We missed this interesting New York Times item from late last year.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s push to increase development in east Midtown would threaten some of the very buildings that give the neighborhood its character, preservation groups and community boards warn.

The buildings include the Barclay Hotel, the Yale Club, Brooks Brothers flagship store and the Graybar Building, which many New Yorkers may think — incorrectly — are protected as landmarks already.

The proposal is intended to provide a legacy of the Bloomberg administration by ensuring that the area around Grand Central Terminal stays on a competitive footing with business centers worldwide. It would increase the maximum allowable building density by 60 percent for some large sites near the terminal. Potential density would be increased 44 percent along an 11-block stretch of Park Avenue. Lesser increases would take effect elsewhere in the area between East 39th and East 57th Streets and between Fifth and Second Avenues, although most of the easternmost residential blocks would not be affected.

Such increases in density — meaning higher potential profits for landlords down the road — would give builders an incentive to spend the time and money needed to assemble large development parcels and then empty and demolish the buildings on them.

Hat tip to Stephen Frankel.

The Vanderbilt Avenue entrance to what used to be a respectable gentleman’s club.

The Yale Club of New York City (Bad idea!) resorted to a membership survey to determine whether the club’s perfectly proper and conventional dress code ought to relaxed.

60% (shudder!) favored relaxing the code, and rather than driving up to New Haven to shoot the people in charge of Yale’s admissions office, the powers that be at the Yale Club reached what our Bolshevik-edited alumni magazine describes as “a Solomonic decision.” (Just imagine what these guys would have said about Chamberlain at Munich!)

In a growing list of work environments and industries, denim has become an accepted and popular addition to sartorial correctness. The Club’s ban on denim in all areas, except the athletic and guest room floors, denies many members the ability to either have a meal or a drink in the Clubhouse. Accordingly, we will now allow denim – neat, clean and in good repair – to be worn on the roof this summer, on the library floor at all times, and in the Grill Room on weekends .

The dress code in the Main Lounge, Tap Room and other areas of the Club will remain business casual.

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Caty Weaver, at Gawker, was deservedly abusive.

In a stunt so preposterous it could only have been dreamed up by a Harvard man, the Yale Club of New York City announced earlier this summer it would permit members to wear the rough twill fabric of Nîmes in select areas of the Clubhouse at certain times.

Yale, which, no offense, is literally a third-rate vocational-technical school that only offers night classes, is frequently ranked among the top universities in the country due to a long-standing clerical error.

At one time it served as a finishing school for America’s elite. In recent decades it has fallen into favor with the kind of people who would be seen in denim out-of-doors on the Sabbath.

Previously, the Yale Club observed a ban on denim in all areas with the exception of athletic and guest room floors. However, recently plain-faced Yalies with calloused hands and backwoods manners had begun grunting about their desire to wear tuxedos of the Canadian variety. To have shirtless wrestling matches in the middle of the club’s fine dining room. To turn cocktail hour into some kind of stockinged feet hootenanny.

Accordingly, the lord of the club, Mr. Yale himself, released a survey to members attempting to gauge how far they were willing to debase themselves.

The results were Fucking. Horrifying.

Over half the respondents reported a desire to wear jeans and probably bikini tops and bedroom slippers that look like cushy oversized sneakers all the time, including in bed and in the shower. Meanwhile, a mere 40 percent of respondents felt it should be legal to shoot and kill a person wearing denim on sight. …

Thankfully, the non-brothel areas of the Club will remain business-casual.

In the dog-bites-man department, famous conservative legal scholar Robert Bork is contributing to the contemporary flood of tort litigation.

The New York Times quotes from the text of Judge Bork’s complaint:

(On) “the evening of June 6, 2006,” …The New Criterion magazine held an event at the Yale Club in honor of Hilton Kramer, the magazine’s co-founder. Mr. Bork, a contributor to the magazine, was among those invited to deliver remarks.

The event was held in a banquet room, the suit explains, where the club’s staff had erected a dais atop which a lectern had been placed for the speakers. It is the Yale Club’s “normal practice,” the suit contends, to provide a set of stairs so that the speakers may ascend easily to their appointed perch.

“At the New Criterion event, however, the Yale Club failed to provide any steps between the floor and dais,” the suit claims. “Nor did the Yale Club provide a handrail or any other reasonable feature to assist guests attempting to climb to the dais.”

Mr. Bork fell backward while ascending the dais, striking his left leg on the side of the dais and bumping his head, the suit claims. As a result of the fall, a hematoma formed on his leg and later burst. The injury required surgery, extended medical treatment and months of physical therapy, the suit contends.

“Mr. Bork suffered excruciating pain as a result of this injury,” according to the suit, “and was largely immobile during the months in which he received physical therapy.” Not only was he forced to use a cane, the suit maintains, but he also still walks with a limp.

How many 80 year olds normally limp or need to a cane, after all?

I can see how it could easily be difficult for a senior citizen to mount a tall platform without the assistance of some steps and something to hold onto, and whoever set up the room was doubtless inconsiderate of the aged. But service requests are typically quickly honored at the Yale Club.

If the room arranger lacked foresight about those missing steps, so too did Judge Bork, who could easily have beckoned a Yale Club waiter and demanded some portable steps and a handrail be provided.