Best of Manhattan 2001: Services

align="left"> Best Shoe Repair Continental Shoe Repair 2 Barclay St. (B’way) 349-6878

Sole Man. Some years ago, we attended a recital at Carnegie Hall. At the intermission, we strolled into the lobby. We passed a strikingly handsome, dignified older gentleman in black tie, knowledgeably discussing the performance with several people. We recognized Sal Iacone, who is as fine an artist in leather as the pianist was at the keyboard. In the seconds before he broke off his conversation to shake our hand, we realized he had been appraising the pianist as a fellow craftsman–for the integrity and skill shown in his work.

Sal is a professional shoemaker by birth as well as training, as he was raised in the family cobbler’s shop back in Italy. He began running the Continental Shoe Repair shop on Barclay St., directly across from the Woolworth Bldg., in 1977.

That is when we met him. We began working downtown around that time. We often wandered about the City Hall area, probably because we were fascinated by local history even then, and stumbled on Sal’s shop. We realized our black oxfords from Brooks Brothers needed new heels. We walked in. The air was rich with the scents of leathers and glues. A tall, kindly man with the unshakable dignity of a Roman senator stood behind the counter. We asked if he could fix our heels. He asked us to take off the shoes. He glanced at them, then his hands began examining them, the fingers pressing the soles and uppers, caressing the stitching and gluing. He looked up.

"You need new heels and taps on the heels and toes," he said. "You should also come back in another month or so, because the soles will wear out by then." Then he smiled. "You have good shoes," he said. "We can work with them."

Sal repairs most things made of leather, with the patience and skill born of art and love for one’s craft. He has been repairing our shoes and our briefcase–a gift from the unsinkable west-side activist Maggi Peyton–for nearly 24 years. We highly recommend him as an artist and an honest man.

We were last there before Sept. 11. The shop is west of Broadway, in the area that is still closed off by the police. Sal isn’t answering his telephone. We hope he is well and that he can reopen soon.

Best Mexican Cowboy Boots Zapateria Mexico 4505 5th Ave. (betw. 45th & 46th Sts.) Brooklyn, 718-851-4074 88-07 Roosevelt Ave. (88th St.) Queens, 718-899-1742

¡Viva Zapateria! The other day we were riding through Brooklyn in a car blasting corridos–those rollicking, accordion-driven, heartwarming tales of the greatest drug traffickers ever to cross the Mexico-U.S. border–and we thought, we need some gear to go with this tape. Zapateria Mexico is the place for fantastic cowboy boots with beautiful geometric, vaguely psychedelic embroidered patterns. Full-sized boots, half-height bootlets, high-heeled boots for the ladies, they’ve got them all. In good-looking leather, ostrich (or a convincing facsimile thereof) and, best of all, snakeskin. Regular ol’ snakeskin, and–the piece de resistance–snakeskin with the heads of the snakes still attached, one on each boot and another on the matching belt if you care to acquire it. If we ever walk into a bar and see someone wearing these snakeheads, much as we prefer live snakes, we’re gonna have to buy him or her a drink or two in salute.

Best Source of Guns ’n’ Ammo Vermont

And Let Slip the Woodchucks of War. What with Rudy probably leaving office and no credible replacement in sight, an underpaid police force and the impending release (from the federal prison system alone) of some 600,000 felons jailed during the Crack Wars, it might be time for the average law-abiding citizen to start thinking about a gun.

If you are filthy stinking rich and have friends in high places, you can get a carry permit in NYC with ease. Having none of those qualifiers, we prefer to do our shopping in Vermont. Guns are cheap and plentiful in the Green Mountain State, and all we had to do was bring the subject up in a bar to gain access to a wide variety of reliable weaponry, from the incomparable Mossberg shotgun line to some very fine concealed-carry handguns of various calibers. We aren’t recommending that anyone violate the law; however, should you be inclined to take personal responsibility for the well-being of yourself and your loved ones in the perilous times ahead, you’d be well advised to head for Vermont to make your purchase. The scenery’s very nice as well.

Best Neurosurgery NYU Medical Center 530 1st Ave. (32nd St.) 263-7300

We Can Still Think, Therefore We Are. We went to the eye doctor last January thinking we needed new glasses for the blurred vision and loss of color perception in one eye. We were wrong. The eye doctor was suspicious and sent us for an MRI. Turns out what we needed wasn’t glasses but brain surgery to fix the pituitary tumor that the MRI found. We made an appointment to see the brain surgeon at NYU. Before we went, we boned up on the pituitary and its possible ills. We learned that it’s the master gland, located right behind the eyeballs and that it hangs by a stalk from the base of the brain like a lightbulb from the ceiling. Its secretions tell the thyroid, adrenal glands and reproductive organs what hormones to make and how much. The pituitary’s a player–other organs return the pituitary’s phone calls right away. When there are "masses" on the gland, those masses don’t spontaneously dissolve, hence the brain surgeon.

The first thing you learn when talking to neurosurgeons is that they aren’t shy about telling you the nasty details of their work. Our guy pops the MRI pictures into his lightboard, looks them over and dives right into the problem.

There are two ways to approach a pituitary tumor, he says: endoscopic surgery or a craniotomy. The endoscopic approach requires only an overnight hospital stay and is generally painless and quick and wonderfully effective. Unfortunately, our mass, the size of a dime, is clinging to the stalk, and that location makes us ineligible for endoscopy. We’re getting the craniotomy. The surgeon then delivers the PowerPoint version of the procedure we would have a week later.

Craniotomies start with a 9-inch incision across the scalp, slicing from the top midpoint of the head down the right side to the front of the ear. Interestingly, they don’t shave your whole head for the procedure. Instead the surgeons cut a neat little path about half an inch wide through your hair. If you’re not bald, the hair will regrow to cover the scar. Once the incision is made, they peel back the scalp like the skin of a banana to expose the skull. Using a drill, they burr little holes in the skull. The doctors then take what looks like a piece of wire to saw through the skull plates, surgically connecting the dots. They remove a chunk of skull about the size of a small salad plate from the right side of the head.

With the brain now exposed, the surgeon cuts an X through the dura, the brain’s tough enclosing membrane, to get to the brain proper. They push the frontal lobe out of the way and literally lift the brain using brain retractors to get at the pituitary lying underneath. The surgical journey from first anesthesia to arrival at the pituitary takes about two and a half hours.

The pituitary lives in a crowded neighborhood. The bean-sized gland is situated in the optic chiasm, the place in the brain where the optic nerves cross. The optic chiasm is smack-dab close to the carotid arteries. And to make it even more challenging for the surgeon, the whole gridlocked area–pituitary, arteries, optic nerves–are all jammed into a playing field about one inch long. One false move with the knife could mean severed optic nerves or, worse, a nick in the carotid artery.

As he’s describing the surgery, he also provides a truth-in-advertising counterpoint of things that can go wrong. In addition to the surgical risks you would run with an ordinary nose job, there are some other brain-specific problems that can occur: strokes, blood clots, seizures, bleeding, infection, incomplete resection and more. The operation is 94 percent effective, he says, leaving a 6 percent chance of the unthinkably catastrophic to occur.

After about two hours of actual snipping and draining, the tumor is gone for good. They cauterize the bleeding and then douse the whole area with something to prevent seizures. After they’re sure their handiwork is secure, they back out. They put the brain back in place, reposition the frontal lobe, sew up the dura and bolt that chunk of skull back into place using titanium screws. The whole thing takes seven hours.

What you want in a brain surgeon–and what NYU’s team provides–is a guy who won’t get the yips and start banging into arteries or snipping optic nerves or poking your hippocampus with a scalpel. You also don’t want him fooling around with the parts of the brain that help you do things like walk, talk, eat, breathe and remember.

We had the actual surgery and everything went perfectly, due in no small part to the incredible nursing staff on the 12th floor Neurosurgery ICU. Recovery time is fairly slow inasmuch as one is coming back from a fractured skull and a scrambled personal chemistry. There were some headaches and insomnia but recovery was otherwise uneventful. And the eyesight? Blur is gone and we can see colors perfectly again.

As brain tumors go, this one went, thanks to the fine skills of the neurosurgical staff at the NYU Medical Center. If you’re planning on a brain tumor in the near future, don’t mess with second best. NYU is the place to go.

Best Place for Oxtails & Chickien M&F Fish & Meat Market, Inc., 240 Canal St. (Mulberry St.) 406-1945

Best Place to Buy a See-Through Wedding Dress Gaelyn Designs 155 E. 2nd St. (Ave. A) 614-6998

Here Comes the Groom! We’re getting married in a transparent, yellow-tinted, latex body glove that shows off everything from our tan lines to our waxed snatch. We want to feel like a warrior princess, we want to flaunt our shapely self and parade down the aisle past 350 guests with our breasts pressed against see-through rubber and our legs flashing under clear latex ruffles. And Gaelyn Designs is going to help us out–show us pictures of the see-through wedding dress they’ve made, talk to us about the one we want, and even let us try on latex pants and corsets when we stop by the shop. They’ll polish our rubber-clad body and whip a bicycle inner tube into a slick, clear gown in time for our big day. They’re so sweet and eager to please, we think if we ask nicely they might even throw in a neck corset and a bottle of body polish.

Best Venue for a Preteen Birthday Party Lazer Park 163 W. 46th St. (B’way) 398-3060, www.lazerpark.com

Wherever Children Go, We’ll Follow. We’ve been to a number of birthday parties at Lazer Park, including two for our own boys, and if the hi-tech gadgetry is beyond our ken, you ought to see the faces of the kids as they race from arcade games to simulated spaceship rides to the dark room where Lazer Tag campaigns are waged.

Read this description and tell us it won’t delight any boy or girl who hasn’t yet reached puberty: "Grab your Light Phasers, slip on your special body armor, and get ready to do battle in the world’s most incredible lazer tag arena. Up to 20 warriors per team stalk each other in a futuristic environment of mind-boggling mazes shrouded in fantastic fog swirls, darting lazer lights and the kind of adrenaline-rush music you need to keep blasting...and to keep you alive!"

After the kids have collected tickets from the games and cashed them in, after the Lazer Tag flight of imagination, a superb staff troops them into a private room for a meal–pizza, McDonald’s or other fast food of your choice–and then the birthday cake. It’s a two-hour escape from reality, for the kids as well as parents, where everyone’s smiling on their brother and getting together right now.

Yes, it’s a long way from pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, but if you accept that your children will never really get The Honeymooners (at least until they study the classic sitcom in college) and prefer Rocket Power or Sponge Bob, then Lazer Park’s the place to go.

Best Wine Store Deal Union Square Wines & Spirits 33 Union Square W. (betw. 16th &17th Sts.) 675-8100

Cheaper by the Dozen. That’s Our Excuse and We’re Sticking to It. Can we be real New York Press about this and air a complaint first? What is up with the rude, bored, barely-ESL chicks Union Square Wines hires to stand behind the checkout counter and give stupid face to its customers? Everybody else who works there, the proprietors et al., are so professional, so polite, so knowledgeable. Why do they have this terrible penchant for hiring ill-tempered, uneducated, gum-snapping girls to work the registers? Not to go all yuppistical and classist on you, but you go into a sort of upscale wine store like this, you spend some time trading snooty vintner names with the professionals, you come to the counter ready to drop some serious platinum... You don’t expect deli counter attitude, okay? It’s sooo a setup for a scene from American Psycho. Hire somebody nice, okay? Spend a dollar more an hour, and train them to be polite to the customer. Is it so much to ask?

Okay. Thanks for your attention. Here’s your award:

We buy wine at Union Square because we drink French whites and Italian reds and they’re good with both. Every wine shop in the world can do French whites, but it’s criminal how few, even in wopaholic New York City, know Italian reds. In a Socialist nation we’d require them all to acquire some sort of Italian Reds license before they’d be permitted to unlock the front door. At Union Square it’s not all just Chiantis and Brunellos, the choice is wide and excellent. They’re always coming up with great new finds, and delight in introducing them to their customers at very favorable prices. They keep the dearly priced old faves–the Brunellos, etc.–in stock as well. We wish they’d get a little more hip to rosato, but maybe that’s a matter of personal taste.

So we go, and we browse, and we fill up our cart with a dozen bottles. Never less. Because if you buy a case, Union Square delivers. And better still, they give you a 15 percent discount. That’s darn decent of them, and we’ll drink to that. Twelve times.

Best Overreaching by a Barbershop Dandie 100 Stanton St. (betw. Orchard & Ludlow Sts.) 598-4490

Tip Not Included. Dandie is a Stanton St. hair salon of recent vintage, the existence of which poses a kind of absurd relief to its immediate surroundings, like the grocery across the street where every morning a man in a white coat named Hector fastens pig carcasses to meat hooks and then stocks the shelves with Clamato Tomato Cocktail and Goya Potted Meat. While the tonsorial artistes who comprise Dandie’s staff are the sort of gaunt, sallow, slit-eyed, fauxhawk-sporting and in-need-of-a-scrubbing, proto-punk-fops-on-a-three-day-smack-jones one really wouldn’t care to have waving scissors or any other sharp-edged utensil in the region of one’s head, just two doors down there’s a Dominican barbershop named Tropical Unisex. At Tropical Unisex a quite excellent guy’s ’do, shaped exactly to order by a professional with more years of haircutting experience than the Dandie coiffeur has years living, costs $12.

So what is it, then, that sets the Dandie buzz apart from the Tropical Unisex buzz? Why an additional $75, of course.

Best Brooklyn Vet Animal Kind Veterinary Hospital 365 7th Ave. (betw. 10th & 11th Sts.) 718-832-3899

He Can Talk to the Animals. We’ve heard this from more than one person, and we’ve experienced it ourselves. The doctors and technicians at Animal Kind are miracle workers. In our case, we brought in a cat on the brink of death–and the staff there told us as much. They made no promises, they were very straightforward, they explained everything they were doing every step along the way. And at every step, they warned us that we could lose him at any time. It was that serious. And two weeks later, we brought that damn cat back home, where he’s still healthy and happy today, having made a full recovery.

It was something nobody expected to happen, but they did it anyway.

There are a lot of things that make Animal Kind different from most vets you’ll encounter in the city. The people are nice, and clearly love what they’re doing. They keep owners regularly updated on their pet’s condition. Most importantly, however, they allow you into the examination rooms with your pet–and encourage you to visit if your pet, God forbid, has to stay over.

We were in the ICU every day, and no one batted an eye. The people on staff knew us, knew the case, and helped out however they could. They realize how important things like that are, for the pet’s recovery as well as the owner’s sanity.

Most everyone we know has a horror story to tell about mistreatment at the hands of a vet–but for all the time we spent at Animal Kind, and all the people we know who go there, we’ve heard nothing but warm praise. That in itself is amazing.

No, they can’t save every single animal that comes in, nor can they keep Fang alive forever. But what they can do is make the worst hours of a pet owner’s life as peaceful and comforting as possible.

Best Italian Food Products Russo’s Mozzarella & Pasta 363 7th Ave. (betw. 10th & 11th Sts.) Brooklyn, 718-369-2874

Mozzarella Story. Used to be a copy shop occupying this South Slope space, wherein you could find a couple of aging beatniks, who on occasion were known to busy themselves with a desultory variety of labor, amidst a perpetual atmospheric sepia tobacco haze. Their dingy copy joint was an appropriate landmark for an as-yet unredeemed neighborhood. That is, 7th Ave. on the other side of 9th St., back then still a district of shabby tenements, oozing diners and Fenians in undershirts.

Well, the neighborhood’s changed over the last couple years, hasn’t it? Half a decade and a whole new world, and dig the wine shops, the good restaurants, the boutiques. In fact, if the Fed wanted to study the circulation through the economy of overpriced baby-t’s, hipster jeans, two-years-out-of-Wellesley-and-we’re-still-bohemian babydoll dresses or curios from precious emporia, it would do well to send its economists here.

And when they show up, they might well find us in Russo’s, which moved into the old copy-shop premises a couple years back, to the delight of locals. Yessir. It would be hard to overestimate the quality of the stuff the guys at this little establishment first make, and then sell: pastas that they churn out all day in the back room (try, especially, the lemon-pepper variety) and in which you can taste that eggy freshness that characterizes the best noodles; flavorful sauces (the puttanesca rules); newly stuffed sausages that look vital and clean; and huge balls of meltingly new mozzarella, which undulate in their bins under the counter glass, pure and white as Alaska.

There is, as hippies have always insisted, something reassuring about knowing who’s making your food, and where they’re making it. Much of ours these days is made by the guys who hang out behind the counter at Russo’s, and we’re not complaining.

Bonus: Russo’s sells bottles of San Pellegrino water for a mere $1.49. That’s a steal, chump. Who says Brooklyn isn’t still a bargain?

Best Way to get a Private Girls’ School Student to Serve Hors d’Oeuvres at your Next Party The Barnard Bartending Agency 854-4650

College Kids Who Really Know How to Party. Cross-breeding New York chic with Northampton political savvy, the ladies of Barnard may already seem the perfect addition to your next party. But, in the spirit of female entrepreneurship, many of them are available to serve your guests as well. The student-managed and -staffed Barnard Bartending Agency charges $18 dollars an hour, $20-$25 for holidays, plus cab fare home. These bartenders arrive at your home wearing bowties, will help prepare appetizers, serve beer and wash dishes. They are, of course, trained to make martinis, are informed about wines and know which sides to pour and clear from, too.

Best Travel Agent Kadesh Travel 908-754-4449; e-mail: Info@kadeshtravel.com

Smart Planning. We’re not afraid to fly.

We don’t mind getting to airline terminals earlier.

We have mild sympathy for the pacifists who’re singing "Where Have All the Skycaps Gone?"

We believe that major U.S. airports have been too lax in security standards for years. It’s similar to–although far more dangerous than–voting precincts on Election Day: Why do you think political corruption is more rampant in urban areas? Because of the volume of citizens, as well as a lackadaisical workforce. That’s why people we know were able to vote for Al Gore three times in New York City last year. Similarly, while in Caribbean airports, say, each ticketed passenger is thoroughly looked over, at Newark, JFK, O’Hare, Logan and LAX, just to name a few, it’s relatively easy to get anything on board the plane, and customs–as long as you’re relatively sober and take off the shades–is a joke.

Like most Americans, we’ll be happy to undergo stringent scrutiny if that’ll prevent murderers from sitting across the aisle from us on a f