GET LOST!--A New York Tour Guide's Guide to New York #13

13. TIPPING

One of the reasons I thought of this as something worthy of discussion at all is that I happen to be in an industry that leaves people unsure as to whether or not I should be tipped. I'm continually asked whether or not I'm salaried, which I am, though not particularly exorbitantly. Some people in similar positions typically are not, especially museum docents. Let it be said that everyone loves a tip. It's extra dollars in our pockets. Every little bit helps, as they say.

Please don't ask the question "do you/ can you accept a tip/ gratuity?" This puts the recipient in a somewhat awkward position. No one honestly wants to answer "no" to that question, but they may be encouraged to do so by their employer. While most employers will condemn soliciting them, most smart ones won't forbid the accepting of tips, realizing a gesture that could read as "your money's not good enough for me" is not necessarily good for business. Answering to that question, "yes, please, I gladly accept tips!" feels tacky and greedy. If you feel the person deserves a tip, just put the money in their hand and don't take "no" for an answer. 

Be aware that a very small tip can be more insulting than none at all. Not tipping (outside of restaurants) suggests you didn't realize it was customary or just didn't think of it. A small one says you felt obligated to tip but you didn't really think the person did a very good job. This can cause embarrassing situations, as well, if you happen to be someplace rather snooty. I once heard a story about a waiter at a very upscale restaurant chasing down a patron to return an insultingly meager tip. He said at some volume, "here, you obviously need this money more than I do," and gave the money back.

Customs about tipping are pretty much different everywhere you go in the world. In an attempt to take the guesswork out of it here, I've come up with this basic rule of thumb: Tip those quality employees who provide a personalized service for you, but who will not receive any kind of commission from their employer for doing a good job. Conveniently, this rule includes my job in the description, but I still think it's a fair one.

For one example, restaurant wait staff are paid considerably less than they might otherwise be, in anticipation that they're working primarily for their tips. In this case, the tip is much like a commission for a job well done. In other words, unlike a retail store employee who can encourage or discourage a sale, a waiter's performance has little bearing on whether or not you'll be purchasing food once you've sat down in a restaurant. That's pretty much a given.

I'll also take this opportunity to weigh in on the low-class individuals who "don't believe in" tipping restaurant wait staff. When you sit down at a table in a restaurant, you are entering into a social contract, the same as everyone else, and the tip is a part of that contract. If you don't want to tip, then eat at a fast food place. Whether or not you "agree with" the practice of paying waitstaff lower salaries in anticipation of tips is beyond irrelevant. That's how it works. By not tipping, you are sabotaging the system for the rest of us. Let me be clear, a zero-dollar tip at a restaurant is not zero dollars for the waiter. That's negative ten percent, and you're now quite literally stealing from that person's paycheck. An eight- to ten-percent tip is around zero. Fifteen percent is normal good service. Twenty or above is truly exceptional service.

On the other side of this are the people who feel guilty for tipping a waiter anything less than fifteen percent, regardless of how miserable the service was. Maybe surprisingly, I do condone tipping lower when it is legitimately justified because of an opinion I once heard. It's that if the person in question is truly that bad at their job, then they really ought to find another line of work. If it's the only work they can get, then they ought to take their job performance more seriously. I believe that's true. And if the person is great, then they'll get that twenty percent from me, no question.

Another thing I'd recommend watching out for, if you're traveling with a lot of people, is the compulsory fifteen percent automatically added to the bill for large parties. I once had dinner with a relatively large group of people at a restaurant in San Francisco. I had never in my life had a waiter more incompetent than this woman. She forgot my order not once, but twice, everyone but me was served, then my food arrived about ten minutes later, and a few other things that I have chosen to block out of my memory. But her entirely unearned tip was already added, so she could let her performance slide, and I had no recourse. It might be to sit everyone at one enormous table if you're celebrating a special occasion. But if practical, I recommend breaking up into tables of four or five people so your server has a real incentive to serve you properly.

With a clothing store employee, if they do a good job, it may mean the difference between a sale or not. Granted, not all clothing stores award commissions to their salespeople, but that would be the rationale behind not tipping them in the parameters of my rule, despite the fact that their service can sometimes be personalized. Usually it wouldn't be. Furthermore, a nosey, pushy retail store employee can actually be more annoying than helpful.

The personalized aspect is explained well by taxi drivers and hotel bellhops and room service staff. Bellhops don't make a ton of money, either, but they are paid for their work. What they do for you, however, carrying your luggage to your room, is about as personalized as it gets. So they are tipped, though not as much as a waiter. The service of a hotel concierge can be extremely personal, but their "commissions" come in the form of innumerable perks like free dinners at the best table at every five-star restaurant in town (that's hyperbole, but you might be surprised).

Museum docents are a strange breed. I've never seen anyone tip them, although I'm sure it does happen. I'd say they mostly fall into three categories of people. Some are museum curators making gobs of money already, anyway. Others are college student interns, the benefits for whom are educational, not monetary. The third are rich old ladies with time to spare who volunteer for these positions and probably don't need an extra five dollars. What docents do is also not very personalized. Any personal relationship between docents and their audiences can only very rarely develop, simply because of the nature of the environment. An exception to this that I might foresee would be, for example, a docent addressing a group of adults on their level who makes a concerted effort to also engage a small child there with his or her parent in a way that's appropriate to the child's age. That shows personalized attention and is worthy of recognition.

If I'm to be honest about my own position as a tour guide, I'd say I'm tipped by about a third of my guests, on average about five to ten dollars at a time. The least I've been tipped was maybe two dollars, the most from one person I think was forty. That was a good day. According to a lot of people I meet, I really am the best tour guide in New York XD, and I go out of my way to personalize what I do, so I may be tipped more than most. But if your group is twenty or thirty people, I'd suggest everyone who enjoyed themselves just give one dollar toward a tip. A single dollar is meager compared to the admission fees for most things in the city. If only five people enjoyed the experience, that's a five-dollar tip, which is not terrible. Everyone? That's a thirty-dollar tip, and most people would be extremely grateful for that. A tour director who rides with you on a chartered bus and spends the majority of your trip helping your group should be tipped relatively generously, I'd say somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty dollars for each day spent with you.

However much you decide to tip someone outside of a restaurant--where the tipping percentages are more or less standardized--the best compliment you can give a person is using small bills. A tip of a twenty-dollar bill is wonderful, but that could either mean you thought they deserved twenty dollars, or that you thought they deserved something, and a twenty was the smallest bill you had on you. A ten and two fives, on the other hand, says five was not enough, ten was not enough, fifteen was not enough. No, this person deserved a twenty-dollar tip and nothing less. Even better than this was something that happened to me a couple of weeks ago. A couple had no cash, or not enough cash on them. They literally went to an ATM machine and came back to tip me. I could not have been more flattered.

©2013, Ryan Witte

14. Shopping

VillaWitte #4--Entertaining

Next are the main entertainment rooms. The Dining Room can be accessed down the stairs in either direction, but it's through the glass double doors directly across the Atrium when you enter the front door.

First sight of what you see when you go through those doors I hope will take visitors' breath away. The room itself, beyond that the back deck with its brass railing, and then...the sun setting over the Hudson River beyond that and off to the right. The house should be oriented so that the Dining Room faces due south.


Here's a view from the deck. The whole south wall is entirely glazed. 

In a nod to one of my favorite architects, John Lautner, those are sliding doors. So the glass wall can disappear almost completely, opening up the whole room to the outside. The ceiling curves upward to amplify that openness and is painted sky blue. The walls are bookmatched black marble.


Across the deck is a built-in grill with a water basin for outdoor dining. I'll return to this later from the roof. The Kitchen is reached through a hidden door. The slabs of marble on the wall are cut and arranged based on the location of this door to keep it perfectly invisible. All the slabs will have a small incised piece cut out to correspond to the location of the handle on the slab hiding the door. The hidden door into the Office on the opposite side is treated the same way. As I'll point out when I discuss the Kitchen, there is a way to also cut an opening into the Dining Room directly from the kitchen counter which would make serving food even easier.

It becomes fairly obvious here that I included no light fixtures or furniture. Likely most of it would be store-bought anyway, but it also would have been terribly time consuming to create that many light fixtures from scratch.

The Powder Room is a black marble cylinder in between the Dining Room and Living Room. Although it can also be easily accessed from the Atrium, I saw no reason why there shouldn't be access to it directly from the room where you're consuming the food in the first place. Probably a small measure of soundproofing would be prudent, but if we're talking about the sonic privacy of guests, presumably there would be music playing and plenty of other background noise if there were a dinner party in progress.

Since, after dinner, guests will "retire" to it, the Living Room is at a lower level than the Dining Room. Instead of stairs, the floor slopes down to it. This was one case where Sketch-Up's awkward handling of curvaceous shapes worked to my advantage. In order to accommodate this slope in the white marble, I want to find a section of old marble that has cracked into pieces naturally due to old age (but isn't from a site with historical importance, of course). Then, these naturally cracked pieces will be fit back into place like a mosaic and installed like the rest of the flooring. It might be interesting to find the shattered marble first and then match the rest of it in the house by acquiring new marble from the same quarry, if possible. While the rendering isn't random like cracked marble, it doesn't look too far off from what I'd envisioned. The marble on the slope might be left slightly less polished to counteract slippage.

The water from the pool in the center of the Atrium falls down through channels in the floor and continues through the Powder Room--since this is a "wet" room. Some sections of the channels might need to be covered with glass, but I'm not convinced it would be necessary.

From there it pours from a brass spout into another pool in the Living Room.

It continues along an irregular channel where the cracked marble pieces are split apart, which should make the flowing water more dynamic and might also produce a lovely sound. It spills into a third pool at the glass wall, where the water feeds plantings through perspiring pipes again. Other than the ivy in the Atrium, I'd love all the plants in the house to be "functional." That is to say, that every single species would be flowering, fragrant, edible, repellent to insects, carniverous, or a combination of the above. It'd be especially cool to get a pitcher plant in there, but who knows how difficult they are to keep alive in this climate. Half of this pool is indoors, the other half outside. Probably this will require a valve between the two and/ or a method to heat it slightly when it freezes.

The water from here is pumped back up to the Atrium ceiling or continues out to the edge of the deck and spills over on its way to the Hudson. It would be nice to connect this to existing rain water runoff paths. I see no problem with creating a few new ones, as long as they're not very large, to watch how the house sculpts the land in a natural sort of way using flowing water. I predict family pets will love having fresh cool rainwater to drink whenever they like. I'll address sanitary concerns in a later post.

Another thing that can't be seen here deserves some explanation. I love fireplaces. I always thought the fireplace in Charles Foster Kane's mansion was awesome. It was so huge that it was practically the size of a small room that you could walk into. This led me to question why, if handled properly, an indoor fire would necessarily need to be enclosed at all. Certainly primitive humans didn't enclose their fires, although they were mostly likely constantly burning their homes down to the ground. I've also always loved the idea of an open fire in the center of the room (better for exploiting the heat it produces anyway), with a canopy suspended from the ceiling to deal with the smoke, which for some reason I associate with panthers and ski lodges. It means the central fire can be enjoyed from both adjacent rooms simultaneously.

Newer technology has made the hearth obsolete along with a lot of other things, unless you consider the symbolism of it. I suspect all but the most corny of traditionalist families actually do sit around a roaring fireplace singing songs, telling stories, and roasting marshmallows on frosty winter nights anymore. The technology I'm talking about was pioneered by EcoSmart Fire. The fuel their products burn is renewable bioethanol, which produces practically no pollutants or fumes whatsoever. In fact, they say that if the room is relatively large, it doesn't even require any special measures for ventilation.

Surrounding the irregular channel of water, where small pieces of cracked marble are left missing, there will be clusters of these burners creating a sort of invisible fireplace. At the press of a button, that whole section of floor at the center of the room will just sort of be, well...burning. The larger slabs of marble surrounding the burners will be touch sensitive so that whenever someone approaches, it will automatically shut down the fire. Some solution will need to be found to prevent the floor surface from becoming dangerously hot, perhaps by having the burners rise up out of it, but interestingly, the flowing water might be useful for this, also.

The television is mounted into the wall with a marble slab that will pop out and slide out of the way when it's turned on. Special prize for anyone who knows who that is and in what movie (there isn't really a prize). The full width of this wall and the black marble wall of the Dining Room will be backed with the invisible speakers I discussed a while back. The walls themselves will be the speakers, immersing the whole space in a complete sound environment. I'd love for the Dining Room wall to be the left channel and the Living Room the right, but this would need to be switched around for viewing movies. Surround sound would be spectacular.

The Living Room is the one place where I specifically intend to design custom furniture, because it's part of the concept of the room and the house in general. The seating will be deeply cushioned chairs with backs. They'll support well but be soft enough that you just sink down into them. One arm will swivel around to the back, the other will swivel up and over to the back. All of them will be on heavy, smooth, industrial hospital gurney wheels with brakes. Any configuration of couches, loveseats, or individual armchairs could be created just by rolling them around and sticking them together with magnets in their bases. They could also be very easily rolled out onto the back deck.

The tables will be on wheels, as well, with scissored legs allowing them to change height. There will be a few smaller tables strewn around which could be attached to one another to form larger surfaces. It's the coffee table, however, which will truly be the heart of this room. It will also be on wheels with scissored legs and will appear to be a plain, glossy black table, about six feet long by three feet deep, and somewhat thick like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. As I sort of hinted earlier, when activated, the top surface becomes a touch-screen computer interface that controls everything that goes on in the room and some other parts of the house. All sound and video, lighting, climate, water, fires, everything can be controlled on this table. It will also bring up the image of the turntables and mixer that disappeared from the study. By sliding your fingers across its surface, you can flip through digitally-stored music files, slide them over to put them on the virtual turntables, and mix them as if they were vinyl records. If I wanted to get really fancy, I could say that at the end of the night, you touch a "recharge" button, and it will automatically roll itself back over to its charging station against the wall.

The overhang of the second story above here is calculated for this latitude so that sunlight at noon will only shine inside the house during the colder winter months. During the summer it will stop just short of the glass doors. On winter evenings, this room should be completely saturated in golden sunlight. The overhang should also mean that the sliding glass doors should be able to be left at least halfway open even during a rainstorm, arguably the best time to have free ventilation on a hot summer day. A stair from the back deck takes you southwest down to the riverbank and maybe a dock? Maybe I should design a matching houseboat next.

©2013, Ryan Witte

GET LOST: A New York Tour Guide's Guide to New York #12g

12g. TRANSPORTATION--BICYCLES & BOATS

There are plenty of places to rent bicycles, especially near Central Park. I was shocked to learn how cheap they can be. You might need to leave a credit card or identification behind for collateral, but it shouldn't be much more than about ten dollars an hour. I don't recommend this as solely a means of transportation, unless you're very used to riding a bike in a large city. Even if you are, it can be extremely dangerous. We have gotten many miles of new bike lanes recently, but we're not yet at a point where motor vehicles and self-propelled ones can move together in complete harmony. For seeing the park, however, this is a fantastic idea.

A couple of times I spotted people rolling around on a conference bike. Either they were unpopular, deadly, illegal, or all of the above. I have no idea, but I really hope they retired them because they're absolutely idiotic on the streets of Manhattan.

Another self-propelled mode of transportation worth mentioning is rowboats. Getting a rowboat in Central Park with two or three friends is very inexpensive and a boatload of fun. [Ugh, that was so awful, sorry.] You can keep them out on the water as long as you want (for a fee), but this means that sometimes there can be a queue of people waiting for boats. Before you enter the park, stock up on wine and cheese or beer and sandwiches, just not so much that you fall out of the boat. Surrounding the park are some of the most exquisitely beautiful (and expensive), turn-of-the-century high-rise apartment buildings in the world, and from the lake is one of the best places to see them.

Although it's very much off the beaten path compared to most of what I'm discussing in these posts, I wanted to mention the kayaks because I just think it's so cool. The Long Island City Boathouse gives out free kayaks in the summer months at high-tide that you can paddle out into the East River. For visitors who may be more active and adventurous but are on a tight budget, I think it's fantastic that they're doing it. I haven't taken advantage of it, myself. I prefer canoes to something that can flip over so easily. I may very well talk myself into doing it one of these summers.

©2013, Ryan Witte
 
13. Tipping