Metro Transit

The photo on the right (click it to enlarge it) is a shot of a Whole Foods advertisement on a Metro-North train. Their unriveled commitment to quality clearly doesn’t extend to spelling.

In other New York City transit news, on a Manhattan-bound L-train from Brooklyn last night, there was a fake pile of poop on one of the benches. Passengers all speculated on whether it was fake (no smell, too neat and regular), with assured pronouncements that it was. Still, no one tested it, and no one would sit within four feet of it.

Only in New York.

New York Allows Same-Sex Marriage, Becoming Largest State to Pass Law

Yesterday, the New York State Senate approved the bill, 33 to 29.

ALBANY — Lawmakers voted late Friday to legalize same-sex marriage, making New York the largest state where gay and lesbian couples will be able to wed and giving the national gay-rights movement new momentum from the state where it was born.

It’s about time!

A funky church for a Sunday post

Here’s an interesting little church in upper Manhattan.

Neighbours

No interlopers, these:

I'm dreaming of a white Boxing Day

As you’ve probably heard, we in the northeast got our first major snow of the season on Sunday. In New York, the airports were pretty much closed on Monday, in the aftermath (more than 1500 flights were cancelled), as were most of the commuter trains into the city. Even the subway system was screwed up. Things are getting back to normal, but aren't quite there yet.

Here’s the dig-out on Monday morning:

Looking up at New York

“Albany Governor Debate Verges on Farce”

So says the New York Times headline. The campaign to be governor of New York is an amusing one, looking a bit like a smaller (much, much smaller) version of the California craziness in 2003, when the Governator beat a cast of hundreds that included a porn star or two, and a bit like a British MP election, with a batch of silly, sometimes meaningless parties.

We had a televised debate last night, where the two serious candidates — current Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, the Democrat, and right-wing idiot Carl Paladino, the Republican — were joined by a handful of Fruit Loops that included Kristin Davis (not the actress from Sex and the City, but the former prostitute/madam who participated in the downfall of our former governor, Eliot Spitzer; she’s running in her own Anti-Prohibition Party, and says she will legalize marijuana) and Jimmy McMillan, who has tried to become New York City’s mayor twice before through his self-styled The Rent Is Too Damn High Party.

To round it out were Charles Barron (self-created Democratic Freedom Party; former Black Panther and Brooklyn representative on the New York City Council — he also tried to be mayor in 2005, along with Mr McMillan), Howie Hawkins (Green Party; lost to Hillary Clinton for U.S. Senate in 2006), and Warren Redlich (Libertarian Party; he ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Representative for his district, near Albany).

From all reports, it was not so much a debate as a comedic talk-show panel, where the panelists shouted over the questions and essentially ignored them, and turned it into something of a free-for-all. From the New York Times:

The moderators’ questions were frequently ignored. The candidates barely looked at one another. One wore black gloves and spoke of himself repeatedly in the third person. And Andrew M. Cuomo, the Democratic candidate and the race’s front-runner, at times struggled to suppress laughter.

And from the Wall Street Journal:

New Yorkers watching the seven candidates for governor debate on Monday night heard a former madam articulate a nuanced position on the merits of hydraulic fracturing. They listened to a former Black Panther and a Green Party activist call for massive tax hikes on the rich. And they learned that one candidate is so supportive of marriage equality, he’d let a person marry a shoe.

But for those searching for insights into the platforms of the two major candidates vying to lead a troubled state, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and Carl Paladino, the first and perhaps last debate before the Nov. 2 election was lacking.

For most of the 90 minutes, the televised debate at Hofstra University on Long Island provoked more laughs and puzzlement than meaningful drama. And while it introduced voters to an obscure cast of characters from the periphery of local politics, it shed little new light on either of the two men who have more than a minuscule chance of winning the race.

I really don’t understand why the organizers of these things, which generally stopped resembling debates years ago, though they’re still called that, don’t exert some control over them. Maybe people have just gotten used to having everyone ignore questions and yell at each other on television now, and maybe that’s what some people want. Is it really what the majority of us want? Wouldn’t we rather see them forced to answer the questions that were asked or have their microphones turned off?

Well, amusing, sad, or silly though it may be, it matters little to me: I’ve already voted on an absentee ballot, because I’ll be travelling on election day. Figuring out whom I voted for is left as an exercise for the reader.

Fiscal responsibility? Or Fiscal lying?

I saw a local political advertisement last night, in which two women are in a diner, talking. One has had a fight with her husband, because she broke the family budget by spending too much on the kids’ school supplies. It seems that she had been hoping the STAR rebate check would come in to cover it.

STAR — the New York State School TAx Relief program — is a program that reduces school taxes for homeowners. The first $30,000 of the assessed value of your primary residence, if you own it, is not subject to school tax (and there are further rules for older people).

In the ad, after the two women set up the situation, the waitress comes over:

Waitress: So, what can I get you girls?

Woman: How about my STAR rebate check? [Smirks.]

Waitress: Can’t help you there. Last year, Senator Suzi Oppenheimer did away with them. [She enunciates the senator’s name especially clearly.]

Woman: So, while I’m trying to make ends meet, Senator Oppenheimer is making it even harder?

Waitress: Can you believe it?

Voice over: Paid for by New Yorkers for Fiscal Responsibility.

Can you believe it, indeed? You shouldn’t.

First, of course, Senator Oppenheimer did nothing all by herself. The New York State Senate has 62 members, and any repeal has to pass with a majority vote.

But what is it that they did away with, according to the advert? The STAR program?

No, look at it carefully. They did away with the STAR rebate checks. The program is still there, reducing our school tax just as it had been.

[Update, 16:00: I’ve made an important error below, and part of the tax reduction has been repealed. Please see the comments.]

See, what used to happen is that we had to pay the full tax, and we had to apply for the rebate. And then, later, the state would send us rebate checks. But that meant that we paid the money up front and got it back later. It also meant that the state had to spend a lot of money processing applications and issuing checks.

What has changed is that we keep the money all along. The STAR rebate has now become a STAR exemption, and it’s calculated into our school taxes from the beginning. There’s no rebate check because we never had to pay the money in the first place. That’s better than a rebate check, and it saves the state a significant expense.

That sounds like fiscal responsibility to me. And this group with the misleading ad is just full of crap.

New York primary election

It was very strange, after more than twenty years of voting on big, clunky machines with levers, to vote for the first time on a paper ballot this Tuesday.

Well, not the first time for me, but the first time at a regular polling place in New York. I once voted by absentee ballot because I was off at an IETF meeting on voting day. And when I lived in Maryland, we voted with a punch-card system (yes, with issues of pregnant and hanging chads, which we never thought of at the time).

But starting with Tuesday’s primary election, New York has switched from the old voting machines to paper ballots, large sheets with small circles that one fills in with a black marker. I have to trust that they work well, but who knows for sure? I suppose we trusted the old machines, and maybe that trust was ill-founded. But they were stately and venerable, and the levers made satisfying and reassuring sounds.

Now I have to wonder whether I really marked the right circle, and whether the machine counted it correctly. I have to make sure I didn’t brush the marker against the paper and make a stray mark, check that I didn’t crease the page in a funny way. Why does it feel odd? Maryland’s punch-cards didn’t give me the same feelings, yet they surely suffered from similar effects, and worse. Perhaps I’m just getting old and inflexible.

Anyway, I voted, of course; that should surprise none of my readers. The New York primary ballot was easy for the Democrats, with just two races: a choice among five for the Attorney General nominee, and one between two for Kirsten Gillebrand’s U.S. Senate seat — Ms Gillebrand was appointed to Hillary Clinton’s seat in 2009, and has to stand in a special election in November to get the final two years of that seat’s term. (Meanwhile, our other U.S. Senator, Charles Schumer, is up for re-election normally, so we’ll have the unusual situation of voting for both of our senate seats at the same time this November.)

Ms Gillebrand easily won her nomination, as everyone expected. The Attorney General contest was more hotly contested, and State Senator Eric Schneiderman — who had the endorsement of the New York Times — fairly closely edged out Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice, my own choice on the ballot. To be sure, all five candidates were reasonable, and I’m perfectly happy with Mr Schneiderman.

On the Republican side, Tea Party idiot Carl Paladino beat perennial loser Rick Lazio by quite a lot to become the Republican nominee for Governor. This is probably good news for our current AG, Andrew Cuomo, who has the Democratic nomination in hand, with no opposition.

Tea Party candidates kicked out traditional Republican incumbents in a few places — the most newsworthy one was in Delaware. Either that will mean good things for the Democrats, who will sail to victory over right-wing nutjobs, or it will say some very bad things, indeed, about the state of the country, should those nuts win in November. We’ll have to see.

What’s always disturbing is the low turnout in these elections. Primary elections get low voter turnout in general, and midterm elections do as well... so the primaries in the midterms involve just a handful of voters deciding things for the entire state.

With 98% of the votes counted, as I write this, we had about 440,000 votes cast in the Republican primary and about 590,000 in the Democratic primary. Put in perspective, there are about 20,000,000 people in the state (of course, they’re not all eligible to vote, and I don’t know how many voters there are). That means that each voter made the choice for about twenty people — only five percent of the population of New York took part in deciding who might be our governor, our attorney general, and our two senators for the next four to six years.

I find that sad.

Non-negative political advertising

We’re preparing for local elections, to be held, what, some two months hence? Not too bad, compared with the lead time we sometimes see. One hotly contested race will be the one for New York Attorney General, a position to be vacated by Andrew Cuomo, who will be running for Governor.

We have a primary election coming up in a couple of weeks to select the Democratic candidate for the November election (the Republican candidate is already selected, Daniel Donovan). There are five Democrats on the primary-election ballot: Richard Brodsky, Sean Coffey, Eric Dinallo, Kathleen Rice, and Eric Schneiderman.

I just got a clever campaign ad in the mail from Assemblyman Brodsky. The ad says, They hate Richard Brodsky, and shows pictures (with captions, in case you don’t recognize their faces) of Alphonse D’Amato, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh. It follows with, You’ll love him. The back of the ad tells you to go to Mr Brodsky’s web site to see other right-wingers who hate him, and liberals who support him.

I like the ad because it’s not blasting his opponents. It’s not direct enough for me, really — it’s not telling me where Mr Brodsky stands on any issues, and it’s not saying what he’ll do as Attorney General — but it’s a step in the right direction. It’s saying, in general, that he’s liberal, and opposes (and is opposed by) the right wing.

That’s a very good start.

The New York Times, on the other hand, criticizes Assemblyman Brodsky’s divisive style, and recommends Senator Schneiderman. I think I agree, but I have to look into it more before 14 Sept.

In any case, I like Mr Brodsky’s ad.

[Here’s more about the NY AG race, from the Times.]

Seattle vs New York, the return trip

There’s another way in which Seattle differs from New York, and it strongly favours the former city: its airport is better, and for several reasons.

1. Sea-Tac is much less crowded than Newark, JFK, and LaGuardia Airports. When I got to Sea-Tac at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday to come home, I went from the curb to my gate in about three minutes, zipping straight through security — there was no one in the security queue to slow me down.
2. Sea-Tac has much better restaurants than any of the New York City airports. I stopped for a bit of fish at Anthony’s, expecting a meal that was overpriced and no better than adequate. But the food was great, and not airport-expensive at all. For what I would have paid for a hot dog at Newark, I got a very good bread-bowl of clam chowder and an excellent Caesar salad.
3. Sea-Tac has free Wi-Fi, and it’s fast and works well. The New York City area airports all charge for the use of their wireless network. Feh!
4. Sea-Tac has a view of Mount Ranier.

Seattle wins on all counts here.

Weekend hike: Popolopen Torne

Popolopen Torne is a rocky mountaintop on the west side of the Hudson River near the Bear Mountain Bridge ("torne" is a variation of "tor", a rocky peak or hill (American Heritage Dictionary)). The mountain’s peak is about 1000 feet above the Hudson River, and standing atop the craggy peak gives one gorgeous, 360-degree views of the Hudson River (to the east), Bear Mountain (to the south), and the surrounding forested valleys and hills (to the west and north).

The hiking trail is steep, and getting to (and from) the top requires scrambling over rocks. The descent is somewhat of a challenge — one needs to be sure-footed (and sometimes sure-butted) to avoid slipping on the steeply angled rocks.

The Timp-Torne trail combines with, and then branches off from, some of the many Revolutionary-War trails in the area, and it always amazes me to think that some of these trails were actually used by fully laden soldiers during the war, as they carried provisions and weapons, and sometimes pulled artillery with them.

I’ve pasted together a panorama from photos taken at the top; click the small version below to see it full-sized. It starts to the northeast on the left, and you can see the Hudson, the Bear Mountain Bridge, Bear Mountain, and the western valley. I’ll have to get another panorama in the winter, when the haze that’s ubiquitous in the summer is gone.

Training for police officers

In a very welcome move, a New York City police department task force recommends giving their officers more training in how to handle reports of sex crimes.

There’s a part of me that wonders why this is necessary: it should be obvious that victims reporting crimes of any sort should be taken seriously, should not be subject to belittlement or counter-accusations from the police officers, should have their allegations fairly, competently, and thoroughly investigated, and should be comforted as victims of violations. But it’s also clear that crimes of violence require more sensitivity, and that rape and other sex crimes are especially touchy.

But going beyond normal sensitivity to victims, the handling sex crimes by police officers — especially, though not exclusively, male police officers — is subject to another sort of problem: denial. There’s an appallingly strong tendency to blame the victim (for her manner of dress, for going out alone, for being drunk, for not resisting enough, for otherwise asking for it), to disbelieve the victim (she’s lying, she consented and then changed her mind, it wasn’t really rape, and so on), to refuse to investigate the report aggressively, and, in general, to discourage the victim from proceeding.

As anyone who follows the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit television series knows, the New York City police department has specially trained detectives assigned to investigate these crimes. The trouble is that cases often don’t get to them. There aren’t enough SVU detectives, for one thing. And then, often, reports are not taken or are not followed through; the victims give up out of embarrassment, fear, or frustration; the cases are not properly classified as sex crimes; or, out of negligence or apathy, paperwork doesn’t make it to the SVU.

The good news is that the police department does seem to care about fixing the problems, and appears to be taking steps in that direction. I’m skeptical, but we need to assume, for the moment, that they will take action. If they do, it will be a good thing.

Weekend hike: Anthony’s Nose

I’ve written about hiking Anthony’s Nose before, so today I’ll just post a few photos from Sunday’s hike, put into a montage (click to enlarge). The one on the upper left is very similar to one of the pics from the earlier post, but taken in a different season, this time with mountain laurel blooming in the foreground.

Sales tax and the Internet

It’s long been popular to buy things mail-order from an out-of-state concern, in order to avoid paying sales tax on the items. Mail-order houses are often not required to charge out-of-state customers sales tax, the shipping charges are usually less than the sales tax would have been (and are sometimes waived entirely), and consumers think they’re getting away without paying sales tax.

What we often didn’t know is that when sales tax is not charged and paid to the state by the seller, the buyer is legally responsible for paying it anyway. We didn’t know that because states didn’t generally publicize that fact, and didn’t enforce it either.

New York decided to start enforcing it a few years ago. The trouble is that now they’re doing some double dipping.

First they set up a new line on the state income tax form, a line for declaring “sales or use tax” that you owe. Here’s the line from the 2009 tax form:

The instructions explicitly forbid you from leaving that line blank — you can fill it in with zero, but that has to be explicit, and there’s a strong implication that doing so might result in an audit. Here’s the applicable page from the instructions (PDF), and here are some excerpts:

You owe sales or compensating use tax if you:

• purchased an item or service subject to tax that is delivered to you in New York State without payment of New York State and local tax to the seller; or
• purchased an item or service outside New York State that is subject to tax in New York State (and you were a resident of New York State at the time of purchase) with subsequent use in New York State.

[...]

An unpaid sales or use tax liability commonly arises if you made purchases through the Internet, by catalog, from television shopping channels, or on an Indian reservation, or if you purchased items or services subject to tax in another state and brought them back to New York for use here.

Example 1: You purchased a computer over the Internet that was delivered to your house in Monroe County, New York, from an out-of-state company and did not pay sales tax to that company.

Example 2: You purchased a book on a trip to New Hampshire that you brought back to your residence in Nassau County, New York, for use there.

[...]

Failure to pay sales or use tax may result in the imposition of penalty and interest. The Tax Department conducts routine audits based on information received from third parties, including the U.S. Customs Service and other states.

Then they give you a nice, convenient table that shows how much sales and use tax you should pay if you want to take the easy way out and not have to document everything: $23 if your adjusted gross income is between $30,000 and $50,000, for example, and $44 if your AGI is between $75,000 and $100,000.

And that’s all fine for what it is: it’s always been the law that these taxes be paid — though we can certainly argue that the example of buying a book while on a trip to New Hampshire is stretching the point too far (and they picked New Hampshire because that state has no sales tax of its own) — and this is a convenient way for the state to enforce it, and for the taxpayers to cope with it.

Is it “fair”? $44 represents, at my local tax rate, sales tax on about $600 worth of purchases. So they’re assuming that someone making, say, $90,000/year will buy around $600 worth of things by mail order (to oversimplify a bit). Just using my own purchases from 2009 as a guide, that seems close enough, though, obviously, different people will have vastly different purchase patterns. Some people buy a lot of things online, and some do almost none of their shopping that way.

But then New York did something else. They passed a law requiring that out-of-state companies that sell products to be shipped to New York charge sales tax on those purchases, and remit the tax to New York. The result was that some sellers stopped selling to New York residents, and others, such as Amazon, started adding New York sales tax to the bills.

In 2009, all of the out-of-state purchases I made were from vendors that charged me New York sales tax. Yet there’s still that pesky line 59 on the tax form, isn’t there? I put a zero on that line, but they’re clearly trying to intimidate us into not doing that, and into using the table to determine what should go there.

But if we do that, we are, for the most part, being taxed twice for our Internet purchases. By having both the new law and line 59 on the tax form (along with the ominous text in the instructions), New York state is trying to have it both ways, to have the vendors tax us and to have us voluntarily pay the tax again when we file our income taxes.

That’s why I can’t fully agree with the New York Times editorial blasting Amazon for resisting New York’s efforts. Amazon’s reasons may seem lame, but it’s trying to keep things equitable.

The right answer is for all vendors to charge sales tax, and for the state to stop trying to extort it from us after the fact.

Crime in the City

This is an example, from today’s New York Times, of why my father moved us out of New York City almost 50 years ago. Some teenagers were having a birthday party at an apartment in the Bronx:

Witnesses said that a group of older, seemingly drunken men entered the party, at a first-floor apartment at 1776 Weeks Avenue in Tremont, and behaved inappropriately with some of the younger female guests. That prompted an argument and a fight before the men left the apartment.

Thirty minutes later, about 2 a.m., as some from the party spilled into the building’s lobby, the men returned with guns and began firing, witnesses said.

While tourists and visitors from the suburbs are, these days, mostly safe in the city, residents — in some areas more than in others, clearly — have a day-to-day risk that accumulates to significance over time. Break-ins, burglaries, robberies and other personal attacks... these are far too common, still. Murders are down, we hear, but, of course, that’s little consolation to the families of these victims.

What I always want to know when I hear about these sorts of things is what makes people behave worse than wild animals? Sometimes it’s subsistence, when attacking someone for his money, or stealing his things to sell, is the only way one knows to eat and survive. But stories like this just make me shake my head in disbelief, to see that people can be so callous, so senselessly violent.

I wonder why, and I wonder whether there’s any way to address it, to change it.

Blaming the victim reaches new heights

The New York Times recently told us about a performance art exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Some of the works, by artist Marina Abramovic, involve nude performers in close proximity to the viewers, and some of the viewers are doing more than looking.

“He proceeded to slide his hand onto my ribs and back and then touched my butt,” Mr. Rawls said. “As he was passing me he looked me in the eyes and said ‘You feel good, man.’ ”

“I just turned and looked at the security guard and said, ‘This man is touching me.’ Then I looked back at my partner and left it at that.”

When his shift was over, Mr. Rawls said, he learned from a security official that MoMA had revoked the man’s 30-year membership and barred him from returning to the museum.

Another performer notes, “I didn’t think that would happen at all; who’s going to do something with all these people around?”

Who, indeed? Yet people think they can get away with pretty much anything, and always seem eager to try their, um, hand. And we best respond to that by calling them on it, and holding them accountable.

Others, though, respond differently. A few days after the article appeared, the Times printed a letter from a reader:

As a 57-year-old professional artist, I was amused by your article about the difficulties of being a nude performance artist at the current show at the Museum of Modern Art.

In my college days, and throughout my career (never achieving the lofty heights of those mentioned in your article), I have often run into performance artists with lofty ideas and ideals. But when the rubber hits the road, if you are going to stand around naked in a museum, you are going to get some unusual attention, and not all of it will be serious artistic consideration.

Humans are, after all, human.

If you can’t stand the heat, then put your clothes back on.

— H. James Hoff, Dallas

Oy.

Mr Hoff is surely right that it’s not surprising that a few people will grope. But the answer is not to have the performers stop performing, to, basically, shut down the work of art.^[1]

Furthermore, Mr Hoff implies that anyone going naked anywhere is essentially asking to be grabbed. And that’s just wrong. A bather, say, at a designated nude beach should feel safe from such attacks. For that matter, someone choosing to walk down Fifth Avenue unclothed should, in the time between starting his stroll and being arrested for it, be left untouched by the public.

Someone’s doing something that crosses one of your boundaries does not give you the right to violate his. Humans are, after all, human — not wolves.

---

^[1] Whether it is art is, of course, as always, left to the opinion of the viewer, and I’m not addressing that here (though discussion of that in the comments is welcome). The museum considers it art, and that’s all that matters for these purposes.

Is it art?

For another in the “Is it art?” series, we turn to a bit of performance art in Greenwich Village:

Ms. Hanford is part of the gallery’s latest exhibit by Brian Reed. She stands fully naked under a suspended web made of various objects including shark eggs and teeth, beads and clay pipes. Her nakedness is essential, Mr. Reed explained, “so she can be fully at the center of that connectivity” of energy.

Some may call it art, others something less flattering.

We actually have two questions here: whether it’s art, and whether its being art should excuse it. (Well, and there’s a third question, about whether we should lighten up and not be so uptight about nudity, but it’s not that question that I’m addressing here.)

To the second question, we have this:

“Simply walking around naked in and of itself is not protected conduct under the First Amendment,” Mr. Kuby said. “But lying down in the street naked with other people in order to express the duality of nature versus man, or to illustrate some post-apocalyptic vision, is artistic and does communicate a message.”

Hm.

I’m very skeptical of that statement. Indeed, I can easily wangle an artistic excuse for “simply walking around naked”, in and of itself... or for pretty much anything else I might like to do. Why can’t one person who’s simply walking around naked be expressing the duality of nature versus man, or illustrating some post-apocalyptic vision?

If I say it’s art, does that make it art, at least at the level that it becomes protected by law?

And where do we draw the line between what we’ll protect and what we won’t? If those nude people whom Mr Tunick was allowed to photograph (read the article) had been, say, actively having sex, chasing people down the streets, or smoking marijuana, instead of just milling about amongst themselves, would the Supreme Court still have allowed it? Couldn’t all of those scenarios be justified as expressing some duality or other, in an artistic sense?

So, what do y’all think?:

1. Is it art?
2. Assuming it is (whether or not you personally agree), should it be protected?
3. What are the limits?

I ♥ NY, hellholes and all

For the latest example of People With More Time Than Sense, we look in my back yard, turning to the mayor of Peekskill, New York. Mayor Mary Foster took great offense at a Saturday Night Live sketch in which a mock Governor Paterson said, “Well, I’m going to do a farewell tour of upstate New York — hellholes like Plattsburgh and Peekskill.”

Rather than embracing the joke and rolling with it, Ms Foster decided to prove that being mayor doesn’t really entail much, and leaves her time to worry about this stuff. (Plattsburgh’s Mayor David Kasprzak did embrace the joke, according to the article, making him much funnier than Mayor Foster, but showing that he has even more free time.)

Does she really not know that SNL makes fun of everything? The faux Governor Paterson was also tossing merciless insults at Governor Paterson. Get a job, Mayor Foster (and the six residents who sent her email, complaining).

Sketch me!

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while, just as a lark. To the right is a sketch of me that was done as I had a beer (several, I’m sure, to tell the truth of it^[1]) in McSorley’s Old Ale House in 1982. Click it, as usual, to enlarge.

I didn’t know the guy was sketching it, and when he finished he showed it to me, and then offered it up; I liked it, and I took it and thanked him. I presume he was a student at nearby Cooper Union, just around the corner from McSorley’s, but he as well might have been from anywhere around New York City. One can expect artists of various sorts to pop out in Greenwich Village and SoHo.

I didn’t get his name, either. If I read the signature correctly, it’s Dan McVeigh. A Google search of that name turns up a singer/songwriter from Ontario, which is probably not the same guy. So I guess I don’t have an early sketch by a famous artist, here. It might have been worth thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands, even — you never know. But, no, not likely.

In any case, I still like it, and I scanned it some years ago. And here it is, now shared with the world.

---

^[1] McSorley’s, at the age of 156 now, is the oldest bar in New York City. Until 1970, women weren’t allowed in, and when I used to go there with my cousin and his NYU-alumni friends, there was still but one loo in the back, shared by all. Beers were two for a dollar in 1982 — they would only sell them two apiece — and we were there to drink many of them that afternoon.

I haven’t been there in years, and I wonder what the beers cost now. I should pay it a visit. I have neither the capacity nor the inclination to have as many as I did at 25, but the place has a character that I’d like to experience again.