Yesterday my friend Julian had a business meeting in Manhattan, so we fired up the Robinson R44 at 0700 and headed down there. stopping at 0815 in Oxford, CT (OXC) to refuel with 100LL and coffee before proceeding straight to the city. We obtained VFR advisories from NY Approach, who handed us off to LaGuardia Tower. The controllers wanted us to fly across Long Island Sound (always fun in a single-engine piston aircraft, but especially unnerving in a helicopter without popout floats), over the “south stanchion of the Throgs Neck Bridge” and then “over the tower cab” (where the controllers sit at the top of the tower) of the LGA airport at 1500′. This is known as the Whitestone Bridge route, even though it doesn’t involve the Whitestone Bridge and isn’t on the NY Helicopter chart. From the top of the airport, we proceed to the 59th St. bridge and down towards the E. 34th St. heliport (6N5).
The heliport consists of a strip of asphalt seemingly underneath FDR drive. There are six spots marked by lines, seemingly far too close together for helicopters to park. A big Bell was on Spot 4. Spots 1, 2, and 3 were empty. They could have asked me to land on Spot 1, leaving ample space between me and the spinning Bell. Instead, they wanted us on Spot 3, right next to the $2 million Bell, loaded with jet fuel. Presumably they were trying to leave the first two spots free in case a big Sikorsky wanted to come in. I forced myself to concentrate on the painted lines, told myself that people probably do this all of the time in bigger helicopters and don’t touch rotors, and tried to banish thoughts of the spinning adjacent Bell from my mind.
Julian got out, reaching the street at about 9:20 a.m. (saving at least 1.5 hours compared to driving to Logan from his suburban house, going through security, taxing a taxi from LaGuardia, etc.). Some of my friends who live in Manhattan got in and we lifted off for a sightseeing tour down to Coney Island, over the Intrepid’s new location, around the Statue of Liberty, over Ellis Island, up the Hudson, over Central Park, and down by the United Nations and past the Brooklyn Bridge to the Downtown/Wall Street heliport (KJRB) where the R44 could be parked for a few hours. The Port Authority folks took a more realistic view of the average Robinson pilot’s likely skills and asked me to park about three pads away from the nearest other helicopter.
Julian had his meeting, so I decided to look at loft spaces to rent. I think it would be fun to have an apartment in Manhattan for trips down every couple of weeks and with high ceilings to use as a temporary photo studio. I had a list of places culled from Craig’s List and also some brokers. The high cost of New York real estate is amazing. A $4000/month apartment in New York City will either be an exquisitely crafted closet or a shabby normal-sized dwelling. The places where a visitor might conceivably say “this is a nice apartment” start at $5000/month.
What amazed me more, however, was the inefficiency of the market. Most markets for most products in the U.S. are fairly efficient. Cars that cost about the same are more or less equally nice and functional. If you spend more money at a hotel or restaurant, it is usually better than a cheaper place. Houses that are reasonably similar and reasonably close together sell for about the same price. The first apartment, at 11th and 2nd Avenue, was advertised as being a “loft” and “drenched in light from three exposures”, $3900. It was two average-sized rooms with a total of about four average-sized windows, all of which faced a central airshaft. At 11:00 am on a sunny day, it was too dark inside to read a book. It seemed like a ridiculously bad value, but the broker said confidently that it would rent at that price. Just on the other side of the island, in the West Village, she showed a couple of apartments that were actually cheaper, in a beautiful building, with a lot more light, with a view of the street instead of the airshaft, etc. Something seems badly wrong with the market if these dissimilar apartments were being offered at the same price.
The brokers themselves seemed very odd. In NYC now, they try to collect 15% of a year’s rent for their services. You would think that people with sales jobs like these would be exceptionally smooth in dealing with customers. Yet most of the brokers didn’t bother to introduce themselves and were not even curious to know my name.
Given the expense of a NY apartment and the hassle of running around the city looking at places that aren’t as advertised, you’d think that there would be a market for much better information about rental units. Apartments would be in a database, characterized by floor plan, square footage, total window area, a grading system for condition (possibly assessed by an independent appraiser), etc.
Maybe the readers in Manhattan can enlighten us as to why the process is so painful and inefficient.
[The flight back was beautiful, up the CT beach at 500′ (after watching the waterside mansions pass undernath, the back seat passenger said that he never imagined there were so many rich people in this world), sun behind us. We stopped at Lanmar in KGON to investigate their Cirrus service capabilities, ended up chatting for a long time, and proceeded back to Hanscom for a 7:15 pm arrival.]
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