Looking Ahead

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis

Since the MTA decided to close the service booths in many access locations to the subway system, travel is a bit more difficult for seniors, and a well-stocked discount Metro card becomes a a real necessity. Thus, on Union Square, if you do not have a Metro card, at most entrances you may end up paying full $2 fare, when you buy a ticket at one of the machines. Watch the colors, the booths at the bottom of most Union Square subway entrances have been painted reddish-brown, meaning that the attendants, even if present, cannot sell you a ticket. Only the main subway entrance on 14th and PAS, under the Food Emporium supermarket, has the booth painted blue, and an inside attendant on duty, who for #2 will hand you a one-time card plus a transfer, entitling you to one more ride. Walking down at some other subway stairs with the transfer in your hot hand may be another disappointment; the walk-around attendant may not be there, though a printed card states that he/she is on premises. That's a crunch, particularly if your knees bother you, but continue looking around for a civilian-looking person wearing a vest with an MTA button: the attendant may just have stepped away or walked upstairs to aid someone. The most important simple trick is to always carry a one-time Metro card, in addition to the transfers – you obtain that by buying a Metro card upon arrival at a blue booth at your destination. If you buy one only at departure, you have to use the card right away, and the attendants are not allowed to sell you two cards at a time.This mechanization is going on in the supermarkets also - Whole Foods has a new computerized methodology of routing the lunch- and dinner-time mobs through their 35-odd registers. Thus, when you arrive at the express under-ten items line with your basket, or a soup cup and an Indian-food container, an attendant will prompt you into one of five lines (the non-express side has four). Your personal super-market strategy of looking for a line with the least loaded-down people will not help, just look for the line with the least number of people . That is because you will be sent to the next available checkout counter mechanically , by way of an overhead screen that has five columns, corresponding to the lines, and, as a checkout clerk pushes the button signaling being free, that number drops into the next free column in the overhead screen. You can be sent anywhere in the checkout area. I saw, though, just ahead of me a young woman beating the system. She was reading a magazine while kicking her basket forward, double-tasking, as the lingo has it. When her turn came and a distant checkout counter was indicated, she ignored it and kicked the container toward the nearest checkout, and stationed herself there until it became free. Call it protest, or anarchism or individualism, she got her way.
Market strategy is seen at Trader Joe's wine shop, where the famous Two-Buck Chuck of California sells at $3, the only venue for the product in NYC known to this analyst. Of the six varieties, Sauvignon Blanc seems to be most popular, and it unexpectedly ran out early in the year, with people having to wait two weeks for new supplies to arrive. So, in late summer, when the stock on hand fell to 20 cases, buyers started to double up their purchases, in preparation for a rainy day, and cleaned it out, with latecomers filling up with emergency bottles of Chardonnay - which, in turn ran out. Now, both whites have came back, and today, a month later, there is a huge stack of Sauvignons Blanc, and badly depleted Chardonnay area. Did buyers switch to the Chard, or did the Trader order up an emergency extra supply of the Sauv? What is the market model? Day traders will have to watch the supply-and-demand carefully and act accordingly.

The checkout machines have also arrived at local supermarkets, another way for the capital providers to cut down on expensive labor through automation. Don’t they recall that Henry Ford decided to pay workers decent wages because he needed buyers for his products? The less workers, the less sales, and more people on the welfare system, the higher the taxes, remember? Besides, the machines are a pain.

Some pleasant thoughts – I needed quarters, and walked into the Associated Supermarket, down toward Alphabet City. The checkout lady, after a split second’s thought, rang up a one-penny sale, opened the cash register and made the exchange. When I started looking for a penny, she waved me off, but I persisted. What a nice person!

My car was in the narrow Stuyvesant Town service road, and as I stepped out of it and locked the door, a man on the sidewalk pointed out that my wheels were sticking out and one of the big supermarket trucks could hit them. I thanked him and straightened the wheels, when he also advised me to fold my side mirrors – his had been ripped off, once, in the same narrow passageway. Good to see people looking out for others.

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis


The year 2007 is celebrated as the Asher B. Durand Year, at least in New York, where the Brooklyn Museum, the New-York Historical Society and the National Academy in New York City have held concurrent exhibitions of his paintings.

Durand (1796-1886) was the founder of American landscape painting and a leader of the Hudson River School. Attending a Durand symposium at the Thomas Cole Home, a museum in Catskill, NY, was a bittersweet occasion because of the reminiscences of “Kindred Spirits,” the picture of Cole the painter and William Cullen Bryant, the poet, at the edge of a chasm in Catskills. This is the painting that the directors of New York Public Library in 2005 sold to the Walton family for their museum of American art, in Bentonville AK, for $35M. Subsequently five officers of the NYPL were awarded substantial salary increases.

The NYPL is very meaningful to T&V Country. While the 42nd Street library was stocked by the rich Astor-Lennox-Tilden rare book collections, the building itself was largely financed by the estate of Samuel J. Tilden of 16 Gramercy Park, the winner of the US Presidency in 1876 by popular vote who lost it the Supreme Court. Construction and organization of the NYPL was largely guided by Tilden’s friend and Lincoln’s former Minister to France, John Bigelow of 21 Gramercy, Bryant's sometime publishing partner and the first President of the NYPL, who was also the great-great-great-grandfather of Andrew Erisfoff, our City councilmember in the 1990s.

It was with in the memory of that painting in mind that we drove to the Kaaterskill Falls and the Kaaterskill Mountain House site, near Hunter, to relive the experience of standing on the edge of the most memorable cliff in the mountains. It is an escarpment from which, in good weather, you can see five states. Durand, who in 1848 painted Kindred Spirits in memory of Thomas Cole, his fellow landscape master, had stayed at the grand hotel, and at nearby Kaaterskill Clove, preparing sketches...

Although having been there before, my memory failed after crossing the Hudson at the Rip Van Winkle Bridge. A USPS letter carrier knew to take Route 9W southbound, then turn right on route 23B, and look for tourists. Sure enough, after some driving the comfortable 23B became a twisting mountain road, alongside the picturesque ravine of the Kaaterskill Creek. This is an old converted carriage road, carved out of the mountain. Hikers started to appear roadside, walking in the car path, along metal bumpers. The road was protected against rockfalls by several stone and metal walls that looked aged.

Soon a huge waterfall appeared on the right. We dove a quarter mile to a modest parking space, and walked back. The waterfall looked even more formidable from the hollow, where hikers start on a rock-climb, marked as half-mile. There were dozens of young people, skipping from stone to stone in the steep descent. It is real wilderness, and most visitors climb only to the first plateau. A middle aged man brought down a flat rock with fossil plant markings but refused his daughter’s request to take it home. Look at it but leave it there is the rule, and hikers honor it.

We now recalled that the ascent to the 3,655 foot viewing point where once the luxurious Kaaterskill Mountain House hotel stood is accessed through the North-South Lake state park and public campground, in Haines Falls, up the road. By now hungry, we opted to drive a little further, to Tannersville, the Painted Village. The buildings in the business district are painted in cheerful stripes, and we stopped at the Last Chance, properly named, for burgers, on the deck, alongside the suddenly busy 23B filled with local traffic.

It turned out to be a good choice, for the drive from Haines Falls to the campground offered little relief, except for a pickup meal at the General Store, rich in local souvenirs.

Parked at the campgrounds, alongside the beautiful North Lake, with shore side picnic tables full of day trippers, we heard conflicting stories regarding ascent to the Mountain House. Tramping on a gravel road past the boathouse and small beach, we drew up short at a path marked with a Stop sign, but a woman life guard at the beach explained that we should ignore it and walk right through. We did, and found a blue-blazed walk path. An easy ascent, and we were at the escarpment, with a panoramic view of Hudson River and Albany in the distance, the other states fogged over, left to our imaginations. Hikers were sitting on the easy parts of the slope, lost in admiration. A good day excursion for locals a bit more than that for New York cityites. We never found the Kaaterskill Clove, nor the Fawn’s Leap, important parts of Durand’s inspiration. Next time, maybe.

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis



This writer has been tallying SUVs on 14th Street for several years, ever since the gas prices started rising. The actual numbers, adjusted by the blocks covered, have mostly varied by less than 10% up or down, and could be considered as about even. Therefore my most recent census of SUVs along the southern edge of Stuyvesant Town on 14th Street was bothersome, showing a nearly 20% increase in gas-guzzlers. This, in an era of oil prices up to a record $88, with car sales down, a substantial US exports deficit and a crisis in subprime mortgages ( will the Chinese take over Bear Stearns?) seems hard to explain.

It is particularly worrisome because during a recent two-week touring trip in Israel we saw no American cars on the roads. Israeli friends and cabdrivers explain it as a function of quality, price and gas mileage. A few SUVs, used as trucks, were seen parked at the main street shouks (bazaars) in wealthy Daliyat al-Karmel, the Druse town near Haifa (Druses are Arab members of an Islam-derived secretive religious sect, who serve in the Israeli army). Trucks throughout Israel are mostly Mercedes or Volvo.

Israeli taxis are invariably 2.0 liter Mercedes, and private cars are South Korean, Japanese and European, with 2.0 and 1.6 liter four-cylinder engines, bravely climbing hot hills with the AC temporarily turned off . Gasoline costs 8 shekels (abbreviated as NIS) a liter ($8 a gallon), and gas mileage reportedly runs upwards of 32 miles a gallon. Israelis drive a lot, there are many religious holidays, the country is only 500 kilometers long, north to south, and the resort towns around Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) are enticing. As to the sources of gasoline, a port official explains, with a smile, that oil has no flavor, and ships appear in the ports with their high-price cargo carrying clean manifestos, no questions asked. Some might be from Mexico, a trading partner, some from any of the Gulf States.

Israel’s high price gasoline problem is duplicated all over the world. This truly dooms the present-day America automobiles as export products. Small American cars, with $1-2K per car added to pay for the benefits of retired UAW workers, are too costly, and the large ones, with the costs better distributed, are too expensive to drive, many producing only 8 miles per gallon.

The Israelis tell the story of Egged, the state supported cooperative bus company that supplied 60% of transportation in the country. The pay scale in Israel is generally low, a senior policemen after 12 years of service, nets 5,000 NIS ($1,500) a month, and most people have two jobs, a regular and a part-time. Egged’s drivers earn 45-50 NIS an hour (to $12.50), not bad, but the public transportation costs were growing, with many retirees drawing benefits. The government finally sold off packages of regional Egged routes to entrepreneurs paying 25 NIS per hour to their drivers, with retirement age at 55 (too high, per my airport taxi driver, an ex-Egged stalwart). As to the costly retirement benefits, they were made a state responsibility.

Is this some kind of indication of the direction of a declining US economy? I think not. With General Motors jobs costing at the $73/hour rate, of which $19 goes into benefits and $22 into retiree benefits, and Toyota at $47/hour ($32 pay, $15 benefits), we will just have to let GM and Ford export business go gently into that good night, as the steel industry did. Guys, you are producing strictly for the US market. Chrysler is already being partly dismantled by its new owner, Cerberus.

There is minor domestic production in 2.0 and 1.5 liter engines, and some reputable hybrid –powered models, but a major technological effort is needed to recover export car business for US-based factories. The Chinese are into an under S10,000 model, and the Indians may have a $2,500 mini in the works.

This is not a new direction; since the 1950s US GDP has turned its 50% manufacturing prevalence into a less than 20% component, meanwhile shifting into service industries to take over the slack. Obviously, service does not produce cars, electronics and household equipment for export, not even for domestic consumption. We operate on the philosophy of letting low-pay foreign countries – Japan was the first one – do the production, until their standard of living rises enough for them to employ other 3rd world producers – such as the Little Tigers of Southeast Asia - and so on. Now we are in the third generation of the pass-along economies, with China and India the leading producers, and the US is still merrily chugging along, like biblical Babel or Berlin 1920, whistling at impending doom. We still maintain an edge in aircraft production, and the massive US agribus can still feed the hungry of the world, as long as the greenhouse effect does not ruin our water supply, and Mexicans come. American technology is still a fraction ahead of the world, and its finance industry gets to invest in developing countries, giving away domestic jobs to low-pay workers in various foreign maquiladoras, while bringing back big bucks for the capitalists. The laid-off Americans are encouraged to retrain for service or tech jobs, or can go into construction, building MacHomes for the wealthy. There’s also the reverse Mexican effect – American emissaries going abroad to work for our multinationals, sending bucks or Euros and such back home to the families.

Are US politicos dealing with this threat scenario? An educated electorate is a disgusted electorate, but as long as sports and Britney are in the news to keep us focused, the officials are safe. No worry, mates.

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis



The mention of William Dean Howells today evokes mostly shrugs. Actually, the largely forgotten Howells (1837-1920) was a literary pacesetter, the dean of the Realists among American writers, and might be remembered for the “Coast of Bohemia,” a book title term subsequently borrowed by several authors.

The peripatetic writer’s first New York address, in 1888, was 330 East 17th Street, an old brownstone from which he had a view of the Stuyvesant Square Park. It is now a bay between the Silver and Dazian buildings of the Beth Israel Medical Center, the staging area for the hospital’s refuse disposal bins. A later 1891-92 address was 241 East 17th Street, still extant, and 115 East 16th Street, variously from 1896 through the 1900s. The author took the 3rd Avenue El daily to work, and enjoyed his walks in the Gramercy neighborhood, eventually moving further uptown.

Howells, a prolific reader, whose only real education was at typesetting for his father’s newspaper in Ohio, started producing news dispatches while in his teens, and in 1860, after writing a campaign biography of Abe Lincoln, earned an appointment for the consular office in Naples, a five year sojourn in Europe that expanded his horizons and turned him into a novelist as well as a travel writer. In his life he completed over 100 books, counting his early poetry and subsequent plays, and including travel books, essays and reviews.

After the Naples term, during which he married Eleanor Mead of Vermont in Paris, 1862, and a brief stay in New York, Howells came to Boston and settled down as an assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, writing and selecting articles for the literary journal Appointed editor in 1871, he remained there until 1881, then took off to travel and write. By then he was a well-known author, friend of Henry James and Mark Twain and his major novel written during his travels, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) came to be widely hailed. Humble Silas was a poor boy who rose to own a huge paint business, and his daughter moved up socially, marrying a Boston aristocrat. Eventually Silas’s business fortunes dimmed, and, rather than unloading the factory to an unsuspecting British investor, he chose failure. Whether this was a wise decision, in today’s perspective, is debatable – Sinclair Lewis dubbed him an idealist, not a portrayer of the real business entrepreneur – but the author’s Ohio ethic prevailed . To illustrate, Howells the widely traveled journalist, critic and explainer of European literature , who introduced to America such authors as Zola, Ibsen, Turgenev and Tolstoy, considered the story of Anna Karenina unsuitable for these shores, since a father could not read the book to young daughter.

Howells’s New York sojourn started in 1888. There was a job as editor of Harpers Monthly, and continued articles for the New Atlantic Monthly and Century magazines and a multitude of social injustice issues to be taken up in his moderate style. Here the Tolstoian wide canvas prompted him into writing A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), a New York panorama of business life, art and social problems. The Coast of Bohemia (1893) had an Ohio girl studying art.

This particular term, the Seacoast of Bohemia, has been teasing me, over the years, and writing about Howells has finally brought in further details. It comes from Shakespeare, in A Winter’s Tale, and deals with a shipwreck, and poor Perdita, child of a Sicilian king (possibly an allegory of Queen Elizabeth I, daughter of beheaded Anne Boleyn?), left abandoned on the shore. Old Bill was first twitted about his sense of geography by Ben Jonson, his contemporary. Subsequent Shakespearean scholars have suggested that the source, Robert Greene’s 1588 romance Pandosto, dealt with a 13th century period when land-locked Bohemia actually reached down to the Adriatic coast line, and, alternatively, that the author meant to speak of Bathymia, a land in Asia Minor. Since then, a number of authors, some Czech, as well as the American Thomas Nelson Page (1905), Australian poet James Hobblethwaite (in a haunting poem of Perdita) and British mystery novelists Nicholas Freeling and Ellis Peters (under her real name, Edith Pargeter) have been charmed by the romance of the expression. The Coast of Bohemia is a mystique, an ideal, and a symbol of both carefree existence and its perils.

Looking at William Dean Howells from the perspective of what we know of the business environment, his heroes do not fit into the panoply of our perspective. Though realist in describing family situations and the social struggle, he applies a somewhat soft hand to the robber baron environment and the highly competitive New York scene. The writer represents America as we want it to be, even today, an unattainable ideal in this consumer credit driven, export deficit economy, where the foreign creditors will eventually own us. But that is not a reason not to honor Howells, who saw America as a dream.

For the interested, there is a William Dean Howell Society, organized by academics some 20 years ago, with a newsletter. The membership is accessible, and the group is always interested in publishable papers. The local addresses came from the association’s resources.

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis


The mention of William Dean Howells today evokes mostly shrugs. Actually, the largely forgotten Howells (1837-1920) was a literary pacesetter, the dean of the Realists among American writers, and might be remembered for the “Coast of Bohemia,” a book title term subsequently borrowed by several authors.

The peripatetic writer’s first New York address, in 1888, was 330 East 17th Street, an old brownstone from which he had a view of the Stuyvesant Square Park. It is now a bay between the Silver and Dazian buildings of the Beth Israel Medical Center, the staging area for the hospital’s refuse disposal bins. A later 1891-92 address was 241 East 17th Street, still extant, and 115 East 16th Street, variously from 1896 through the 1900s. The author took the 3rd Avenue El daily to work, and enjoyed his walks in the Gramercy neighborhood, eventually moving further uptown.

Howells, a prolific reader, whose only real education was at typesetting for his father’s newspaper in Ohio, started producing news dispatches while in his teens, and in 1860, after writing a campaign biography of Abe Lincoln, earned an appointment for the consular office in Naples, a five year sojourn in Europe that expanded his horizons and turned him into a novelist as well as a travel writer. In his life he completed over 100 books, counting his early poetry and subsequent plays, and including travel books, essays and reviews.

After the Naples term, during which he married Eleanor Mead of Vermont in Paris, 1862, and a brief stay in New York, Howells came to Boston and settled down as an assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, writing and selecting articles for the literary journal Appointed editor in 1871, he remained there until 1881, then took off to travel and write. By then he was a well-known author, friend of Henry James and Mark Twain and his major novel written during his travels, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) came to be widely hailed. Humble Silas was a poor boy who rose to own a huge paint business, and his daughter moved up socially, marrying a Boston aristocrat. Eventually Silas’s business fortunes dimmed, and, rather than unloading the factory to an unsuspecting British investor, he chose failure. Whether this was a wise decision, in today’s perspective, is debatable – Sinclair Lewis dubbed him an idealist, not a portrayer of the real business entrepreneur – but the author’s Ohio ethic prevailed . To illustrate, Howells the widely traveled journalist, critic and explainer of European literature , who introduced to America such authors as Zola, Ibsen, Turgenev and Tolstoy, considered the story of Anna Karenina unsuitable for these shores, since a father could not read the book to young daughter.

Howells’s New York sojourn started in 1888. There was a job as editor of Harpers Monthly, and continued articles for the New Atlantic Monthly and Century magazines and a multitude of social injustice issues to be taken up in his moderate style. Here the Tolstoian wide canvas prompted him into writing A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), a New York panorama of business life, art and social problems. The Coast of Bohemia (1893) had an Ohio girl studying art.

This particular term, the Seacoast of Bohemia, has been teasing me, over the years, and writing about Howells has finally brought in further details. It comes from Shakespeare, in A Winter’s Tale, and deals with a shipwreck, and poor Perdita, child of a Sicilian king (possibly an allegory of Queen Elizabeth I, daughter of beheaded Anne Boleyn?), left abandoned on the shore. Old Bill was first twitted about his sense of geography by Ben Jonson, his contemporary. Subsequent Shakespearean scholars have suggested that the source, Robert Greene’s 1588 romance Pandosto, dealt with a 13th century period when land-locked Bohemia actually reached down to the Adriatic coast line, and, alternatively, that the author meant to speak of Bathymia, a land in Asia Minor. Since then, a number of authors, some Czech, as well as the American Thomas Nelson Page (1905), Australian poet James Hobblethwaite (in a haunting poem of Perdita) and British mystery novelists Nicholas Freeling and Ellis Peters (under her real name, Edith Pargeter) have been charmed by the romance of the expression. The Coast of Bohemia is a mystique, an ideal, and a symbol of both carefree existence and its perils.

Looking at William Dean Howells from the perspective of what we know of the business environment, his heroes do not fit into the panoply of our perspective. Though realist in describing family situations and the social struggle, he applies a somewhat soft hand to the robber baron environment and the highly competitive New York scene. The writer represents America as we want it to be, even today, an unattainable ideal in this consumer credit driven, export deficit economy, where the foreign creditors will eventually own us. But that is not a reason not to honor Howells, who saw America as a dream.

For the interested, there is a William Dean Howell Society, organized by academics some 20 years ago, with a newsletter. The membership is accessible, and the group is always interested in publishable papers. The local addresses came from the association’s resources.