very simple

Back in the 1930s and 40s, when cars were an up-and-coming thing and still used primarily for leisure, someone (Robert Moses, naturally) had the ‘inspired’ idea to build a series of highways along the waterfront in NYC. Of course, immediately afterwards, driving became a means to an end, rather than and end unto itself, and these highways served mostly to cut off the largely pedestrian residents of new york city from their waterfront, and generally turning what should have been a lovely area into a giant eyesore. In the past 10-15 years, the city has sought to reclaim the waterfront for pedestrians, extending the west side greenway the entire length of the west side of manhattan. some spots are more developed than others (the 30s near the west side rail yards is still, well, rail yard detritus), but otherwise it’s now a lovely park, bikeway and pedestrian route.

Yesterday, I had the brilliant idea to take a walk down to see the ships for fleet week, which then turned into a walk all the way down to 18th street. I’m really glad I’ve got today off to recover from the sunburn. No individual descriptions, but the walk starts out at 72nd and Amsterdam, heads down the greenway toward the Intrepid and the other ships in town for Fleet week, and ends at Chelsea Piers, where I stumbled across the intro to an Indian wedding.

I took a lengthy walk along the hudson river greenway with my camera today, and more pictures are forthcoming, but I wanted to highlight this little series of a mother goose (or father goose, who really knows?) either trying to scare away the pedestrians or get her gosling’s attention, or both. The gosling, however, couldn’t care less.

Apologies, but I need to have a little digression from the photography, and while I’ve posted a few links on twitter and Facebook, I have too many thoughts to get out.

Approximately three years ago, I got laid off from my job as a lawyer at a big new york firm. At the time, I was devastated, because I LOVED my job. Sure, it had its stresses and its late hours and its…personalities, but by and large, I liked what I did and I was good at it. The story at the time was that, since I wasn’t going to make partner, it was time for me to leave. In a recession. As I understood it at the time, they were trying to avoid getting tarred in the legal press for mass layoffs, so they started with the most senior associates and tried to tie it to ‘other’ explanations. The decision was made by someone (or someones) in upper management without consultation with the team I actually worked with, as the partners I was actively working on deals with had to find out from me that I had been canned. That made things a bit…awkward, particularly given that one partner had a ‘state of the relationship’ meeting with the GC at one client only a day earlier, where the GC apparently spent time talking about how glad she was that I was back on the team after returning from overseas.

I spent two years unemployed, looking for a job. Happily, about a year ago I started working again at an ‘alternative’ legal services firm that seconds its employees full time to companies, so I spend my days doing interesting work up in Stamford at a big multi-national company.

In the past few weeks, the firm that laid me off, Dewey & LeBoeuf, has been in the news quite a bit. Because they’re imploding in a spectacular fashion. On the front page of the New York Times. From what has been reported, as well as what I’ve heard from a few former colleagues that I remain in touch with (who have all managed to find new firms, thankfully), it’s largely due to gross mismanagement on the part of the post-merger firm.

Some background. I worked for Dewey Ballantine, which merged with LeBoeuf Lamb in 2007. As the story went at the time, Dewey had a bunch of debt but a stellar name, and LeBoeuf had solid financials. Even though the Dewey name came first in the post-merger firm, that was due to a quirk of Thomas E. Dewey’s estate requirements, and the merger was really a takeover by LeBoeuf – as evidenced by the fact that the post-merger leadership was headed by the LeBoeuf team.

So – to the current day. In order to attract some top talent from other firms, the leadership handed out a few payment guarantees. A few of these things are typical at any firm, but they should be limited because they otherwise undercut the entire nature of a partnership structure. But the vaunted, fiscally conservative post-merger management apparently decided to start handing out these guarantees left and right, including to incumbent partners. When they did their unusual bond offering in 2010, they didn’t disclose this. They apparently DID disclose that they ‘eliminated’ 300 lawyers post-merger, so their attempts at obfuscation discussed above were clearly just that. The Dewey debt pre-merger pales in comparison to what was apparently run up in the post-merger environment. As the story has been reported, none of the partnership were informed of the guarantees until last October, at which point there was mutiny. The Manhattan DA is apparently investigating the leadership to see if they did anything criminal.

What’s come out in the press is that they gave out 100 of these guarantees, then ran out of money to pay them as the economy took time to recover and more and more clients got stingier with external legal spend. So guarantee-less partners stopped getting paid altogether. Those partners, obviously, were going to look for any reasonable exit plan, creating a vicious cycle where the firm had less and less income (because a law firm has no ‘assets’ other than its legal talent). Earlier this year, FedEx apparently cut them off and the cafeteria stopped accepting the in-house payment system. And as partners start leaving, the chances that their clients (who move with them) will continue to pay outstanding bills to the old firm drops dramatically (sure, they have an obligation to pay, but they’ll focus on the new firm that they want new work from).

I’m torn between extreme sadness for a 100-year reputation that I helped contribute to for a few years, and the schadenfreude that comes from seeing the people who decided that I was an expendable resource that they could brag to investors about cutting get hoisted on their own petard. Mostly sadness. And horror at watching the slow-motion train wreck wreaking havoc on peoples’ lives (particularly the staff) because a few people were so freaking greedy.

What a shame. I now count myself lucky because at least I got some severance and COBRA coverage during my unemployment. In any event, I’m not spilling any secrets at this point, given how much of this has been written about in the press, but I just felt the need to get my thoughts down on (virtual) paper.

I’m also starting to feel a little weird, as I moved to Dewey from Thelen Reid & Priest, which went bankrupt about 3 years after I left there as well. My resume is starting to look like a graveyard.

Just putting up a few additional pics from my most recent weekend in the berkshires. The trees weren’t blooming much yet, but it was still quite lovely taking a walk around Ashley Falls.

Once in a very blue moon, someone approaches me about buying a print of one of my photos. I end up having to deal with this manually, given that I don’t upload hi-res images here for copy-protection reasons, but I recently saw that blurb was testing out fotomoto, and I thought I’d give it a try. I had two big concerns – first, whether fotomoto would be able to take into account the slimbox plugin that I use to create the lightboxed albums on some of my entries, and second, whether it accounts for the fact that I upload low-res copyright bugged images to my site (no one would want to buy those!). It handles both issues. In particular for the latter, if you were to attempt to purchase one of my photos, I would get a notice and then have to upload a ‘clean’ hi-res image directly to fotomoto for the print to be made. If I failed to do so within a limited amount of time, the sale wouldn’t go through.

I’ve tried to keep the pricing reasonable, while not undervaluing my work (such as it is). I’m still working out the kinks on how the ‘buy prints’ link actually looks, because it’s defaulting to something kinda ugly in the lightbox, but it’s functional.

In any event, this isn’t an attempt to push sales or anything, it’s just to address an issue that has come up a handful of times over the many years that I’ve been posting photos.

Since it’s gorgeous out, it was starting to get a little warm and stuffy in my apartment. So I opened the living room window (with screens of course). Sadie hasn’t moved since (other than to shift her position in between sitting up and crouching).

For years, I’ve been going up to the Berkshires, and one of my favorite towns is Great Barrington. It’s a combination of quirky-cute and quite practical (unlike, say, Stockbridge, which has quirky cute down pat but after 20 minutes of wandering around, you realize that you can only buy country kitsch, or Pittsfield, which, in its development as an industrial company town has plenty of practicality but just looks ragged). And then I realized that I had never taken my camera over to Railroad Street to take pictures. So here you go.

As I may have mentioned before, my brother is getting a (second) master’s degree, this time in international development (his first is in education), at the London School of Economics. Because he’s such a slacker, he obviously couldn’t make it home for Passover. But that didn’t stop us from trying to include him in the festivities, even if he couldn’t actually partake in the wondrous density of my annual matzo ball failure.

In the Berkshires this weekend for Passover, and thought that this shot of my dad was an example of pretty much the quintessential Berkshires life. Coffee, paper, dog, big leather chair. And flannel. Always flannel.

Plus, a bonus shot of Ollie. As cute as ever.

I was so struck by the sky tonight that I had to stop and take a picture. And then blog about it on the bus because I didn’t want to wait til I got home.

Taken at 125th and Lenox.