For the past few years, I have lived around the corner from the Firemen’s Memorial in Manhattan. Every September 11, the neighborhood gets quiet. Streets are closed to traffic, and instead are filled with fire fighters in their formal uniforms, somberly marching to the monument, alongside a substantial police presence, mostly directing traffic but also respecting the moment.
I have no direct connection to the firefighters; I’m just a neighbor, and a lot of the time I’m walking my dog nearby. But since 2019, I have felt the moment more viscerally than I did for the decade-plus before, reminded of the effort, the tragedy, the grieving that continues.
Regardless, I don’t tend to dwell on the day, other than to pay my respects. Since it’s getting a fair amount of attention this year in other spaces, I thought I’d briefly call attention to how 9/11 was experienced here. My thoughts are with those who have much worse to remember today.
The Flatiron Will Go Condo. This is sad, because it will severely limit who can enter one of New York’s true landmarks. I had a job interview with Penguin many years ago, and HR was in the pointy end, and I can still picture the goofy narrow office in my mind. It’s a fun memory even today. Sixty luxury apartments will reduce opportunities like that to near-zero.
The point here isn’t to argue against capitalism, or to debate the merits of adding housing stock to a city that needs plenty, or to say my little recollection is particularly important. It’s about the Flatiron Building and New York itself, and what it means when landmarks turn into residential real estate.
Of course the Flatiron needs new life, and it’s a mess inside, and it’s such a major project that no one even wanted to buy the building. Commercial office space is not a bullish investment in 2024, and adding apartments in Manhattan is fundamentally good.
That said, its sixty ultra-high-end luxury condominiums are likely to be purchased by a mix of LLCs and holding companies, held as investment properties and pied-a-terres, ultimately contributing little to the neighborhood. A small staff will stand guard at a lobby that a limited number of residents will use each day. Is this the best outcome for the city?
The Plaza Hotel went condo in 2005, four years after the September 11 attacks, when New York was convinced that high-end hotels had passed their peak. This was widely viewed as a disappointment, one that spurred talk of government intervention. How soon we forget! No one wanted to lose access to such a grand, iconic space. Never mind that the old hotel was expensive; at least one could go there, see the lobby, get upstairs if interested, and experience it.
There’s still a hotel in the Plaza, of course, but greatly downscaled. What remains—some hotel rooms, the Palm Court, the ballrooms—exists in part because public pressure helped it persist. That pressure has abated. No one is really fussing over the Waldorf-Astoria’s slow transformation into a more residential space, other than to lament how long it’s taking. And few are going to fuss over the Flatiron, if the reactions to that Threads post are any indication.
I know firsthand what it means to have set foot in these iconic buildings, to use them for their stated purpose, and my hope is that many others get to experience them, too, not just as nice pieces of architecture (which they all are) but as part of the city’s fabric.
Just before the Plaza closed as a full hotel, my wife and I spent a night there. We wanted to experience its grandeur for ourselves. And it was grand indeed: wide hallways, high ceilings, a strikingly oversized room, and all the prewar detail still on the walls, aged but beautiful. Staying there was a singular New York experience. Like my one pop into the Flatiron Building, I’m glad I got to be there. So, too, my coffees in the lobby of the Waldorf, and the various industry dinners I once attended there.
There will always be somewhere else to go for a meeting, a dinner or a night’s stay, and landmark designation means these special buildings will remain a part of the streetscape. Still, losing access to them, in full or in part, marks a shift away from part of what makes them special.
For most of the first century of its life, the Flatiron was a thriving space, with thousands of people walking into its lobby and filling its 22 stories with an ever changing population, each generating their own experiences, their own memories. The building was lively inside and out. That is likely never to return. And the transition away from a bustling and interwoven piece of the city is noteworthy, and a little bit sad.
“I don’t have to like everything. But maybe I’m attracted to it because it’s unusual or makes me feel anxious or makes me want to dance or other kinds of impulses that get triggered.”
That’s drummer Doug Schulkind, in conversation with Rob Walker, discussing how he approaches music. It’s a great quote to keep in mind when flipping around radio stations or streaming music feeds. Or doing anything new in life, really.
Also, this:
“My end goal is to live long enough to have loved everything, and I’m not going to get there, but I’m getting there as fast as I can.”
Seriously: I love license plates. I think they’re endlessly interesting and amusing. Growing up, I played the license plate game for years on family vacations, looking for every U.S. state (Montana was my last). I got to know styles, variants, and updates for all of America, and the plates for eastern Canada, too. Growing up, I hated my local plates, so I tried to design my own (more on that later). I read—past and present tense—license plates as I go by, looking for catchy phrases and humor; I know by alphanumeric sequence which plates in my home state are the newest; I bristle at the new trend of defacing a plate to avoid tickets and tolls—in part on ethical grounds, and in part because it takes away some of my fun.
For better or worse, I have passed on this fixation to my younger son, who constantly tells me about what he sees, although he’s more about the logical order and less about finding words where there aren’t any. We do both enjoy a well done custom plate.
Anyway, Garrity’s post was about the recent history of PEI’s license plates, so let me discuss my own. I grew up in New Jersey, and when I was a little kid, they all looked like this:
New Jersey license plate, 1970s.
They weren’t much to look at, but they get high functional marks, with their high contrast making them easy to read. (I recall at one point learning about how plates’ readability correlates to cops’ ability to recover stolen cars.)
Soon after I started paying attenion, the Jersey plates got redesigned. The state added a New Jersey silhouette to the profile, replacing the center dot, but they inverted the color scheme, and came up with this cringe-worthy style:
New Jersey license plate, 1980s.
Apparently “blue and buff” is a thing to New Jersey, but it makes for an awful license plate. Readability certainly took a hit with this style. And the overall effect was just unattractive.
I had an Apple //c computer growing up, and around 1987 I went so far as to redesign the New Jersey license plate in Dazzle Draw. (Why I didn’t draw it freehand, I do not know.) I played up the Garden State angle, with a Jersey Tomato, and leveraged the Jersey Devil and the new hockey team’s color scheme, making a design with a white background and green-and-red visual elements. I sent two variations with a note to Governor Tom Kean’s office. I’m sure it looked pixelated and awful, but I bet it wasn’t any worse than the blue and buff license plate. The governor’s office did not respond.
By 1993, I had gotten a new car, and New Jersey had updated its license plates again, so mine looked like this:
New Jersey license plate, 1990s.
Readability was back, and the design was both retro and modern with its color fade, but what was this design? We’re giving up on “buff and blue”? The nice state stamp in between the letters stuck around, but in an era when other states’ license plates were increasingly attractive and clever, Jersey got a plate that met outsiders’ low expectations. With minor tweaks, this design persists to present day, thirty years of uninspired license plates on the Garden State Parkway.
Meanwhile, New York was pulling ahead. My childhood memories of New York plates were of the color and then the Statue of Liberty, which were fine—not exciting, but somehow more stately, interesting and important than New Jersey. Like the state and its namesake city, New York’s license plates (like California’s) had some presence, and it suited them.
In 2001, New York redesigned its license plates to showcase more of the state, and they nailed it.
New York license plate, 2000s.
This plate brought lots of good elements together: the state outline divider, the slogan, and a collage of statewide geographic features across the top, from Niagara Falls to the Adirondacks to the Manhattan skyline. It was handsome, easy to read, interesting and memorable. A great license plate.
My car at the time was registered in New Jersey, so I missed having that license plate on my vehicle. By the time I got a new car, in 2015, New York had moved back to the orange-and-navy theme of the 1970s, ditching the geographic elements, which were beginning to seem fussy, in favor of a simple, clean layout.
New York license plate, 2010s.
This design was… fine. Easy to read, plays off the past, curved lines and fonts give it some style, the shade of orange matched the NYC taxicab fleet pretty well. I didn’t love it, but there was nothing to dislike, either.
The same cannot be said of the current New York plates, which adorn my car now. They are emblematic of much of the Andrew Cuomo administration: well-intentioned, earnest, but failing to stick the landing.
New York license plate 2020s.
We are back to the previous geographic elements—all of them! Plus the Statue of Liberty returns, and now there’s a lighthouse, and some clouds. “Empire State” has been sacrificed for EXCELSIOR, which Cuomo loved to use, presented in an overly bold and blocky font, while the stripes atop the plate fall at an odd height and fail to tie the design together. The overall effect is amateurish. Kind of like something a middle school student would design at home, only this time it’s on every new license plate in the state.
Governor Kathy Hochul hasn’t expressed much concern over the current New York license plate, which is just three years old, but perhaps her successor will. Maybe we’ll get something inspired for the next decade. At least the current plates are easy to read. Excelsior.
A number of years ago, I made a conscious decision, based around privacy concerns and ad trackers, to minimize my time spent on Facebook and Instagram. It wasn’t especially hard; I deleted the Facebook app on my phone and diverted my attention elsewhere, and that was that. A little bit of righteous indignation goes a long way.
I have largely stuck to my decision and I’m no worse off for it. I’m not a Meta heathen; my accounts are active, and every now and again (a couple of times a month, I’d guess) I look through my feeds. I occasionally post to one or the other, when the moment is right. (And I use WhatsApp, because every group chat that’s not immediate friends now defaults to WhatsApp.)
Mostly, though, I’ve chosen to keep current on the news and chatter of the day, rather than the personal posts of social media. And for a long time, getting the best information of the moment meant hanging out on Twitter.
For the past nine months or so, the once-vibrant Twitter community has watched with concern as its new owner has put the service on a path of self-destruction. Competitors are now rushing to take its place, from grassroots distributed platforms to scrappy startups to, now, Instagram, in the form of Threads. Like many others, I have accounts on all of them.
Perhaps in a few months or years one of these systems will be our collective hangout like Twitter used to be. In the interim, though, it’s all rather overwhelming. I find myself completely at a loss as to which short-form posting platform to open. I’ve been flipping indiscriminately around all day without rhyme or reason. And still in muscle memory is that Twitter search is best for in-the-moment breaking news, so I’m still there, too, quieter but not gone.
What to do? We have so many decision points now. For one, where are my friends? My business colleagues? The interesting journalists and pundits I follow? The push news from the sources I trust? The fantasy baseball content? Darth?
Then: who do I want monetizing my feed? Elon Musk, on a site where he’s pushing extremist views? Or Mark Zuckerberg, whose platforms I so deliberately left not long ago? Or Jack Dorsey, whom most people blame for this situation existing at all? Or no one at all, via Mastodon, but leaving so much behind?
Or maybe—just maybe—I should just let go?
It may be time, at least for me, to stop chasing the conversation. It’s not really a conversation, anyway, not most of the time; you post, I post, they post, once in awhile someone replies, and once in a great while an actual conversation ensues. We’re all so used to this cadence that we don’t realize we don’t need it. But I know I don’t: my time away from FB/IG proves it. I just need to extend that motivation.
Giving up a 15 year short form posting habit would not be easy. I enjoy having an outlet for sharing thoughts in writing (see also) and with social media there’s a built-in audience. But then, audiences are elusive; sometimes my posts get some attention, and oh the dopamine hit that comes from a retweet, but sometimes I float a thought at the wrong time of day, or that the algorithm doesn’t dig, and fewer than 20 people even see it. With the fragmentation of the landscape, it’s all a crapshoot now.
I’ve been carrying around an old copy of “The Power Broker” for a good while. This could be a great time to commit myself to it. And a hundred other things that don’t require a social media feed.
Instead of the usual musician or candy-seller, we encountered a gymnast performing for money on the 4 train this afternoon. With a boombox playing Michael Jackson and a mouthful of one-liners, he did one-arm flips and off the ceiling-mounted bars, then tried to entertain us as he asked for money.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “if I didn’t kick you in the head, you got nothing to be angry at.”
“Gentlemen, if you can’t do this, please donate accordingly.”
“Ladies, if your man can’t do this, please come to my place… it’s right by the subway and I have cable.”
Across from us, a 7-year-old boy turned to his mother: “We should go to his place.”
Drafted 2007/09/03 at 9:56 pm. Published unedited.
You’ve been playing Wordle the past few months, haven’t you? Who hasn’t? It’s a great little game, a couple of minutes of diversion, deep thought and great satisfaction. I play it almost every day.
To everyone’s delight, Wordle quickly spawned knock-offs, all in the open-source, free-to-play spirit of the original. I play a bunch of them. There are all sorts of variants, from words to maps to songs to movie stills. They all have their charms, and the internet is a little more fun as a result.
As someone who likes word puzzles, I’ve spent most of my -rdle gaming time on the letter games, espeically the spin-offs. Wordle begat Dordle, which is two wordles solved simultaneously; that led to Quordle, and the multiplying went from there: eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four. Many of them even use the same codebase.
You can play them in order, which is fun, or you can just hit the best ones: Wordle, the original, and Sedecordle.
Wordle is a brain teaser, great for all the well-documented reasons. Sedecordle is a puzzle: 16 words, 22 total guesses, each attempt painting in different parts of each grid. It is part word search, part crossword and part jigsaw puzzle, requiring dexterity and clever construction to find every word in time. It takes a few more minutes than Wordle, but like any good word game, the satisfaction that comes from completing it is great.
Sedecordle is inherently solvable, but not easy. I try to crack it in as few as 18 rounds, but I still lose outright maybe once a week. A word with multiple uncommon options (PATCH, MATCH, WATCH) can quickly undermine the day.
The others? All worthy, just not as satisfying. Dordle is a great little trifle, as is Quordle (although their word choices are much more esoteric). The 32- and 64-word options are noble but more of an endurance exercise than a game; they use every single letter, and with patience it’s just a matter of filling in words. Octordle alludes to the promises of Sedecordle, but the eight word grid is not as compelling as sixteen.
Tomorrow is the 20th anniversay of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York. You know this, of course. This weekend, many corners of the internet will be commemorating the occasion.
I have never been one to look back on the event in great detail. Many people do (Anil Dash, for example, every year) and I appreciate their reflections without feeling much need or desire to add my own. I lived it, I wrote down my reactions in real time, and for me, that has been enough.
Speaking of which, my memories of the day and the week were chronicled here on the Ideapad, and I still recommend reading them; the page is both contemplative and raw, and it holds up. Also, for really raw writing about the event, my friend Adam’s firsthand writeup is chastening.
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