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Tivoli Comes To Brooklyn?

This could be a really nice compromise:

A world-famous Danish amusement park that inspired Walt Disney to build Disneyland is considering expanding operations to Coney Island, officials said. Robert Lieber, president of the city's Economic Development Corp., flew to Copenhagen last week with other top agency officials to meet with representatives from Tivoli Gardens

I've been to the original Tivoli Gardens and it strikes me that this could be an excellent fit. I have a lifelong DisneyWorld obsession, but I've always felt like a pure Disneyfication of Coney Island would be a disaster. On the other hand, there's a lot of today's Coney Island that's just kind of lame -- and I say that as someone who takes his kids there at least ten times a year. What you want is a mix of the freak show present and the the original turn-of-the-century excitement, without it feeling too stale and mall-like. I could easily see a Tivoli park hitting that sweet spot, assuming they don't take over the entire boardwalk.

The Entrepreneurial Generation

In my various talks about Everything Bad Is Good For You I'm often asked for evidence that all the Sleeper Curve skills that I discuss in the book are having a real-world impact on the web/gamer generation. One of the things I often say in response to this question is an anecdotal one: "Has there ever been a time when 20-somethings have had such a profound impact on the economy? Think Google, MySpace, YouTube, FaceBook, etc." Now two studies are backing up that general impression, outlined in this Inc. cover story on "The Entrepreneurial Generation":

No wonder that a recent study by The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor shows that 18- to 24-year-olds in the United States are starting businesses at a faster rate than 35- to 44-year-olds. The college campus is now a fertile breeding ground for company builders. "Forty percent or more of students who come into our undergraduate entrepreneurship program as freshmen already have a business," says Jeff Cornwall, the Massey Chair in Entrepreneurship at Belmont University in Nashville. "It's a whole new world."... Fifty-nine percent of Gen Y company owners described themselves as serial entrepreneurs, compared to just 33 percent of baby boomers. Maybe that has something to do with their attitudes about risk: 72 percent said they actually enjoy taking risks, while only 53 percent of older entrepreneurs were risk junkies.

This generation also happens to be the most politically active and progressive since the 1970s. A pretty sweet combo.

I Contain Multitudes (Of Banana Republics)

We're spending a week of part-work, part-vacation out on the eastern end of Long Island this week, and on the way we stopped by the Apple Store in Huntington to buy an iPhone for a friend. Turns out the Apple Store resides in the Walt Whitman Mall, which is rivaled only by the Walt Whitman rest area on the Jersey Turnpike in its rolling-over-in-his-grave quotient. The thing I love is that they've reprinted Leaves of Grass -- in the shape of leaves, mind you -- on the typically barren exterior of the mall. But every now and then one of the tenants has punched a window through the wall, interrupting the verse. I took this snapshot of Whitman's words dueling it out with a Sbarro chain.

The edited line now reads:

Sing on,
Sing on, you grey-brown
bird. Sing from the swamps,
the recesses, pour your chant
from the bushes. Limitless out of the
pizza, pasta
take out
804-0900

Escape To The Rockaways

I mentioned in the previous post that I thought living in Park Slope was quite a bit like living in London. But here's one reason that it's different, and better, at least for four months a year: Brooklyn is a great beach town! I piled the older boys in the car this morning at about 8:45, and by 9:10, this is what we were doing:

On an early Sunday morning, there's no traffic on the BQE and the Belt and so you can get to Jacob Riis Park on the Rockaways in about twenty minutes, driving most of the way with spectacular views of the harbor and the open ocean. (I realize that the Rockaways are in Queens, for the record.) The beach is largely deserted at that time, even on a perfect July weekend morning, and the water is sublime.

At the risk of sounding like even more of the Brooklyn cheerleader than I usually do, I happened to plant our beach towels about twenty feet from my friend Jonathan Mahler, whose excellent book The Bronx Is Burning is debuting as a miniseries on ESPN this week.  (Jonathan had arrived with his son thirty minutes before.) So we hung out for an hour or two and talked writing and kids and baseball.

It was one of those entirely unplanned encounters, on a beach that's got to be at least a mile or two wide -- what are the odds?

Our Neighborhood In The News

It was all-Park-Slope-all-the-time today in the Sunday Times. The City section lead with a big piece about Brooklyn bloggers that focused on the Slope's Only The Blog Knows Brooklyn, and cited outside.in's survey of America's Bloggiest Neighborhoods a few times. (Too bad they never quite managed to explain what outside.in was exactly.) Then it was onto the Real Estate section, which opened with an ominously titled piece, "The Park Slope Parent Trap." The article ended up being largely a love song to the hood, with a few obligatory skeptics quoted just to make it seem well-rounded. The thing that struck me about the piece was that it was one of the first times I've seen someone say in print what I've often said to friends or visitors about what it's like to live here: that it's the closest thing you can get in New York to living in London. (Big green parks, low-rise Victorian housing, gardens everywhere, etc.) The "Parent Trap" piece reminded me that I never linked to a piece on "Why does everyone hate Park Slope" that ran in TimeOut NY Kids, which included this excellent quote from a "novelist" named Steven Johnson who appears to live in Park Slope:

At least to non-locals (such as Brooks, who doesn’t realize that Williamsburg is actually where the “hipsters” are), the Slope seems to represent all that is reprehensible about gentrified New York and modern urban parenting. “Non–New Yorkers think of it disparagingly as a hipster alterna-playground, and Manhattanites think of it as a sanctimonious PC stroller derby, like one big suburban PTA meeting stuck in a food co-op,” says novelist Steven Johnson, a longtime Sloper who jokes on his blog that “all writers with young children in NYC are legally required to live” there. “To the outside world, it’s too cool for its own good, and inside New York, it’s not cool enough.”

I've had one or two people come up to me since this was published, and gripe about the "one big suburban PTA meeting stuck in a food co-op" line -- thereby confirming all the Gawker stereotypes of humorless Park Slope. So just for the record, I wasn't saying that I think of the Slope in this way. I love Park Slope, probably to a fault. I was saying that's what other people think about what goes on here. And I say that as a card-carrying member of the Park Slope Food Co-Op. (Which is itself a topic for another post...)

How To Make The iPhone More Of A Phone

So the one mild criticism I have about the iPhone thus far is that the phone functionality isn't quite as front-and-center as you'd like it to be. Remember Jobs' line about "calling someone is the killer app"? Well, I'm not quite sure they've got it exactly right yet. But I have an idea for an easy improvement that would really make a difference.

Here's the problem. If I was last using a non-Phone application, these are the taps it takes it takes me to call my wife:

1. push the home button to wake the iPhone up
2. "slide to unlock" on the screen
3. push the home button again to get back to the main application screen
4. tap the phone icon
5. tap "favorites"
6. tap my wife's name

On my old Nokia, I could generally get to my wife's number (assuming it was recently dialed) in 3-4 steps, even if I'd left the phone running the Gmail app. My gut is that 6 steps is asking a bit too much for calls you make ten or twenty times a day to your core group.

So here's my solution: double clicking the home button automatically takes you to the phone favorites screen.

If the phone is off, you'll still have to do the "slide to unlock" move, but even then you'll be always be three taps away from your top ten favorites. And if you're working in another application, two taps will do it (counting the double-click as one gesture.)

I'm wondering if there's a reason Apple didn't allow double-clicking of the home button -- the double tap is a pretty key element of the multitouch UI.

Thoughts?

Here's one I wouldn't have predicted in advance: the iPhone makes me want to take a train somewhere. People who have above ground mass transit commutes are going to be psyched. Surfing, checking mail, listening to music, picking up a few calls -- all without lugging out a big laptop, or switching back and forth between the Treo and the iPod.

I'd like to think that the iPhone will lead to widespread adoption of mass transit. But I suspect it'll just lead to a widespread adoption of driving while trying to read Digg on your iPhone.