Gays/Blacks/Jews Not The Only Ones Denied Admittance

Author:: Bess Levin
Updated:: Jan 14, 2019
Original:: Apr 9, 2008

You know who’s not worried about the economy? The co-op boards of Manhattan’s most exclusive apartment buildings. Why? Cause a long time ago they made the prudent decision to safeguard themselves from things like a recession by not allowing anyone whose wealth might be exposed to market fluctuations to move in.

“You find that people at River House are rather serious and not as exposed to the vicissitudes,” [Mr. Blinken, said about his co-op, where he was a board member before becoming President Clinton’s emissary to Hungary].
The meticulous, monogram-shirted, Virginia-born broker Edward Lee Cave said the best buildings want buyers with three times the apartment price in liquid assets. “It’s never been more important than today,” he said. “I’ll tell you why! They don’t want you going belly up, they don’t want you, your fabulous company—Bear Stearns, excuse me—all of a sudden going face down, and you have to sell apartments and you can’t pay your maintenance,” Mr. Cave said. “The current crunch doesn’t affect them at all.”

Top Co-ops Amid Dismal Economy: No Fear, Still Loathing [The Observer]

Are your pants getting a little tight? Have you become convinced mirrors have a personal vendetta against you? Are you too distracted by the rolls spilling over your pants to trade? Do you find yourself veering off course in your letters to investors to talk about your love handles? Is it only a matter of time before you lose your firm billions and/or take down the entire market because your fingers are so big they span four keys each on the keyboard? Do you want to do something about it but are repulsed by the idea of healthy eating and exercise and also know yourself well enough to realize that there is no way you're going to be able to stay strong if everyone around you is eating delicious fried food at lunch and sooner or later you, a usually pretty mild-mannered guy, will be leaping across a row of Bloomberg terminals and threatening to kill a coworker (and meaning it) unless he hands over Ho Ho now? Then round up your tubbiest colleagues and tell them they're in for a real treat. Eric Helms, who founded the four-year-old Cooler Cleanse company with the actress Salma Hayek, says office cleansers now make up 30 percent of his business, and in the last year he has hired three customer-service employees just to handle the details of them. He said there has been a “huge increase in popularity” of cleansing with co-workers in the last year, which he credits to juice diets being more mainstream. “Everyone knows someone who’s done one, and they realize they’re a lot easier to do with colleagues during the workweek,” he said. “People want to indulge” — not sip celery — “on weekends.” Recent six-juice-a-day-dieters include employees at Merrill Lynch and the Carlyle Group, she said. In May, Citigroup began offering BluePrintCleanse in some of its Manhattan cafeterias, a spokeswoman said...About two-thirds of cleanse clients over all are women, but corporate cleanses “commonly skew toward men, especially traders, investment bankers and lawyers,” said Jina Wye, director of sales and marketing for BluePrintCleanse, founded in 2007 by two former Hudson Hotel bartenders looking to swap their poisons. (Mr. Helms said 90 percent of his male customers are part of groups.) Ms. Wye said: “These Type-A men have an all-or-none perspective. If they’re going to commit, they do it whole hog.” Most popular among male en masse cleansers: the Excavation cleanse, described on the Web site as “the most intense.” And if you want to really crank things up a notch, consider gauging interest in a group colonic to top things off. Cleansing From Cubicle To Cubicle [NYT] Related: I’m afraid I might tell her to buy a gun and just shoot me before the fat and the cellulite strike again.