Entrepreneurs' efforts mix pop-up and history

There's not a lot going on in the Troy restaurant world that doesn't have some input -- be it actual or inspirational --  from the husband-wife team of Vic Christopher and Heather LaVine.

Their latest item is a little something called Tavern Ramen, a pop-up restaurant that will be in operation during this Sunday's Victorian Stroll.

The venue will be 217 Broadway, just off Monument Square, where Christopher and LaVine are resurrecting The Tavern, a longtime mainstay that has been in ruins for years. Tavern Ramen will offer ramen noodle dishes -- guaranteed to be popular with the city's many students from RPI, Russell Sage and Hudson Valley colleges --  plus pork buns and a few other items from 11 a.m. on Sunday.

Will this pop-up lead to something more permanent?

"We're taking the concept for a test-drive," Christopher says. "(It) could evolve into something else at some point."

Spiak's dining room neon sign.

Details of The Tavern Restaurant concept and menu will be revealed over the next few weeks, with a soft opening projected by year's end.

Christopher and LaVine already operate the Charles F. Lucas Confectionery & Wine Bar and The Grocery in the same neighborhood, both in once-crumbling buildings they have completely renovated.

The couple has a penchant for preserving/restoring as many original items as possible in their projects, or re-purposing others with a touch of local history. A prime example of the latter is their acquisition of the dining room neon sign that hung for years at Spiak's, a popular Watervliet restaurant that has closed due to retirement.

"Walter Spiak has been working in the restaurant since he was 12, and he's got no regrets about retiring. He wanted the dining room sign to end up in a highly visible location, so he decided to send it our way," Christoper says. 

"It will be displayed prominently at The Tavern Restaurant. The sign has been on display for decades, and is actually a replacement for the original sign which read 'Ladies Entrance'."

For those of you who keep track of such anachronistic items, the former South End Tavern in Troy -- still up for sale along with several adjacent buildings -- still has a "Ladles Entrance" sign on premises.

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Why soft drinks and food stamps don’t mix

As I stood in the checkout line at my local supermarket the other day, mentally complaining about the continually rising prices of food, I noticed a couple ahead of me piling up cigarettes and beer on the conveyor belt.

It caught my attention because they had been paying for their groceries with food stamps supported by your tax dollars and mine. That left them plenty of cash for the beer and smokes.

Ah, the cradle-to-grave welfare system. Why use your money for the basics of life when someone else’s money will get them for you? In effect, you are buying their drinks and smokes.

There are, of course, some people who can’t exist without assistance, but I see so many examples of people simply milking the system — put bluntly, stealing money from my wallet — that I have less and less sympathy all the time.

I recall some months ago when the partial collapse of an old brick residential building in Troy forced tenants of an apartment to find accommodations elsewhere. I felt bad for them at first. Then it was revealed that the building was Section 8 housing in which a big chunk of the rent is paid by -- guess who? -- you and me, through our taxes.

On the surface that’s alright because some people need such assistance. But, by law only family members are allowed to reside in each unit, and their total income must be below a certain level to qualify. It turns out one of the occupants was the boyfriend of the mother of the family, not a legal family member.

Plainly put, this lout and loutess were jobbing the system to get cut-rate rent for her and rent-free housing for him while other members of the community whose taxes are supporting them are worrying about making their own rent or mortgage payments.

These are far from isolated cases. When they keep popping up generation after generation, I root for some tighter oversight of welfare programs so the truly needy are aided and the truly cheating are exposed.

In many communities around the country, municipal governments have been petitioning the federal government to allow them to prohibit food stamp recipients from using the handouts to purchase soft drinks. A small step, but better than no step, unless you’re among the soft drink makers/distributors/sellers and their cohort (snack food manufacturers, for one) already whining about the proposal.

Why do I regard this as a positive step for society at large? Besides the obesity problem, to which sugary drinks contribute mightily, take a look at the numbers, step by step:

• There are 1,700,000 New Yorkers getting food stamps.

• That is roughly equal to the combined entire populations of Vermont, Wyoming and Washington, D.C.

• If each food stamp recipient bought just 1½ soft drinks daily, that would come to about $2,500,000 a day, or $76,500,000 a month of your money being spent.

• That last figure exceeds the annual gross state product of each of 13 states: Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming.

Perhaps you’re beginning to get an idea of the enormity of the topic.

By the way, if you think my figure of 1½ soft drinks a day to make my case is too high, consider that all available data puts the average American’s soft drink consumption at 3 quarts per week. We’re the largest soft drink consuming nation in the world. And you and I are buying the sodas for a lot of those people.

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Threat to BID the latest mismanagement move by Troy

Under Mayor Lou Rosamilia and an eternally, childishly bickering City Council, much of the progress the City of Troy has made in the past two decades to revive itself is beginning to circle the drain.

Troy has an ongoing record of epic overspending on police and firefighter overtime, and ignores its own budget by continuing to hire more part-time employees than it has money to pay. What that means is that (a) administration and council people are inept budgeters, and (b) they are even worse as managers.

When you practice this sort of financial cliff-walking and have the state looking over your collective shoulder and threatening to take over the city's finances -- again -- there's a problem. You begin grasping at straws because you are too incompetent to remedy the situation.

One of the straws is a proposal by the city to raise the fees it charges the Troy Downtown Business Improvement District (BID) for helping it ... well, improve downtown business. You know, the lifeblood of a community when its tax base keeps eroding?

The BID, a non-government organization -- that alone qualifies it for credibility -- made its mark under founding director Elizabeth Young Jojo and continues to be relevant under the direction of Erin Pihlaja and special events/marketing coordinator Danielle Roberts. If you're not familiar with the organization, you probably are familiar with the events it co-hosts with the city to bring thousands of people and even more thousands of dollars to Troy through such things as the Troy Pig Out, Chowderfest, Rockin' On the River, Riverfest, Troy Night Out, Troy Restaurant Week, public art such as the Uncle Sam statue project ... .

You get the point. The city, apparently does not. The same city that is incapable of paving its streets, getting rid of burned-out structures and boarded-up buildings, closing its brazen open air drug markets, that has council members threatening to sue each other for slander, that dithers endlessly on bringing to reality a development project on  the former site of City Hall ... yet continues to practice out-of-control spending then searches for pockets to pick to make up the deficit.

The BID is a self-supporting organization devoted to helping businesses small and large thrive in an atmosphere that makes downtown relevant again. It works on a thin $400,000 annual shoestring to achieve what government has failed to do for so many years. The cost to the city treasury? An estimated $63,000, an average of about $170 a day. Hardly a speck in a municipal budget, but with a great bang for the buck.

So, what does the city council propose doing? Including a budget revenue line of $150,000 it would siphon from BID-run events. The problem: If the BID has to pay that kind of money, it won't have as many events, it probably will have to raise vendor registration fees for the events it does have, and, thus, the city won't have as many visitors coming here to spend money.

It's such a simple equation, I'm amazed that even the short-sighted council and administration don't realize it. (Wait. When I re-read that sentence, I'm not amazed. It's par for the course with government in this city.)

BID Executive Director Pihlaja succinctly summed up the situation: “We cannot afford this.”

She said she was blindsided by the proposal. She also said she could get the services the city says cost it $63,000 for roughly half that figure. Given the standard government inefficiency, I believe her.

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Update: Slidin' Dirty, restaurant version, sets opening

Historic look at the building.

UPDATE (11/10/14): The new restaurant version of the popular Slidin' Dirty food truck is expected to open a week from Friday, on November 21, at 9 First Street in downtown Troy. It will be a casual, 63-seat, full-service restaurant with a 15-seat bar.

(Originally published 6/28/14.)

9 First Street is a historic spot poised to take part in a modern movement -- the rapid expansion of the restaurant segment that is sparking much of Troy's latest renaissance.

The renovated four-story building, built in 1864 as William Young’s bookstore and bindery, is a 6,100-square-foot structure of brownstone and cast iron. It has been vacant since 1996 when the city's Code Enforcement bureau ordered it closed due to unsafe conditions.

Last year, CEO Jeffrey Buell and his company Sequence Development purchased the structure -- located just off River Street next to the Rice Building -- for $10,000 from the Troy Local Development Corporation (TLDC), a community improvement nonprofit that provides financial assistance for construction, acquisition and rehabilitation projects in the city. Buell, who worked in the administration of Mayor Harry Tutunjian, is supported by new chief operating officer Elizabeth Young Jojo, former director of the Troy Downtown Business Improvement District.

Announcing the restaurant.

On Friday, the owners of the Slidin' Dirty food truck, Tim and Brooke Tanney, revealed they will open a restaurant on the first floor as well as maintain the truck operation they started in March 2012. An opening late this year is projected. No name has been announced for the restaurant, and its theme is not yet known.

“Everyone that looked at this building prior to our purchase deemed it too far gone or not worth the effort,” Buell said in a statement Friday during an open house. “We rejected that concept and want to challenge people to think differently. The urban cores of our cities are what grew this country. It is history that cannot be replaced. Just because a building is covered in dust, falling apart at the seams, and collapsed upon itself doesn’t mean it can’t be saved. It just requires hard work, creative thinking, and a willingness to go the extra mile.”

The third and fourth floors include a pair of 1,350-square-foot, two-story duplex apartments featuring exposed brick and beams, quartz counter tops, recessed lighting, washers and dryers, and forced hot air heating with central air cooling. Rent is $1,750 per month. The second floor is a loft-style flex space expected to be occupied by August.

Sequence Development also is in the process of a $2.4 million rehab of a block of three buildings across from 9 First Street on the corner of First and State (16 First Street). Those units will be available for rent this fall. Other Sequence projects include 1 Monument Square (construction of two new mixed-use buildings); new student housing developments for Hudson Valley Community College, and redevelopment of 160,000 square feet of space for Clarkson University in Potsdam. The company was formed in 2012.

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Cafe Congress unveils opening menu, not opening date

The soon-to-open restaurant.

Sara Fish hasn't yet announced a firm date for the opening of her new Troy restaurant, Cafe Congress, but she has revealed the opening menu.

Fish, known for her everything-from-scratch cooking, also will be leaning heavily on baked goods from Crazy Russian Girls Bakery in Vermont. So, when will the new venture, located in a renovated building at 336 Congress Street, actually open?

"Hopefully in just a few weeks," says Fish. "I'd like to say by Thanksgiving, but I've learned not to commit to firm dates."

Here's a look at what she'll be cooking, with the beverage list still to come:

• Featured Soup $4/$6
A cup or bowl of homemade seasonal soup
• Bakery Bread $3.50
Warm with real butter or herbs and olive oil
• Bagels $2.50
Toasted with butter, hummus, peanut butter or farmer’s cheese, ground nutmeg and cinnamon
• Toast with the Most $2.50
Bakery bread sliced thick, toasted with butter, jam or local raw honey
• Yogurt Parfait $5.50
House yogurt with local organic granola, drizzled with local raw honey and dusted with fresh ground nutmeg
• Goldie Lox $9
Honey oat bagel, farmer’s cheese spread, capers, local field greens, red onion, Nova lox, honey
• Mega Muffins $2.50
Made from scratch locally in a variety of flavors
• Cinnamon Roll $5.50
Hot and oozing with icing, made locally with organic ingredients
• Ultimate Peanut Butter and Jelly $5.50
Local white chocolate peanut butter, homemade jelly, thick slices of whole grain wheat bread
• Hot and Twisted $5
Perfectly salted soft pretzel, served with homemade seasonal mustard
• Pickle Your Fancy $5
A selection of artisan pickled vegetables cured locally
• Cheese Board $13
A selection of locally sourced artisan cheeses paired with seasonal fruit compote
• Hummus Plate $7
Homemade roasted garlic and lemon chic pea hummus served with warm bakery bread
• House Mac and Cheese $7
Cheddar and Swiss cheeses, elbow macaroni, caramelized onions, diced apples
• Beans and Greens $11
Braised kale in lemon-garlic chicken broth, shallots, chic peas Romano cheese, garlic toast
• Hummus Among Us $10
Garlic-lemon hummus, local greens, red onion, roasted red peppers, feta cheese, olive tapenade, whole grain wheat bread
• Apple Chevre Sandwich $7.50
Local herb blended goat cheese, local raw honey granny smith apple slices, ciabatta roll
• Greek Salad $11
Field greens, feta and blue cheeses, tomato, red onion, Greek olives, balsamic vinaigrette

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Troy Waterfront Farmers' Market moves indoors Saturday

The Capital Region's largest farmers' market will begin its indoor season this Saturday.

The Troy Waterfront Farmers’ Market, now in its 15th year, will operate from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturdays in The Atrium building at 49 Fourth Street.

The market will have five new vendors this winter. They are:

• Nine Pin Ciderworks
• Jamtastic
• Tidy Thyme
• Tierra Farm
• Vital Eats

“We are very excited to begin our winter season. The market and its vendors are committed to providing local, producer-only products to the Capital Region. Our new vendors bring a new or different element to the market family and we look forward to welcoming them.” said Monica Kurzejeski, market manager.

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To lurk and to protect

UPDATE (10/1/14): Today, I drove by the Troy PD patrol car spot I mentioned in the following post written last month. There’s a cruiser there again, in the same low (if any) crime area. This time, the officer inhabiting the vehicle isn’t just idly watching traffic go by while nefarious activities go on in some of the surrounding blocks. He wasn’t watching the street at all. I circled around the block and checked to be sure what I saw the first time was accurate. Yep. He was busy reading. Oh, and protecting and defending, too, I’m sure.


I had to pay a visit to an Adirondack Tire Center in Troy’s Lansingburgh section today. Not much of a way to begin a commentary, but it’s the reason I noticed what I noticed. A Troy Police Department cruiser sitting in the parking lot of an abandoned gas station across the street.

I had seen the same thing while driving down that same street a day earlier. Under many circumstances it would be an unremarkable sight either time. This time it caught my eye, however, because I remembered Chief John Tedesco several weeks ago announcing an expanded police presence in the wake of numerous outbreaks of arson, shootings and stabbings in that city neighborhood.

If so, this particular deployment was a waste of the cop’s time and my tax money.
That stretch of 2nd Street is anything but a hotbed of illicit activity. It’s a commercial strip, just south of Powers Park. A smarter place to be would be about four blocks north and one block east. That’s where you’re getting into the sections of open-air drug markets and plywood-studded deteriorating buildings that seem to attract arsonists and other assholes.

Unless the intent of stationing a patrol car on that quiet section of 2nd Street was to catch the occasional speeder or scare off any out-of-towners headed deeper into the ‘Burgh for a drug buy, it doesn’t make much sense. We already have too many spots in the City of Troy where patrol cars are stationed to catch errant motorists while ignoring obvious drug activity in areas the police have, in effect, surrendered to crooks.

Our city's cops have been trained for better things. They are good cops who, I am quite sure, would rather be putting their energy and training to better use. Let them.

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Looking back, sadly, at the War On Poverty

President Johnson visiting a poor rural Kentucky family.

In more than four decades as a professional journalist, I never had the experience of being a war correspondent. However, I did serve as a reporter in the War On Poverty.

It was 50 years ago this year that President Lyndon B. Johnson announced his “War On Poverty,” an extensive set of federal efforts meant to combat the curse of poverty in America’s city, suburban and rural areas.

This was a big deal for me. I had recently moved from being a sports reporter to the news side of things and wanted to see how such a sweeping, historic program would affect my Upstate New York newspaper’s circulation area.

So, along with a handful of fellow journalists, we set out to beat the bushes to find people and communities the War On Poverty would impact. We found plenty and dutifully interviewed, researched and then wrote about their plights and which “War” programs might best eliminate their woes.

So, how did that go?

In January, President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers issued a “progress report” that was a jumble of conflicting statements. (One example: that “poverty in the U.S. when measured to include tax credits and other benefits has declined from 25.8% in 1967 to 16.0% in 2012. “ No mention of the three missing years – from when LBJ issued his “War” declaration in 1964 to the 1967 benchmark the Council decided to use.)

But, to me the telling paragraph in its report was this:

“The official poverty measure (OPM) has several flaws that distort our understanding of both the level of poverty and how it has changed over time. Perhaps the most significant problem with the OPM is its measure of family resources, based on pre-tax income plus cash transfers (like cash welfare, social security, or UI payments), but not taxes, tax credits, or non-cash transfers. As such it inhabits a measurement limbo between ‘market poverty’ (based on pre-tax, pre-transfer resources) and ‘post-tax, post transfer poverty’ reflecting well-being after taking into account the impact of policies directed at the poor. Several other shortcomings are more technical.”

Translated into everyday English, nobody can agree on how to measure or define poverty.

Another view of how LBJ’s dream is doing comes from The Daily Caller, a politically conservative news and opinion website. A story it published today is headlined: “Miscounting Poverty Again: The War On Poverty After Fifty Years.” As contributor Robert Rector writes (underlining has been added for emphasis):

“Today the U.S. Census Bureau released its annual poverty report. … [It] reported that 14.5% of Americans were poor in 2013. This is essentially the same rate as in 1966, two years after the War on Poverty was announced. According to Census, the country has made no real progress against poverty for more than 40 years.

“This lack of progress is remarkable. The government has spent some $22 trillion (in constant 2012 dollars) on means-tested welfare programs since the War on Poverty began. Adjusted for inflation, this is three times more than the nation has spent on all military wars combined since the American Revolution.

“Today the federal government runs more than 80 means-tested welfare programs providing cash, food, housing, and medical care to poor and near poor Americans. Last year, more than 100 million people, or roughly one in three Americans, received aid from at least one of these programs. In Fiscal Year 2013, federal and state spending on these programs came to $943 billion or around $9,000 per recipient. (These figures do not include Social Security, Medicare, or Unemployment insurance.)

“Adjusting for inflation, annual welfare spending is 16 times greater today than when the War on Poverty began. How can government spend so much while the poverty rate remains unchanged? The answer is, it can’t. … “

If you want to read the rest of Rector’s analysis, you can find it here.

As for that young journalist back in 1964, he still had enough starry-eyed idealism that made him think his government could do great things, just as it had in galvanizing a nation to lead the battle to defeat Germany and Japan and their minions in World War II, then push this vast country into the modern era.

The former journalist of today knows better. And, that is a sad realization.

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For amusement purposes only

• This letter to the editor appeared in the Times Union on 1/10/13:

After reading many reports on the controversy over the upcoming gun show in Saratoga Springs, I'd like to point out that this should be what we call a "teachable moment" when it comes to modern communication.

Without taking sides on the matter (both camps have some strong points as well as some ridiculous logic), I call attention to how laughably easy it is to get people to affix names, "likes," comments or anything else to an online petition on virtually any topic. That is evident in the sort of silliness that goes on every day via Twitter, Facebook, etc. Simply put: There is absolutely no conceivable way they should be taken at face value.

Media specialists, social scientists, etc., should be easy to find to comment on the efficacy of such knee-jerk "petitions," often "signed" with unverifiable online pseudonyms and unknown geographic origin.

Lacking that sort of perspective, I find the stories published by the Times Union and other local media shallow journalism that is misleading, especially to people not well-versed in the intricacies of social media.

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The second Lockerbie tragedy

• This letter to the editor appeared in the Times Union on 8/26/09:

I have been to Scotland. I liked it. I especially enjoyed the hospitality of the people I met along the way, and I respected their tales of fighting for justice and equality against bad government and oppressive rulers.

Because of that, I am not foolish enough to condemn an entire population because of the actions of their government officials. If everyone in the world held our own government against us, no one ever would visit our shores. However, it will be a long time before I visit Scotland again.

The reason: One of the worst mass-murder terrorists on record has been freed despite being sentenced to life in prison for his role in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, the commercial airliner that exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, butchering 270 innocent souls, many of them Americans.

And why was Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, 57, set free? For what Scottish officials termed "humanitarian reasons."

The former Libyan intelligence operative has prostate cancer. By contrast, 259 Pan Am passengers and 11 people on the ground where the wreckage hit them still are dead.

In a typical and sickening outpouring of adulation too often seen for an Arab who has slain non-Arabs, a crowd of thousands turned out to greet al-Megrahi when he landed in Tripoli, the capital of his homeland. They danced, sang and chanted. Some wore T-shirts with his face printed on them. Some waved posters bearing his image.

After all, he murdered "infidels" and only had to serve 10 or 11 days per victim. What a hero.

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