PAtownhall.com
Pennsylvania's Marketplace of Ideas
Pennsylvania's Marketplace of Ideas
PAtownhall.com
Pennsylvania's Marketplace of Ideas
Pennsylvania's Marketplace of Ideas
Ralph Reiland does New York
by Ralph R. Reiland,
Professor of Free Enterprise
TUESDAY
It's an easy six-hour ride from our driveway in Pittsburgh to the Millennium Broadway Hotel in Manhattan, a leisurely drive through the hills of Pennsylvania -- no red lights, and uneventful and non-political until we got off I-81 north of Harrisburg for a coffee at Esther's.
The restaurant is on a semi-deserted stretch of Route 22 -- nothing much in sight but a ball field and a few barns. Inside at Esther's, some local yokel, it seems, apparently insufficiently schooled in the value of diversity, had written the following message on the men's room wall: "No Jews, no niggers, no fags, no daggos, no illegals, no spikes."
Imagine being a lesbian farm couple, fresh up from Guatemala, trying to raise pigs in that neighborhood.
I realized that I was still a few hours away from cosmopolitan New York, still in the Mississippi section of Pennsylvania, but the anti-Italian slur still came as a surprise. I thought that particular prejudice was long gone, even in the sticks.
With his final category, "spikes," I think the writer was attempting an anti-Hispanic jab but couldn't spell -- or maybe he's just against gel and stiffened hair. Who'd want to see a cowhand in a Mohawk, with blond tips? Next thing it'll be Brokeback Mountain.
Everything else was fine until we got to the Holland Tunnel, an oft-mentioned target of Al-Qaeda (they like the dramatic, like blowing up a bumper-to-bumper tunnel and flooding lower Manhattan).
Last time, we were delayed at the tunnel entrance because the anti-terrorism squad was sticking mirrors under our cars. This time it was an abandoned vehicle inside the tunnel that had the authorities on red alert.
Before going to the hotel, we stopped at our favorite New York restaurant, the Gotham Bar and Grill in Greenwich Village. This year, we were lucky to get in, even at 9 P.M. on a weeknight -- the chef, Alfred Portale, was recently named "Most Outstanding Chef" in the nation by the James Beard Foundation. Parking at the garage across the street was $22 per hour (what's cheaper than home is the parking tax -- 18.25 percent, versus Pittsburgh's 45 percent).
WEDNESDAY
Walking the half block the first morning from our hotel to Starbucks, I saw a guy with an orange traffic cone for a leg. He was passed out in a doorway, lifeless. Not being a local, I asked a nearby cop, "You think he's okay? You think you should call an ambulance?"
The cop said, "He be all right. He be there every day. He be all right." So one guy can't walk and the other can't talk -- and the city's spending $13,755 per student per year in the public schools, $165,060 per student in 12 years.
At 11 P.M., after "Jersey Boys," my wife, son and I stopped at the Stage Deli. We had two reubens, two matzo ball soups, onion rings, a $10 wine, two Cokes and no cheesecake. The bill was $83.50 --- with a $16.50 tip, an even $100. Outside at the newsstand, the Marlboros are $85 a carton. At our hotel, parking is $45 per day, plus $45 each time the car is taken out.
THURSDAY
The morning started off with a crowd gathered around the guitar-strumming Naked Cowboy in his tighty whiteys on Broadway, a block from our hotel. "He makes $1.5 million a year," said a cop. "He said on TV that he makes $250,000 a year but it's all cash, plus he has record contracts."
There's a bumper sticker on the officer's car: "Call 1-800-cop-shot: $10,000 reward for the arrest and conviction of anyone shooting a police officer."
For lunch, it was the stylish Gramercy Tavern, the kind of place with no ethnic slurs on the bathroom walls. I got the special, a $20 softball-sized meatball stuffed with fontina cheese. A lady was carrying a small, friendly, black and white dog with oversized and upright ears. "He's French, a Papillon, meaning butterfly," she said, pointing to the dog's supposedly butterfly-like ears.
Becoming increasingly artsy, we squeezed in a visit to Ronald S. Lauder's Neue Galerie in Manhattan before heading off to "Mama Mia." On display was Gustav Klimt's 1907 gold-flecked portrait "Adele Bloch-Bauer I," purchased last year by cosmetics heir Lauder for $135 million, the highest sum ever paid for a painting.
Conspicuously, there's big money in tighty whiteys, and in mascara.
Ralph R. Reiland is an associate professor of economics at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh.
Ralph R. Reiland
Phone: 412-884-4541
E-mail: rrreiland@aol.com
"Ralph R. Reiland is the B. Kenneth Simon Professor of Free Enterprise at Robert Morris University, the owner Amel's Restaurant, and a columnist with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review."
