The Magnolia is no Garden of Eden

It may look like a garden, but its really more of a snake pit.  Its not the paper thin walls, or the windows that have been painted over so many times that they will never open, or the termites, or the weird (unwritten) rules, or the obsolete electrical system, or the baroque legacy gas system where you are as likely to be paying for your neighbor's utilities as your own.  Its not the suicides of which there have been two in recent years.  Its the people.  The smile to your face, stab you in the back people that is the problem here.  The emotionally-challenged woman who thinks that every man lusts for her calves and complains about invasion of privacy when no such thing has occurred.  Or the neighbor who sang Joni Mitchell  songs at night whenever she got drunk (which was every night) but complained to management that I used the telephone.  I didnt appreciate it when Management threw her out with 3 days notice, I think that she deserved more compassion than that, even if she had stabbed me in the back.  But by far the worse part of this was the new landlady, one of those who is scared of computers and doesnt know much about them, and is willing to say the most appalling things in writing apparently too stupid to realize that she was letting both herself and the Magnolia in for an astonishing lawsuit that they would lose, if I did lawsuits, which I dont.  And neither does my patron, whose guest I was.  And so, may I advise you, dear reader, if you are considering the Magnolia to save yourself some trouble and go elsewhere.  Life is too short.

The Move Continues and the State Fails

draft

I will talk to a lawyer in a week to understand my rights in this situation.  This unexpected and incredibly destructive and stress inducing move.  My guess is that while I could prolong this situation, I probably dont need to so I probably won't.  But it might be fun to understand the rules and throw these people a fuck because they sure deserve it.

I have written a letter explaining why the libel they said about me is wrong and encourage them to do better in the future. I will deliver it right before or after I move.

My patron has graciously extended a benefit which will allow me to live in the area, see and complete the procedures with the dentist in Westlake Village, and pursue in a modest way the UCSB thing.

The state has failed to protect the people so what are they good for?

The Story of Columbia University's Second Campus

So I am going to tell you a New York real estate story, the story of Columbia University's second campus. Their current location is their third campus.

Columbia University has been around since 1754, in other words, before the American Revolution. It is a recent college by the standards of a Virginian or a European, but it is still venerable.

It was originally located down by Wall Street, the street named for the wall they built to keep the Native Americans out. That's right they built a wall, and south of that wall was "civilization". How ironic given the pestilent sore of moral depravity that Wall Street represents to the world today! Back then, there was a lot of open country, a lot of farms, and no skyscrapers. But it started getting crowded, people were building the area up, so they decided to move out of there and bought a second campus somewhere around what we call today midtown, and sold their first campus.

After a while, they realized that they had made a mistake. They should have kept their first campus as a long term real estate investment and merely leased it out to others as Wall Street real estate was proving to be a good investment. So, when, years later, midtown was also getting crowded and they started looking for a new campus, they remembered this lesson. This time they leased their old campus and moved to their new location, the location they have now, in Morningside Heights.

So the question you are supposed to be asking yourself, is where in midtown the second Columbia campus was located and what is it called today.

The second campus was Rockefeller Center.

When I heard this, I realized that I had been told this long ago, but had not understood what I had been told. I remember reading that when the Japanese bought Rockefeller Center that what they had actually bought was the buildings not the land. The buildings themselves had been built on land owned by the Columbia trust on a 99 year lease said the article in the NY Times.

Now Columbia is one of those old American names filled with Symbolism and doesn't necessarily refer to Columbia University.  We used to call everything Columbia. The Statue of Liberty is called Columbia. So I thought nothing of it, and just assumed it was the name of an old financial institution or something like that. But no, when they said Columbia Trust, what they meant was the Trust for Columbia University.

The moral of the story is that educational institutions are well positioned to benefit from long term real estate investments in the cities where they reside. For two other examples, check out the history of the real estate investments of Harvard and Stanford.

Wikipedia page for Columbia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_University