New York is a city of professionals and predawn discipline, an empire meant to be conquered not by wanderers but by the lusty achievement of the hyperemployed. Languorous weekday afternoons are the province of those deemed to be lacking in power.
Still, a fair portion of the city's employable population can be found, midweek, far from any office, whiling away the hours in restaurants and cafes. Unlike the corps of freelance writers with their laptops, these loiterers do not appear to be engaged in any income-producing work. Call them flaneurs, if you want to romanticize them with a French name. Some are princes of leisure, who clearly have never learned that a bank account may approach zero. Others are conscientious objectors to the rat race, who have decided that their personal freedom is worth more than the compromises that might gain you a flat-screen TV.
All of them -- super rich, rich or merely upper middle class -- have somehow inoculated themselves against the fiscal anxiety that drives most unemployed people to try to get a job. And they have enough disposable income to afford the minimum entry (a cup of coffee) into one of the precious places that allows low-revenue loafing.
Scattered throughout this alternative ecosystem of cafes, these people off the city grid appear to be upstanding folks with open wallets and nice footwear. But who are they? Why are they not working? And how on earth can they afford those shoes?
Cipriani
The outside tables at Downtown Cipriani, on West Broadway in SoHo, were packed at 3:30pm on a Wednesday. Robert Dimin, an artist; Justin Melnick, a young entrepreneur; and Nicole Trunfio, a model, sat inside, around a bottle of Acqua Panna (US$9) and lemonades (US$5.50 each).
Dimin wore a black baseball cap with an orange Princeton "P" pulled low over his forehead. "It's the only time to come here," he said. "Weekdays, when everyone else is working."
Trunfio got up to leave, and Melnick walked her out. They stood by his black Vespa, which has custom black matte rims, racing tires and a pipe that makes it sound like a Harley.
"Tomorrow is my birthday," Dimin said. "I turn 25. That's old." He swore he had nothing fabulous planned, just a private party at Lotus.
"I view myself as a downtowner," said Dimin, who grew up on the Upper East Side but now lives in Princeton, New Jersey He said he had studied photography at Parsons but did not graduate. His fiancee, Elizabeth Kessler, is working toward a PhD in archeology at Princeton University, and he is not, at present, employed.
"I only want to make my own projects," he said. "I get yelled at every day by my family: `Get a job. Go work for The AP Use your skills.' I can't. I have to do it my way."
He was wearing a black Burberry pique shirt and striking orange Nikes. How could an idealist afford such stuff? "My US$150 Nikes that should have cost US$35?" Dimin said. "A lot of gifts. And my art sells for a lot of money."
Dimin's work, shown at CVZ Contemporary, includes photographs of nubile young women and an American flag fashioned of gray-and-blue fatigued cloth -- much like the material of Dimin's baggy shorts -- and stripes of the same thin Prada red that graces his beat-up wallet.
"I don't like money," Dimin insisted. "I'm not rich like a lot of people I know, like the Born Rich movie. That's an entirely different ballgame. I'm the poorest kid of the rich kids."
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