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 Pious New York days
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| Looking towards Columbus Circle from within Central Park. 5:30 PM. Photo: JH. |
September 21, 2009. A beautiful weekend in New York. The end of the Ramadan fast, the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah) and the German-American Steuben Parade on Fifth Avenue.
Before anything else: A reminder that the 6th Annual Fete de Swifty takes place this Wednesday night from 6 to 9 at 73rd Street and Lexington Avenue. If you don’t already know, the Fete is the Upper East Side-iest block party (in a tent between Lex and Third) going in New York today.
It’s staged entirely for charitable purposes. It was Liz Smith’s idea seven years ago when she was celebrating a big birthday. She asked people to send a check to the city instead of buying her a gift. The city took in six figures for The Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York.
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| Miss Smith with Miss Liberty at last year's Fete de Swifty. |
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Liz was amazed at the outcome, and it suddenly occurred to her that wouldn’t it be great if there were a way to continue raising those funds to help New York children and families with all kinds of needed services. So Liz got a group of us together to organize it.
The Fete-style party was inspired by the Fete de Famille that Glenn Birnbaum, the late owner of Mortimer’s restaurant, staged annually to raise money for assistance for AIDS patients.
This year, Tim Gunn, Mariska Hargitay and Nicole Kidman are serving as the honorary chairs of the event. Ms. Kidman’s been a big supporter from Day One. The Fete draws a big crowd of mainly UES residents of all ages, types and stripes; including some of our boldfaced citizens, as well as the Mayor himself, and occasionally some Hollywood types.
Otherwise the crowd is cocktail party dressed, the young movers and shakers, the junior-seniors and the silver foxes and the ash-blonde cougars. Plus Great Uncle Charlie who never missed a good party. Just kidding. Kinda.
Very good people watching and even better if you don’t know anyone personally. Hundreds of dwellers in the naked city, a million stories. Those are my favorite kind of parties, although this one, because I’ve been in since inception, I know enough people that I watch with my camera. And eat as many pigs in a blanket as I can get. And the night’s din just from the hors d’oeuvres alone.
Great buffet, a silent auction for you philanthropic bargain hunters, cocktails, music, fortune tellers, hold that pose, and a lotta people you see every now and then, and maybe once a year or maybe on the pages of NYSD, etc.
That’s this Wednesday night at 73rd and Lex, from 6 to 9. You can buy a ticket at the door. Starts at $175 for the junior. Or call: 212-788-7794. See you there.
I like New York on religious holidays. The city quiets down to a much slower pace, and so do its citizens. Furthermore on the religious day, there’s a stronger connection to the sense of family – something that many city dwellers often see or experience little of. I mean families together. In my neighborhood there are a lot of young families, so I see the children and the nannies, or the mother and child or the father and the child, every day all day. Although modern families exhibit a lot less evidence of the unit I’m referring to because of two-income nature of a lot of families.
On the Jewish holidays in New York, however, you’ll see a whole family, dressed for synagogue, walking. I used to see this sort of thing growing up in a small New England town where families walked (instead of driving) if they were in reasonable proximity of their house of worship. This sight is a rare and brief but important sign of the stability in the culture. A sense of family is natural for all of us, no matter our actual experience of it. That is why, at the base, the family still matters and it’s re-assuring to see it as a unit in public in the city.
At just about the same time that I was finishing that paragraph, I got an email from Alexandra Lebenthal with her latest Guest Diary missive about the world around her (fictionalized of course). That world being that part of New York, many of whom you might see at the Fete de Swifty on Wednesday night. Plus others; Boomers late and early, many of whom took major hits in the past 18 months because of their work or association with the financial markets.
In Alexandra’s new piece her main character is sitting in temple this past week celebrating Rosh Hashanah, and while listening to the sermon, she realizes it's been almost a year to the day when the worlds of many of the people in the room were turned upside down ...
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The Book of Life ... One Year Later
Alexandra Lebenthal
Abby and Jon sat in Temple on Rosh Hashanah Saturday morning.
The service proceeded to the point in the liturgy that discusses the many outcomes that would occur to people during the year
On Rosh Hashanah it is inscribed,
And on Yom Kippur it is sealed.
How many shall pass away and how many shall be born,
Who shall live and who shall die,
Who shall reach the end of his days and who shall not,
Who shall perish by water and who by fire,
Who by sword and who by wild beast,
Who by famine and who by thirst,
Who by earthquake and who by plague,
Who by strangulation and who by stoning,
Who shall have rest and who shall wander,
Who shall be at peace and who shall be pursued,
Who shall be at rest and who shall be tormented,
Who shall be exalted and who shall be brought low,
Who shall become rich and who shall be impoverished.
It had been a long year. When the rabbi read these words, Jon whispered to Abby “Last year they should have added who shall be Madoffed and who over concentrated in financial services company stocks.”
Abby glared at him, but she had to admit, it was right on target. |
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In 2008, the world was beginning to collapse on Rosh Hashanah and by Yom Kippur, a mere ten days later, it had cratered.
Abby remembered saying to Jon during that Yom Kippur service, “Don’t you dare look at your iphone to see what the market is doing. It’s a day to block out the world. It will still be there at sundown.”
But it was impossible for him to resist- and he wasn’t alone. When they walked outside after the morning service, they could see a lot of devices in people’s hands. It was down a few hundred points, the sixth day in a row. They took a walk in the park that afternoon. It was a beautiful, crisp, perfect early Autumn day.
It felt like it was the end of the world as they knew it.
By late afternoon when the market closed down 678 points and would be off more than 20% in total that week alone. |
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Now in September 2009, Jon and Abby looked around the room and thought about some of the people sitting there as well as others they knew. Much had changed over the year.
In front of them was Jon’s brother, Bob. He couldn’t raise the money for his new fund so he closed it and sent his four employees packing.
He put his home in East Hampton on the market in April.
There was finally one bid at the end of August-- 20% below the asking price --which was already 40% less than he would have listed it at a year before. He took it.
Abby’s best friend Ellen sitting a few rows ahead of them lost her job on the Corporate Bond desk at Bank of America. One of the salespeople from Merrill covered the same accounts she did but had stronger relationships with them. Ellen’s husband was doing alright at Citi, but his bonus was half of what it had been the prior year and waiting to see what limitations on compensation might be was nail biting. When Citi’s stock hovered at $1 per share in March, they cancelled their Spring vacation and didn’t send the kids to camp over the summer.
Abby waved to Jim and Susan, their dear close friends of many years who now had Susan’s parent’s living with them. They’d had everything in Madoff and now couldn’t afford their own home.
They went from the lap of luxury- a house in Boca Raton on the Intracoastal, and a sprawling home in Hewlett, to nothing. Susan at least had a sense of humor about it and joked that it was her payback for every terrible thing she did to her parents when she was a teenager.
There was Melanie, sitting far away from Marty.
After losing 90% of their net worth in Lehman Stock, their marriage, already strained but held together by money and possessions, fell apart. The divorce was going to take another year at least to complete, but in the meantime Melanie finally started that business everyone had always been telling her to she should have. She was now selling the knitwear that friends raved about. |
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She was working out of her home, now floor to ceiling with yarn and patterns. She’d just gotten an order for twenty pieces for a store on Madison Avenue, and had hired another person to help her. One of the top fashion magazines just did a shoot for an article on her in their January issue. She told Abby that as miserable as the divorce and loss of money was, that becoming an entrepreneur was a dream come true and she actually had never felt this good about herself.
After looking for work for six months, their neighbor Joe (who must have overslept; they didn’t see him) finally got a new job in June. It wasn’t at one of the “bulge bracket” firms that he’d always worked at. It was a start up with fifteen people. In fact, he probably would have laughed had he gotten a call from a headhunter for a job at a company that small in the past. In the last several months, however, they’d built up tremendously.
As a matter of fact, the most recent hires had been from Merrill, Lehman, Bear and UBS. There was a feeling that the big firms were walking dinosaurs. Being at a boutique meant Joe could make a difference in the bottom line every day. And what’s more, it wasn’t a TARP firm. He could get paid commensurately with the effort he expended.
He told Jon some of the old timers said this was what Wall Street was like in the 60’s and 70’s, lots of small partnerships where people really depended on one another.
Jon also thought about his college roommate Chad who moved his family to a hotel for a few weeks in March when protesters picketed outside his house In Stamford. He’d been in the AIG Financial Products Group and was one of the bankers that had gotten one of those bonuses. Someone threw eggs at his house and that was the last straw. He truly worried there could be something more violent. The funny thing was that Chad could have taken another job last November but wanted to stay on at AIG to help see things through. That was just the way he was.
Things could have been a lot worse for Abby and Jon themselves. The manufacturing business they owned had definitely gone through some tough times over the last year. Sales dropped 40% over the prior year.
In January their bank of fifteen years told them it wouldn’t give them a loan they needed for expansion. Only a year before that loan would have been approved in a second.
When Treasury Secretary Geithner announced the TALF plan in March that was supposed to create a market for loans for smaller businesses like theirs they called their banker back, assuming the loan would go through now. No, the bank wasn’t changing their policy. They called thirteen other banks before they found one willing to extend them the credit line and loan but at half the amount they’d requested. They had to personally guarantee it using their apartment as collateral. They had no choice.
When CIT was in danger of declaring bankruptcy Abby and Jon held their breath as their receivables were financed by them. Surely the Government would step in. They scrambled to find alternate sources, remembering their experience with the bank earlier that year.
But they were fiercely proud of the fact that they did not lay off a single person of their staff. They wanted to look back years from now and know that they protected fifty people and their families.
They were starting to see signs of life in the business now. A few new orders were coming in. They didn’t know and frankly didn’t care if it was because of the government’s actions. They still didn’t quite understand what that TALF thing was. It certainly didn’t’ get them the credit they needed. But knock on wood, they felt like they’d turned the corner and were going to make it.
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The last twelve months for many of us has been life changing, sobering, and painful. For some, old lives have ended, but at the same time new opportunities have arisen. In the last week there have been dozens of “one year later” articles documenting the actions taken by the Government in response to financial meltdown.
But behind the headlines, look at the people in any synagogue, church congregation, school community or population of the towns and cities in this country. There are thousands of real stories that are the reality that we have all lived with over the last year.
May this be a sweet year for everyone. |
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