Where We Are:
As a country, we find ourselves in an uncertain job market wondering if we will be in our home next year with debt pouring out of every bodily orifice. So how did we get here? The answer is fairly simple.

We swapped out production and saving for consumption and financing. Basically, we didn't make many things or save much money, but we bought a lot of stuff, and did so with easy credit. A good portion of the credit came from home values, and home values increased because the credit was easy.

It sounds like a nice existence, but it can't last forever. At some point the credit came due, and when it did, a bunch of people found themselves wondering what happened as they stood outside of a Midtown office building gripping a few personal possessions in a cardboard box, classing up the bum scene with their work attire.

This was definitely a buzz kill, but we could have lived thought it. That is one thing a recession can do, correct the market. It would not be great, but over time Americans would cut back on financed purchases and begin to rebuild savings. It's kind of like waking up on Sunday morning with a killer hang over from Saturday night. You've lost some brain cells, they are not coming back, but if you suck it up and resign Sunday to recuperation, you can be back kicking ass when it counts on Monday morning.

However, the powers that be in Washington didn't want the party to end. They dumped what is at this point about $7.6 trillion of your tax dollars into banks and other places that made bad decisions with the hopes people would continue making more bad decisions, and this would somehow work. (For those of us with a home we can afford at a fixed interest rate and no credit card debt, this is really irritating.) Instead of toughing it out, they did the financial equivalent of shot-gunning a bottle of Jack Daniel's on Sunday morning. Sure, it brings back the feeling of Saturday night, but this kind of behavior inevitably ends up with someone dead in a cheap Vegas place after a mostly sexless relationship with a hooker. And that seems to be where we are heading.

Where We Might Go:
So does this affect Harlem? Of course. Much of the recent changes in Harlem were due to rising real estate values. This fueled everything from the increase in rents and new developments to the cleaner streets, lower crime, and growing selection of amenities. With tightening credit markets and lower home values, we can expect these things to change. With the bailout shenanigans in Washington, we are probably in for something really, really bad.

Adding debt worth about half of our nation's GDP to the public tax burden will be ugly. The middle class can be expected to shoulder a lot of this, because that always happens. With more of our tax dollars going to debt finance, we will see reduced spending on infrastructure and cut backs in services. With more of our income going to taxes, we will see fewer people able to live a middle class life. We may see building construction stop unfinished, and plenty of neighborhood amenities shut down.

Will Harlem be a bit worse off than other places? Maybe, but it will be the difference between someone punching you in the stomach, knocking you down, and urinating on your face versus someone punching you in the stomach, knocking you down, and urinating on your face after eating asparagus.

You don't have to go that far back in time to see that other nabes were not always so glamorous. The Lower East Side really still is one big drug corner. SoHo is what it is because not long ago starving artists moved into bleak, unused buildings. The Upper West Side was still West Side Story when most of us were born. We can expect the only nice neighborhood left to be floors two thru 18 of 740 Park Avenue. For those who can't live there, the Upper West Side probably wins the location, location, location pick, as 'kick, snap, spin, kick, stab' is more charming than just 'stab.'

So what about the rest of the country? Here is one possible scenario.

Washington goes on with its IOU printing party to try and keep borrowing its way out of debt. At some point the rest of the world catches on and realizes that buying IOU's from people selling IOU's to cover other IOU's they can't pay back is not a good investment. Our country then turns to printing money to make good on promised funds, devaluing the dollar like mad. Seeing it sink, entities around the globe using the dollar as a reserve currency start dumping it, furthering the devaluation, and inflation takes off to destabilizing extremes.

All hell breaks loose. Cash will be king. The reason for this is we can still withdraw large amounts from banks in clumps of one dollar bills to burn in garbage cans during the cold winter months. People in the street will be heard saying "If only I moved all of my savings to Argentine pesos, I would have so much money." Enterprising Mexican men move their wives and children to the United States and sneak across the border to Mexico so that they can work, send money back here, and give their families a better life.

It's at this point we realize why Hillary Clinton wanted to be Secretary of State. The position has not proved well as a launching pad to the presidency, but but that's because others tried to get elected president. Hillary, having used her diplomatic skills to warm world leaders to recognizing her new rebel government, throws a coup in the mist of the mayhem, and rules with an iron fist as President for Life in a pant suit-based military uniform.

Serious.

Possible Strategies:
Can anything save us from this fate? Shy of some truly extreme event like the death of everyone in third world industrial nations, no. So what should we do? Depending on your personal style, here are some options.

The Optimist: Move to Las Vegas
Befriend a hooker and drink yourself to death.

The Survivalist: Move to Michigan
So why would moving to a state that already has an 8.6 percent unemployment rate be a good idea? I look at it this way; if only one of the big three auto makers fails, that dumps about another 300,000 unemployed, burly people with mechanical know-how and access to the scrap yard that is Detroit onto the streets. It won't be long before these skills are used, and Michigan's people are your Mad Max vehicle-driving overlords. You might as well start making nice now.

The Risk Taker: Leverage yourself to the Nth degree and buy every real asset you possibly can
So if over leveraging ourselves got us into this mess in the first place, why would I encourage doing more? The reason is that the government also got itself way over its head in debt, but unlike us, they have access to the money supply. Some genius will figure that they can get themselves out of this mess by printing more money and stoking massive inflation. In a climate like this, if you have a fixed rate mortgage, the amount you owe plummets. When this passes, you are in a much better position.

Any other ideas?

Also, if you do get the chance to find out what distirict you vote in beforehand, it can help the poll workers point you in the right direction.

The three-day-old 79 Orchard Street, nowhere near Orchard Street, but instead on Frederick Douglass Boulevard between 112th and 113th, is a recreation of an African American speak easy from a different age. The seats are limited to provide a cozy feel, the downstairs can host intimate gatherings of eight for a multi-course dinner, and the photo rights are held by New York Magazine until their story on the venue runs.

Opened by the owners of Society Coffee, the locale offers unique liquors served by a learned staff who not only know their specialty mixed drinks, but also can converse on esoteric Public Enemy lyrics and releases by MC Solaar.

Around 9pm on Sunday evening, sirens started to kick up. They were quickly followed by ten or so minutes of helicopter engine noise randomly accented by a search beam. We began scouting online for any word, and came up nearly dry. Aside from a few blurbs on Gothamist's Newsmap, the only reporting we could find was from the Hip Hop Republican:

As I am typing, all of Harlem is in fear the time is around 9pm and there are shots all over the Harlem. On 127th near and St. Nicholas, a young light skinned black male in his 30's or early 40's was shot and possibly an officer. I am not sure how accurate the information is regarding the cop death is but I do know that there is no mention if this on NY media. Usually the media is quick on reporting this stuff but there is a dead silence where is NY1? caught the tell end of this criminal act and witnessed the guy laying on the street with blood flowing from his chest.

...This is Richard folks reporting for HipHopRepublican.com from the a war zone in Harlem not Fallujah.

Monday and today have seen nothing from dailies that I can find, but Gothamist did dig into the Newsmap items for a bit of clarification. Gothamist reports that no arrests have been made.

For those who would like to help, your local police precinct and Harlem Mothers SAVE are great places to start.

There on the rooftop flooded by the warm light of a serene blue sky, with impressive views spilling out across Harlem to far reaching parts of the city, I could not help but wonder, Can this moment be captured for others to enjoy? Can this sublime experience, transcending language to become what Lacan calls 'The Real,' be transcended back into the symbolic?

Yes. The man who did it was Harlem Hybrid.

A Titian of the digital camera, Harlem Hybrid's Dwyer rooftop party oeuvre shows his mastery of both landscape and portrait genres. Be it the city as a subject or the city within the subject, Harlem Hybrid proves himself to be "the sun amidst small stars" or "the man with the SLR amongst those with point and shoot compacts." At times he is a Stieglitz exploring the play between spaces carved out by the city's rising buildings, and at other times he is an O'Keeffe rendering explicit the provocative power of the flower in full bloom.

But his greatest production of the evening? This piece. Simply amazing.

Here we see captured the full essence of the city man. The technical fibers of his sweat wicking shirt pairing sport and a gentlemanly embrace of life, his denim trousers a duality of working class roots and urban style, and of course, the stripped collared shirt slung long across the back at day's end.

Grandiloquent prose aside, and for those of you who have not thrown up all over your computer, John Cross put together a great project, both in terms of the building and the party's guests. I've been to a few development parties, and they can be difficult to pull off without feeling like all the rest. However, this party had two great things going for it: the people and the building. Amazing, but I actually wanted to talk to everyone there. And the Dwyer does a first class job of accessing the the lay of its surroundings for killer views and light.

Our hats go off our furry little heads to you, Harlem Hybrid, for landing a pad in such a cool building.

A couple of days ago I took these two photos to tie together Harlem Hybrid's look at 110th Street with NYC The Blog's look at Frederick Douglass Boulevard. Both streets recently saw tire repair shops close up. Frederick Douglass had the 8th Ave Rim and Tire, and 110th had General Tire. General Tire was a personal favorite, as they let cyclists use their air hose for free.

At the time, I was thinking of matching up the photos with some by-now-trite Smart Car joke, maybe even enhanced with a rim job double entendre. But after the absolute punishment Wall Street has taken these past few days, I'm wondering if loosing them wasn't a mistake for a couple of reasons. I mean, potholes still plague the streets, and where are you going to sell tires to when you need a little extra cash?

For those of us looking for comfort in the familiar, I have a new Smart Car photo after the jump. It has a Semper Fi Marines license plate frame, just for the calming sense of incongruity.

So on my way to work this past Friday at about 8:30AM what do I see taped onto the front door of the place but a LATE RENT NOTICE. It was in the amount of $13,300 and change. The wave of schadenfreude that swelled up inside me would have been less intense had my wife and I not had so many mediocre experiences at that place. Anyhoo, just couldn't resist sharing.

I wonder if that includes an 18 percent gratuity?

Fire in the disco? Of course, and we don't need no water.
Fire in the Taco Bell? 89 cent Cheesy Double Beef Burrito. Done.
But Danger! Danger! High Voltage! in Marcus Garvey Park? This is not my desire.

Harlem Fur reader Mickey writes in about the electrical burns one of his sister's dogs suffered from walking in Marcus Garvey Park.

Recently we noticed one of them had sores on her paws so we took her to the vet and the vet said they were electrical burns likely sustained from manhole covers or exposed wires.

We walk our dogs in Marcus Garvey Park so we next spoke with the parks workers who told us it happens "all the time". We were horrified! The workers said that the reason we don't hear about it is because it is only reported if the dogs get killed and thankfully no dogs have died at MGP, yet!

What sucks is at least one dog has died due to errant voltage, and it has been over a year since this happened. So you think this would have been resolved.

in June of 2007, New York Post reporter Denise Buffa's 100-pound Italian mastiff Mushy died from a Marcus Garvey Park electrical shock. 100 pounds is no small animal. As was pointed out at the time, there are a lot of kids and dogs running around the park who weigh much less than 100 pounds.

Mickey is looking to connect with other pet owners who have had similar problems. The idea is to approach the city and ConEd in full force. It's not as much as a shameless plug as it could be, but if you want to connect up, the Harlem Fur network (also liked via the box in the upper right) is a place to start.

68 Bradhurst, as the subtitle says, tackles the good, the bad and the nasty in The Langston. As an example, a post from earlier this month covers some of the bad getting nasty with a board member at the near-by Duane Reade. A rather unrestrained public exchange turns noticeably cooler back in the building lobby.

So is the offer to buy out her apartment real? Will the person behind the anonymous offer be revealed? Is this a viable sales strategy in a soft real estate market?

Who knows.

This summer's first genius idea was sending her off for a relaxing month in the country. We tried finding her a farm to visit upstate, envisioning her romping through alfalfa, intently watching bugs, and drinking fresh milk from a saucer. The reality was a total and complete failure. Given what we saw, Jane Austin would have vomited all over Charlotte Bronte. I may write about if, my insides stop turning.

Our second genius idea may involve YOU! That is, if you are someone either home during the day or have a small pet that could be her playmate. We're thinking a kind of co-parenting or something. Don't worry, this is nothing like Flexpet.

If you are interested, drop a note in the comments, or send an email to the address in the upper right hand corner. Successful or not, hilarity is bound to ensue.

As a Public Service Announcement, Harlem Fur wants you to know that people speaking a different language are talking about you.

Tourists seem to forget that our little town has a cosmopolitan thing or two about it. People speaking something other than English feel free to openly critique and discuss those right next them. But strange as it may seem, some of us take our understanding of other languages beyond "Donde esta el bano?" (Where is the bathroom?) and "Ich bein ein Berliner" (I am a jelly donut). This evening's subway ride home was one such example.

(A little bit of background: Cheryl speaks 'language.' Having a gift for picking up languages, she studied a host of them, taught a couple, and understands many more than a normal person should. Cheryl's caught people talking about those right next to them, sometimes us, in Spanish, French, Italian, German and more. So, on with the story...)

Packed in this evening with roughly 46.1 million people on the uptown 2, I leaned over and gave Cheryl a quick kiss as a means of saying 'Don't worry, we'll get through this together.' When I did this, Cheryl could swear she heard the mother from a family of four standing right next to us say in some language 'Look, he kissed the black one.' Wondering if she heard it right, she asked me to give her another kiss. I did, and the woman said, roughly translated, 'Oh my God, he kissed the black woman on the lips!'

This wasn't 'Oh my God, we are in this great big diverse melting pot of New York and look, everyone gets along!' It was more like 'Gross!' Always able to entertain ourselves, Cheryl and I started exchanging small kisses and saying, in English, 'Oh my God!'

As the ride continued, the four of them (mother, father and two teenage children) kept talking about us in their language, and we kept doing things in response. Finally, they caught on that we just might understand them.

The mother sent the male child over to stand by us and listen to what we were saying. 'Over by us' meant he moved all of 5 inches. Remember, we were all crammed so close together on the train that I'm shocked none of us are pregnant. So when Lorenzo (because at this point we knew his name) came over and leaned in to hear what we were saying, Cheryl and I looked directly at him and continued lightly making fun of the four. He then made the 5 inch trek back to the group, and told them 'She understands our language.' They then continued to talk about us, but in lower voices.

Anyway, the family stayed on the train until 116th St, and then got off with us. Thinking this was too much fun to pass up, we guessed they were staying at the new hostel on 118th (correct!) and planned to walk behind them all the way. Looking to ditch us, the parents ducked into Fine Fare as the kids continued on to the hostel. Cheryl and I easily lost interest, and headed across the street. We would have continued home, but looking back, we saw the parents come out of Fine Fare, see us, and go back in.

This was too much. We hung out on the other side of the street, waiting them out. When the parents finally emerged from the safety of the grocery store, Cheryl and I walked over with big smiles and asked to take a photo with them. Totally confused, they agreed, and we posted the photo here for your enjoyment.

It's never polite to talk about a woman's age, but if yesterday's adoptable cats were too young for your taste, know that Mr. Pete, an orange female, has recently passed her giggling years. And she's newly single.

Pete is the long-time cherished pet of a good friend who went and did this crazy thing. He got married, moved to the Upper West Side, and no doubt will soon have his wife put Cheryl and I on the invitation list to their kid's oboe recital. (Given how quickly he and his wife accomplish things, I expect them to magically give birth to a 6 year old enrolled in a charter school any day now.)

Everything was perfect, save for his wife's insane cat allergy. An intensive cleaning routine backed up with multiple air filters didn't cut the mustard. So, Pete's now two months into a stay at Paws and Claws in Williamsburg, waiting for a new home.

And in case Pete deciding to recycle herself isn't enough to win you over, click through for more photos of her being herself.

So I'm going through photos I snapped this weekend of soon-to-open or recently opened venues, looking to pick a few to post on, and I notice that the number of new unique places, in comparison to new chain stores, really isn't as bad as what one might think. (Or even what I might think.)

Granted, I am not including shots of the new Starbucks in SoHa 118 on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, the new Starbucks on 125th St and Adam Clayton Powell, the new Dunkin Donuts on Frederick Douglass and 113th-ish, or the new Dunkin Donuts on Frederick Douglass and 124th-ish. However, as best as I can remember, only the Dunkin Donuts on Frederick Douglass and 124th-ish replaced a unique neighborhood joint (La Marmite, which relocated). The others mostly filled vacant space. (I think the Dunkin Donuts on 113th-ish replaced a Curves, which is kinda funny, as if people just gave up and went for the donuts anyway.)

Now we will soon have Cafe Latte filling vacant retail space on Lenox and 122nd-ish near Settipani and Louise's Family Restaurant, as well as SVNTN Below and Subway coming into virgin retail space near Tribal Spears on Frederick Douglass and 116th. Cafe Addis on 125th and Amsterdam is open, and the Ethiopian coffee is good. (Neighbors let us know that the food is not spiced to tradition, as they had to ask for salt to give it some flavor.)

A reader writes in looking for a home for two kittens born from a rescue cat:

I am emailing you to ask if you would be willing to post an ad on your blog for kitten adoption on my behalf? In April, my boyfriend and I picked up a beautiful stray tiger/tabby mix in harlem and brought her into her home. We were unaware that she was pregnant at the time. A month later, while we were in Europe, the cat gave birth to three adorable kittens. We have given the mother away because she became disturbingly aggressive after the kittens were born. We still have two kittens left, but are unable to provide them with a stable home - we have also been unable to find suitable adopters. (Craigslist tends to yield a few dodgy responses.) I completely adore them, but am unfortunately allergic to them. I am also a graduate student and will be leaving for research next year.

Finding a good home for a cat is a difficult undertaking, so any and all help will be appreciated.

Insanity now comes bunked four to a room in Harlem's Lotta Hostel.

Walking past the former 118th St Lotta Condos building on Saturday night, I noticed that the time honored Harlem activity of socializing on the stoop was being carried out in several languages by a mix of late teen to twenty somethings. At first I thought that the Harlem Experience tours had really gone too far (Gospel service, Sylvia's, African Market, Stoop?), but then noticed the fully functional check in desk and a faint wiff of college.

Maybe it was fate, or maybe it was the full moon, but I am guessing that two of the French-speaking guests came from Quebec, based on the license plates of the Smart Car parked down the street. (Right! Because how could this story not include a Smart Car?) It was enough to make me run home and grab a real camera, as my cell phone could not capture the car in the dark.