The View From Manhattan

More stores are being shut down every day. The former tenants are always careful to erase their names, so passersby think: "What was there? Was it X?" I get a creepy feeling from these anonymous board-ups.

Even creepier is the silence. Manhattan used to be full of traders talking about the market, about business, about margins. No more. The restaurants in Tribeca, near Wall Street, are either completely empty or full of people with other things on their minds. If, by chance, a market-related conversation does occur, the person discussing it is a painfully obvious loser.

Not that I have been doing much better. I'm just too stunned to talk about it.

Once in a very great while, perhaps once every two years, I get an English-speaking taxi driver interested in talking. Most of the drivers now are from Bangladesh or are totally non-conversational types named Mohammed or the like. (I am convinced that these latter either work for Al Qaeda or the FBI, or perhaps both.) Anyway, I had one of these rare articulate birds the other day, and he said the recession is not as bad as people think. He said his business is way up. He also opined that the last thing a woman will give up is the manicure-pedicure, and that he is seeing no dropoff in the trade.

I checked with a couple of female friends, and indeed, they reported that NEW mani-pedi outlets have been opening among the boarded-up windows.

These green shoots, however, are dwarfed beside the giant sequoias still falling. While work continues on the new Deutsche Bank building here in Tribeca, the World Trade Center site is still a wilderness. Giant cranes are parked around the site, but do nothing. Tourists peek through the fence onto a vast waste.

J.P. Morgan just put its huge Chase Manhattan Plaza digs up for sale, along with two other choice Manhattan properties. The brand-new financial buildings along West Side Highway seem to be unoccupied. I never see the lines of limos parked outside the old Merrill Lynch digs at the World Financial Center any more, not since early this year when they were signing over the firm to BankAmerica.

My Citibank branch by City Hall is kaput, boarded up, no name, already forgotten. Citi is offering larger-than-normal CD rates, shades of Wamu. I just money out of my trading account, where it has been doing nothing but shrink anyway, and I'm going to put it in a big fat Citi CD. It will be sooooo amusing in a post-2008 kind of way to see which bank it migrates to when Citi is sold off into tiny bits.

The only thing that keeps me amused these days is Thomas Pynchon's new noir detective tale, Inherent Vice. And my 3-year-old son, Aubrey, who is riding a 19-inch Specialized all over and boogie-boarding in the building pool.

It's 86 degrees here in my green building, because all of the "green" air conditioning units went out at the same time and the parts had to be shipped from Canada. Somehow, it took them three weeks to get to customs in Buffalo. Supposedly they will be here tomorrow. This has done nothing to improve my mood.