By Carol Tannenhauser
Monday, January 16, 2022
Fair. High 46 degrees.
Notices
It’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a federal holiday, schools, banks, and post offices are closed. “MLK Day is the only federal holiday designated as a National Day of Service to encourage all Americans to volunteer to improve their communities,” according to AmeriCorps, a federally funded program. For local ways to observe click here.
Our calendar has lots of local events! Click on the link or the lady in the upper righthand corner to look.
NYC Restaurant Week (which is actually a month) begins on Tuesday, January 17 and will run through February 12. This is an opportunity to sample discount prix-fixe menus from participating restaurants across the five boroughs. To explore the menus, find spots by neighborhood, and book a table, click here.
News
Five popular brands of dark chocolate — including Trader Joe’s — were shown to contain high levels of lead and cadmium — “two heavy metals linked to a host of health problems in children and adults,” according to a study conducted by Consumer Reports. CR also lists “safer” dark-chocolate options, including Mast, which has a market in the neighborhood on Columbus Avenue near W. 77th Street.
A new study from Pacer.ai shows that Manhattan has more residents now “than it did pre-pandemic, with a nearly 4% population hike from January 2018 to October 2022,” the New York Post reported. Far surpassing that was “the Upper West Side, which saw a 30% increase in residents between November 2019 and October 2022.” For a look at how other boroughs and neighborhoods fared, click here.
Metropolitan Opera ticket sales are way down, according to an article in Parterre. “A quick survey of the Met website shows wide swaths of available seats for the upcoming performances of La traviata and L’elisir d’amore. Only new works like The Hours and Fire Shut Up in My Bones have been achieving sold-out houses.” As a result, the Met will be making changes next season, including decreasing the number of performances, increasing the number of new works presented, and opening “each season with the Met premiere of a new opera.”
A pandemic version of Hamlet will be presented this summer at the 61st season of Shakespeare in the Park at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater, Gothamist reported. “This year’s production will be directed by Tony Award winner Kenny Leon and feature Tony nominee Ato Blankson-Wood in the title role.” The production will have an extended nine-week run, June 8 through Aug. 6.
Finally, we received a response to last Monday’s Bulletin about the endangerment of telephone operators. Jane R. wrote:
“When I was in college, in the late 1950s, I went from New Jersey to Florida to spend the summer with my oldest brother and his family. Since I needed to make some money for school, I had to find a job. Not so easy, but with some fudging about my plans I got a job with Southern Bell Telephone and Telegraph. As it turned out, they trained me to work on overseas operating, which from Miami was the Caribbean. At that time, the only underwater cables, enabling multiple lines, were to Cuba which was a very big tourist destination for Americans who could afford it. For all the other islands, there were only radio connections, usually only one per island. Therefore, we had to negotiate with the island operators, who were mostly men, about whose turn it was to put a call through next. I guess because of traffic patterns, we had to work split shifts, which at my level of family responsibility was not a big problem. I don’t know what it was like for women with families, working 8 am – noon, then 4 pm – 8pm. I was able to wander Miami and enjoy myself. I don’t have any exciting stories. Once I was set to try to track down Errol Flynn in Cuba, but I had no success. Would have loved to speak with him!
Enjoy the week!
Wow, those population stats are interesting. I didn’t realize the UWS has grown so much since Covid began.
It’s pretty obvious when you have to walk single file down the street.
That rarely happens.
Regarding the population surge, if you click on the link to Pacer.ai they have a map showing the % imcreases. The only area of the UW S that is over 30% is around Waterline Square. I think this is attributable to those buildings not be being fully occupied prepandemic. The rest of the UWS has not become 30% more crowded
The Pacer.ai post says the UWS is 30 percent of the neighborhoods in Manhattan into which folks have moved. The 10024 and 10025 zips show increases in the 3 percent range.
That lovely boid is a Hawk…I believe. Am I sure? Well, like “The Melancholy Dane”* (Prince Hamlet) I, too, “….know a hawk from a handsaw” !
Unlike the morose prince, there was a much happier Dane, the Danish-American entertainer Victor Borge, who was beloved for his rollicking performances.
Supposedly Borge was known as “The Un-Melancholy Dane” and even…wait for it…”The Great Dane” !
If they lowered the ticket prices I am sure attendance would go up. The old classic operas are wonderful but when even a mediocre balcony seat costs over $100 there is a problem. And thos seats are so far from the stage it’s as if you are looking thru the wrong end of a telescope.
I am sure the Met doesn’t want to change prices but what is better – higher prices and fewer sales and consequently less overall interest or lower prices that would attract more of the already-opera-lovers and new ones.
The house is far too large but that’s something that can only be overcome by scrapping the interior and rebuilding to include, perhaps, several venues.
I love the grandeur of the Met interior, particularly the high ceilings and chandeliers. Whatever happens, I hope that they will never be scrapped.
You had me at the noble photo of that beautiful hawk, above. Now THAT’S the kind of sentinel that all our public spaces deserve, or at least cops with that kind of focused gaze, especially where pharmacies & smoke shops are concerned.
As far as Trader Joe’s is concerned, I’m gobsmacked, are they asleep or what? I OFTEN ate those pound plus dark chocolates, but was forced to stop due to the massive migraines they often triggered in me; could they have been caused by heavy metals?
In other words, was I poisoned?
Real people suffer when those tasked with protecting our food supply from contamination can’t be bothered to do their jobs adequately.
I followed up on the report above:
“Heavy Metals: Another issue with metals is the heavy variety. Mercury, cadmium, arsenic, and aluminum can all contribute to migraines. Heavy metals can come from a variety of sources, and often the headaches come on as the body is trying to get rid of them”
https://askdrgil.com/simple-cure-stubborn-migraine/#:~:text=Heavy%20Metals%3A%20Another%20issue%20with,to%20get%20rid%20of%20them.
and:
“According to the International Agency for Cancer Research (IACR), cadmium and its compounds have been classified as group 1 carcinogens, while lead and its compounds have been classified as ‘probably’ human carcinogens (group 2A) [32]. In addition, lead and cadmium have adverse effects on the immune system [33, 34].”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7203386/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20International%20Agency,system%20%5B33%2C%2034%5D.
also:
Cadmium (Cd), poisoning has been reported from all around the World, causing many deaths annually. Cd is a toxic heavy metal, and is widely present in environment. It has been reported that chronic Cd exposure is associated with kidney disease, osteoporosis, cardiovascular diseases and cancer.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6801231/
If you google cadmium & lead & cancer, there are A LOT of articles & sites, especially about breast cancer.
Thank you for these medical research articles. I learned a lot from reading this. ALL THE POT/TOBACCO SMOKERS SHOULD BE WARNED ABOUT CADMIUM.
The hawk is an immature Red-tailed Hawk. It has fine barring on its tail, and its tail won’t turn red until its second year.
Per placer.ai study, how could UWS have 30% more population now than at beginning of pandemic? Where would they fit?
MET has done those old warhorse operas to death and people have become bored. Added to this you simply don’t have the same great voices and talent that would get people to sit through La Traviata for the umpteenth time.
In keeping with the post war mantra that America was great and had to have the biggest and best of everything, Lincoln Center comprises those huge barns of buildings with many seats that need filling.
MET is the largest opera house in world (3,975 – based on 3,800 seats and 175 standing room places).
Idea behind such a behemoth place was noble; the old MET had 3,625 seats with 224 standing room. A slightly larger house was meant to be more democratic in that more room was available for “every day” people thus the new MET wouldn’t just be for wealthy and society persons.
Above is fair enough I suppose, but such a large house needs performers with voices that can cope. It also needs performances that will fill all those seats.
Furthermore one of the biggest mistakes was allowing Joseph Volpe to team with is childhood best friend Rudy G. and others to put the kibosh on NYC Opera redeveloping the old Red Cross building site into a smaller opera house.
Opera demographics are shrinking year to year which is one reason why the MET has so much trouble filling that great barn of a place.
Paris, France in common with many major European cities has two opera houses; the Opéra Bastille (2,723 people in total, with a main theatre, concert hall and studio theatre) and Palais Garnier also known as Opéra Garnier with 1,979 seats. Both are far more manageable in size in terms of opera, dance and concert performances.
I’m so glad that I don’t like chocolate!!
I am very lucky that a good friend has a Young Patron membership to the Met, so we go often and it doesn’t break the bank. We saw L’elisir d’amore and I must say, it’s one of the funniest operas I’ve ever seen and Javier Camerena is a charming treasure! I am sad to read they are struggling, but as others have pointed out it is a massive space
You might want to use someone other than a digital ai. company servicing its commercial real estate clients as Pacer.ai appears to be to cite statistics. Call me skeptical. From all that I’ve read from the city’s agencies and media reports that track growth the largest population growth is in Brooklyn and the Bronx. And some of the population growth is not actual population growth but the result of the latest census which corrected under-reported population. There’s a lack of statistics available for 2022-most reports go up to 2021.
I’m not sure that someone working primarily with commercial real estate companies would not want to paint a rosy picture on the UWS. I could be mistaken but there’s a whole lot of commercial real estate sitting empty on the UWS at street level where it’s very visible.