Paul LaRosa's Blog
April 27, 2009
Today would have been my father’s 84th birthday but he died back in 1995 so the only place I could visit him was St. Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx. While I was there, I started thinking about him, and growing up not too far away in the James Monroe projects, also in the Bronx.
I was raised in those crazy projects and have many memories but today, because it was such a nice day, I went back to Monroe to stir up the past. I had not been to Monroe in quite a long time but I was happy to see that i
April 24, 2009
All taken with my blackberry — it’s a great thing taking surreptitious pix! Please take a look….
April 22, 2009
Happened to spot playwright/actor Sam Shepard and actress Jessica Lange eating in Greenwich Village this afternoon at Le Pain Quotidien. I was eating nearby but they did not notice me!
April 21, 2009
That’s what Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart called it in early March — he actually called it “the largest source of prostitution in America” — when he filed a federal lawsuit asking a judge to force the popular online classified site to eliminate its listings for erotic services.
Dart also asked the site to reimburse Cook County $100,000 for the time spent by Chicago officers investigating prostitution on the website.
This is all brought to mind of course by the arrest of Philip Markoff, the so-calle
April 20, 2009
Today at the West 4th Street station, I heard a woman yelling on the platform, and, for once, it was a sane human being. Very sane. She was railing against the coming NYC subway fare hike initiated the MTA, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
She wanted everyone to join the facebook page “1,000,000 People Against the MTA Fare Hike” which now has 72,000 plus members and is growing. Two friends are trying to marshall support to fight back against the MTA’s plan to raise subway and bus fares
April 18, 2009
Hate dirty platforms, late subway trains, the rising cost of commuting?
You can now create your own subway poster and vent your frustration thanks to a website called whereandy.com. It allows you to write whatever you want in posters that look all too much like the real subway notices the MTA sticks on thousands of subway columns.
On the site, you can also view the posters created by your fellow commuters which can be pretty funny. My favorites: “Suck it up and take a cab” and “No trains running —
April 17, 2009
So what’s up with our billionaire Mayor Bloomberg lately?
Our always-uptight Mayor has made a series of eyebrow-raising pronouncements capped off Thursday by his temper tantrum with a disabled reporter during a press conference.
The mayor, as reported in the NY Times and elsewhere, huffed and puffed at a reporter confined to a wheelchair as the reporter struggled to turn off a tape recorder that accidentally went off as the mayor was speaking.
The Times reported that most people in the room could n
April 15, 2009
One thing about NYC - parking is very tricky and filled with unwritten rules, as my friend AA found out last week.
Rushing to dinner on the now-very-hip Lower East Side, he saw only one possible parking spot. It was at the end of a block, just before the crosswalk. In order to make his car fit, AA had to go bumper-to-bumper with the car behind him. The bumpers were touching, a clear sign of aggression in this grand city.
But AA was hungry and accepted his fate, figuring he’d be out of dinner befo
April 14, 2009
New York Magazine is running a pretty cool cover story this week about how out-of-towners view NYC when they arrive in this crazy city for the first time.
There are a lot of funny stories about what happened on those first visits. E.B. White, who wrote the classic “Here is New York,” always believed that it was the people from out of town who give NYC its jazzy energy. Of course, as a native I beg to differ with the great man.
And who says you can’t have a “first NYC moment” just because you’re a
April 11, 2009
The other day, as I rounded a corner in NYC, a woman leaning against a store mumbled to me, “Good morning.” Of course, I ignored her.
I’m a native NY’er and good or bad, I have a protective shell up at all times. When someone asks me directions on the street, I never stop moving because I don’t want to fall victim to some dumb scam or worse, get robbed. There are legions of people on the streets of NYC who bump into you, drop their glasses or a bottle or something else, and claim that you broke i
