If New York City can’t have a bank on every corner, we definitely need a drug store every 300 feet.

Duane Reade will soon open a new store on the ground floor of my building. That makes at least seven drug stores within about a quarter mile of my front door. If I went out to a half mile, that number would easily triple. While this isn’t quite Greenpoint Avenue Rite Aid silly, I think we’re covered in the drug store department.

Here’s a map showing all the drug stores within a quarter mile of my apartment:

View Larger Map

And their approximate distances:

New Duane Reade

50 feet

Old Duane Reade (across 14th St)

240 feet

CVS (around the corner on First Ave)

375 feet

Walgreens (the old Elm Drug on First)

1060 feet

Duane Reade (Third Ave & 14th)

1120 feet

Rite Aid (14th btw Ave A & Ave B)

1280 feet

Duane Reade (Third Ave & 18th St)

1840 feet

It’s remarkable how Duane Reade turned this space around, it seems like about a month since they started construction and they’ve started stocking the shelves already. The Walgreen’s at Astor Square (2700 feet away) took far, far longer to open and the space was undoubtedly in better shape, the old Gristedes was a stinking, filthy wreck.

There was a sign up on the door of Gregory’s Coffee this morning.

Signs on doors are almost never good.

I called their Park Avenue store to ask what happened. The woman I spoke to sounded sad about it, but would only say the store had closed. The neighborhood is going to miss them. Everyone I told at Noemi’s school drop-off this morning was surprised at the news.

Gregory’s was one of three connected one-story storefronts on the corner of 14th and First Avenue.

I’ve never really understood how the bodega next door stays in business — or avoids the Health Department. The Hot Dog place has also never seemed especially permanent (or clean for that matter). But the biggest thing I don’t understand is how there is still a one-story building on a busy corner across the street from Stuyvesant Town. That location is worth a fortune and I won’t be at all surprised if I wake up one morning and find the whole thing being demolished.

Getting iPhones turned out to be pretty easy. I got to the Soho Apple store at 4:30pm, the line was about a fifth of a mile, stretching almost all the way around the block, up Greene St, across Houston and back down Mercer St. But Apple was ready, they’d cleared almost the entire line in 45 minutes. Two friends walked into the 5th Avenue store after 8 and walked out with iPhones in less than 15 minutes. The AT&T stores were slower, I walked by the line outside the AT&T store on Broadway at Astor and there were still nearly a hundred people lined up on the sidewalk. Walking home was somewhat nerve-wracking. The special iPhone bag just screamed “mug me.”

What has turned out to be difficult is getting the phone activated. I’m pressing publish on this post nearly six hours after first attempting to activate. Michelle’s iPhone somehow activated right away, and it is truely amazing — totally exceeding my hype-inflated expectations. However, counting six other friends and co-workers who got iPhones tonight, Michelle is the only one who lucked out and got hers to work, all the rest of us are still waiting on activation. One for eight. That’s beyond lousy.

At this point I’m too tired to be angry. I’m really disappointed that AT&T wasn’t more on the ball with this. I’m upset that Apple locks out all functionality prior to activation. I’m not the slightest bit surprised that Verizon probably had something to do with borking this up.

AT&T’s phone support people are somehow remaining chipper and polite despite an inevitable deluge of iPhone support requests. The last person I spoke with finally admitted that the transfer system was overwhelmed and it was going to be a while. Overall they’ve been a pleasure to talk to, even if they haven’t been able to help at all.

The question arises: Would we have been happier had we been unable to buy iPhones, rather than having iPhones which we’re unable to use. I’m leaning towards the first.

Anyone else near 14th St and First Avenue in Manhattan notice their water smelling funny? The smell is very chemical, sort of like chlorine but sharper and more caustic. It’s not an overpowering odor, the water doesn’t taste bad and isn’t discolored. The odor tends to dissipate after the water has been left to settle for a short while. None of this is normal and I can’t recall anything like this happening before.

I first noticed the smell in our building’s water around 7pm, then again around 10pm at the 14th St Y across the street.  The smell was still in our water at 11pm and also when I wrote this at midnight. I went for a walk at about 11:30pm and thought I smelled the same smell in various pockets around the neighborhood.

I called 311 and ended up filing ticket 1656381 with the New York City DEP.

The easiest way to smell the odor is to fill a glass with tap water and quickly smell it. If you’ve got the same odor, you won’t have to  get very close. The smell does fade relatively quickly. Our water filters seem to have completely removed the smell.

If you smelled this too, please leave a comment including your location.

So apparently the NYC Department of Health has shut down Blue 9 Burger. Too bad, they’d only just turned that place around.

I used to like the burger there as a late-night option, a sort of California ex-pat drive-thru reminiscence. However I stopped going a few years ago. Declining food quality wasn’t the main reason, it was an insultingly stupid staff. The miscreants they had working there were just horrible, I decided that any place willing to hire morons like that wasn’t getting my money and deserved to go out of business.

This January, for some reason (coincidentally the four year anniversary of my first visit), I decided to give them another try. Amazingly, they’d fired everyone and hired a completely new crew with a decent work-ethic. The quality of the food was as good or better than when they first opened.

The place was never especially clean, but I’ve seen far worse and gotten sick at far better. More amazing though, that the Dept of Health has all this information online now. Bloomberg’s New York is all about transparency.

Found via East Village Idiot.

Update: Blue 9 was back open after about a week. The burger I had the other night was again better than they’ve made in several years. No discernible differences I saw in the kitchen or anywhere else.

Momofuku Ando died in Osaka January 5th, he was 96. In 1958, Mr. Ando invented the instant ramen noodle and changed the world.*

• Nissin Foods bio: Meet the Inventor
• Wikipedia: Momofuku Ando
• New York Times: Momofuku Ando, 96, Dies; Invented Instant Ramen
• San Jose Merc: Revolution in a bowl

I’ve been eating at the Momofuku Ssäm bar regularly, never realizing that the name of David Chang’s expanding restaurant empire was a winking nod to the inventor of the instant noodle.

* After writing this I found the Forbes obituary, which cited an inscription at the Momofuku Ando Instant Ramen Museum, “In 1958, Momofuku Ando invented instant noodles here in Ikeda, and changed the food culture of the world.”

Rather than IM the hell out of Marjorie about her latest column, “An Education on Good Education” I thought I’d put my thoughts down here and link it (and digg her too).

This is one of those columns where Marjorie was on fire, there are too many good quotes to pull them all, but here are some of my favorites:

Remember the column I did, back in the Pleistocene era, making fun of parents who obsessed about getting their kids into the 92nd Street Y preschool? This is the column where I eat that column. …

But: I now understand the fear that one’s child won’t get a good education if one doesn’t go to the mat for it.

I would add that your child won’t get a good education relying only on school, which I’m pretty sure Marjorie would agree with.

But when your 4-year-old tells you, “The most important thing about school is no matter how hard someone hits you, it’s wrong to hit back,” you know she’s going somewhere else for kindergarten.

WTF is our children learning?

Josie is a few months older than Lila, and so she missed the Dept. of Ed cutoff regarding which year. Ironically, or something, had Josie gone to private school, which use a different calendar, they would have been in the same year.

We reapplied to The Neighborhood School. It had been my first choice last year, with the small size, progressive philosophy and mixed-age classrooms I liked in the school Josie got into, but with higher test scores and a long-established and well-respected principal. Last year, Josie’s name wasn’t picked in the lottery. (The school is kept balanced deliberately by race, reflecting roughly the same demographic breakdown as the neighborhood: something like 31% white, 21% black, 32% Latino and 18% Asian.)

First, there is some seriously questionable selection going on with these “Lotteries.” I’m not going to go into accusations I can’t backup, but a significant increase in transparency would be a good thing for all the schools.

Second, racial quotas: I don’t like them, but in this case it’s almost amusing how badly they’ve played out. This is the year the September 11th Baby Boom lands in public school Pre-K. The population of four year-olds in New York City has ballooned, with most born sometime after May 2002. I find it deeply poetic that humanity’s innate reaction to death and carnage is babies.

In our neighborhood, the population demographic has fully inverted. The progeny of the hipsters and young, formerly childless couples who lived in the East Village don’t fit the Department of Ed’s out-of-date demographic. The result is that Neighborhood School, everyone’s first choice, got that demograpic. Earth School probably got close to the demographic “ideal” since it’s usually the number-two choice (despite having an upside-down picture of their namesake planet in their science room).

Which brings us to our school, East Village Community School. The Pre-K classes are overwhelmingly white and female. As racial and class boundaries seem to track closely in our rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, the DOE’s imposed diversity program will likely cause a drastic upending the funding balance between this group of schools. My biggest hope is that they don’t break things more by trying to fix these new imbalances.