Wired, Jobless and Free (for Now)
December 23, 2001
By JENNIFER TUNG
HERE wasn't an empty seat at 71 Irving Coffee & Tea Bar, a cozy below-street-level coffee shop near Gramercy Park. A stream of customers lined up for lattes and bagels. Men with rumpled hair flipped through magazines, and young women in yoga pants and sneakers caught up over coffee, some sitting at tables by the fireplace, others on the benches outside. Half a dozen laptop screens glowed in the dimly lighted room, and cellphones trilled over a Sunday morning soundtrack of twinkly jazz piano.
But it wasn't Sunday morning. It was 2:30 on a Tuesday afternoon. And many in this leisurely crowd, refilling their mugs and picking at fruit buns in their pleated khakis and wire-rimmed glasses, looked a little too old to pass as students. So why the midweek tea party? Didn't these people have jobs?
In a word, no.
Kenneth Wall, a 33-year-old programmer typing code into a black Dell laptop, explained: "I was laid off from a multimedia software company five months ago. There's probably only one day a week that I don't come here." Mr. Wall, who has been living on unemployment benefits and savings, said he felt an almost primal urge to get out of his apartment every day. "Usually I sit here and work on my computer for a few hours, go out for some air and then come back."
Four tables away, Jocelyn Bell, 26, perched in front of a tangerine-and- white Macintosh Powerbook that matched her orange-and-blond- streaked ponytail. A former account executive at a communications company, Ms. Bell was laid off in April and did temporary work until recently, when she moved in with her mother and decided to apply to graduate school for social work.
"You can drink a cup of coffee for hours, and nobody bothers you," she said of 71 Irving. Glancing around at the packed room, she added, "The crowd here has exploded in the past few months."
Crowds are exploding at similar spots all over the city. With the economy in a recession, and 97,600 jobs lost in New York City in October and November alone, a peculiar kind of cafe society has emerged, at least in one thin substratum of the suddenly unemployed — college-educated young people without dependents, and whose only previous association with hard times was a grandmother who reused tinfoil because that's what she did during World War II.
These Gen X'ers don't have families or mortgages. Severance and unemployment benefits have left them with a passable, if not buoyant, financial cushion. Being jobless has made them anxious about the future, but has also given them a strange and exhilarating sense of freedom — at least for a moment.
Knowing that job prospects only become scarcer during the holidays, many of the recently unemployed aren't even bothering to look for work. Instead, they're congregating in coffee shops, libraries and galleries. What these haunts have in common are comfort, affordability and the kind of laissez-faire atmosphere that encourages people to linger. Seven-grain muffins and high-speed Internet access are extras.
This is the latest generation of New Yorkers to gather in inexpensive places during tough times, said Kenneth Jackson, president of the New-York Historical Society and a history professor at Columbia University. In the Great Depression, he said, "the first place people spent time was the park system, which became noticeably better during that decade, with new pools and better maintenance." Another popular spot was Coney Island, where there was no admission charge. "You could walk among the crowds and at least vicariously share in the excitement," Mr. Jackson said, adding that in winter during the 1930's unemployed men gathered at volunteer firehouses, bars and the headquarters of the local ward bosses.
The bars and firehouses of yesteryear are the coffee shops and Barnes & Nobles of today. Michael Tobias, a manager at the Big Cup Coffee and Tea House in Chelsea, has noticed a considerable increase in weekday lingerers. "Usually, we get a rush around 10 a.m., and then it clears out," he said. "Yesterday, we had a packed house at 10 and it lasted all day. And it was a Monday."
On a recent Friday morning at Ozzie's Coffee & Tea on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn, a stream of patrons fueled up on caffeine and plugged in computers. "I'm here two to four times a week, and I see all the same faces," said Jason Weinstein, 28, who became a dot-com casualty in October and has since finished a novel. "I also spend time at the Rose Reading Room at the Public Library on 42nd Street," he said.
The Rose Main Reading Room, with its 51-foot ceilings and 42 white oak tables, has long been an attractive option for people with time on their hands. The winter of 1929-30 was the most active period in the room's history, the library said, with New Yorkers fighting for standing- room-only space. The single busiest day was Dec. 30, 1929, said Rodney Phillips, director of the library's Humanities and Social Sciences Library, home of the reading room.
This recession is no exception. "I have noticed an awful lot of young people hunting for jobs or just coming in to read lately," Mr. Phillips said. "As long as they don't have to go to work, they might as well read in a pleasant room."
For every unemployed New Yorker gravitating to a favorite weekday spot, there's another rediscovering an outpost free of the weekend crowds. Melissa de la Cruz, author of the novel "Cat's Meow" (Simon & Schuster) and a former computer consultant at Morgan Stanley who was laid off in June, has been on the museum circuit for months. "I go to a different one practically every week," Ms. de la Cruz, 30, said. "I also go to a lot of 2 p.m. movies."
Rob Molchon, a 31-year-old Web developer whose company, Private Labs, shut down in October, works out at the New York Sports Club in SoHo three or four afternoons a week. "I can easily sit in front of my computer and while the day away," he said. "This gives me a good reason to get out."
And Rebecca Braverman, 25, a former shopping editor at Citysearch.com, has discovered the advantages of being out and about while others are at work. "Any place that can be horribly unpleasant after work or on the weekend becomes 40 times more pleasant when you go in the middle of the day during the week," said Ms. Braverman, who was laid off in July.
"Recently I met a friend at ABC Carpet & Home, and no one was there," she said. "We were in the area with all the Herman Miller repros, and we sprawled across an Eames sofa and chatted. She wrote down the name of my hairdresser. People walked by asking if we needed anything."
Of course, lounging around in quiet stores is all well and good for now (provided the stores can stay in business). But when the bubble of "unemployment as extended vacation" bursts, today's Tuesday-afternoon gadabouts may find themselves relating more to the out-of-work single mothers and service workers barely scraping by all over the city. They might want to start saving their tinfoil.
nytimes.com
[Harry: So what happens when the benefits run out? Even if the economy has turned I don't think we go back the run rate of the last few years, given the re-new focus on profitablity.] |
