, BTW.  She is, in fact, quite a decent person and, I think, a competent physician.  I think she does the appropriate professional reading; I think she hangs in the right circle to get the latest doctor-talk.  Nor does she necessarily make claims to science — wise, with me as a patient.  But the trappings of science, and sometimes the claims, are around, and they are just plain mistaken.

One commentator observed this might be a result of drug-manufacturer hype.  I think most competent medical professionals consider what is presented to them, but take it cum grano salis, along with other evidence.  That is a whole different question, finally; here my interest is the beliefs which some physicians adopt, explicitly or otherwise, convincing patients and perhaps in some way themselves, that they are being-scientific.  Something like that.]
More recently, I have had occasion to look at three ostensibly scientific papers from researchers on pigeon populations in cities. I inquired of their author about one of them because I was puzzled by the hiatus that seemed to obtain between assertion and supporting evidence; reading the papers convinced me that this was indeed the case, and that the problem was pervasive in the work coming out of this institute, part of an eminently respectable Swiss university.

[Keep in mind: I do favor pigeons — at least, the ones I visit with in the park by my house. First, they are remarkably friendly birdies. Even when I am not putting food right up in front of their little beaks, they will come and sit on my arm or hand, look me straight in the eye and just be, well, companionable. They seem to have very individual characters; they are all hungry, of course, but they respond to being fed, and to those of us who feed them, differently. They have a hard life, and yet it doesn’t seem to lead to ill-temper (as it can, for example, in dogs) — I have no way to understand this seeming stoicism. They sustain injuries of various kinds, and it is nothing short of amazing how they respond to being caught, held and having their wounds treated (far better than most children…). They are generally pretty clean (not a lot of pigeon poop — amazing considering that this group commonly includes 30 or more birds). While it’s summer and I am wearing short sleeves, the birds perching on my arms and hands can leave scratches, which have occasionally been just deep enough to draw blood; unlike cat scratches, which inevitably get a bit red and inflamed, these did not and quickly healed — prima facie evidence that these feral animals are cleaner than some folks’ house pets. I also confess, I am delighted that I don’t mind that I have the pleasure of these charming animals’ company, without having to clean cages or go for walkies at 6AM. All I need to do is show up with a cup or two of grain, bread crumbs, peanuts, lentils, unpopped popcorn every so often (interestingly, not even daily, and at variable times).]

The three papers from this one institute consisted of a literature survey, a report on pigeon-flock behavior and a report of diseases-pigeons-carry. Consider the paper, “Parasites from feral pigeons as a health hazard for humans”. The title suggests a positive causal relationship between pigeon parasites and human disease. The 8½ page paper (including an impressive list of references) describes the main tick and flea problems to which pigeons are prey, complete with appropriately unappetizing pictures of infested pigeons. In short, pigeons get ticks and fleas, just like dogs and cats. These make the pigeon sick, maybe.

But: The article observes that the fleas wash off in a shower and bath. While they can carry diseases (no surprise; so do other fleas — including some that are more prevalent and more likely to be picked up by human beings), the author of the paper cites only a limited number of instances of contact resulting in disease. Even allowing for under-reporting, the numbers appear statistically insignificant; people are more likely to die in a car-accident (even on the streets of Basel, one suspects).

Much the same is true of the ticks. The little blood-suckers that pigeons can reproduce only on a diet of pigeon blood; human beings in most cases will experience no problems; a few may have allergic reactions to the tick bite more or less the same way some people respond more strongly to mosquito bites. Stripped of the fancy lingo, a person might get a red inflamed bump and might even have secondary symptoms. Assuming reasonably prompt action (washing, perhaps the application of a topical cream of the same sort one would use for insect bites, based on hydrocortisone and maybe including an antihistamine — over-the-counter stuff even in the most regulated countries), problem instances are few, and allowing for underreporting, statistically insignificant.

The same author, in his paper, “Health hazards posed by feral pigeons”, observes, “Although feral pigeons pose sporadic health risks to humans, the risk is very low, even for humans involved in occupations that bring them into close contact with nesting sites.” People who are “immunocompromised” (that is, they are already sick in one way or another) may be more susceptible to pigeon-problems. The key word is “may”.

This is crummy science — better: it isn’t really science at all. The evidence presented does not extend adequately to form a foundation for the beliefs expressed in the paper titles and conclusions. The presentation of that evidence — the explanatory parts — fails to get beyond the merely problematic. But the title and concluding statements are couched in apodictic language. In short: Academic smoke and mirrors.

So, the tale is quickly told:I think a besetting sin at the onset of Post-Modernity is that we are holding as necessary beliefs which extend far beyond any evidence we have, or even, may have. The mistakes would be comical, were the consequences not so grave.

On the other hand, the Christian god is not incarnate until after the parthenogenesis takes, so in its previous, spiritual state, it could not have supplied a sperm cell (which is flesh, not spirit). Moreover, as Rome has made clear, the Christian god’s whimsy is restricted by its rationality and obedience to its own limitations (unlike the Muslim god; not clear about the Hebrew god). Then too, how many miracles can one have in one event? To get a parthenogenetically engendered boy-baby would have taken three or four in quick sequence; there is a parsimony problem, and a rational deity would not commit such an irrationality.

At least, not among Christians. [One could argue that for Jews, the deity can be quite irrational; read his dealing with Ezekiel, Samuel and Saul, and Solomon. Muslims admit their god is capricious at least, certainly not rational; one is not sure how to take that. In these religions, of course, their gods are clearly capable of working as many miraculous suspensions of Natural Law as are needed to get the job done.]

There may even be scriptural warrant for this, in the Secret Gospel of Mark, the existence of which is attested in a letter of Clement, now missing but seen by two reliable witnesses and photographed — admittedly, in a late copy. In the interesting passage, Lazarus (clearly a buddy of Jesus) spends the night with her — or him. There don’t seem to be any other records of Jesus making it with other folks. One could maintain Jesus was an abstinent homosexual, but Clement is clear, this is not so. The alternative? Lazarus and Jesus — who was normally a cross-dresser, so she would be taken seriously in a patriarchal world — had a Thing going.

This is a good argument for women in the priesthood, don’t you think? And there is the germ of an interesting heresy, too. Of course, it does leave Bishop Robinson out in the cold, still….

But the effect on Nigerian bishops could be wonderful. Think of all the shades of red they might turn (or, purple sufficient to match their clerical garb), when one told ‘em “Jesus was a gurl!”

Part of the deal done when where I live was deregulated allowed folks like me to enter into the federal Section 8 subsidy program, keeping our rent consistent with our limited incomes. Each year, I “recertify” — I demonstrate that I am still eligible for this. It’s not as stable as the old Mitchell-Lama (state) program, but it keeps the escalating rent in check. It would work better still if, when my income falls (as it will this year), my rent would de-escalate.

HPD is the designated supervisory agency. In past years, I put in the pile of paperwork. This includes all sorts of letters from people we work for, pay stubs and our IRS form 1040, including W2 forms. HPD went kapocketa kapocketa and three months later spit out a “rent breakdown” specifying what I was to pay in rent.

This time, HPD took eight months (May through December, 2006). The “rent breakdown” informed my new rent was based on Sue’s and my income being around $13,500 more than reported income — that is, the income on our 2005 income tax return, and more than $20,000 more than we will actually earn in tax year 2007. I asked how these numbers were calculated; I was told the numbers came from my 2005 tax return. Nope; I have that form, too, and that is not what it says. I have the 2006 form 1040 (I do taxes early…); those numbers are even lower.

In short, either the folks at HPD are illiterate, or they are arithmetically challenged — or something….

I am not the only person living where I do, getting this assistance to keep my home of 30-some years at a rent I can afford, having this problem with HPD. Something is going on.

I decided to see if I could figure it out. Effectively, this is a three-horned problem; here’s what seems to be happening:

First, Mayor Mike promised lots of new low- and middle-income housing back in 2002 — starting with $3 billion to build or renovate 65,000 new housing units. In 2004 he hired a new HPD commissioner with public housing credentials. Commissioner Donovan’s brief was to start the ball rolling on 160,000 new units of “affordable housing” to house a half-million people. This housing was to be done by private sector developers with substantial city incentives. Almost immediately, this program had problems. $600 million dollars paid to the city by the Battery Park City Authority in lieu of property taxes was supposed to be used to build new low-cost housing. It was spent on other things. [David Chen, "City Diverted $600 Million Set Aside for Low-Cost Housing", New York Times 5/27/2004] Asked why not spent on housing, Bloomberg’s aides alleged that the refurb’d housing was happening — but a literature survey turns up no reports of new or renovated housing, only studies of how hard this is to do. [See the report, "Affordable Housing in New York" prepared for the city's Public Advocate's office, appropriately dates April 1, 2005.] Three years into HPD Commissioner Donovan’s term, the big “new idea” is nothing more than a revived 421-a program: This gives real estate developers a tax break if they allocate some apartments for low-cost housing, either in the main project on on adjacent property. [Janny Scott, "New York City Acts to Add Low-Cost Homes", New York Times 10/11/2006] So far: Apparently, not a lot of takers.

The logic is inescapable: Three years into a 10-year project, with about two years of effective governance by Mayor Mike’s crew, the city Dept. of Housing Preservation & Development has failed to accomplish its mission. Not good; something must be done lest Mayor Mike and a whole lot of his crew looks, well, seriously imprudent.
We come then to the second horn: Mayor Mike’s administration has a second housing agency, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). It actually owns buildings; some are city-built, some are acquired in one way or another.

In short, the city is a major landlord — and not one of the best. NYCHA is commonly reported to be riddled with corruption. A literature survey reveals numerous complaints of poor responsiveness to repair and maintenance problems. This is important because a great deal of the NYCHA housing stock of all provenance is old and consequently difficult to maintain. A lot of it is not eligible for direct federal funding; on the other hand, it can be indirectly funded through section 8 vouchers. A two-bedroom NYCHA apartment rented directly for around $350-$500 a month carries a section 8 contract rent of over $1,000 a month; the bookkeeping appears to be — interesting. [NYC IBO, "Examining NYCHA’s Plan to Preserve Public Housing", June 2006]

NYCHA’s own reports show it has been notably unsuccessful at contributing new housing to the city. It’s own website, in an undated but presumably current capital report, shows it created only 1,138 new or substantially renovated housing units. The Authority offers this as its contribution to the $3 billion, 65,000 unit commitment made by the Mayor Mike administration.

Again, the conclusion is clear: The city’s main public housing operating authority has not been doing a brilliant job. Again, it’s pretty obvious, Something Must Be Done to save Mayor Mike from looking, well, about as you’d expect for an ex-techie out of a stock-brokerage.
The third horn is purely fiscal, and has to do with the way the city has determined to manage its Section 8 programs — perhaps, move some money around to make it look like Mayor Mike and his crew weren’t talking through their hats.
Keep in mind, the money available for Section 8 support is limited. Though appropriations bills passed in Summer 2006 called for a modest increase in section 8 spending (essentially, enough to keep up with inflation), a continuing resolution passed at the end of the last Congress holds actual 2007 funding to 2006 levels, except for defense and homeland security. That is, under this Republican resolution, not yet disavowed by the Democrates, other agencies are funded at the same levels as in 2006. Allowing for inflation, this is actually a three percent decrease. Section 8 funding is correspondingly reduced.

Against this, there are the local political considerations:

• Mayor Mike has an absolute need to show he has delivered on promised low- and middle-income housing.
• He needs to pump money into NYCHA, to generate revenue to renovate that agency’s aging housing stock.
• Having raised taxes in 2002, then reduced them in time for the next election, he cannot very well raise them, especially for something like public housing.
• He is constrained by all sorts of limits from borrowing money.
• There is no new money to be had from Washington.

The evidence seems to be, Mayor Mike has resolved on a financial shell game.

On January 29, 2007, NYCHA reopened its section 8 voucher list to new applicants for the first time in 12 years. [NYCHA Press Release, 1/29/07] NYCHA has available 22,000 new section 8 vouchers. Ostensibly, this reflects an additional $100 million in section 8 funding; this has to be reconciled with the likely effect of the continuing resolution noted above, the fact that only some of that money might be available for city use and the time it takes to actually move appropriated money into operating accounts.

This is an interesting set of numbers: $100,000,000. divided by 22,000 vouchers works out to pretty much a full-ride rent for very-low-income folks, and about two-thirds of the rent for working-poor folks — making under $35,000 a year gross. The federal government will, in this scheme, pick up the slack between a contract amount and what the tenant pays. If the contract amount is generous enough, NYCHA (&c.) actually gets a chunk of money for which it would otherwise not be entitled. In short, an addition of 22,000 new vouchers should allow NYCHA to move marginal tenants already in place to the better-yield program, thus bolstering what the city’s Independent Budget Office believes to be seriously shaky finances.

Add to this:

• the target population for Mayor Mike’s vision of section 8 is largely homeless and poorest-of-the-poor housing.
• HPD section 8 contract rents set just a couple years ago are no longer “market rents” in some formerly middle-income residential neighborhoods.

Where I live, the HPD contracted rent is about $600 per month per room. New tenants pay $800 per month per room. Landlord Larry was delighted to have me here when that meant a full rent roll while he restored the Speculator’s Blush; he’ll be happy to see the back of me now that he’s painted this aging beauty’s face to conceal its blemishes and can sucker the 30-somethings with the cheapest-on-the-block Tribeca rental. This ignores the fact that one reason he got the buildings cheap is their age, and another is that the city paid for them, borrowing the money at 10½ percent, then giving it to the developer at 1½ percent, along with various rebates and deferrals that made the “loan” effectively interest-free.

It is entirely plausible that HPD policy is to find as many extant “working-poor” and borderline middle-income section 8 participants who can be removed from the section 8 rolls on some pretext or other. The resources thus freed can be reallocated to the just-announced NYCHA section 8 program:

1. NYCHA gets its needed influx of capital, regardless of what Washington eventually does.
2. Mayor Mike gets his housing initiative to finally show some movement.
3. Private-sector landlords, stuck with section 8 contracts they cannot easily void, rid themselves of tenants who cannot pay rapidly escalated rents.

City pols seem to be generally accepting this political shell game. This is interesting if only because the elected officials and their staffers created the solution only a few years ago, to cover over inadvertently giving away housing bought and paid for with taxpayer dollars.

And I, it seems, am screwed. Along with a lot of other folks who really thought the republic was also a commonwealth.

Simcha "Bottom" Felder

Simcha Felder has a problem: In a year or so, he loses his plum job as a city councilperson. He is turfed out by term limits — and anyway, his patron, Dov Hikind, is finding Albany a bit too warm for him, so he needs to toots on down to town and find a different pulpit.

Simcha Felder’s new ambition: To be New York City Comptroller. After all, the pay isn’t bad. The perqs aren’t bad. Mrs. Felder and her side of the family will not be embarrassed — and what else is poor Simcha good for? He took a modest degree in a very modest school, then added another modest degree from Baruch — a business school well regarded in news magazines, but never listed (not even at the bottom) among choice schools by business publications, a place only its former president now chancellor, Matt Goldstein, could love.

Simcha’s problem: Outside of his own city council district, no one knows him. Inside his city council district, there are those who know him who sincerely wonder why he was elected. [Vid. inter alia: http://vosizneias.com/2006/12/new-york-ny-councilman-simcha-felder.html]

Simcha is not glad, not joyful. Simcha’s answer: Pick on pigeons.

The Felder Report on Pigeons

So Simcha and his team product a farrago of a report. It is so bad, it even admits it’s wrong about some of its key assertions. A really smart lawyer, Lori Barrett, put together the definitive response (http://citywildlifealliance.org/Felderrebuttal112607pm.pdf); she commented further in other places (http://www.sanepr.com/Simcha-Felder-s-proposal-lacks-scientific-data_28312.cfm).

Let’s be perfectly clear about this: Simcha Felder made himself something of a foil. The popular press didn’t like him (The Daily News had a field day). Possible mayoral candidate, currently police commissioner Kelly cited Felder for discovering the latest threat to the city: feral pigeons. Ordinary New Yorkers made clear they like pigeons better in informal polling (about 60/40 in favor of the pigeons in the AM New York poll). Man-on-the-street conversations confirm this; people who are not at activist on animal issues or the like, when asked, generally think the pigeons are inoffensive and should be left alone.

New York went through this before; some years ago the city banned a pesticide called Avitrol because people found dead pigeons dropping out of the sky or flopping about in terminal central nervous system collapse sickening.

The Really Silly Part

Simcha wants to be the city’s fiscal watchdog. Are we to take seriously a person who would hold this position, and who proposes creating a million-dollar pigeon-czar office? Are we to take seriously as fiscally responsible a person who wants the city to spend between $5 million and $7 million to buy unproven birth control agents for pigeons, then pay city workers to feed this to the birds and stand there making sure they all eat it up? How does Simcha want to fund this? He is going to have city officials fine people who feed the birdies — pigeons, but necessarily all the others, since they all more or less share the same space. City employees — police, park rangers and so on — will have to be passing out tickets for this offense; it will have a $1,000 price tag, which means those same police, park rangers and so on will be sitting in court, waiting to testify, racking up overtime — and giving up donut-chomping or whatever to do the paper work. Uh huh.

All this Because Simcha Needs a New Job

Lemme tellya a story: When Mrs. Jenner started getting interested in pigeons, I was concerned. When she started bringing some up to our digs, to cut off the threads some of them get caught on their feet — leading to loss of toes, even the entire foot — I was very concerned. I did what I always do when I am concerned; I do research. It’s a good thing, to find out if a concern is genuine, I think we can agree, before haring off on some wild set of misconceived false assumptions.

Here’s what I found out — and your staff can verify it without much trouble, in about half an hour in front of the computer.

• You can’t get sick from pigeons; they are not a vector for any human disease. This is the clearly stated public view of the CDC, the NCID and New York’s own DHMH. It is also held by numerous university researchers, both here and in Europe, including researchers who are anti-pigeon.
• Pigeon poop is not a problem. It is not hazardous (your poop and mine, by the bye, is…). It is not hard to clean (water soluble, it hoses off; this assumes that maintenance staff is not too lazy to do their jobs).
• No case of disease associated with natural garden fungi, sometimes associated with bird poop (not just pigeons…) has ever been traced back to pigeons. Such disease is very rare (max-1 case per year in New York, over the last half-century), and inevitably in people who work in petshops and don’t wash their hands.
• Pigeons are clean birds; they like baths and they preen constantly. If you see a dirty feral pigeon, it is dirty only because it has been driven to trash bins to forage for food.
• Pigeons are smart, curious animals. They explore constantly the environment they inhabit; they adapt well to changes in it, both as a species and individually. They learn quickly and can be trained to do quite involved tasks; they retain that training. They have remarkable abilities for pattern matching and identification — substantially better than human beings.
• Pigeons are social animals; they live peaceably in flocks. Pigeon cocks have a modest personal-space territorial imperative; pigeon hens are even less territorial. They are constant companions to each other and care for their offspring.
• Many pigeons easily include humans in their social circle. They recognize specific human beings (and possibly, though it is disputed, particular birds, including self-recognition in mirrors, a sign of fairly developed intelligence if true). They will come to such people, and — this is very surprising — remain with them by choice, even when not being fed.
• Pigeons are a scientific challenge. Cornell University’s ornithology labs has a long-term project to study urban feral pigeons, mainly (as I understand it) to understand why they break all the rules for feral populations reverting to purely wild status. Pigeons don’t.

Those are facts. It is verified in my own not uncritical experience. This is quite unlike the farrago foisted on the City Council (and readers of the New York Times) by Councilman Felder.

Pigeons are nice animals. They have a slightly declining population in this city. They give pleasure to many people — old people, children — and what a charming thing, to watch a child go wide-eyed with amazement, when a small soft ball of fluff sits quietly on the kid’s arm eating seed from its hand.

These birds are for many people what, O, say, Councilmember Vacca’s dog is for him. They are the city’s pets. They are the companions for old folks and poor folks and people who cannot keep a pet in the house and so on.

So what to do?…

Councilman Felder — an honorable man, a religious man, a man who is “well liked in the body” (so says Councilman Vacca) — wants to employ a highly paid “ pigeon czar” (a councilman turfed out by term limits who couldn’t get a real job, perhaps?) and accipitrine robots and adulterated feed (more folks on the city payroll to pass this out) and so on to control a naturally limited and declining population. He assaults the sensibilities of a wide array of people — the polls that have been taken show a 60/40 split in favor of the pigeons, after discounting for people who got counted more than once.

This is shameful on the surface of it, and imprudent as a legislative measure — enacting expensive legislation no one will obey is just plain foolish.

Absent such cogent reasons, perhaps the probity of those support such an initiative should be doubted.

Nowhere does this become more apparent than among the various classes of teachers employed in the Academy. In the City University of New York, two-thirds of the teaching is done by people who are labeled “adjunct” and “part-time”. They are compared — negatively — to “full-time” teachers.

Time for a reality check.

First, the City University of New York has no full-time instructional staff. No university does; I doubt one could find a rural college that has a full-time faculty.

Full-time employment is widely defined (by statute in some cases) as working 40 hours a week. Let’s be generous and allow for four weeks’ vacation; we can say reasonably, people employed full time work 40 hours a week, 48 weeks a year.

No CUNY salaried instructional-staff employee — even those at the six-figure top of the scale — would dream of putting in more than 30 hours a week, for more than 30 weeks a year. [In fact, it seems likely, were the senior dons where I hang my mortarboard clocked, they’d never show more than 20 hours a week, and some of ‘em would skip out even for a conference or two, or some other sort of junket, during the week on the college’s nickel.]

Well, of course they do — but only at their convenience, and if given a $75+ per contact hour sweetener. The old scam was to get “release time” from classroom teaching, to carry out some other chore, then get hired back as a part-timer to fill the class assignment thus left vacant. That abuse stopped; the new Chancellor has agreed to revive it. The new wrinkle is to allow folks employed at one college of the university to moonlight at another college of the university — for an additional fee beyond that covered by their “full-time” salaries.

In short, the “full-time” instructional staff is not overburdened with work under their usual conditions, and many have both the time and energy to teach lots more — so long as they can guzzle a bit more at the public trough. Apparently Head Trustee Benno Schmidt and Chancellor Matt Goldstein think this is just dandy; they appear to be encouraging it.

The only real difference between the 30 percent of CUNY’s instructional staff that is salaried, and the 70 percent that is paid by the hour is the way they are compensated for their work. The 70 percent get paid by the hour, and the salaried 30 percent connives with the Benno-&-Matt crew to limit the amount of work these folks can take on.

The result is interesting: The vastly larger group of hourly-wage part-time teachers do most of the teaching. Since most of them have other roles outside the constraining walls of the city colleges, they bring their wider range of experience into the classroom. Since university teaching is about experts in their field bringing their latest experience and insight into that field to the classroom discourse, one can rightly infer the hourly-wage not only teach most of the classes, but they do a measurably better job than their salaried colleagues who rarely have to deal with a larger extramural world.

Some of us find this frustrating: In the CUNY college where I teach, expository writing — the kind of writing required for college study and damn near everything else — is taught to lower-division college students only after one or more semesters of remedial writing and a semester and a half of Freshman English. They write one, short, barely researched paper in the second semester of that year-long course. I was shocked to learn this from a long-time member of that department. What are they writing the rest of the time? Apparently one senior don, chap name of Lapides, has ‘em writing about their deep inner feelings; he announced this with great pride in a union newsletter.

How flawed is the CUNY offering? CUNY appears to be large enough that its particular performance system-wide is not different from that of public university systems taken altogether. Some reports have suggested that 1st-degreee (BA) failure-to-complete rates for such institutions is 65 percent after four years, 35 percent (perhaps more) after six years. Comparable failure rates are reported for two-year school programs. These failure rates are consistent with what can be seen in the classroom. CUNY’s chancellor has announced programs aimed at fixing the problems in certain target groups; this appears to mean passing out notes about the importance of retention, followed by other notes stressing uncompromising standards.

This pattern is not unique to New York’s city colleges. It is commonly the case at other schools in the area. And it is perfectly clear: The folks who operate this system — those salaried but part-time teachers, the deans and presidents promoted from their ranks and the system-wide administration — realize that what they have on offer, claimed as a superior educational experience, is tragically flawed for many students.  They cover for this, and the concomitant cognitive dissonance, by derogating the hourly wage staff as merely “adjunct”.

To call the substantial majority of the instructional staff — the only class which, as a class, has ongoing experience outside the hothouse walls of the city colleges, which can then be brought to the classroom — “adjunct” is plainly absurd.

“Adjunct” is a term suggesting superfluity. Arguably, it is the salaried (but still part-time) instructional staff that could readily be dispensed with. [On the other hand, “casual labor” is entirely accurate; us and the grape-pickers, but we haven't got a Cesar Chavez working on our behalf.]

Of course, it would be more fun to make those salaried folks who claim to be full-time really work full time. The squeals of outrage would make a pig-farm seem peaceful.

That is to say, many — maybe most — people are dogmatic. They don’t actually think much about what they believe to be the case, or whether it is really the case; they just assume the filter of their value-hierarchy is correct. Tribeca newcomers who are objecting to pigeon-feeding in our neighborhood are a very good example.

They ignore reality; I did, too. I had to deal with reality when Mrs. Jenner decided Feeding The Pigeons Is Good! Not my usual taste, but prudence of several sorts sent me to do a bit of research. That is, I had to waken from my dogmatic slumber anent pigeons.

Once past the limits of dogmatism, the realities about pigeons are really quite interesting.

First — and most important: We are responsible for the pigeons around us. These urban birds — descended from Rock Doves — are not native to the Americas. We brought them here. We are answerable for their welfare, having made them part of our natural human habitat. It is a severe moral failing, not to care for the world we ourselves make, as part of our being human. To put it properly, it is a severe deficiency in moral judgment to fail to care for pigeons. You might as well go fuck your neighbor’s wife, or dog or something.

Aside from providing a tasty dish for the well-to-do and a slang term for a pretty young girl — squab — pigeons have been real companions for us. Their remarkable homing sense has made them couriers of surprising reliability. Then there is that wonderful grave stele of a little girl; her parents chose to remember her with her pet pigeons; don’t think this is artistic license; I have seen similar interaction right here in Tribeca.
Pigeons exhibit remarkable intelligence. There is some evidence that a pigeon — like human beings, dolphins and chimpanzees — can recognize an image of itself in a mirror; this suggests a rather surprising sense of Self, and greatly disturbs the cognitive-science crowd (”who just now are rather rife…”).

They clearly do distinguish among other pigeons, and take their cue from other birds. Pigeon fledglings learn from parents (both of them) and from other birds around them. [I have actually seen this happen; it is remarkable to see one pigeon copy another to get a desired reward.] Pigeons can learn very complex actions; B. F. Skinner is famous for having taught pigeons to play ping-pong. Pigeons can discriminate between different artists’ works — they do about as well as human college students in the standard undergraduate art-appreciation course, with about the same amount of training. This intelligence, and ability to learn quite complex behaviors led to pigeons serving the Coast Guard training them for use in air-sea rescue; pigeons were dramatically more effective in finding people lost at sea. [The program ended when Republicans changed the Coast Guard mission from rescue to interdiction. Yet another example of Republican turpitude.]

The pigeons in our neighborhood, especially those who gather in Washington Market Park, also appear to remember people. One bird — with distinctive markings — will see me come in and immediately come to sit on the fence, to see if I will give it a peanut. A few others will often come over, lining up to take a peanut one at a time. It is quite a charming sight to see them all lined up nicely waiting their turns. Others will come to perch on one’s arm and feed from the hand. Interestingly, most seem to avoid making messes when they do this. [The exception is one little charmer who thinks it’s a parrot and prefers to ride on my shoulder. It won’t walk down to my wrist even for peanuts. Just sort of sticks its head out to look me in the eye.] They are even more thrilled to see Mrs. Jenner; the word gets out and they all come over to say hello.

They line up, waiting to see what might transpire. One might think this was in hopes of a meal, but then the birds surprise you. For example, one Sunday on the way to Divine Worship, I stopped to give out some grain and some peanuts. After the Peanut Parade — perhaps ten or fifteen minutes later, I left to go meet Mrs. Jenner. The birds walked along with me, down two blocks to Chambers Street and across. [I got a few very strange looks as I was walking along.] No food. Nothing special, just Jenner and a small flock of pigeons out for a stroll. It is not an isolated incident.

In short, these “feral” birds claim a role in the extended community.

This has some interesting consequences. Children who have hitherto gotten their jollies by scaring the birds, see that the birds are actually quite tame, even friendly, and they find feeding them at least as much fun as chasing them. Wise parents find that this is a nice way to show their offspring a different, more civil way of dealing. Greater civility is generally a good thing; we could use a good deal more of it around the ‘hood.
But, goes the common line, these smart, pretty, sweet birds constitute a health hazard. It turns out, this just isn’t true.

The New York City Dept. of Health & Mental Hygiene has made it clear that pigeons pose no special health hazard. Of disease-causing organisms associated with pigeons, two are naturally occurring soil fungi; a person mucking about in the garden is as likely exposed to these same fungi, regardless of the local bird population. See http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/html/epi/epi-pigeon.shtml.

The United States government’s health authorities concur: “[For example, histoplasmosis disease rates are] misleading and irrelevant, because histo’s so ubiquitous. It’s in the soil, regardless of whether pigeons are around or not…,” according to Dr. Marshall Lyon, National Center for Infectious Diseases.

Another disease claimed to be pigeon-borne is most often associated with caged birds — parrots and so on; in New York, it is so rare that less than one case per year is reported (and none associated with pigeons). “The New York City Department of Health has no documented cases of communicable disease transmitted from pigeons to humans,” according to Manuel Vargas, DVM, MPH, a research scientest in that department. Also: “Since 1996, fewer than 50 confirmed cases were reported in the United States annually. In New York City, psittacosis is very rare with less than one human case identified each year. According to the CDC, about 70% of infected people had contact with infected pet birds. Those at greatest risk include bird owners, pet shop employees, veterinarians, and people with compromised immune systems. No person-to-person cases have ever been reported.”

This view is widely held: “Pigeons are not a public health hazard. Nobody in public health is losing any sleep over pigeons,” notes Dr. Joel McCullough, then Medical Director, Environmental Health, Chicago Department of Public Health. And, comments Dr. Cornelius Kiley, a Canadian food inspection agency veterinarian. “Pigeons do not get avian influenza and don’t carry the virus” — no bird flu.

Summarizing the evidence, pigeons don’t pass diseases to human beings — period. This is admitted even by researchers deliberately seeking the most damaging anti-pigeon case: “In spite of the worldwide distribution of feral pigeons, the close and frequent contact they have with humans, their use as food, and the [claimed] high prevalence of carriage of human pathogens, zoonotic disease caused by feral pigeons is infrequent.” (Haag-Wackernagel & Moch, writing in Journal of Infection 2004, #48, pp. 307-313). That’s as nasty a comment as you will find in the literature, based on a search of 60 years’ records for examples of folks getting sick from contact with pigeons. In short, Mommy (or her nanny) is more likely to give her kid a case of salmonella poisoning by not cooking the chicken long enough, or through cross-contamination in her kitchen.

But what about all the pigeon poop? Agreed; pigeon poop is inæesthetic. But it’s not a great problem to get rid of it. It’s water-soluble. A good rain storm does a pretty good job of rinsing it away; soap and water takes off your clothes. The city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene recommends washing accumulations away with water under pressure — not a difficult thing to do in most public places. In the few places where dropping have accumulated (in our area, buildings with less than diligent building staff, as a walk around the neighborhood shows), the recommended procedure is to soften the accumulation, then shovel it into plain old trash bags, and dispose of in plain old trash. Pigeon droppings as such are not toxic, and not generally infectious (less so than, say, your neighbor’s infrequently cleaned cat-box in the bathroom next door…).

In fact, pigeon poop can be beneficial. Pigeon droppings are great fertilizer. Nitrate rich, and completely “green”, they rapidly dissolve into soil. In fact, take a look around grassy areas where pigeons have been resting; one rarely sees pigeon (or other bird) droppings. They are there (what? you thought the birds in the trees didn’t poop?) — but out of sight…. Notice, sunbathing remains such fun, especially when the lawn is so lush and green. The kids can shed their shoes and toddle about. One could say, our neighbors who feed the pigeons in and about the gardens and the lawns of our local parks ensure a healthy soil beyond what the Parks Department can promise. A bit of pigeon-processed feed on a well-watered lawn is a Good Thing (as That Woman has been so fond of saying).

Another good thing: Pigeons help prevent rat infestation. Pigeons are — well, bottomless pits; the amount of food put out by pigeon feeders is not enough to sate these birdies. They also clean up stuff that the lunch-in-the-park crowd dribbles around the park benches (you can verify this by inspection). They also clean up after the rug-rats. Interestingly, they do this in park areas, but one never finds them encroaching on the playground areas (clever birdies!). Pigeons are diurnal; they do their cleanup during the day, before the rats come out. Those of us who were here before Tribeca got parks, and who helped fund the first and second parks (the first park was supposed to be locked, and I vaguely recall having a key given out when one made a contribution), recall cat-sized rats in large numbers. Pigeons have reduced the attractions of the park; rats — nocturnal critters, and proven bearers of “zoonotic” diseases — now haunt the trash piles set out by the local restaurants as they close at night and the leavings of the local school cafeterias.

Finally, there is the very obnoxious Tribeca resident who characterizes pigeons as “rats with wings”. This expression gained currency in the Woody Allen movie, “Stardust Memories”. To this woman — on record as not liking animals of any kinds: Life is not a Woody Allen movie. Even in New York. Thank Heaven!

Conclusion? Folks who look at the real world as it is, who check the data and do the research — both pro-pigeon and anti-pigeon — have to conclude that pigeons are fairly decent neighbors. They are not especially dirty (in fact, there is good evidence they are clean-freaks) and such mess as they make is easily managed without much fuss. They are neither causes of disease, nor transmitters of disease. They are occasionally enthusiastic and their enthusiasm can be a bit overwhelming (I speak from personal experience) — but an adult reaction to this quickly calms things down. [On the other hand, it’s sort of fun to walk into a place where you’ve visited the birds before, to be recognized by one or another of them, and have them waddle up and look at you, as if to say, “Hi, and O, you wouldn’t have a peanut with you, would you?”]

The relatively small number of people who take a different view — ignoring fact in favor of personal fantasy — have embraced value-totalities that simply make it impossible see what is really real in front of them. They lead lock-step lives, devoid of clear thinking. What is particularly sad in the case of such folks caught up in their private totalitarian hells: No one else will ever really fit in, so they they will live alone and lonely. Perhaps as a gesture of good will, we might poison their tea.