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We always knew that Jerry Seinfeld, apart from his TV show, is a phony, unfunny moron (see Recharger’s previous Seinfeld entry). What we didn’t know was that the over-the-hill standup is also that lowest of human life forms: a car collector.
In fact, the washed-up TV star is reportedly squandering his millions on one of the largest Porsche collections in the world. So large that during a period in the 90s, he rented out a hangar at the Santa Monica Airport in California to store his cars. After his return to New York, Seinfeld, at a cost of $1.4 million, commissioned the renovation of a two-story garage on West 83rd Street in Manhattan. The garage, which took two years to complete, is probably the gaudiest car-park in auto history. Floors are white terrazzo. Walls are epoxy resin panels. Cabinetry, steel shelving, and the industrial elevator are custom. Touch-screen panels on the wall control everything.
Then there’s the married Seinfeld’s upstairs bacheloresque hideaway, an 844-square-foot apartment with kitchen, bathroom, plasma screen TV, and (we really hate this) a pool table.
Seinfeld owns 47 Porsches. The collection reportedly includes vintage 911s, 10 Boxsters each painted a different color, and the famous 1955 550 Spyder. (we have no idea what any of this means, but we guess it sounds cool to brain-damaged car-philes).
The centerpiece is a $700,000 Porsche 959, one of only two hundred built.
The comedian’s biggest regret (aside from making Bee Movie) is that he can’t drive it. U.S. Emission and Crash tests were never performed because Porsche refused to donate four 959s for the destructive tests. Seinfeld imported the car for exhibition purposes, which stipulates the car may never be driven on American roads.

Now that’s funny

– Frank Collins

Just days before the leases expired; Thor Equities, the realtors who gobbled up Coney Island’s thuggy-but-fun Astroland, ran into a roadblock named Bloomberg. The Mayor unveiled a plan that will transform Coney Island into a year-round entertainment destination (read South Street Seaport) with seaside attractions (read: miniature golf) and a stronger residential community (read: zillion-dollar condos.) The Mayor also gave an additional $50 million to implement the plan after previously pledging $23 million. Combined with the Brooklyn Borough President’s $7 million and Congressman Jerrold Nadler’s $3.2 million, a total of $83.2 million is now marked for the area.

Unfortunately, according to Kinetic Carnival, the Coney Island blog, Thor has begun booting poor people from the area. Says Kinetic Carnival:

Thor has given notice to most of their newly acquired tenants in the Henderson’s building and beyond!…This is just the beginning of Thor clearing its land up for the zone that will mark the first construction site towards the revitalization of the New Coney.

Having spent some scary summer nights watching cops chase teens through Astroland, we are not too sad about this massive urban renewal. And we don’t trust opponents. After all, community activists also objected to the construction of Keyspan Park, home of a very minor league Mets team, and that turned out to be such an astonishing addition to the area, we are almost trading in our copy of Das Kapital for a Brooks Brothers tie.

We do have one question. After Thor finishes the project, will the area still have that hot-doggy, French-fryey smell that mugged our senses as we walked from the D Train, down the ramp to the Surf Avenue on the hottest day in July?

-Jerry Saieh

We have a soft spot for family entertainment like Scarface and Goodfellas, but when it comes to pure shmaltz, American Gangster takes the cake.
The “true” story chronicles Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington). a heroin dealer who adopts the financial wizardry of his Italian mafia peers to run the Harlemites working under him, and Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe, his arm still aching from throwing telephones at concierges), a cop whose honesty makes him a pariah within the corrupt police community. Even with that handicap, Roberts spends the movie closing in on the bust he needs to put Lucas away.
Not that we care. Director Ridley Scott is so concerned with developing the paradoxes of these two characters (Lucas as a Pablo Escobarian enemy of the state, but a community philanthropist and responsible family-man; Roberts a good cop but a fuck-up at home) that he neglects the plot and, difficult to fathom, character development.
Indeed, his characters are chess pieces—their abilities limited as Scott clumsily tosses foreshadowing and extraneous information into this 157-minute epic, giving the movie an “oh, but first this happened” feel.
Because it’s based on a true story, we’d normally forgive the obligatory car explosion, cop vs. criminal shoot-out, drive-by shooting, bad guy’s suicide via .22 to the mouth; but the whole movie is a cliché. Worst of all, it roots for Denzel’s ruthless,drug-dealing Lucas.
If you want genuine, gritty, ghetto realism, watch Full House re-runs.
- Eric Siegel

About those new decals on the yellow taxis, we agree with Time Out New York:

“the current flower-power art project looks like the Summer of Love threw up”

As ex-cabbies, we find the decals vaguely reminiscent of Thomas Hoving’s famously phony “be-ins” back in the 60s (back when Hoving was Mayor Lindsey’s Parks Commissioner).

Still, with one hand, we sort-of applaud Garden in Transit’s attempt to do something original. Organized by Portraits of Hope, a non-profit creative therapy program for seriously ill and disabled kids, the art celebrates the centennial anniversary of the first metered taxi in NYC (yawn). Thousands of children, adults, schools and hospitals volunteer to paint flowers on adhesive panels which are then stuck to the taxi hoods.

Forgive our morbosity, but wouldn’t it be better to paint a portrait of every driver who’s been murdered over the past 100 years?

- Dionne Poblete

The original City-Hall subway station closed in 1945, and since then has remained hidden as we, unawares of the beauty below us, dragged our sorry asses from home to work and back again. Now we can glimpse what used to be. If you stay on the #6 train, past the final stop–the Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall station–you will make a u-turn (don’t freak out; transit officials allow riders to stay aboard for the u-turn) until you are facing up-town. Beforehand, get yourself to a front window (sadly, newer cars have double front windows, killing one of the true joys of subway riding). Peering through the dark, you catch a glimpse of the past, the original City-Hall station, opened in 1904 and considered the crown jewel of the New York Subway System. For more info on this treasure, visit Forgotten New York
–Doreen He

After Carlos Beltran looked at a third strike to end last year’s Mets, we didn’t think it could get worse.

It did.

The best we can say about this year’s Mets is that the shlong they sucked in the sky reserved for baseball folding acts–the 1951 Dodgers, the 1964 Phillies, the 1978 Red Sox–is flavored with Yankee subterfuge.

For three years we’ve been saying the obvious: the Mets are led by a Yankee in Mets clothing. Willie Randolph, as those gazillionaires in the Bronx well know, is a Yankee. As such, he cannot be good for the Mets (let us not forget 1973, the last time a Yankee star–Yogi Berra–managed the Mets. How Berra led them to the promised land, then, in the final game against Oakland, refused them entry).

The recap: the Marlins scored 7 runs in the first half inning yesterday. The Mets so-called ace, Tom Glavine (not a true Met!), was worse than pathetic. The Mets, leading the division by an unsurmountable 7 games two weeks ago, with only 17 games to play, folded.

1929: city announces that it will build a Second Avenue subway line, part of a plan to add a 100-mile network at an estimated cost of $800 million.
2007: city starts building Second Avenue subway.
And we thought work orders for the Board of Ed were slow.
Back to 1929, the Great Depression stopped the plan until—weirdly–work resumed in 1972, then had to be stopped again because of the fiscal crisis. 35 years later, no trains run through “the tunnel to nowhere.”
Incredibly, on Thursday, April12, 2007, groundbreaking for Phase One of the Second Avenue subway was announced. The first section of the subway, which will include stops along Second Avenue at 96th, 86th, 72nd and 63rd Streets, is expected to open in 2013. After the city finds more cash, the line will extend north to 125th street and south to Lower Manhattan. Stations, the city promises, will resplend with state of the art escalators, stairs and elevator connections from street level to mezzanines to platforms.
God willing, we won’t have to exit at Bloomingdale’s ever, ever again.

- Mohammad Abu Taher

Great website on civil servants, doctors, etc. who abuse parking privileges.

Example: cop parks his $70,000 Corvette on River Terrace at Warren Street. Parks in the exact same spot for 14 months. Uses his unmarked car to hold his spot when he takes his Vette out. In the above picture, said Vette with car cover that hasn’t been moved since before last months’s storm cannot possibly be on ‘official police duty.’
Transportation Alternatives, champion of drug-addled cyclists and 12-step pedicab drivers, says — and we agree — that municipal employees, especially the police, abuse their city-issued parking permits. The group estimates that at least 150,000 drivers — more than 12.5 times the number of yellow cab drivers — have such permits.

Parking permits, says TA, have become de facto salary bonuses. A Police Department Spokesman disputes this, claiming that permits do not allow police or other vehicles to park at bus stops or fire hydrants. Indeed, several weeks ago, the Police Department towed 12 vehicles displaying police and court permits that were parked illegally in Chinatown.

Okay, but did they pay the $600 ticket and pound fees?

– Swapon Nath

Contrary to urban myth, the L train is not the worst, slowest, ugliest subway line in New York history. Running from the miraculous bowels of Carnarsie—a neighborhood with more auto repair shops than people—through the dope-addled Williamsburg wasteland, to 8th Avenue and 14th Street in Manhattan, the L, out of 22 subway lines, ranks third in cleanliness, punctuality and in-car announcement, according to subway watchdogs, The Straphangers Campaign.

Better yet, 91% of L trains arrive “with above average regularity,” better than the system-wide 87% average. The L does break down more often, and it is harder for young talentless artists with phony dreadlocks and pretentious tattoos to find a seat (when they’re hogging seats from people who work for a living — see above); but who cares? It’s not like they work.
– Omobolanle kazeem

The Airbus A380, the world’s hugest passenger plane, landed yesterday at JFK on its “trip to nowhere.” Clunky and slow-moving, like the six-footer in your eighth-grade class who sucked at sports, the jet is capable of carrying 800 passengers, bringing to mind fiery crashes into the Atlantic, grieving relatives, and somber FAA investigators in windbreakers.
Still, even at $300 million, everyone needs an Airbus A380. It’s that cool. First, it’s a double-decker jet with doors on both levels, and a wingspan the size of a football field. Fully loaded, it weighs 1.2 million pounds, 400,000 pounds more than a Boeing 747. The plane is so genormous that the Port Authority has spent $200 million upgrading JFK. Not that it matters. So far, no American company has bought one.

“Airbus has not helped itself,” says the New York Times, “problems with the plane have delayed production. There are more than 300 miles of wires in the A380, and problems installing them have forced Airbus to announce two delays in its delivery schedule. The delivery problems have cost Airbus $3.3 billion so far and have led to layoffs of thousands of employees and the ouster of the chief executive.”
Did you say something about problems with 300 miles of wires? Wasn’t it a single faulty wire that probably brought down TWA Flight 800?

Cool.

– Mohammad Taher