Patrick Lynch lies on an examining table, squirming in pain. Kunal Kalra, a doctor at the Harkness Center for Dance Injuries, has just plunged a 4-inch-long needle into Lynch’s swollen left quadriceps.

Moments before, Kalra had examined the partly-healed incisions on Lynch’s knee. The marks were caused by an operation Lynch, a professional dancer for the last 20 years, underwent 10 days earlier to repair a torn anterior cruciate ligament, or ACL. Today he has come to Harkness’ weekly Dance Clinic on East 18th Street for his first post-op visit.

Lynch’s surgeon, Dr. Donald Rose, who is the center’s director, and Kalra, an intern observing Dr. Rose, want to relieve the swelling in the thigh muscle above the incisions.

“Taking out the fluid will make a difference in the pain,” Kalra said. “We’re gonna have to drain the blood out.”

“That sounds like fun,” Lynch mutters as he lies on his back on the table. Then he laughs out loud.

Lynch stands 6-feet-4 inches, and has long legs and a barrel chest. His brown hair, blue eyes and quick wit were endowed by his Irish immigrant parents. When Lynch is not auditioning for or performing in operettas as a dancer and singer, he teaches yoga at Bikram NYC. He is 45 years old and still dancing. Or was before he snapped his ACL doing the limbo at a wedding.

Kalra probes the dancer’s thigh with the long needle. Lynch arches his back and grimaces as the intern draws back the plunger. The barrel remains empty.

Dr. Rose, the city’s premier ACL surgeon and a leading champion of dancer orthopedics, steps in to demonstrate as the intern looks on.

“Small prick,” Rose advises as he expertly inserts a larger syringe with a 60-ml barrel to hold the built-up fluid.

“What?” Lynch’s eyes widen in mock horror. This time, the vial fills immediately with bright red fluid. “Ohhh, it’s better,” Lynch says, relieved. Kalra nods.

Unlike a painter or a musician, who generally can produce paintings or compose music into old age, a dancer’s ability to create art depends almost entirely on keeping his or her body healthy and fit.

Until recently, dancers’ fitness was determined by their youth. Dance careers used to end around the ages of 30 or 35, if they were lucky. Dancers’ hips, knees and backs were worn out by strenuous overuse and dancing on too-hard floors. Injuries, often misdiagnosed or improperly cared for, also cut careers short.

But today, improved specialized care for dancers, more complete education and a holistic approach to dance training is helping dancers continue into their 40s and beyond.

EDUCATION AND TRAINING

In 1941, Nora Shattuck dropped out of high school in Ottawa to move to New York City where she joined the School of American Ballet. A year later, at age 17, she was accepted into the Ballets Russes. For six years, Shattuck toured with the itinerant company eight months a year, performing eight shows a week.

At the time, ballet dancers practiced a prescribed set of movements that originated from a centuries-long tradition of French ballet later refined in Russia. Exercises at the ballet barre remained relatively unchanged from those ballerinas had done centuries before, exercises developed to be aesthetically, rather than ergonomically, pleasing.

“We had no anatomy and no kinesiology,” Shattuck said of her dance training. “You didn’t learn much about your body.”

Although she was never injured herself, Shattuck saw numerous friends and colleagues drop out in their prime because of injuries. Shattuck, who was lucky enough to work with famed choreographers George Balanchine, Alwin Nikolais, and Martha Graham, said she envies dancers today who have greater opportunity to study dance at academic institutions where anatomy is part of the curriculum.

Dancers today know more about anatomy and the physiology of exercise than ever before because more of them are pursuing college degrees. About 5 percent of American university students obtained performing arts degrees in 2008, compared to 3 percent in 1970, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. And anatomy classes are a regular part of the curriculum for most university dance departments.

The Juilliard School requires all students in the Dance Division to take a six- credit anatomy course, which examines movement strategies to enhance stability, control and develop musculo-skeletal problem-solving skills applicable to dance. Irene Dowd, who teaches the course, explained that when dancers without anatomical awareness experience discomfort or pain, it can be difficult for them to know whether to push through it, change technique, or stop dancing entirely.

“Familiarity with anatomy makes dancers more likely to listen to their bodies,” Dowd said.

Medical practitioners agree—one recent study shows that 74 percent of dance specialists think that it is important for dancers to understand human anatomy to avoid injury and to know when to report injuries to medical professionals.

Alison Deleget, a Harkness clinician, said the dancers she sees who are aware of how their bodies work tend to have fewer or less severe injuries. These dancers are better able to manage overuse syndromes, such as heel, knee and back injuries.

Still, knowledge about the body would not increase dance longevity without a complementary change in dance training. Nowadays, dancers and teachers incorporate anatomical awareness into what they do in the dance studio. They are adjusting traditional dance positions to place less stress on the joints and build strength for specific dance shoes.

Shattuck said when she toured with the Ballets Russes, she moved from one classic ballet to another, switching from ballet shoes to character shoes without proper training. The muscles she had developed in pointe shoes did not translate to the strength necessary to dance in high-heeled character shoes.

“It’s a wonder we ever got out of this without killing ourselves,” she said.

In those days, ballet teachers used to tug their students’ feet into first position, so that their heels and toes were forced into a perfect, if unnatural, 180-degree turnout. This placed a great deal of torque on the knees. In the past decade, teachers have begun to teach turnout from the hip down, so that knees and feet are aligned, alleviating stress and preventing common knee injuries.

Another development in training is combining exercises from different movement traditions. Rather than learning only the dance vocabulary particular to one technique, like Graham, Horton, or Limon, now dancers cross-train. A modern dancer may complement 15 hours a week of dance classes and rehearsals with five hours of yoga or Pilates. These alternative movement practices are popular among dancers because they focus on proper alignment and strengthening, but lack the jumps and other rigorous movements that can lead to stress fractures and broken bones.

As a yoga teacher, Patrick Lynch is hyper-aware of his body. During his doctor’s visit he describes his aches and pains in detailed anatomical terms, mentioning “meniscus,” “tibia,” and “quadriceps,” at various moments.

“My yoga has made me in tune with what was happening in the body at the point of injury, surgery, and then recovery,” he says after his visit with Dr. Rose.

“I can put my faith in it.”

Lynch’s friend Catherine Thibault, 54, danced professionally in France for 15 years before moving to the United States to dance for Alwin Nikolais in the 1980s and ‘90s. She has retired from a performance career, but still takes ballet class every day and performs in a folk dance company—her life as a dancer is hardly over.

Thibault credits cross training as the thing that has allowed her to dance into her 50s.

“I stretched like any dancer would as a young girl, but 14 years ago I started doing Pilates,” she says. “That’s where you really improve preparation for the body to dance. Now I always do yoga after ballet class to relax my hips and knees and rebalance both sides of the body.”

IMPROVED CARE

Like most dancers, Thibault is no stranger to dance-related injuries and the doctors who treat them. Dancers have one of the highest rates of nonfatal on-the-job injury, as high as 97 percent according to one study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Thibault has broken four toes and, like Lynch, torn her ACL. In 1996, she broke her big toe and was disappointed by the care she received from dance specialists. She said her doctor, whose name she requested not be mentioned, had been running a dance clinic for a half dozen years but still misdiagnosed arthritis in her feet and legs and set her toe improperly. It is now crooked.

But dance medicine has improved dramatically since the 1990s and many injuries that were once career ending have become manageable. This past October, Thibault slipped as she pirouetted in a class at the Ballet Arts studio in New York and broke her right arm. She found herself being cared for by the very same dance specialist who had treated her 14 years before. This time, the doctor knew more about scar tissue and set her bone more efficiently than he had 14 years ago.

“The years of experience made him better,” she said. “Now they can help dancers heal faster.”

Thibault now plans to get back into the studio within two months of the injury— one that, years before, might have barred her from ballet because it demands full range of motion in both arms.

Wendy Whelan’s experience with scoliosis offers another example of how advancements in medical treatment have lengthened dancers’ careers . A principal dancer for New York City Ballet, Whelan still performs with the company at 43, an age that few professional ballet dancers reach as performers. (Notable exceptions include British prima ballerina Margot Fonteyn, who danced into her 50s.) As a girl, Whelan was diagnosed with scoliosis, a curvature in the spine. At the time, she was treated with stretching machines and plastic braces. Now, acupuncture and massage help Whelan manage the disease between performances.

The quality of care has improved as more doctors have entered the field. The Harkness Center, which has provided dancers of all ages with specialized care since 1989, is a teaching hospital. Over the years it has trained hundreds of residents about the unique orthopedic issues dancers face and published more than 25 research studies on dance-related injury in journals like American Journal of Sports Medicine and Journal of Dance Medicine and Science to reach thousands more doctors.

Since the 1980s, dance medicine also has expanded to include physical therapists and athletic trainers, in addition to orthopedic surgeons. Today it is common for companies like New York City Ballet or Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater to have dance athletic trainers as on-site consultants.

Physical therapists, or PTs as they’re known, work with dancers long after the surgeon has said “you’re O.K.,” and signed off. They help dancers recover from injuries and prevent future ones.

“Physical therapists are the heroes of the dance field,” says Lynn Garafola, Professor of Dance at Barnard College. “Now physical therapists really help people get through injuries that once would have been career ending.”

Physical therapists and trainers who specialize in dance are often former dancers. Like nearly all of the certified athletic trainers (ATCs) at Harkness, Megan Richardson, was a dancer before she became a trainer. She attended George Washington University on a dance scholarship and graduated with a Bachelor of Athletic Training and later earned a master’s in kinesiology at Indiana University.

On a practical level, ATCs’ familiarity with dance allows them to communicate better with dancers.

“We speak their language,” Richardson explained. And it’s not simply knowing basic dance terminology like releve or plie, but jargony, unofficial phrases that have never been written down.

In one consult at the Harkness Center, a doctor asked a 16-year-old girl what she was doing in her Graham technique class when she hurt her knee. The girl mumbled, “Tumble on down.”

Richardson, who accompanies the doctor on all consults, responded, “You mean, go down to the floor?”

The ATC twirled as she dropped her body to the floor. The girl nodded. Knowing this, helped Richardson and the physician diagnose the specific nature of the injury. Richardson recommended that while she healed, the girl modify her Graham floor exercises by doing them in a chair.

Harkness’ Alison Deleget recalled how chronic tendonitis in her left ankle caused by hours of ballet was treated without success for nearly a decade until, during college, she saw an athletic trainer who specialized in dance. Deleget was finally able to manage her injury after the ATC took her pointe shoes apart and spotted the problem. The revelation re-routed her into a career as a dance-specialized ATC.

As communication among doctors, PTs, ATCs and dancers has improved, dancers have started trusting medical professionals more.

A study published in 1994, found that just 20 percent of dance injuries were reported to doctors. Only 43 percent of dancers who did seek medical treatment would stop dancing to recuperate and follow through with physical therapy prescriptions. With the dawn of dance specialized trainers and PTs, Barnard’s Garafola said, dancers are much more likely to follow through with treatment.

Lynch walks into the Orthopaedic and Sports Physical Therapy Center on a Thursday in late October, three weeks after his surgery and one week after his post-op visit with Dr. Rose. Harkness patients like Lynch receive physical therapy at the center, located on the fourth floor of NYU Langone Medical Center’s Hospital for Joint Diseases. Lynch limps slightly, wearing shorts that reveal his muscle loss. Compared to his right calf muscle, which bulges like a balled fist under his skin, the flesh on Lynch’s injured leg is slack where the muscle has melted away.

First stop is an exam bed, where therapist Sally Donaubauer massages around the incisions on Lynch’s left thigh to prevent the scar tissue from adhering to surrounding muscles. Then he moves to the center of the room to do exercises designed to strengthen his quad. Lynch turns toward a mirror with an attached ballet barre to practice balance. Stepping with his injured leg onto a squishy foam square, he wobbles, then stabilizes. In the mirror, Lynch checks to see Donaubauer is not watching and then pulls his healthy leg into a ballet attitude and rounds his arms above his head, a classic ballet silhouette.

“I get bored easily,” he says as explanation.

Lynch may be bored, but he follows Donaubauer’s prescribed exercises carefully. He credits the speed of his recovery to Donaubauer’s exercises before and after the surgery—and his own willingness to listen to his doctors and PT.

During his massage, Donaubauer urged him not to push his body too much, because at six weeks the repair is at its most vulnerable.

Recalling that moment, Lynch said, “Having such a fast recovery, it’s having the intelligence to really hear that. I would have pushed myself. I would totally have gone back to class,” he says as he completes his reps.

“She’s a life-saver.”

Still, Lynch can’t resist pushing just a little. His eyes dart to the mirror to make sure Donaubauer isn’t watching and then he strikes another off-limits pose.

ACCESSIBILITY

Without the surgery Lynch would most likely have had to retire from his life as a professional performer, which for him was not an option. “I don’t want to give up dance,” he says. “I want to do it as long as I can.” Although 10 percent of dancers who experience torn ACLs can return to dance without surgery, Dr. Rose felt that Lynch’s age made surgery the best option.

Lynch is uninsured. So the operation’s $24,000 price tag—nearly his entire annual income—might have made that option out of the question. That figure does not include the additional tens of thousands of dollars in physical therapy costs that are so essential to recovery.

Lynch had the good luck to be referred by a friend to the Harkness Center. His income, around $30,000, qualified him for Charity Care. The NYU Langone Medical Center’s Hospital for Joint Diseases absorbed the cost of surgery and physical therapy, which should then be reimbursed by the state.

Physical therapists may be the lifesavers and the heroes for the dance world, but without access to these specialists the longevity of a dance career would remain unchanged. As medical insurance has been—and continues to be—unobtainable for most dancers, more dance specialists offer sliding scale fees and free clinics. Harkness’ Deleget says that the majority of dancers, those not employed by big companies, are functioning in an uninsured or underinsured state.

“Dancers for Paul Taylor, Alvin Ailey, or City Ballet are all insured through their companies and are well-compensated. But they are the minority of the dance population in New York,” Deleget said.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 1,370 dancers were employed in the New York metropolitan area in 2009. The study acknowledges that the number does not include dancers between engagements or who make a living through another means entirely, like Lynch and Thibault. Still, the official number probably reflects the number of dancers employed by companies that can afford to provide health insurance. And that leaves thousands of others who are uncovered.

Now, those uncounted dancers in New York have more options in obtaining health care. The Actor’s Fund’s Al Hirschfeld free clinic, founded in 2003, offers subsidized health care services. Dancers must prove they earned at least $3,000 of income generated through dance to qualify for care.

Another invaluable resource is the Artists Health Insurance Resource Center. Created in 1998, it assists people in the arts to find affordable health care and coverage.

The Harkness Center, which offers a free orthopedic clinic and subsidized surgery remains one of the city’s most well known organizations committed to dance medicine. Unlike Al Hirschfeld, it waives an income requirement, because, as Deleget explained, most downtown modern dancers do not earn an income from dancing.

“If you say you’re a dancer, we believe you,” Harkness trainer Megan Richardson said.

Most Harkness patients earn more than $24,000, the cutoff to qualify for Medicaid in New York state, but not enough to afford private insurance. As of September, nearly one quarter of the 879 patients who visited the Center this year were uninsured. The majority of those with some kind of coverage were underinsured, or, covered only for catastrophic incidents like being hit by a bus and emergency room visits. The average deductible for dancers with this insurance is around $2,000, a hefty amount for a group whose income hovers in the low five-figure range.

“If they can’t afford us, we’re not doing any good,” Deleget said. “We want to subsidize dancers so they can get care and still make a living.”

Harkness Center considers it part of its mission to help dancers find financial assistance to pay for their care. The institution encourages New York residents to apply for Charity Care, or federally funded financial aid, through the NYU Center for Joint Diseases. The state reimburses the hospital for all incurred costs by Charity Care recipients. And for out-of-state dancers, Harkness offers the Special Assistance Fund. The Fund, supported by the LuEsther T. Mertz Advised Fund of the New York City Community Trust, covers “pretty much all costs” of surgery and physical therapy, according to Harkness administrator Leigh Heflin. And when all else fails, the Center offers a sliding fee scale for visits from $250 to $110.

An injury is difficult for any dancer to overcome, but the difficulties are acutely felt by dancers above 40. For young dancers, losing control of their bodies through injury can be dismaying, but they still have time to enter a new career. For older dancers, the thought of finding a new career can be disorienting.

“The visits can be emotional,” Richardson said. “This is their identity.” An identity that dancers intend to keep for as long as they can. Dancers ages 40 and above are clearing a new space for themselves in the world of dance. From 1991 to 2006, Nederlands Dans Theater III, a company for dancers over 40, proved that dancing was not the sole province of the young. It paved the way for other dance groups like PARADIGM. The New York-based company started by Gus Solomons, Jr. and Carmen de Lavallade is made up of dancers over 60. In non-performative settings even more older dancers can continue to practice their art. For example, the 92nd Street Y’s Dance for Life series offers Ballet for the Older Body to accommodate these dancers’ needs and limitations.

In describing Wendy Whelan’s value as a mature dancer, Barnard’s Garafola seemed to capture the importance of the entire population:

“There is a deep pleasure in her dancing. She’s happy, even joyous I would say, doing what she’s doing. And while her physicality is diminished, there is no question, there is not the same physical exuberance that one saw in her dancing 10 years ago, there is another quality that is deeply satisfying and rich.”

For Patrick Lynch, who, going into his sixth week post-op, is told by Dr. Rose he has made an above-average recovery, the experience of the injury has been transformative. It gave him a new level of caution as he has realized what dance means to him: “Dance is my life. I can’t live without it.”

Even so, he is realistic about what he can and cannot expect from his aging body. “At my age, I’m 45, it’s not like I want to go have some big solo career,” he says over coffee following his final check-up. What is comes down to, what these advancements in dance have given him, is the freedom to self-determine when and how he will see out his career. “I want to be able to do what I want to do with it. And I want to dance.”

The headquarters of one of the longest-running independent record labels in America– and certainly the longest in its genre – is hidden in a squat orange warehouse on Fourth Avenue at First Street in Gowanus. The graffiti-scrawled space houses Projekt Records, run by Sam Rosenthal since he founded the brand in 1983.

With asymmetrical black hair, a small, wiry frame, and strong, jutting features, Sam could play the part of a late-90’s emo kid, perhaps without the naïveté. Then again, who knows? His label has consistently released music into a niche market of dark and introspective listeners. Often, both the music and the audience are described as Goth, a term somewhat negatively associated with mall-core, if not for theatrics or want of a more practical worldview. In critical circles, arguing the more juvenile of Goth, emo or death metal is like naming shades of gray – obsessions with new-Romantic motifs the three share seem to have run their course. But Sam, and by extension Projekt, happens to be more pragmatic about his business than Goth implies. And besides – it’s only a label.

“Goth was an appropriate description of who was listening to it. But the music itself… it’s always been more the mood,” Rosenthal said on a cold Tuesday in January from the Projekt office, cluttered with old Projekt promo posters, boxes and boxes of CDs, and even a box of Projekt-embossed coffee mugs.

A father of one – Sasha, seven – Sam dresses all in black: a two-toned striped hoodie, a Projekt T-shirt, jeans, and Chelsea boots. In a way he’s fitting a role, but a decidedly different one. Projekt is known as the premier independent American label putting out Goth, but the term isn’t all-inclusive. He rifled around for others, post-punk and coldwave among them.

Really, there are numerous sides to Projekt’s sound and one term alone doesn’t give any of them a fair shake: there’s the drifting, zoned-out ambience, led by Steve Roach and As Lonely As Dave Bowman; the straightforward dark rock by Autumn’s Gray Solace, Melodyguild, Mira, and others; the subtle new wave in the electronic etch of Android Lust and others. Rosenthal also coined the terms darkwave and dark cabaret, performance genres non-existent 25 years ago. Today on Projekt, Voltaire and Rosenthal’s own band Black Tape For A Blue Girl lead the charge in that department.

And you’ve probably heard none of that.

That’s the strange dichotomy of Projekt – while nothing in its catalog stands out to most these days as even familiar, the label is still trucking right along. In the midst of a critical minefield, a genre known more for style than music, and a catalog of relative unknowns, the label is in as good a place as ever, at least as far as putting out music goes.

Even with a massive downturn in sales at the end of the last century, the label has more recently gone through exponential growth. In 1999, Projekt released its one-hundredth recording; in 2009 the label put out number 230. So after nearly thirty years of operation, there is no sign of letting up. Again: you’ve probably not heard much, if any, of it.

“I often think I’m the only one who has heard everything on the label,” he said.

After 27 years at the helm of Projekt, it’s still hard for even Sam to pin down the label’s ethos.

“It’s been more diverse than what other people think. The ambient fans sort of think of it as this ambient label. The Voltaire fans think it’s a Goth label with some weird ambient stuff,” he said.

Projekt began as an avenue to release Sam’s own music, which he described in the beginning as “mopey and non-mainstream,” insisting there wasn’t a name for the sounds that interested him back then. His band has put out 10 proper full-length releases of orchestrated, melancholy rock, driven by theatrical vocals and dark waves of synth. Couple this with insistent arpeggios on a couple acoustic instruments—mainly piano and guitar—and you’ve got the bulk of much of Projekt’s sound.

But then there is the swirling, electronic ambient, lulling the listener into hypnotic states. And the big wall-of sound shoegaze that appears from time to time as well. Projekt’s records can be listless, unidirectional at times, but when trying to relate this darker side of personal affect, epiphany isn’t the most important aspect; these artists seem content at the bottom of the manic wave.

“I’ve been doing this for my entire adult life. I can’t imagine doing anything else,” Rosenthal said.

What began as a hobby for Rosenthal in college quickly turned into his full-time job. He distributed Projekt Records out of his house in Los Angeles while pursuing his film degree. The label grew organically, and before long he had a couple employees. Projekt advertised free catalogs in the back of Spin and other magazines, amassing a database of some 40,000 interested listeners. Soon after, he had an office. And not long after that again, Projekt began its trek east, landing in Chicago in the 90’s.

“In Chicago it kind of went crazy. I had eleven employees and lots of expenses and I found myself all day being in charge of the employees then working all night to get my own work done.”

Now, with declines in sales in the wake of a collapsing music industry, Sam has two employees. One of them is Shea Hovey, who runs promotions and is a formidable presence. A taller woman with neon-pink bangs and tufts of blue gracing her face, tendrils of silver and azure tumble from her head like electric dreadlocks. She is pierced to the nines and strikingly beautiful in an unconventional way. Shea runs most the electronic correspondence directed at the label – its main way of now conducting business. They still send out CDs the old-fashioned way in labeled boxes the postman has to pick up.

Rosenthal predicted the collapse of the major labels in a 2000 interview, saying back then the big labels were too caught up in profit and not focused enough on artist relations. This led the RIAA to the wrong course of action against Napster and other file-sharing sites that hit the scene around that time – a huge part of Projekt’s loss has been illegal downloads.

“Now a band that used to sell 10,000 maybe sells 2,000. But it does keep the music flowing, keeps it coming out,” Sam says. “And legal digital sales have been growing to make up monetarily for the difference. Obviously less units are being sold, but artists are still being compensated that way.”

Even still a little timid about what he does and the success he’s culled over three decades, Sam admits he had a different idea about how downloading music would benefit record sales.

“I had more of a utopian belief in the positive benefits of it,” he said. “I thought digital was a great thing because people would hear the music and they would love it so much they would run out and buy it – not so.”

Ultimately, his prescience in the fate of the industry led him to Brooklyn to completely downsize his operation.

“Projekt is the easiest now in Brooklyn, even though it’s probably the most expensive place to live. I mean I live three blocks from here. I walk my son to school next to the Gowanus Canal. It’s all sort of like a small town because I really stay in a small area.”

Above the Projekt office is its distribution warehouse, an expansive space lined with thousands and thousands of cataloged CDs. They are stacked ceiling high in some spaces, all packed neatly into cardboard boxes and labeled meticulously by hand. There’s an old Apple IIE crammed between a couple boxes (the office now uses iMacs) and an entire room is filled with freeze-dried coffee (the last tenant left it, Sam organized it). At the back of the warehouse, there’s a smaller room with a covered window letting in shafts of blue light. A solitary leather jacket, Motorhead-style with big lapels and a clunky zipper, sags on a wire hanger, looking eerie in the gloom. Sam picked it up in Mexico years ago, and hasn’t worn it in ages.

“It’s just not long enough – I can’t stay warm as I’d like.”

And somehow, that’s the perfect metaphor for the entire operation: while there could be another level of stylistic posturing going on, in the end, Sam just wants to get done what he needs to get done. Yes, Projekt tends to be a label pigeonholed for something beyond its tunes. But defining success to Rosenthal is as simple some days as choosing the right jacket, letting nine employees go, or knowing when to cut your losses on the retail market. He is Projekt Records, and Projekt Records is him, plain and simple.

In preparation for the this year’s Academy Awards, celebrity stylists like Rachel Zoe scrambled to dress their A-List clients despite the so-called recession-induced “dress drought.” It seemed that designers were producing far fewer of the red carpet dress contenders—because they were just that—mere contenders. Why invest the time and money, designers asked, to create an Oscar-worthy dress that a star wasn’t even guaranteed to select?

During the awards season, as fashion houses began to rebound from economic uncertainty, the red carpet saw only the slightest jolt of innovation. A-Listers (or their stylists) were forced to pick primarily from the runways for their Oscar looks, proving that truly custom-made gowns have become something of a distant memory even for Hollywood’s elite.

If you thought the Avatar actress Zoe Saldana’s lavender ruffled gown looked familiar, it’s because it was. Team Saldana plucked the Givenchy Couture gown directly from the Spring 2010 runway show in Paris.

Atelier Versace also managed to get double play out of their looks, with presenter Elizabeth Banks in a gray strapless gown with cascading ruffles that previously showed on the Spring 2009 runway. Actress Demi Moore also wore a familiar Atelier Versace gown in blush.

The list goes on.

Some designers did, however, invest in the redesign of dresses from their collections. And in these few instances, the risk paid off.

Dries Van Noten restructured Maggie Gyllenhaal’s gown from the Fall 2010 runway to resemble the sleek, strapless silhouette of the sentimental newlywed’s recent wedding gown. (And to complete the picture of marital bliss, Gyllenhaal’s husband, Peter Sarsgaard, wore his wedding tuxedo.)

Carey Mulligan, too, made an old look fresh again. The Prada Pre-Fall 2009 dress was edited down to feature only its most striking elements: the asymmetrical hemline, and the tiny jeweled adornments in the unexpected shapes of forks, spoons and scissors.

No one can predict what fashions next year’s award season will hold. We can only hope that as business picks up, designers will regain the power to innovate, and splash the red carpet with a few more fresh ideas.

One of the time-honored delights of New York is the so-called street food offered by all manner of vendors. Tourists welcome the novelty of these rolling mini-kitchens on so many corners, and often go back to Peoria or Dubuque talking about the crusty hot pretzel or Hebrew National hot dog or roasted nuts they bought and consumed on the street. What many visitors don’t realize is how much everyday New Yorkers depend on street vendors near their homes or offices.

Sometimes it’s worth a subway trip — even to the outer boroughs — to try a local food cart that offers a menu far beyond the routine fare in touristy areas of Manhattan. In the Bronx, for example, Fauzia Abdur-Rahman’s regulars know the only guarantee is that there won’t be hot dogs or pretzels. Of the 10 or so items on her menu every day, she promises to include rice, some sort of chicken dish and at least one vegetarian option.

Everything else is up in the air.

“Today I have a spicy stewed chicken,” said Abdur-Rahman recently. “I just bought a case of mushrooms, so tomorrow I might make stew with that.”

“I live in Manhattan, and her vegetarian food is some of the best I’ve ever had, anywhere,” said Diane Donato, a high school teacher who frequents the cart. “She has a very fine hand with spicing and flavoring.”

Although she typically only serves lunch, Abdur-Rahman arrives at her corner every morning around 8:45 a.m to begin cooking. A basic outline of the day’s menu is planned the night before, based on whatever ingredients the 51-year-old mother of three has available.

All but two dishes are made from scratch in the next two and a half hours or so; Abdur-Rahman serves cake from Lloyd’s Carrot Cake, a North Bronx institution, and every once in a while, she makes Jamaica’s national dish, ackee and saltfish, using canned ackee — the national fruit of Jamaica.

Born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, Abdur-Rahman first came to New York City 34 years ago. In the nearly two decades before getting her street vendor’s license, Abdur-Rahman worked for myriad employers — her jobs ranged from grocery store cashier to secretarial positions — but said her family ultimately convinced her to take the risk of entrepreneurship.
“One day my grandmother just pretty much told her that, you know, ‘this is pretty much the only way that you can do what you want to do,’” said Ibrahim, Abdur-Rahman’s 25-year-old son.

Abdur-Rahman’s unique cooking style developed through on-the-job experimentation, and a blending of the divergent culinary interests of her mother and sister.

“When I was younger, my mom was not that good of a cook,” Ibrahim said. “My grandmother had taught her to make some Jamaican foods, like codfish cakes, and we sold them at fairs for extra money.”

As Abdur-Rahman mastered her mother’s Jamaican classics, she and her sister, Gay-Marcin Smith, began experimenting with diverse tastes. Smith recalls learning about the ethnic foods while attending weekly potluck dinners with her college’s multi-cultural club.

“Every Friday night you’d have an abundance of food from Ghana, Morocco and all over,” said Smith. “I started sharing with (Abdur-Rahman) the types of things I learned… but you can’t just throw it all together, you have to really understand different seasonings.”

Soon Abdur-Rahman assimilated her favorite flavors from New York.

“New York is such a melting pot and people are very open to different flavors and tastes, said Abdur-Rahman. “You’ll find, you know, somebody from Ireland, and they want jerk chicken!”

“I play with different flavors and tastes,” said Abdur-Rahman. “You would never go to a Jamaican restaurant and get butternut squash, or green beans and corn. But as long as the flavors are balanced, it’s good.

Abdur-Rahman gives credit to the city’s heterogeneous culinary landscape, with contributing to the success of her food.

“I love Indian food, the flavors and the spices, so I incorporate that. And I love Iranian food; you know, I love how they use lemon. So I incorporate a little of that, too.”

By 11 a.m., Abdur-Rahman is usually finished preparing her food, but people often start checking to see if she’s ready well before.  While the menu varies from day to day, customers say the quality is reliable.

Bronx prosecutor Jamie Moran regularly makes time for Heavenly Delights’ long lines. “Even though it takes a long time, everybody stands here and waits. Even if it’s cold,” said Moran.

At the height of the midday rush, as many as a dozen people at a time wait in front of Heavenly Delights – a trend that local competitors have noticed

“There’s a new place in the mall selling fried fish and they have a guy who hangs around,” Abdur-Rahman said. “Then there’s another Jamaican restaurant, and his guy sometimes actually comes on my line to hand out his stuff.”

Managers at both restaurants, Shrimp Box and Sa Lena West Indian Restaurant, confirmed that they hand out flyers nearby.

As he left the Bronx County courthouse recently, Michael Thomas, a sales trainer for Research in Motion, said he was drawn to Heavenly Delights by scents that reminded him of his own Jamaican heritage.

“Originally, I was just looking for coffee, but then obviously I smelled the spices and the food,” said Thomas. “Those are the things. It’s the smell that tantalizes you. That’s what draws you.”

The band was playing on the L train platform in the station at 6^th Avenue and 14^th Street.  They weren’t using any sort of amplification.  They huddled together near one of the white-tiled staircases, allowing people to pass easily around them.  A guitar case displaying homemade CDs sat open in front of the singer.  People bought the CDs for a suggested donation of five dollars, or dropped in singles or loose change as they saw fit.  The band did not directly solicit money.

So when the police officers approached them and told them to leave, they pointed out that they had broken no laws.  It wasn’t the first time they’d been told to get off a subway platform, but they always argued the legality of their presence before acquiescing.  This time, however, one of the officers had an unusual reaction.  Rather than simply repeating the order to leave at a higher volume, as usually happened, he told them that he knew they were right.  That they were doing nothing wrong.  And that it didn’t matter.  The officers were told to periodically chase out anyone busking on the platform, and that anyone who didn’t move would be issued a summons.  Even if it was thrown out by a judge, even if they knew it was going to be thrown out, they’d write one anyway.  The law may be clear, but orders are crystal.

“It was the first time someone had told us the truth,” Russell Holland, the singer, said later on.  Realizing that they would always be targets, the band members decided to appeal to the one force in the subway ostensibly higher than the NYPD: the MTA.

Music Under New York, or MUNY, is a program sponsored by the Metropolitan Transit Authority that issues licenses to play in the subway system to musicians.  Depending on the quality of the auditions, MUNY will issue up to 25 of these permits per year.  Musicians get an official MUNY banner to hang, may use amplifiers, and can schedule to play in specific locations, eliminating the chance that another act will grab their spot or a police officer will tell them to vacate the premises.

The MUNY auditions were still some months away, so the band knuckled down, learning more songs, rehearsing more often, and, occasionally, busking in the subways, hoping that they could get a good set in before they were asked to move along.

It takes a couple of minutes to figure out the gimmick.  The songs are famous, but the arrangements unfamiliar, and the context odd.  But by the time Russell Holland starts to sing, a couple of people have stopped to listen.

“Please could you stop the noise, I’m trying to get some rest/From all the unborn chicken voices in my head,” he wails over a banjo, carefully plucked by bandmate Drew Pitcher.  Radiohead.  Paranoid Android.  Acoustic.  In the subway.  And in truth, it’s kind of perfect.  By the four minute-mark, when Holland wails out, “God loves His children” and the band crashes through the bridge, there are two crowds.  One on each platform.  As the uptown N train clatters into Union Square station, one man sprints across to the downtown platform where the band is continuing its set of covers, grabs one of the homemade CDs, drops a five into the open guitar case and runs back, jumping onto the express train just as the doors issue their familiar double tone.

The band is Storyship, a four-man ensemble that takes Beatles tunes, Radiohead jams and the best of E.L.O., among others, strips out the electricity and plays the results for donations and CD sales in the subways, parks and public hubs of New York City.

Russell Holland, Drew Pitcher, Tom Blancarte and Andreas Pichler have been performing together for a little over a year, and their ease with one another is apparent.  Throughout the subway set, the band spoke only a few sentences, all to one another, all short.

“Pass the accordion, please.”  “Ready?”  Not even a “one-two-three-four,” Holland tapping his foot or Pichler brushing his drumstick over a tom to start the next song.

Subway performers are nothing new, and many have the ability to stop commuters for a moment of recognition or pleasure, but holding and monopolizing the attention of New York’s commuters is rare.  By the time the band launched into its uber-bluesy rendition of “Boy Blue,” all but three of the people on both platforms were knotted together, swaying and head-bobbing at the southern end of the station.  The three abstainers were all wearing headphones, listening to their own music.

The band didn’t seem to notice the crowd, though.  During “I’m Only Sleeping,” John Lennon’s ode to laziness from Revolver, Holland’s eyes were closed, and it fell to Pitcher to nod thanks when someone made a donation or purchased a CD.  Inspired by the performance, a teenager mock MCd in front of the band, though the lyrics he mouthed into his fist never matched those Holland sang.  None of the musicians said anything or looked askance, though Pitcher had to scoot his stool back when the young man stumbled, overcome by either the music or something else.

When a Q train rolled in, Brooklyn-bound, a couple hesitated.  “We can take the local,” the woman said, and they continued to hang out as the band kicked out Tom Petty’s “Free Falllin’.”

Holland, who bears uncommon resemblance to the actor Paul Dano, allowed a small smile to break as the Q train departs and the crowd, only slightly diminished, shot the train dirty looks as its noise interfered with the concert.

Storyship was ready.  The more they busked, the better they played.  Once winter began to break, they started hitting Central Park, where the crowds were enthusiastic, much more willing to listen than commuters.  There was also more competition.  On a recent sunny day, Storyship planted itself among the photo hawkers, hot dog stands and caricaturists surrounding the grand staircase of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The band showed up early, got set, played well.  And then another band, an a cappella doo-wop group that plays the Met often, set up nearby, poached the audience and sent Storyship wandering around to find a new pitch to play.

“We found a little open grassy place nearby, so it worked out in the end,” Pitcher said.  “But there’s so much competition over just a few spots.”

A bit of background: Buskers, or street performers, are found in high-traffic spots in major cities across the United States.  Jackson Square, New Orleans; Union Square, San Francisco; Millennium Park, Chicago.  All boast healthy busker populations.  But New York, as it is for so many things, is busker central.  Central Park, Times Square, Washington Square and Battery Park are all busker havens.  Busking can be pretty much anything: miming, caricature drawing and break-dancing all fall under the general term.  It’s simply a performance for an audience that doesn’t know there’s going to be a show.  The spot where a busker sets up is the pitch.

The improvisatory nature of busking has many good traits.  There is no boss.  There is no set schedule.  There’s not even a workplace.

The drawbacks to busking are closely related to its pleasantries.  Without a boss, there’s no one to complain to if things go sour.  With no schedule, it’s easy to show up to a favored spot and find it claimed by another performer.  Not having a workplace means that, more often than not, one has to be created.

In addition to protection against over-zealous police officers, the other huge advantage to the MUNY permit is the protection against other buskers intruding on Storyship’s pitch, as MUNY gigs are booked in advance.

Busking was not what the members of Storyship had in mind when they moved to New York.  Holland, Pitcher and Blancarte all trained as jazz musicians at the University of North Texas, though they did not play together during their college years.  After graduation, they all played on separate cruise ships, an experience that Holland describes as “an easy way to get stuck,” and Pitcher remembers as “where I saw ‘Along Came Polly.’  What else was there to do on a cruise ship?”  The money was decent, though, and the three decided to move together to New York.

Day jobs were uninspiring, naturally.  Pitcher and Blancarte worked together in a mailroom that didn’t get much mail, so they spent time playing chess, learning how to play the harmonica and talking about music.  When the company folded, Pitcher went to work in another, far busier, mailroom – Columbia House, the CD-by-mail company.  The job wasn’t any more inspiring, but the fringe benefit – lots of CDs – was substantial.

The turning point was still a year away, but the cause was already in the apartment, wrapped in plastic.  It took a year before Pitcher got around to opening one of the many CDs he’d brought home with him, an old ELO album.  But one night, one of the many sit-around-drinking-beer-and-listening-to-music nights that Pitcher and Holland and Blancarte have had, the CD went into the player and, as Holland puts it, “the holy shit moment,” happened.

“It was like, ‘How have I been on the Earth this long and not known about this,’” Holland said.  “Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

Frustrated by the New York jam sessions they’d participated in and unhappy in their day jobs, Pitcher and Holland threw themselves into picking apart pop music, figuring out how the harmonies worked and how to re-arrange the music for the instruments they were teaching themselves: harmonica, banjo and accordion.  In addition to ELO, the two gorged on massive helpings of Beatles, Radiohead, Paul McCartney and Bruce Springsteen.

“But it all goes back to Jeff Lynne,” Pitcher said.

The third roommate, Blancarte, was finding steady work as an avant-garde jazz bassist, but he enjoyed the process of prying tunes apart to see how they worked and then reassembling them to see if they could still run.

Pichler came from Austria on a tourist visa to play drums in avant-garde jazz groups and connected with the others through Blancarte’s girlfriend.  The Bruce Springsteen song “The River,” which his American friends introduced him to,  haunted him.

“He’d just walk around, picking at a banjo and singing ‘The River’ softly to himself for hours,” Pitcher remembered. “He’d be in his room late at night and we’d hear him at it.”  He joined up and the quartet was complete.

They swear it’s not about money.  They make some money with Storyship busking gigs, but there are outside revenue streams, including what Pitcher calls a “Bossa Nova Christmas album thing” on iTunes that sold well last year.

They played together for a year, until just before the MUNY audition, when Pichler had to return to Austria and Blancarte left to tour Europe.

“Andreas had a banjo shipped back to Austria,” Holland said.  “He’s probably playing the Boss on it right now.”  Pichler wasn’t happy about leaving the States.  He’s told Holland and Pitcher that he wants to return as soon as possible and get back to busking with them.

Those departures left Pitcher and Holland as the only members of the group who would actually be present for the audition that would make busking so much easier for all of them.

The two men, long-time friends, waited with two men they knew less well at Grand Central Station for their audition time.  They had gone to college together back in Texas, where they trained to be jazz musicians.  They had not anticipated this audition when they moved to New York City.  Stability is not something that any musician relies on, but if chosen from among the 57 acts trying out, a small amount of stability would be theirs.

The song they were going to play was easy, a crowd-pleaser, but the two old friends had played it together hundreds of times, while the two they were relying on today had played it once.  If the two guys they usually played with could have been at Grand Central, it would be a lock.  As it stood, they felt confident, just less so.

When their time came, Russell Holland took up his guitar, Drew Pitcher his accordion, the two fill-ins their bass and drums.  Then the foursome stood before the judges and belted out “Free Fallin’” by Tom Petty, hoping to win their license to busk.

“We just want to be able to play the music that we like to hear,” Holland said later on over a plate of chili fries (actually an order of chili poured on top an order of potato wedges) in a downtown bar.  Pitcher nodded and sipped his pint of Brooklyn Lager.

Unfortunately, MUNY disagreed with their taste, or their interpretation, and turned them down for a permit.

Back to bannerless busking, but so long as the beer is cold, the boys in the band will abide.

Many gay and lesbian bookstores followed, all over the country, as the movement grew in the following years. Many of those bookstores have closed recently, however, including the Oscar Wilde. Many see the disappearance of the stores as a sign of success growing out of the wider acceptance of gays and lesbians throughout society. They don’t need their own special bookstores any more because so many general bookstores carry gay and lesbian books.

The doors at Oscar Wilde closed in the spring of 2009, only weeks before Amazon.com accidentally pushed all books deemed gay and lesbian to the pornography section, a sad reminder of the days when a gay and lesbian bookstore was necessary due to discrimination. It’s worth taking a look back on those days.

Forty years ago, Christopher Street was the center of the Stonewall Inn riots. Today, the street still has problems with theives and vandals, but it still lies in one of the pricest areas of real estate, even for New York. Those riots of the 1960s and ‘70s, when Greenwich Village was the heart of a revolution seem like a long time ago in an age when gay marriage has been passed in Iowa, and when the Oscar winner for Best Picture played gay politician Harvey Milk, who was frequent visitor to the store and, for a time, a boyfriend of Craig Rodwell, the founder.

“You could say it’s really good because it means we don’t need segregated facilities but at the same time there’s something about going to a queer space that gets lost,” said Sarah Chinn, the executive director of the Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies at CUNY Graduate Center.

In 42 years, however, Rodwell’s tiny shop became packed with not only books and DVDs, but also people. Located on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village—just one block from the infamous Stonewall Inn—the bookstore became an information center, intellectual hothouse gather place and a home for the gay and lesbian movement.

When the Oscar Wilde Bookshop first opened its doors, the nearby Christopher Street park was home to homeless gay youths, now a statue stands in memory of the Stonewall Inn riots. The Christopher Street Liberation Parade, organized at the Oscar Wilde, is now known as the Gay Pride Parade.

While there was a once a network of gay and lesbian bookstores in New York, the Oscar Wilde was the first and now the last to fall. Other famous institutions such as Creative Visions on Hudson Street and A Different Light in Chelsea all closed their doors in the last decade. The website for Oscar Wilde suggests only three stores for patrons looking for gay titles: Lambda Rising in Washington D.C., Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia and Common Language Bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Martin Duberman, the author of the book “Stonewall” and a professor emeritus at Lehman College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, suggested this is part of a trend of gay bookstores closing.

“I’m always sad when a bookstore closes, especially a gay bookstore,” Duberman said.

Rodwell died in 1993, and the neighborhood surrounding his store is no longer the revolutionary one it once was. While up and down Christopher Street, from its western edges near the Hudson to the eastern end at Sixth Avenue, gay pride flags still wave proudly outside many of the stores and the Stonewall Inn still stands, instead of having a notorious reputation, the old articles about the Stonewall riots are framed in the window in order to attract tourists. A Starbucks is now at the corner of Sheridan Square, where young homeless gay youths used to sleep because they had nowhere to go. Christopher Street has become one of the priciest areas of real estate, with tree-lined streets and old buildings that were once dilapidated have been fixed up and for sale for high prices.

In the last few weeks before the store closed, the shop filled with regulars, tourists and reporters.

Cecilia Martin, 39, working the register, called the store a “safe place” for the gay community. She herself remembered her first time visiting the store, which she loved so much she later applied for a job.

“I didn’t even know what being gay was—when I was 16, I thought I was the only one that was,” said Gary Merston, 46, of East Orange. “Since I was 16, I’ve been coming to this store. I love this place.”

Merston stopped by with one his 14-year-old son, one of two children he adopted with his partner. Merston and his son said were saving souvenirs from the bookstore, right down to the shopping.

“When I saw Channel 7 broadcast, I couldn’t believe it,” Merston said. “I said, this is not really happening. We must have watched it 10 times, and repeated the news over and over again.”

Both Martin and the last owner of the bookstore, Kim Brinster, a former manager who bought the place after one of the store’s near-death experiences in 2003, said they felt the store is a victim of the current hard economic times, and the increasing presence of on-line retailers.

“Unfortunately, we do not have the resources to weather the current economic crisis and find it’s time to call it a day,” Brinster said.  “So thanks to all those who have been a part of the Oscar Wilde family over the years, you have truly been a part of the global community.”

Rodwell had been one of the more militant members of the homophile movement in the early 1960s, but by 1966, he was fed up with the Mattachine organization, the leading group fighting for gay rights across the country. Rodwell wanted to open a bookstore that would be an intellectual gathering place for gay people, and in fact, he banned the sale of any pornography in the early years. In order to save up the money for the bookstore, he worked summers at a motel at the Fire Island Pines, the popular vacation spot for gays on Long Island.

After two summers, Rodwell had saved enough money to rent space at 291 Mercer Street, the first location of the store. It moved two years later to its famed home on Christopher Street. The Mercer Street location, according to Duberman, was the cheapest place Rodwell could find.

Duberman profiles Rodwell in his book and wrote Rodwell struggled in those early days—and even had to ask his own mother to help set up the store the night before it opened due to a lack of resources. Rodwell later relented on the pornography ban in order to make some money, Duberman said.

When the bookstore first opened, the mainstream press either ignored it or attacked its existence. According to Duberman, a columnist for the New York Post compared it with see-through dresses and topless flicks, despite Rodwell’s hatred of pornography. Some gay activists were not happy with the store because it did not stack pornography, and other claimed it was stinted more toward men. Still, Rodwell put in 70-hour weeks and ran the store by himself for the first 18 months.

In addition to the bookstore, Rodwell also began his own gay and lesbian organization, called the Homophile Youth Movement—later amended to Homophile Youth Movement in Neighborhoods, so the acronym would be HYMN and less gender-specific—and used the store as the headquarters. He published a newsletter called The New York Hymnal, where he called for homosexual law reform in New York State. Rodwell even hung a banner in the front window proclaiming “Bookshop of the Homophile Movement.” He would later replace it with a bumper sticker proclaiming “Gay is Good.”

During the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, the police attempted to raid the Stonewall Inn, located at 51 Christopher Street, only a few doors down from the new location of the bookstore. But the raid did not go as planned and turned into a full-scale riot. Rodwell, who personally hated the Stonewall Inn because he thought it was unsanitary, could see the riot going on from Oscar Wilde and called the newspapers and three New York papers—The New York Times, the New York Post, and the New York Daily News—all covered the siege. For the next few nights, people gathered on Christopher Street to protest—and Rodwell printed leaflets from the bookstore to help organize. From the back room of the bookstore, Rodwell encouraged a boycott of the Stonewall Inn, which closed only a few weeks after the riot.

One year later, Rodwell organized “Christopher Street Liberation Day” from Oscar Wilde, now celebrated each year as “Gay Pride Day.” The gay rights revolution had been born.

Rodwell died of stomach cancer in 1993, and one of the store’s managers, Bill Offenbaker, bought the store. After Offenbaker struggled to keep it afloat, Larry Lingle took over in 1996.

But Lingle could not save it either, and he announced he would have to close its doors in 2003. At the last minute, Deacon Maccubbin, the owner of gay bookstore Lambda Rising in Washington D.C., bought the store and rescued it at the last minute. Three years later, Brinster, then one of the store’s managers, took over.

While rents in Greenwich Village have increased over the years, Brinster said the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop paid only $3,000 a month, well below market value. But that was still too much.

Sarah Chinn, the gay and lesbian center director at CUNY, said she thought the world around Oscar Wilde had changed too much for it to survive.

“Now you don’t have to schlep all the way to the Village to buy a gay book—you can just go on-line and order it,” Chinn said. “I think someone could see it as a good sign. That we’re not totally marginalized, but at the same time, community-run institutions have a place and they have a value beyond what’s available. It’s essentially a shame that it’s the oldest gay bookshop in the United States and it’s closing.”

Martin said the full force of the bookstore’s closing hadn’t hit her yet.

“I think it’s definitely a loss,” Martin said. “It’s like, you may realize someone is dying, but you don’t understand the real impact…and they won’t until they don’t have us as a resource—the regulars who come in every week.”

One month before the scheduled closing date, the last meeting of the Lesbian Book Club still met. Instead of Rodwell’s famous “Gay is Good” sticker in the front windows, they were covered in “Final Sale” stickers. The club was meeting to discuss “Aimee and Jaguar” by Erica Fisher.

On the last day, the store officially closed at 7 p.m. The doors were locked, but the club members lingered in the trailblazing store for just a little while longer.

At a generous estimate, about half of the 60 folding chairs set up in the main bidding room of Doyle’s New York were occupied. It was the auction house’s 11th Dogs In Art auction and on this recent midweek afternoon, with New York in the throes of a trickle-down recession, empty seats were not unexpected. But even in a recession, the niche world of sporting art auctions saw a few brave souls come away with their own prized purchases.

The auction’s offerings ranged from lower-priced porcelain, ceramic, cast iron and marble dogs to higher-priced etchings and paintings featuring dogs, horses and birds. For the most part, the dogs presented in hunting scenarios fetched the highest asking price, peaking at $20,000 for a breed portrait of a pointer from William Harnden Foster, an avid sportsman and pointer specialist. The other paintings showed dogs sniffing out their prey, dogs clamping down on birds, and dogs portrayed with one paw raised expectantly above the ground, as the animal waits for a bird to fall out of the sky. Other paintings featured men on horses, men firing guns, dogs in portrait, and fox hunts.

Russell Fink and his wife, Marlee, a couple in their late-50s, had made the trip from Lorton, Virginia with one goal in mind: to pick up game bird and waterfowl etchings by Richard Bishop, an admired sportsman and etcher. Fink recently completed a limited-edition 500-page leather book on Bishop’s work.

“We got just what we wanted,” said Russell, speaking of the ten carefully-crafted drawings of geese, pintails, and bogs that they picked up. The Finks travel around the country going to auctions, attending events in Las Vegas and Boston. They are familiar with market conditions.

“Prices are depressed,” said Marlee.

The auctioneer moved quickly through the early part of the auction. Many of these pieces – mostly the figurines – did not garner a bid either from the few attendees or from online or phone bidders. Overall, of the pieces that did sell, about one-third sold for less than the stated low estimate.

“The market is down, but people will always buy tangibles,” said Marlee. “It just depends how much discretionary income they have.”

One attendee who spent some of this discretionary income was Tom Smith, 71, a retired judge who recently moved to New York from Los Angeles. “New York is a great place to retire to,” he said.

Smith bought two sporting art pieces, one of a horse riding a trail and another depicting of a polo match, spending a total of $3,450.

“They’re very good deals,” he said, “Plus, they’re horse paintings, and I’m a horse person.” He said he would hang them in his new house on East 73rd Street.

An attendee who came away empty-handed was Laura Maioglio, who owns Barbetta, a restaurant in the theater district that is New York’s oldest restaurant owned by the same family. The restaurant’s interior is riddled with antiques, but Maioglio, clutching her handbag, left halfway through the auction.

“I’ve been buying all my life,” she said. “The consignments here are not as impressive as other years.”

By auction’s end, 61% of the pieces had sold for a total of $168,056. One piece, a rendering of horse riders in the English countryside by Peter Curling, sold for $3,100 higher than expected. But overall, sales were down compared to previous years. Russell Fink put the depressed results of the auction in a personal context.

“Some of my best years were during the Carter administration, when inflation was through the roof,” he said. Russell and Marlee then waited as the workers at the auction house carefully wrapped up the Bishop etchings in butcher’s paper for a safe journey back to Virginia.

At some point, I could ignore the Julie and Julia phenomenon no longer. I had dodged Julie Powell’s blog, and subsequent book, but the media onslaught that led up to the movie was impossible to avoid.

Vanity Fair provided appetite-whetting details about Julia, a spy who shagged her husband on her lunch break from Le Cordon Bleu. Michael Pollan wondered, in The New York Times Magazine, how Americans find less and less time to cook, and more to watch cooking shows (and, it would seem, read articles about movies about cooking show-hosts and the bloggers who love them). Nora Ephron, who wrote and directed the film, explained on NPR, that today’s food television exhibits cooking as an inaccessible spectacle, unlike Julia’s encouraging French Chef, and she then elaborated for Vogue’s Jeffrey Steingarten, as she browned the beginnings of a beef bourguinon for the camera.

Once I succumbed and saw the movie–which, in case you summered in Siberia, weaves Julia Child’s formative years of Mastering the Art of French Cooking in France with blogger Julie Powell’s year in Queens of making her way through the book’s recipes, it was altogether enjoyable, like an extended episode of Sex & the City for foodies. Le Creuset stood in for Manolo Blahnik; carnal close-ups of glistening bruschetta and soft-peaked pudding substituted for, well, carnal close-ups; and Julie Powell spoon-fed us lessons from her laptop at the day’s end.

From the first pat of butter sizzling on a skillet in Queens, through euphoric afternoons in Parisian bistros, and the best lobster scene since Annie Hall, Julie and Julia demonstrated that cooking, like sex, friendship, travel, adventure, champagne, and going to the movies, is an indulgence that can make our lives a little more colorful, and even more complete. Even without all the media’s mise en place, that story alone would have left me satisfied.

The Poseidon Bakery on 9th Avenue near West 44th Street has been a neighborhood fixture for more than 85 years.  The Greek pastry shop is like an extension of the owner’s kitchen.  Lili Fable, who runs the bakery with her son Paul, called her family “quintessential shopkeepers” because she still lives upstairs with her husband Anthony.  Even Paul lives in the building with his wife and children.

Anthony’s family started the business in what is now the Port Authority Bus Terminal.  When his father’s bakery was evicted by the city in the early 1950s to build the terminal, they moved to the spot near 44th Street.

“In those years you couldn’t fight the city,” Lili said.

Anthony’s father bought the entire building at 629 9th Avenue.  The bakery has been in that location since 1952.

“We have staying power,” Lili said.

Many new restaurants have opened over the past few years, but Lili didn’t think they would last.

A new gourmet pizzeria is opening on the corner, she said, and their rent is nearly $12,000 a month.

“How much pizza do you have to sell?” she said.

Lili said she didn’t know how Poseidon would have survived if they had to pay the astronomical rents the neighborhood now commands.

The bakery’s homey atmosphere has also contributed to its staying power.  Lili keeps photographs of her grandkids behind the counter, and drawings they’ve made in school on the refrigerator.

The musty smell of fermentation emanated from a back room where phyllo dough is made.  Poseidon is the only bakery in the country that makes phyllo dough by hand.

Large, mold-green bricks lined the baking room, and the windows were too cracked and dirty to let in much light.

“Phyllo means leaf in Greek,” Lili said as she smoothed her hand over one of the tissue thin sheets of dough.

The sheets of dough were placed between layers of raw, unbleached muslin on two large tables.  Extra muslin hung on a clothes line strung across the back wall.  An industrial clothes dryer stood by to keep the muslin bone dry on humid days.  Otherwise, the dough would stick to it.

Nata and Eric, Lili’s employees, make phyllo all day long.  Nata stood on the flour-covered floor, rolling out dough balls called boulakas to the size of large, thin pizzas.  He listened to a Spanish language radio station and sung along to the music as he worked.

“Nata’s been doing this for 35 years,” Lili said.

Lili brought finished phyllo into the next room where all the pastries were assembled and baked.

Kaila, 19, is the only one who assists Lili with making pastries.  She wore lavender Crocs and listened to an iPod while making flogera, phyllo cylinders stuffed with custard and nuts.

Kaila started working at Poseidon last October, and learned how to make all of the pastries in two days.  Even though the hours can be long, especially around the holidays, she loves her job.

“Lili’s like a mother to me,” she said, “and boy, can she cook!”

Kaila’s specialty is making miniature pastries, or cocktails, that are popular for parties.  But her handiwork was suddenly interrupted.

“Kai-LA!” Eric, her boyfriend, yelled from the phyllo room.

She rolled her eyes and asked “Que pasa?” before returning to her post.

While Kaila worked quickly, Lili wrapped vegetable pies called Menina mash at lightning speed.  Lili’s mother-in-law Menina invented the pie to get her children to eat vegetables.

Lili methodically brushed phyllo with melted butter from a coffee can, stuffed it with spinach, and folded the package into a triangle.  A stack of finished trays multiplied by her elbow.

“I love how green these veggies came today!” Lili said, pausing to admire her work.  “Emerald green, St. Patty’s Day green!”

Soon, the pastries were ready for the oven.  Lili called the two ceiling-high ovens “Vulcan,” after the Greek god of fire.  She and her husband couldn’t agree whether they are 80 or 100 years old, but they looked like they could easily be older.

The heat of the huge cast iron furnaces can be felt from at least five feet away, and usually kept Lili away.

“They’re too tall and I’m afraid of getting burned,” she said.

But the day was cold and the ovens warmed the back room.

“It’s so cold out,” she said.  “I need to go sit by the oven.”

The pastries already baking inside smelled like Christmas, emitting a scent of cinnamon and cloves.

The doorbell rang, signaling that a customer had entered.  Lili shuffled in her battered black clogs from the baking room to the front counter to assist the customer.  Trays of pastries fresh from the “Vulcan” beckoned: spanakopita, baklava, cherry cheese strudel and kounbiedes cookies.

Lili put up a pot of coffee and offered some to everyone.  She put some pies in the oven to get warm.

“Anthony, I need a meat pie, too,” she called to her husband in the baking room.

A middle-aged man in a red and black plaid jacket perused the pastry cases as the half-century old refrigerators wheezed.

“Take your time, we have all the savories in the oven,” Lili said.

He was visiting his son, a Juilliard student, who lives nearby.  He requested a cherry strudel and a spinach pie.

“I just put a pot of coffee on,” Lili told him.  “You interested in coffee?”

He wasn’t, but soon the mailman arrived.  He announced his presence by yanking open the front door and yelling “Mailman!”

Lili said “o-pa!” as she lifted a heavy tray.  She greeted the mailman and the rest of her customers with a cheery “Hello!”

The ancient teal cash register opened with a “ping!” as miniature busts of Greek philosophers watched over the proceedings.  Replicas of ancient Greek vases and signed headshots of celebrity fans like Ernie Anastos and Olympia Dukakis were mixed in.

But Poseidon still caters to a local, family clientele, not just celebrities.

Lili said some families have been coming back for three generations, especially to buy traditional Greek Easter cakes.

“Every Greek family in creation must have a koulouda,” she said.  Koulouda is a braided sweet bread with dyed red eggs baked into it that is eaten at Easter.

Even though customers may have moved away, the bakery will ship items anywhere in the United States.  Lili has sent packages to Maine, Hawaii, Colorado and Puerto Rico.  But her most unusual request was for a family who wanted to bring her pastries back to Greece with them.

Though Poseidon might not ship anything back to the motherland this Easter, the pace of the bakery’s work will pick up quickly in the coming weeks.

“Work hard, play a little, work hard, play a little,” Lili said about the bakery’s schedule.

With Greek Easter only a month away, Lili and her employees were relishing the calm before the storm.

“Right now,” she said, “we’re just going about our lives as we always have.”

During his years at the London College of Printing, McIntyre would spend hours in the gray, utilitarian library. Standing in the aisle before the art and photography section, he pored through copies of French Vogue and books of Picasso and Guy Bordin, filling himself with their history, their pictures—with all the things he hadn’t learned at school growing up in Scotland. It was in these explorations that, McIntyre, now 48, came across the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, a photographer best known for the term “the decisive moment.”

The decisive moment: the fleeting instant when, as Cartier-Bresson said, there is a “composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera.”

“I assumed he was just walking around with his eyes sharp and alert, looking for that picture,” McIntyre said in his soft burr. “And when it happened, he had somehow anticipated it, got his camera up, took the picture.”

With thumb and pointer finger, McIntyre picks quarter-sized pieces from a muffin as he speaks, leaning forward over the hunter-green topped table at the Cupcake Café in Midtown Manhattan. The café, McIntyre’s choosing, could double as an abandoned set. It is filled with furniture painted different colors, made of different materials, designed in different styles. Three ceiling fans rotate slowly in the first room, milk for the coffee is kept in a refrigerator disguised as a cabinet and there is no music.

McIntyre is the co-founder and publisher of ZooZoom, an award winning online fashion magazine, and a free-lance photographer. Today, he wears a faded gray hoodie, half zipped, over a t-shirt of the same color. He has stubble on his face and receding hair of the same length. Hard lines around his mouth and brow, and deep set eyes, make him appear stoic, but his soft eyes give him away. Those eyes focus on something distant as he speaks about Cartier-Bresson.

McIntyre was 18 when he found Cartier-Bresson’s work in that library. He was fresh to England and, artistically, in his “formative years.” He wandered the streets of London with his camera, attempting to emulate Cartier-Bresson’s style of street photography, seeking to capture those ephemeral instances where both character and composition of the scene fell into perfect alignment. He trained himself to see the shots developing in front of him and to shoot quickly.

Just two years ago, in an online article, McIntyre learned that searching for decisive moments was not, in fact, the process practiced by Cartier-Bresson.

“I found out that he’d find a place where the buildings, the streets, whatever, were graphically pleasing, and he’d maybe stand there for four or five hours, photographing different people walking through his set, as it were, until he got one that he thought was perfect. So I realized he’d brought patience to it,” McIntyre said.

It was like finding out he had been adopted.

“It was a shock to me,” he said.

Those years in college had shaped him as an artist. In practicing what he thought was Cartier-Bresson’s style, McIntyre learned to seek out moments rather than wait for them.

“My misunderstanding of this process actually brought me something much more valuable, which was, the sense that having a camera is being in the moment,” McIntyre said. “Whenever I’m walking around with a camera I’m totally not worried about stuff—I’m looking for pictures.”

This technique led McIntyre to fashion photography, a field that requires the intuition of when to capture the look or gesture that defines a style. He thrived, and his work took him all over the world, from Paris to Milan to Germany. His learned lesson of foresight, however, wasn’t constrained to just taking pictures.

In 1999, shortly after he moved to New York City with his pregnant wife, Kelly, the pair launched ZooZoom. It was the first of its kind: an online fashion magazine filled with stunning images at a time when the Internet was made up of basic, visually unappealing sites.

ZooZoom was precedent setting. Since its birth, the site has won two Webbys (the Oscars of the Internet), been nominated for two others, and been recognized in Time magazine’s yearly “50 Coolest Websites” list.

Despite all its apparent success, ZooZoom may have been progressive to a fault.

“Ten years ago was just too ridiculously far ahead,” McIntyre said. “It would be much nicer now to be starting with the enthusiasm of something new at a time when the market in the world is much more ready for it.”

It’s only now, a decade later, with print journalism being shaken at its foundation, that many magazines are transitioning to the web. McIntyre knew back then he may have been early to the conversion, but he was sure a shift would eventually occur. He wanted to be ready when it did.

“It’s a trifle egocentric—but the one thing I seem to have been able to do consistently is be slightly too far ahead of things,” McIntyre said.

He is no braggart. For McIntyre, art, like music and politics, reflects a collective consciousness. There are major events in the world that affect all of our opinions, and those who look forward from the reaction to these, he believes, will eventually come upon the same ideas.

Mike Hartley, a web designer for ZooZoom since 2004, says McIntyre is an artist with some futurism mixed in. Hartley thinks McIntyre’s unique ability stems from what he allows himself to see.

“His process seems to be about keeping his mind open and receiving,” Hartley said. “He sees things most people filter out.”

Futurism isn’t necessarily lucrative, though. At times, it has been difficult for McIntyre to sell his innovative work, only to see that style become a commercial norm just years later. McIntyre views our time as one of brand identity, where you find a style that brings you success and repeat it endlessly.

“But my level of boredom’s always been way too low for that kind of persistence,” he said.

Five years ago, he began photographing models on set, then building strikingly photo-realistic digital backgrounds on his computer for those shots. Looking back on the work, he calls it intensive (a month’s work for a day’s wage), beautiful and, again, ahead of its time. But now he’s noticing a similar style in some car advertisements, and suspects it will probably be, in a couple year’s time, the trend.

At that point, McIntyre will have moved on, seeking life’s next decisive moment. Already he is dabbling in video, developing ways to bring rich, stunning fashion movies to the web. It’s something he’s been planning since ZooZoom’s inception ten years ago, but the lack of bandwidth kept him from doing.

“I’ve never stopped fiddling, thinking, making stuff, watching, learning,” McIntyre said. “You know the kid who breaks the radio down? I’m still kind of doing that, deconstructing and trying to build up.”