This is the time of year when some contemplate throwing out stuff. It is a noble idea, but not one I am particularly consumed with. I am more inclined to nod my head at stories (in the NYTimes) about clutter in midtown--usually people clutter, but more recently Uber car clutter. Our inept mayor (and former presidential primary candidate) De Blasio has made the matter worse by banning cars in favor of bikes and scooters. Well, never mind! He'll be gone soon.
Such were my thoughts as I read a story in the Guardian today about the City of Edinburgh (Scotland). They have tourist clutter brought on by seasonal festivals managed by a company called Underbelly. Coming up is New Year's Eve and a public celebration in a part of the city that appears to be residential. In order to control the crowds, residents must obtain permits to enter their own neighborhood. They can also request up to six permits (presumably for their own guests). One suspects the six limit there has to do with "Underbelly" fearing it will loose money for tickets to its New Year's Celebration. Who Knows? But the locals are up in arms!! I salute them.
Reminds me why we have never gone to Times Square for the New Year's Eve Stand Around waiting for the ball to drop.
Just for laughs let me mention that there is a bagel store in our neighborhood that has lines winding around the corner on week-end mornings. When passing I stop and say, "there's another bagel store down two blocks--No Lines!" I get a blank stare and someone waves a tourist guide, "Best Eats in NYC." No mention that they're all the same and in today's New York they are all made by cheerful friendly Thai immigrants! That's authentic for you.
UPDATE: The Guardian reports that the security arrangement "Underbelly" has in place for Hogmanay, the New Year's celebration in Edinburgh will not be enforced by the local police. It's up to Underbelly to enforce its rules, which obviously have no legal basis! Anyone know what Hogmanay means?
At last the Brooklyn story appears on line....In the meantime, here is a Brooklyn (NY) saga of residents dealing with cruise ships who dock in Brooklyn (yes, it is lapped by large amounts of water). They seem to spend a whole day in port disembarking thousands and embarking thousand more while suffusing the air with pollution. In it's own way it mirrors the stories of Venice and Edinburgh.
NB. Note the center of the story is a local advocate of ships turning off their engines. He's been at a long time. The story never really gets to the bottom of the problem: why don't the ships plug into the on-dock facilities available for providing electricity? The NYTimes is treating this as a human interest story rather than Why isn't our city/state government working for the benefit of its citizens?
When in Philly, don't go to the highly advertised Pat's or Geno's for a Philly Cheesesteak. Compressed meat and cheese whiz. I got a better cheesesteak at the Village Saloon near Sparta, NJ. In Philly, the Reading Terminal Farmer's Market has an incredible impossible vegan "cheesesteak".
ReplyDeleteWell, DC has a lot of tourists too. I have never gone to the Mall on the 4th, and, if I lived in NYC, would skip Times Square. Lots of road closures downtown during the year because of marches and demonstrations. Next up will be the January March for Life. The Marine Corps Marathon closes roads all over - not just downtown. Tour buses downtown are a constant road clog factor. But.....
ReplyDeleteA slight inconvenience for we locals but a whole lot of small businesses, and jobs of all types, are sustained by tourism,
According to this, NYC does well, as does the whole state. So does D.C.
"Last year, a record 239 million visitors traveled to New York State, generating an economic impact of $104.8 billion – exceeding $100 billion for the third straight year. In addition, visitors generated an all-time high $64.8 billion in direct spending."
My God, I can only wonder what kind of city council is running Edinburgh, my favorite city in all the world, to allow Underbelly to ransack Christmas, Hogmanay and the Fringe festival. (To see the travesty Underbelly's Christmas market made in the Princes Street area, including the Sir Walter Scott Memorial, go here: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/nov/23/edinburgh-christmas-german-market-splits-opinions-local-residents
ReplyDeleteUnderbelly is a London-based entertainment management company. According to its Web site, a total of about 48,000 pounds were donated to the city or city charities from various Edingburgh Underbelly events. That seems like a pittance compared to the disruptions and anger these events generate.
We lived in Trenton, N.J., for nine years, during which time I often reviewed a play in one town one night and the other the next. We never were in Times Square for the ball drop, although all the kids went one year or another. We did go to Philly for the Mummers parade once. Froze absolutely to death.
ReplyDeleteWhen I saw the word "clutter" I thought maybe it was about going all Marie Kondo on everything.
ReplyDeleteMarie Kondo: I think that has been remaindered. And! Second-hand stores and good will deposits have been overwhelmed.
DeleteYes, read somewhere recently that thrift stores only sell about a third of their donations. Some of the overflow goes to third world countries along with unwanted commemorative t-shirts,caps, hoodies, etc. I guess it's a sneaky way to get poor countries to take our trash.
DeleteMy mother had over 100 pounds of bank statements, cancelled checks, bill stubs, Medicare notices and the like that I took to a shredding service. They assured me it was used to make paper pulp.
A friend and I were bemoaning the crap our packrat husbands kept that we would have to get rid of if we outlived them. We decided that people should have to purchase cemetery plots big enough for them AND their junk. A mutual acquaintance has a storage unit in which he keeps his overflow. He would need a crypt. Maybe business opportunities for those companies that pick up and sort recyclables and compact the rest into dense little bricks.
Extra Closet buildings have become as ubiquitous here as 7-11s. And those are for people who have their garages so packed they have to park the car in the driveway. One good reason for favoring electric vehicles is that they have to be plugged in, which may force people to clean out their garages. Or maybe it would just create demand for more Extra Closets.
DeleteMy mother-in-law passed away in 2009. So why did we keep the storage unit with her stuff in it until 2018? Part inertia and part emotional reluctance to part with it on the part of my husband. We had already taken what we wanted and had room for. Anyway we finally took a day to deal with it and close out the unit. And it is nice to have the extra money that we were paying each month, and nice to be free of that nagging feeling every time we drove past the U-Stor-It.
DeleteA whole other post could be written on the subject of recycling; or when is trash just trash?
The Edinburgh story recalls the recent laments from Venice of cruise ships debarking thousands of passengers into what seems to have become a city with lots of infrastructure and maybe weather issues. The ships are said to create waves and wakes that slosh through the canals and threaten many buildings that are already surrounded by water, even perhaps sitting on watery substrata. To say nothing of thousands of people downloaded in droves.
ReplyDeleteAs in Edinburgh (according to the Guardian story) this is part of local government efforts to make money. Where would Venice be without tourists? Would Edinburgh have a life of its own without the tourist dollar? Never been there. Jean thinks highly of it. Obviously NYC benefits from gazillions of tourists. How did this happen? How did the tourist industry become the mother lode of cities?
Maybe because there are many cities that we like to visit but would not want to live there for many reasons, e.g. prices
DeleteMy correspondent in Reykjavik tells of horrendous tourist woes--people camping in parking lots and leaving human waste around; rescue crews having to recover bodies of people who did not heed safety notices about ice floes, currents, and tides; tourists spooking local livestock or wild horses; people tearing down stone cairns that locals use to mark dangerous terrain; tourists renting orv's and tearing up pasturage.
DeleteIceland has benefited economically from tourism, but it is an ecological disaster.
I think one thing contributing to the tourist clutter is the Air B&B craze. It means that tourists are cluttering up residential areas which aren't set up for the extra traffic. Some people are renting out spare rooms in the house they live in, others have properties dedicated to Air B&B. Hawaii is one place where this is a real problem; they have homeless issues because of the high cost of homes, yet they have homes rented to non-residents for astronomic prices. I think the hoteliers have a point when they say that the air B&Bs are not held to the same standards of health and safety as the hotels are.
DeletePersonally I have no intention of staying at an Air B&B anytime, ever. If I want to stay in somebody else's house I'll stay here and crash on relatives. Due to my mom's well-developed hospitality ethic, that's what happened anyway. We were Air B&B before our time; you couldn't have third cousins one-removed, or your old college professor passing through town, stay in a motel. Had enough of that.
Jack, consider the possibility that people who live in those cities that people love to visit and can't afford to live there, may be displacing people who live there and can't afford to be tourists!!! One living example in NYC and Boston (I've read) is that AIRBNB is turning apartments into cheap(er) but not cheap hotel rooms for visitors and booting people out of their rental apartments.
DeleteMy theory of clutter is that beginning about age sixty one should get rid of one thing for every thing that one acquires, and also since one's life expectancy is about 20 years, one should also get rid of 5% of one's clutter per year, by one's seventies that should be getting rid of about 10% per year.
ReplyDeleteA seventy year old friend of mine was forced to downsize from her vintage home of many decades into an apartment. That was a long and rather expensive process of sorting things into a smaller amount to keep, things to give away, things to auction away, and things to trash. Fortunately a local moving company is very good at that. Most importantly they were willing (for a price) to do it slowly since her health limited her ability to help.
Although she paid a lot in moving expenses, she was rewarded by selling her vintage property for more than her asking price. It is one of the few Queen Anne pattern homes left in the area. She priced it high, so high Zillow asked the question of what did they not know? The first couple to see the place offered her more than her asking price to avoid a bidding war. Zillow promptly decided it agreed.
Showing the place bare but with all its wood work shining did the trick. Fortunately the building was very structurally sound built of timbers on the site and survived all the many inspections. So removing the clutter of decades was the right choice.
Observing her success, I have gotten more into the clutter removing mood. I offered the local parish three couches. They only took one. The two I thought were in the best condition structurally they rejected. Unfortunately that meant the landfill for them. My friend said they were vintage sofas from the fifties and could have been rehabbed. Since the landfill cost is by the truckload, I filled a truck with everything that I could mainly based on the criteria that it would not fit into a garbage container. I think I made my 10% reduction in clutter goal for 2019 in that one truckload.
I have one rule when I travelled abroad: try, try, try not to be an asshole. When on a wilderness trip, it was, leave it as you found it.
ReplyDelete"...try not to be an asshole." Good advice, Stanley. And not just when we're traveling.
DeleteRe: the update, I wouldn't have thought of Brooklyn as being a place where cruise ships dock, especially in the winter.
ReplyDelete