A New York Moment

It happened the other day. Okay, it happened a couple of weeks ago and it’s exactly the kind of thing I should come home and write about immediately. But instead I let it sit in my brain.
I was on a late-morning, let’s-get-ready-for-lunch run to Giacomo, my favorite deli. On West 72nd Street. And the lovely woman who makes the best sandwiches on the planet was there. She was bantering with a pal, a guy who was harassing her from near where I was standing. But harassing in a good, friendly way. She was telling him to get lost. Also in a good, friendly way.
They were talking about her background, her ethnic heritage. I had always assumed that she was Italian, given that she makes the best Italian sandwiches. But she said that since her school days she’s been known as 3P. She grew up in Puerto Rico, but she’s Palestinian and Panamanian.
Almost instantly, that struck me as so New York. All those different backgrounds coming together in one woman, who I think of as Italian.

Finding Faith at the Marriott Marquis

“Retail is my detail,” famed realtor Faith Hope Consolo told a panel last Friday afternoon.
You got the feeling she’s used the line before.
You got the feeling that Consolo, famous for getting her name—and the names of her clients into the papers—has used a lot of her lines more than once. In person, she’s a force of nature. Funny in an old-school way.
I had wanted to see her in person, since I’ve quoted her in newspaper pieces and blog items for many years. And because she sends me stuff with her name on it, like pads and pens. She takes a fair amount of heat for her self-promotion, but she made it clear that she can live with that. If you can’t take the heat, then get out of the kitchen. And all that.
“You take the kisses. You take the hits,” is the way Consolo put it at the panel, which was part of a city real estate expo at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. Also on the panel: an old pal of mine, Linda Alexander, a p.r. guru with her own shop, Alexander Marketing Corp.
I love Consolo cause she’s so darn quotable, and so darn willing to share those quotes when an ugly deadline looms. She’s even good at getting back to me to tell me that she cannot get back to me, so that pretty much makes her a journalist’s favorite.
She’s enough of a traditionalist to believe in print, even in a digital age, and she says that her clients want to see their properties publicized in what may seem like an old-fashioned way. She held up an imaginary magazine and said, “They like to say, ‘Oh, my God. She looks terrible.’”
There’s something inspiring about Consolo, about the mix of gritty and funny, about the way she even bothers to have a public persona when so much about real estate in this city has become rote or tired. On Friday afternoon she was weary bright red and passing out candy, taking names and talking about making deals. But the warmth of her jokes and the talent of remembering names only goes so far. She’s tough too.
“We’re not here to make friend,” she said. “We’re here to make business.”

My Kind of Town

San Francisco is my kind of town.
Evidently.
At least that’s what the weird Facebook quiz just told me. In a test to see which city I should be living in, I wound up in California. At least metaphorically.
Granted, I was trying to wind up in New York. That’s why I voted for a place with high housing costs. Or at least said that I don’t mind high housing costs. Cause the places with low housing costs tend to be spots in which I do not want to live. Anyway, I think that my pro-Asian-food answer may also have helped land me in San Francisco. The truth is that I’d just as soon have a pizza, but there was no place to say that.
Usually I avoid Facebook quizzed like the plague. They seem like gigantic time-wasters. But after reading one jerk’s post about how the test sent him to live in Denver, Colorado…well, I began to wonder what kind of response I would get.
It was weird, too, cause I’ve been feeling a little bit under assault in the city lately. I mean that literally. Last night, Halloween, I was in a car that was hit by…was it a pumpkin? Something hard and squishy that landed on the car we hired to bring us back from the Bronx last night. It was no big deal, but it was no small one either. Cause it reminded me of being harassed on the street about two weeks ago at Herald Square. And of that time a couple of years ago I was bugged by a screaming teenager on a subway.
The little assaults start to add up. And I’m at the age where they become a little bit harder to shake off. Or is that nonsense, blaming age? I know the key to this, and to just about everything else, is to bounce back as quickly as possible. My basic rule—the one I carry around in the New York part of my brain—is to say to myself that if I have not been murdered and if there’s no slicing of my skin, then I’m fine. Good to go. Back to the streets of the big city.
The truth, though, lies somewhere else. I feel just a tad less safe than I used to. In New York and in general. I wish this were not so, but pretending otherwise, ignoring how I feel about things, would hardly be a New Yorker's kind of move. We do tend to call them as we see them. Right now I'm admitting to a sense of danger out there, but I also see the amazing interactions each day in this city. The woman in Washington Square who hands cash to the fellow standing next to her who lost it. The oh-so-many people who do things like that for me. The guy over the weekend who picked up the woman who was falling at Whole Foods.
I can think about those people instead of the incredibly flying objects. Think about the people who help instead of the ones who harass. It helps. I may be better off switching thoughts instead of switching cities.