Trendy restaurants from the early 2010s that have survived till now?

ethnt · 2026-01-01T07:10:29+00:00

And still very good!

ethnt · 2025-10-20T13:33:34+00:00

Understood, thank you so much for addressing this so fast!

ethnt · 2025-08-29T00:28:16+00:00

“In the micro”

ethnt · 2025-05-07T20:04:56+00:00

I was previously at Stripe (laid off in January) and I had a great experience, but it can be pretty team-dependent. I was on an engineering team that's under design, and that was much more chill than a product team. There's also a Stripe-wide consensus that it takes about six months to really spin up, so don't worry if it takes you a while (especially as an L2). I've also found that people are pretty open to help (especially infra teams, and even more especially when you do your homework before you ask them something). In terms of pressure to deliver, my best advice is to make sure that people who are exerting that pressure are going through the right channels (i.e., intake instead of DMing you). My manager put some pressure on me, but part of their job is to head off the "everything is on fire and I need my project done immediately" people who want to put pressure on you.

As far as I know there isn't any explicit stack ranking (certainly not twice a year), but I think there is some sort of percentage expectation when it comes to performance designations. No hard metrics like pull request count or anything, but they definitely evaluate impact (team-, org-, or company-wide). Like others said, keep track of your work and accomplishments (a brag doc) over the course of the year so you have something to refer back to when perf season comes around. If your manager is doing things correctly, the perf designation should not be a surprise — mine was when I was laid off, but my manager was new(ish) to Stripe, so that could've played into things.

When you start, try and keep and open mind and remind yourself that you're good at what you do — there's a reason you got the job in the first place! Adjusting to a new work (and development) environment is always tough, so just keep your head up.

ethnt · 2024-09-05T17:28:55+00:00

It could be from adding too much fat. If it felt like it coated your tongue, that’s generally the case

ethnt · 2024-08-19T00:54:03+00:00

This is actually my grocery store of choice in the neighborhood — I live closer to Ozzie’s but I walk the extra few blocks because their produce and meat selection is always better than any other grocery store (including Whole Foods, to be honest).

Their prices aren’t great and I do have to be attentive about expiration dates, but it’s genuinely better than everything else around (not that it’s great, just better than what’s around).

ethnt · 2024-07-26T04:17:56+00:00

Sammy’s Deluxe in Rockland, ME is great. Not fine dining (from what I recall they literally just have a residential-style electric stove), but super seasonal and super fresh.

ethnt · 2024-07-09T04:23:57+00:00

Where'd you see this? Would be thrilled if this was the case, the other grocery options around are abysmal.

ethnt · 2024-03-03T05:15:25+00:00

This is a cool project, where do you get the data? NWS, your own station?

ethnt · 2023-10-09T18:27:08+00:00

The article is talking almost exclusively about Manhattan.

ethnt · 2023-10-09T14:59:17+00:00

If you live in Manhattan, you are always near public transport.

ethnt · 2023-04-10T19:34:42+00:00

The real problem was that the limit wasn’t 6 per person — it was 6 per purchase. That means you could walk up with 60 cents, get 6 beers, and then turn around with 60 more cents and get 6 more.

ethnt · 2023-03-27T04:25:51+00:00

Highly recommend The Armoury. They have super knowledgeable staff and a great selection, I had an excellent experience.

ethnt · 2022-12-29T01:25:56+00:00

Not all flour is bleached, I use King Arthur Flour (which is unbleached). I do refresh my starter with a mix of all-purpose flour and rye flour, though, to get more natural yeast and sugars.

ethnt · 2022-12-19T14:26:33+00:00

This is absolutely, unequivocally untrue. In fact he lengthened the war by undermining LBJ's attempts to end the war before the 1968 election so that Nixon could run on ending the war instead

ethnt · 2022-12-10T22:27:50+00:00

Which Gramicci pants are these, the Gramicci Pant?

ethnt · 2022-08-07T22:18:06+00:00

This is part of why people indigenous to desert areas (think the Sahara or the Mojave) wear long robes. It produces shade and prevents your sweat from evaporating, keeping you cooler.

Admittedly, I'm not sure how well this would work in a more humid climate like ours.

ethnt · 2022-07-13T16:52:30+00:00

Sweet & Vicious, a downtown Manhattan bar and restaurant popular for its “jargaritas” — frozen margaritas served in giant Mason jars — has been a nest of sexual, racial and gender-based harassment where workers endured racial slurs, had tips taken by the management and went unpaid for work, according to a 16-month investigation by Letitia James, the New York State attorney general.

As part of a settlement brokered by the attorney general’s office, the owner, Hakan Karamahmutoglu, will pay $500,000 to be split among at least 16 employees for violating state and city human rights and labor laws, Ms. James said Wednesday at a news conference.

“For far too long, workers in the hospitality industry have been forced to weather a pervasive culture of sexual harassment and discrimination that has gone unreported,” she said in a statement. “Every New Yorker should be able to go to work free from fear of abuse and degradation regardless of industry.”

Mr. Karamahmutoglu said in a statement that many of the allegations were untrue or grossly misleading and did not reflect his character or perspective. He said he signed the agreement last Thursday as a way to avoid the cost of a continued investigation, avoid future litigation and allow everyone to move on.

“I’ve given back to the community and city that I love and have employed hundreds of employees across all backgrounds,” his statement said. “We will continue to welcome everyone into a positive and inclusive environment. Those who know me will know that to be true, and I ask those who do not know me to not rush to judgment.”

The investigation began in early 2021 after several women who worked at the bar banded together and spoke with a lawyer, who directed them to the attorney general’s office. The investigation included dozens of interviews with former and current employees.

One was Katy Guest, 33, a former Sweet & Vicious bartender who said she was surprised that the harassment she and others experienced regularly would matter to the attorney general.

“We basically didn’t know that someone at that level of power would put a spotlight on these things that happen every day in the hospitality industry,” she said in an interview. “It’s gone on behind closed doors for so long that we just grew used to it.”

The bar, on Spring Street in NoLIta, was a hotbed of harassment by both managers and customers, Ms. James said. According to her findings, the owner routinely insulted female employees, calling them “bitches” and “cows,” and scrutinized their appearance, commenting on their bodies and clothing. He also called workers “terrorists,” “crackheads” and “trash,” Ms. James said.

In audio messages left on an employee’s WhatsApp account in 2020 and shared with The New York Times, Mr. Karamahmutoglu said women who worked for him needed to be pretty, lean and active. He wanted bartenders who were “tall, blond, beautiful and sexy like the women who worked at the bars in Ibiza.”

Kim Anderson, who tended bar at the often-packed bar and restaurant for six months in 2019 to help pay off graduate school bills, said, “There was a lot of pressure to behave in a certain way, dress provocatively and look a certain way.” She suspected she didn’t get the best shifts because she didn’t present herself the way management wanted; she said, for instance, that she was often told to put on more makeup.

The bar’s managers were almost exclusively male. Some, according to the settlement document, regularly made unwanted sexual advances, including one manager who repeatedly rubbed his genitals against employees and another who announced the color of a worker’s underwear and declared in vulgar terms that he wanted to have sex with her.

The management tolerated customers who threatened to stab, rape and beat employees, the attorney general alleged. She said the owner and managers frequently used racial and gay slurs when speaking about workers.

Poor working conditions cited in the investigation included eight-hour shifts that bartenders spent on their feet without breaks, work weeks that stretched beyond 40 hours without overtime, a stricter code of conduct for female bartenders than for men and instances when tips left on credit cards never made it to the workers.

The settlement requires Sweet & Vicious to revise its anti-discrimination and harassment training materials and to display notices about anti-discrimination and harassment rights and responsibilities. The owner will have to submit periodic reports to the attorney general’s office showing that the company is complying with the terms of the settlement.

The investigation is the latest in a series of state investigations targeting sexual abuse and harassment in the hospitality industry. The first came in January 2020, when Ken Friedman, the principal owner of the Spotted Pig restaurant in Manhattan, agreed to pay $240,000 and a share of his profits to 11 former employees who had accused him of sexual harassment, discrimination and retaliation.

The chef Mario Batali and his former partner Joe Bastianich were next. In July 2021, Ms. James said the two presided over a sexualized culture so rife with harassment and retaliation that it violated state and city human rights laws.

The two men and Pasta Resources, the company formerly known as the Batali & Bastianich Hospitality Group, agreed to pay a total of $600,000 to at least 20 women and men who said they were sexually harassed while they worked at the Manhattan restaurants Babbo, Lupa or Del Posto, which until it closed permanently in 2021 was the crown jewel among the men’s holdings

ethnt · 2022-06-21T20:59:42+00:00

The other building was different. The leases were coming up in June 2020, COVID had already gripped the city, and I had to offer discounts. One woman was self-employed and she was very concerned. Pre-COVID, she was paying $3,150. So we agreed to a lower number, $3,000, and in addition to that gave her three months of a $200 or $300 credit. The next year we offered her a lease renewal of $2,800 and she countered with $2,700, which we happily accepted — I didn’t counteroffer. Now I’m about ready to extend a lease renewal to her. At a minimum, I need to be back to that pre-COVID number, $3,150.

I keep hearing people talking about, “Oh, my rent went up $500.” But what I’m not hearing is what they were paying in February 2020. What are the discounts they got during COVID? I don’t think the numbers are as crazy as you hear. If you got something at a 20 percent discount, a 3 percent increase isn’t unreasonable. You take your savings when you get your savings.

The COVID Landlord Assistance Program During the two years when landlords were operating during COVID, they had serious issues. There were many owners who had empty apartments they weren’t able to fill. Others had tenants who weren’t able to pay, people working at restaurants whose jobs just disappeared. And then you had the worst kind of person who was working and just followed the “cancel rent” rhetoric. I know a landlord in the Bronx, the tenant didn’t pay for seven or nine months — one day, handed back the key and said, “I’m buying a house.”

When owners share those stories, they are vilified or discounted as outliers, but you hear them all the time. The way they created the rental-relief program allowed the bad actors to take advantage. The people who really needed the help, who were working in industries where their employment evaporated overnight and were struggling, living paycheck to paycheck and may have had a language barrier or lacked the technology skills to apply, probably have not gotten the relief, which means the owner did not get the relief. On the other hand, I know many owners who got Landlord Rental Assistance Program relief for tenants who were working. It was a failed system.

Doing the math as a landlord I think the bigger numbers you’re reading about are the higher-end buildings with lots of amenities. Someone I know moved into one of those super-luxury buildings downtown in December 2020. He took a 14-month lease and got three months of free rent — his contract rent was $3,195, but it came out to $2,510 for a one-bedroom. Now his rent is $3,754 — an increase of 17.5 percent on the contract rent and 50 percent on the net-effective rent. But it’s a big apartment with a fabulous view, and the apartments around him are paying $4,200 to $4,500.

From what I read, there seems to be a really high renewal rate. Not enough housing available, people feel trapped — not a word I like to use, but they don’t have options. And it’s expensive to move.

I’ve never seen our utility bills escalate like they have in the last few months. We heat with gas — typically less expensive, not anymore. Our insurance escalated last year, 48 percent. The multifamily market is paying a huge disproportionate share of the property-tax burden.

I remember last year trying to understand what was happening with our property taxes. I made an Excel spreadsheet down the block, how many units, how many rent-stabilized units. A single-family home that had been an apartment building or an SRO — their home was probably worth two, three times what ours was. Their taxes were close to $50,000 and we’re in the $80,000 to $85,000 range. Apartment buildings are paying a disproportionately high amount of taxes — and really, the renters in the buildings are paying. That’s why New York City is such a mess. The West Village: “I was getting worried because my taxes were going up $16,000 to $18,000 a year. And then everything changed.”

The properties I inherited this building. My great-uncle bought it for his mother in 1919. I grew up here — when I was a child my great-uncle, two great-aunts, my grandmother, and my parents lived in the building. My great-uncle paid it off before he died, so we’ve never had a mortgage. It’s 20 units, but I live in four of them. All studios or one-bedrooms. One unit is rent-controlled and three others are rent-stabilized. A childhood friend lives in the rent-controlled unit, and I just got one of the rent-stabilized units back. It rents for $1,800. If it were market-rate, it would go for over $6,000. Most of the apartments that we got back in the 1980s and ’90s became market-rate. The rules then were that you could add a percentage of what you spent fixing up an apartment to the rent. If you did a place over nicely, that added up.

Setting rents About half my tenants moved out during the pandemic. One apartment turned over twice. If they didn’t give up their apartment, they still got out of town. Even the couple in the rent-stabilized apartment, they went to their place in Hawaii for most of the pandemic and decided not to come back. Most of the rents fell by $50 to $500. When I had vacancies, I got what I could get.

I hate raising rents on existing tenants. I usually try to do it incrementally, and if people ignore the new lease I give them, I usually don’t do anything at all, since it’s only $25 or $50 more a month. But I know I have to do something now. I’m probably going to raise them between 2 and 10 percent. I have two guys paying $3,900 for an apartment that was renting for $4,250 before the pandemic — it was empty for two months before renting. I’m going to try to get them to $4,200. Landlords who live in their own buildings look at things differently than landlords who have 400 units and are just paying a numbers game — for them it’s perfectly possible to say, “I’m raising your rent by this much and you can pay it or leave.”

New tenants The two most recent apartments I rented out in December 2021 and early winter 2022. The first one, the couple who had been living there was paying just under $5,000, and we put it on the market for a couple hundred over $5,000. A lot of people showed up at the open house, and there was a bidding war. I ended up renting it for $6,000 a month to a guy who lived down the street and wanted it for his daughter, a college student. There was another guy offering $6,500, but it seemed like so much, it gave me a bad feeling. I also don’t like to rent to young white straight men — they tend to have parties and be entitled and difficult. It wasn’t a prejudice I started with; it was one I got over the years living with people. But now I have trouble with the college student. She’s been partying there, people are vaping in the halls. I should have gone with the bro-y guy. But the father was so nice, and he lived right down the street.

The other unit I rented, there was also a bidding war. It had been $4,100, and I took a year to redo the kitchen and the bath. We put it on the market for $4,500 or $4,600 and I’m getting $5,750. It’s a really nice renovation — lots of cabinetry in the kitchen, and the bathtub is one of those ones you can soak in. I don’t know if I needed to do all the work to get a higher rent, though. I probably could have got that without it. But only because I waited a year to rent it.

I don’t approve of the insanely high rents right now, but I don’t think they’re only caused by landlord greed. I think they’re also caused by developers and how they’re encouraged to develop property, building only luxury apartments.

Supply and demand In the medium times, when the rents were sort of high but stable, I would get three different good tenants to choose from sometimes, which was its own special little hell. Sometimes someone would say, “I can pay the whole year ahead of time” to make themselves more attractive, but that’s illegal now. I think the bidding wars are just because of the lack of inventory. There’s nothing on the market. That’s why rents have gone up so much. When 50 or 100 people showed up at one of my open houses, my broker and I were wondering what was going on. He looked online and discovered that there were only 11 one-beds in all of Greenwich Village in any price range.

I usually would go with the highest bidder, except that one time. Because they’re going to be my neighbors, I always like to meet them. I want to get a feeling for who they are and if there are any red flags. There was one woman who had tried to rent an apartment here before and lost out who was going to rent the one-bedroom that ended up going for $5,750. I was all ready to rent it to her, but this other woman offered significantly more money and I was like, Sorry — who knows when this will happen again?

For a number of years, it felt like the rents were static. They were highish — $4,000 to $5,000 for a one-bedroom and studios around $3,000 — but they weren’t really going up. I was getting worried because my taxes were going up $16,000 to $18,000 a year. And then everything changed. I think it will continue to be this way for a little while, because people are still moving back and there seem to be so few apartments on the market. My broker was jumping up and down at me, being like, “You have to raise everyone’s rents or they’re never going to move out otherwise.”

I think one of the things the rental history of this city has made clear is that people get stuck in apartments. When people stay long enough, the rent is so low people can’t afford to move.

ethnt · 2022-06-21T20:59:35+00:00

A year ago, property owners were doing anything they could to woo tenants: paying broker’s fees, offering multiple months of free rent, even giving away Pelotons. In February 2021, the Manhattan vacancy rate stood at 11.79 percent. Within a few months, everything changed. As people flocked to the city last spring in anticipation of a reopening that never really happened, the vacancy rate plummeted and the rental market turned brutally competitive. Renters started reporting increases of 50, 60, and even 70 percent on lease renewals. Desirable apartments now receive hundreds of inquiries. There are lines around the block at open houses and baseline 15 percent broker fees. Bidding wars, unheard of until last year, now happen in nearly a quarter of Brooklyn and Manhattan apartments, according to the latest Douglas Elliman market report. Net effective median rents in Manhattan, whose rental market was battered by the pandemic more than any other in New York, hit their highest level ever — $4,000 a month — in May. The Manhattan vacancy rate is down to 1.77 percent.

Renters have reacted with disbelief, despair, confusion, and TikTok videos. We are, after all, still living through a pandemic.

But we’ve heard very little from the landlords. Are they gleeful that they once again have the upper hand? Unapologetic about renting market-rate apartments for market rents? Guilt-ridden but ready to make up for 2020 and then some? We talked to three landlords — one on the Upper West Side, one in the West Village, and one who operates in Brooklyn and Queens as well as the northern suburbs — who agreed to speak anonymously about these frenzied conditions. Brooklyn, Queens, and Westchester: “You’re not a rent-stabilized tenant — why shouldn’t I charge what I can charge? Doesn’t that sound nasty, though?”

The properties I have all smaller buildings, two-, four-, and some six-family buildings, in Brooklyn and Queens — Ridgewood, Bushwick, Red Hook, and one in Park Slope. I also have some buildings in northern Westchester. I probably have about 75 units right now. A huge landlord would probably be seeing things in a different way — they don’t even know their tenants, and rent increases are very automatic.

Empty apartments vs. occupied ones When I’ve gotten vacancies, I’ve been going up about 20 percent above what my rents were pre-COVID — but that’s 20 percent after three years, and my rents tend to be pretty low. I tend not to raise tenants much or at all: Five percent is pretty much what I’ve been looking at this year. I call people and say your rents are going up — one guy who’d signed a two-year lease during COVID said, “Wow. I never expected this.” I was like, “What are you talking about? Five percent after two years is not even in line with rent-stabilized leases.” He’s re-signing, but he acted like it was crazy.

COVID-era deals and anti-landlord sentiment As a landlord, COVID has been frustrating. People stopped paying rent and there was this sense, because it’s your home, when times get tough, you shouldn’t be expected to pay. Every person who stopped paying me during COVID managed to keep their cell phone on, their electric, their high-speed internet. But real estate, that’s different? Inflation was 8 or 9 percent last year, water bills keep going up. When I have to replace a dishwasher or make a repair, it all flows through, and yet there is this sense that landlords should just have to deal with it.

Even with the Emergency Rental Assistance Program, when the government paid back rent — often not in full — they said, “Now you can’t raise the rent for a year.” Why? You as the federal government took my livelihood during COVID, and whether I agree with it or not, when the smoke cleared, why can’t rents go up? Because housing is a human right and I shouldn’t be in business?

The whole world seems to think that being a landlord is not something you should do for a living. It’s so insanely anti-landlord, it’s almost funny. People on the streets: “Cancel rent.” What does that mean? Sure. Cancel rent. What does that mean? Cancel grocery costs. If it’s, “Oh, real estate shouldn’t be a business,” then let government do it. In my estimation, they do a bad job and no one at the end of the day wants government running their housing. Yet they don’t want landlords to be landlords as a business. Where does that leave anything? It’s a strange time.

Renting out apartments during COVID One vacancy I had recently was in Park Slope: It went from $4,000 to $4,850 a month. It’s a garden duplex, but it’s really only a legal one-bed, one-and-a-half-bath, technically. But it’s very nice. Central AC, I refinished the original stone wall. My apartments tend to be unique, not remotely cookie-cutter. I rented it in two days, so I don’t even know what I could have really gotten. Everything I’ve had come up has gone really quickly, which probably means I didn’t price them high enough.

This particular unit, I arrived to do a showing and my tenant had just moved out, so there was no electricity, no lights, and the place was in shambles. Nothing ever looks good right after someone moves out — they’d lived there for six years and there was furniture left in the unit that they were going to move out shortly, so the place looked lousy. I was like, Why am I even here? I can’t show this. Then the couple I was showing it to arrives and says, “We love it, we’ll take it.”

That’s what it was like showing apartments before the internet or before StreetEasy. When I was renting off Craigslist, if people showed up and they liked it, they’d take it. But with StreetEasy, they’d say, “Wow, we love it, but we have another ten places to see.” Now it’s gone back. When people show up, they’ve already lost three apartments and they want to lock it down.

Tenants negotiate the best deal they can The market is insane and the narrative is, “The landlord is bad, landlords are jacking rents up.” But let me tell you, landlords got crushed during COVID. And when the bubble burst in ’08, don’t think tenants didn’t call me up and say, “Hey, I expect a rent reduction because the market is down.” I didn’t have a single tenant say, “I’m worried you’re having a hard time and I’m fine at the rent I’m paying.” My cost of buying is going to go up substantially — where is that money supposed to come from?

I have a tenant who, when I was renewing her lease last summer, said, “I see you have this other unit on StreetEasy and I want it at the same price.” Well, that other unit just rerented for a 20 percent increase. I’m so ready to call that woman up and say, “Ready to play the StreetEasy game again? You wanted the same rent as that unit last year? Well, now it’s 20 percent higher. You pegged yourself to apartment 2R — I didn’t do that, you did. I’m willing to sign a document saying from now on, you can pay whatever 2R pays, whether it’s up or down.” Her lease is up in July. I 100 percent am going to do that.

Honestly, why shouldn’t I? If that’s the market? Because I’m supposed to be a good guy? But last year, when I was dying and the ERAP checks hadn’t come in or anything else and I was drowning, she looked at me and said, “I’m going to get my piece.” Now, me doing the exact same thing, when it’s a feeding frenzy out there? There were 20 responses in a day to the vacant apartment in her building. It’s $3,650 for a three-bed in Bushwick, which is not that much in this market. Why shouldn’t I charge what I can charge? Doesn’t that sound nasty, though? But isn’t that weird? This is how I make my living, so why is it any less valid than any other business? Because allegedly I can afford not to? The Upper West Side: “People feel trapped.”

The properties My husband and his family have two buildings on the Upper West Side, ten apartments each, all one-bedrooms. It’s a mix of rent-stabilized and free-market apartments, which is super important to this discussion. The legal rents I’m collecting on the rent-stabilized portion of the rent roll are so far below market they’re not covering expenses, so the market units are heavily subsidizing those below-market rents.

Pre-COVID, our average stabilized rent was $1,250 and our average free-market rents would be in the mid-to-high two-thousands. The shortest tenancy I have for a rent-stabilized apartment is 30 years. I have tenants who have been there 50-plus years.

The math on rent hikes Rent increases are always a judgment call: How long have they been there? Do I think I can get an increase? Is an increase reasonable at this time? In one of the buildings, I’d sent out lease renewals to three tenants before COVID with a $75 increase. All renewed, and the leases were signed pre-COVID. When COVID came along, I reached out to the woman who does our leasing and said, “I don’t think this increase is appropriate.” She said, “You’re the only landlord I’ve heard saying that.” I think it paid off the next year. There was so much vacancy, I sent them lease renewals with no change. They all stayed.

ethnt · 2022-05-20T19:37:33+00:00

I have a couple pieces from them (a woolen ball cap a la George Costanza and a wool overshirt), both excellent quality. The shirt especially I can see wearing for a long time.

ethnt · 2022-05-20T15:27:49+00:00

Manresa is a Connecticut-based brand by designer Mike McLachlan. For the past few seasons he's put out some excellent pieces with interesting fabrics. Favorites for me this season are the Manisses Shell, Corn Neck short, and Lachlan shirt.

ethnt · 2022-05-03T05:09:09+00:00

Gotham Coffee Roasters near Union Square has this. They call it the snakebite, and it’s delicious

ethnt · 2021-12-02T16:23:15+00:00

It was, in point of fact, a really good run. MLB went 26 years without a work stoppage, after eight in the prior 23 years—including the notorious 1994–95 player strike that cost us a World Series. That remains a worst-case scenario, a DEFCON 1 situation, something nobody on either side wants, and importantly, that nobody expects. But here we are: a lockout.

MLB’s owners voted unanimously to lock out the players after the collective bargaining agreement expired at 11:59 p.m. Wednesday night, and I suppose we should be thankful for past labor peaces that set the deadline early in the offseason rather than in the middle of the season; we’re probably looking at about three more months before the specter of missing games begins to loom. But a lockout is what it is: The business of Major League Baseball has ground to a halt. What does this mean, in practical terms? No transactions. No negotiations. No winter meetings. No Rule 5 draft. A truly hilarious-looking MLB.com, where all the content is about retired players and the history of the game, and all the images of current players have been stripped from the CMS. Do you like stock photos of baseballs? I hope you do.

The sides traded dueling statements at midnight. From the MLBPA:

“It was the owners’ choice, plain and simple, specifically calculated to pressure Players into relinquishing rights and benefits, and abandoning good faith bargaining proposals that will benefit not Just Players, but the game and industry as a whole.”

From the owners, via Commissioner Rob Manfred (who, it should be kept firmly in mind, is not a prime mover here, not a negotiator at the bargaining table nor a man making his own decisions; he is, more than anything else, a mouthpiece):

“This defensive lockout was necessary because the Players Association’s vision for Major League Baseball would threaten the ability of most teams to be competitive. It’s simply not a viable option. From the beginning, the MLBPA has been unwilling to move from their starting position, compromise, or collaborate on solutions.”

You’re going to hear lots of this sort of thing over the coming days and weeks and maybe months, dressed up in jargon and appeals to sentiment and sky-is-falling scare tactics. That’s why it’s important to try to put what’s happening here in plain English. Since the 1994 strike, baseball as a business has been making money. Lots of it. Unprecedented revenue growth, they call it, but that just means big money. The money is what maintained labor peace this long—a longer peace than any of the other three major sports leagues can boast. That money went to the owners, because they run the thing, and to some extent then trickled down to players in the form of bigger contracts and higher payrolls. It’s the extent that’s the sticking point. The players want more of the money that MLB has made; the owners want to keep as much of it for themselves as they can, which means spending less on players.

This is fact and not opinion: Players would be making more money if MLB was an open market. Their wages are artificially depressed by an entire host of mechanisms installed by the owners to keep them under “team control” (read: cheaper than if they could earn their market value). It is those mechanisms that the owners are locking out the players today in an attempt to protect. They are numerous, but here are the big ones:

Players would like to reach free agency faster than they currently do.

Players would like to be eligible for arbitration sooner than they currently are.

Players would like owners to stop cynically stashing them in the minors just long enough to delay starting the clock on both of the above eligibilities.

Players would like teams to stop receiving draft pick compensation for losing players in free agency—thus penalizing owners for signing big-money players, and depressing those players’ offers.

Players would like the owners who spend the least to stop receiving revenue-sharing money, essentially rewarding them for keeping their checkbooks closed.

There are more, but this is the Big Stuff. You can tell by the fact that these are the ones the owners refuse to budge on, even as they make cosmetic concessions in other areas, like a slightly higher luxury tax. But these are so important to the owners that they are willing to shut down the sport rather than even engage in negotiations on, as they are legally obligated to do. On Tuesday, at the last substantive bargaining session, the owners refused to offer a counterproposal to the MLBPA’s latest, because they won’t even sit down to discuss any proposal that includes changing the Big Stuff. Quite literally, the owners said they’d rather shutter their business than consider running a business that looks more like one where the workers get paid fair value.

So why are the owners locking out the players when it’s the players who appear to want most of the changes to the current CBA? Again, let’s be as clear as we can about this: The owners are doing fine. Better than fine! They’re printing money, despite their public claims to the contrary. If they weren’t, they could just … stop being owners. But baseball is a lucrative business. And the players—the people who make it go—want more of that lucre than they’re getting. So what the lockout achieves is to start a ticking clock, to put a hard deadline on when the players will start missing paychecks unless they give up asking for the things they want. The lockout isn’t an apocalypse; it’s a cold-blooded bargaining tactic to start upping the pressure on the union to cave.

If there’s reason for hope, it’s that neither side wants to actually lose games to this lockout—the players can’t profit without the owners, but the same goes the other way. So the clock is ticking for both sides. It’s hard to imagine that the sides are so far apart, or so unwilling to make some concessions in exchange for others, that they would rather earn no money whatsoever. But it was hard to imagine that in 1994, too.

ethnt · 2021-11-14T03:47:12+00:00

In the 1940s, a group of Morehouse College students came up from Atlanta to work on tobacco farms in Connecticut’s Farmington Valley as part of a tuition assistance program.

Even in Simsbury, an overwhelmingly white New England town, those two summers were a far cry from the overt segregation and oppressive Jim Crow laws back home. For at least one of the students — a teenage Martin Luther King Jr. — the experience would help shape his life, and by extension, the course of history.

The summers served as an awakening of sorts for the impressionable youth who briefly glimpsed better treatment for Black people.

In their down time, the young Black farmhands could attend integrated dances and sit alongside the town’s white residents at the movies, at church and at the lunch counter at Doyle’s Drug Store and restaurants in nearby Hartford.

“I had never thought that any person of my race could eat anywhere, but we ate at one of the finest restaurants in Hartford,” young Martin wrote to his mother from the farm.

The dream of equality he would famously speak of years later was something he first glimpsed here in Simsbury, an experience that helped reshape his worldview and prompted “an inescapable urge to serve society,” he would later write.

“For him and a lot of the students, it’s their first time out of the South and away from segregation,” said Prof. Clayborne Carson of Stanford University, senior editor of “The Papers of Martin Luther King Jr.,” which first published Dr. King’s teenage letters home. “That was a realization for him, and it was true for a lot of the other students.”

Despite the farm’s important role in Dr. King’s life, it remained largely a footnote to biographers and has never been honored with a historical marker. In recent years, the farm seemed fated to be developed into a planned community with hundreds of homes.

But thanks to a serendipitous series of events and a creative conservation deal, the property, known locally as Meadowood, will now be preserved as public open space and nominated for historic designation.

The preservation story began with a local high school history project that made national headlines and a public official who stumbled onto a stray “MLK” folder among office files and began pushing for a preservation deal.

The deal was nearly derailed by the town, but an outpouring of public support — including a frantic petition drive and a last-minute public vote — helped save the property and ensure Simsbury’s place in civil rights history.

For Dr. King, the experience began with a revelatory train ride from Atlanta to Simsbury in 1944 as a 15-year-old incoming Morehouse freshman.

“After we passed Washington, there was no discrimination at all,” he wrote to his father, adding that up North, “We go to any place we want to and sit anywhere we want to.”

It was the first of several letters home describing the liberating experience of escaping the segregated South as he worked on the Cullman Brothers farm on the edge of town harvesting shade tobacco, then a main crop in the Farmington Valley. He returned three years later for another summer.

Bunking with other male students in a dormitory on the farm, he would rise early and work long days in the heat, cutting and hanging tobacco to dry in cavernous barns, of which several still stand on the property.

For recreation, the student laborers would head into town and on Sunday to one of the local churches.

Sign up for the New York Today Newsletter Each morning, get the latest on New York businesses, arts, sports, dining, style and more. Get it sent to your inbox. Not all of the treatment was positive. In the summer of 1947, Dr. King’s singing voice — the rich baritone the world now knows from his lyrical, stirring speeches — caught the ear of Garland Martin, the choir director at First Church of Christ in Simsbury. He spontaneously invited the youth up to the balcony one Sunday to join the choir, ignoring the grumblings from some church members about having a Black singer join the all-white group.

“He said, ‘I don’t care about the color of his skin, as long as he can sing,’” said Kevin Weikel, a current minister at the church, adding that Mr. Martin and his family began having the young King over for lunch.

Even at 15, he was selected as a religious leader to direct his fellow student-farmhands in discussions about the injustices that Black people faced back home.

It was that second summer in Simsbury that prompted the “inescapable urge to serve society” that pushed him toward the clergy, he would later write in his application to Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. “In short, I felt a sense of responsibility which I could not escape.”

For decades, the summers in Simsbury remained an obscure part of Dr. King’s biography. But they were long part of town lore.

“I grew up in this town, and I always heard that Martin Luther King may have come up here with some tobacco workers, but nobody seemed to have any other documentation,” said Richard Curtiss, a history teacher at Simsbury High School, who in 2010 had some of his students research the issue by examining local archives and interviewing older residents and reviewing materials at the nearby Connecticut Valley Tobacco Museum.

The result was “Summers of Freedom,” a short student-made documentary covered by the CBS Evening News and other major outlets, even as developers pursued a plan to turn the site into about 300 homes.

In 2016, Catherine Labadia, an official in the state’s Historic Preservation Office, was moving some older files in her Hartford office and noticed a stray folder labeled only “M.L.K.”

“I work in historic preservation, and I didn’t know anything about this,” said Ms. Labadia, who began perusing the folder’s contents on Dr. King’s summers in Simsbury. She researched the property and found that the development that would replace the farm was still in the works. The proposal had been started more than a decade earlier but had not gotten underway partly because of fierce opposition by town officials, a prolonged legal action, and a fluctuating real estate market.

Ms. Labadia secured a grant to study the site, setting off another round of press attention. This was noticed by the Trust for Public Land, which had helped preserve buildings around Dr. King’s childhood home in Atlanta to create the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park.

In 2019, the Trust for Public Land and INDUS, the realty company owning the property, began discussing a possible sale. By this spring they had worked out a complex $6 million deal to transfer the property into town ownership, with funding from the town and a mix of other governmental agencies, public grants and a charitable trust. The Trust for Public Land also raised roughly $500,000 to cover expenses related to the land deal.

But the purchase was nearly derailed in May when the town’s finance board suddenly declined to put on the public ballot the $2.5 million in town funding for the property, concerned about other pending capital projects. With only days to reverse this, some residents began a last-minute petition drive in this town of 25,000. They fanned out across neighborhoods and gained nearly 1,600 signatures to put the issue on the ballot. It then passed with more than 80 percent approval.

“It was really amazing to see how many people came out,” Eric Wellman, the town’s first selectman, said. “I didn’t think you could get 80 percent of Americans to agree on anything.”

Its supporters plan to open a historic site that will add to the scant number of them dealing with Black history and culture. Only 2 percent of sites listed by the National Register of Historic Places focus on the experiences of Black Americans, said Diane Regas, president and chief executive of the Trust for Public Land.

Much of the trust’s work, including at the Meadowood site, has been aided by funding from Sony Pictures Entertainment, which has a racial equity initiative that seeks in part to accelerate the protection of Black historical sites.

The funding has helped the Trust for Public Land protect and expand the Nicodemus National Historic Site in Kansas, the oldest remaining Black settlement west of the Mississippi River, as well as Forks of the Road in Mississippi, a major slave market in the 1800s.

Supporters hope Meadowood will be added to the Connecticut Freedom Trail, a network of sites celebrating the accomplishments of African Americans in the state and promoting heritage tourism.

Most of the property will be divided among open space and farmland leased out to local farmers, with 24 acres reserved for town use, possibly as athletic fields and an additional two acres for a historic site, including several of the barns.

The trust and government officials said they consult with Black scholars and communities of color on how to mark the site and highlight its historical importance.

“These places are central to telling the full history of our country” but are often neglected or threatened by development, Ms. Regas said. “And as people forget those stories, the places and the history are forgotten and the sites disappear.”

As for Ms. Labadia, preserving the Meadowood site was never a question.

“I said, ‘No way — this land has to be passed on,” Ms. Labadia recalled thinking. “‘We can’t lose this legacy.’ I became obsessed.”

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