Meatpackers & Meat

VANISHING


meatpackers with bloody aprons vanish under luxe towers

Visiting the Meatpacking District, I skipped Pastis and ate some fresh meat at Hector's, where the burger is bought twice a day from local packers. Hector's has been tucked under the High Line for more than 20 years, the owner (whose name is not Hector) told me, but the building has been a restaurant for close to 100. They used to serve a crowd of meatpackers, but the meat guys are vanishing. Now the place is filled with construction workers, all of them laboring to wipe out the meatpackers, replacing their plants with luxury high-rises. When the building is done and the meat guys and construction workers have gone, who's going to eat Hector's burgers deluxe and piles of roast beef?



This area has been the site of overwhelming, lightning-fast, preposterous change. The punks, leather-daddies, and transgender hookers have all been swept away. Not everyone is happy about it. Chelsea Now reported that residents of the area are sick of the “Gaggles of drunk girls in those heels,” and being "overrun by screaming, drunken children all night long." The tranny hookers provided protection and camaraderie to a once-quiet neighborhood where now it's every screaming girl and boy for themselves.

What else, besides meatpackers and sexual outlaws, is being lost in the destruction of this neighborhood? Heaps and heaps of exposed meat. Why is this a loss we should mourn?



Because when you walk past a bucket of meat, buzzing with flies, when you breathe in the stink of death--a biting, visceral odor that lingers in your nose for the rest of the day--when your shoes slide across cobblestones slick with blood and liquified fat, it feels real. It feels real because it is real. And it reminds you of your own meatiness, your own mortality. It reminds you that you are human and not a glittering piece of plastic. You are vulnerable and won't last forever.

These are important facts to be reminded of, but they are being bulldozed under the sleek glass and steel of hubris, under oblivious spiked heels, under the precious perfume that the new boutiques furiously pump out from their front doors, trying frantically to cover up the pervasive stink of a reality their customers cannot bear to face.


the face of hubris

more meatpacking pics on my flickr

Like Pigs in Shit

Balazs hotel rises over buckets of bloody, rotting meat

When did the affluent become attracted to shitty locations? It used to be that a neighborhood was safe from luxury development if it had (a) crazy, drunk homeless people, (b) housing projects, (c) undesirable tunnel, bridge, or expressway traffic, or (d) an all-pervasive bad smell.

A VanishingNY reader sent in this satire from the Onion, which I think is poking a bit of fun, but does beg the question: When and why did the wealthy start desiring to live, work, and play in the city's most undesirable locations?

A glassy undulation is coming to the malodorous Gowanus [Gowanus Lounge], Balazs' Standard Hotel squats over buckets of bloody offal in the Meatpacking District [my flickr] [NYMag], and in the midst of Holland Tunnel onramp traffic sprouts the Zinc Building [my flickr] [Curbed].


Fashion model and photogs saunter past buckets of melting animal fat

Keeping in mind that the people attracted to these places are Yunnies, here's another thing about malignant narcissists and sociopaths: They believe they are omnipotent. Sheathed in an armor of dissociation and entitlement, they feel impenetrable. In their obliviousness, they hear, see, and smell no evil--least of all their own. And they view themselves as the ultimate winners.

When the Diane von Furstenberg store opened recently in the now super-chic Meatpacking District, abutting a packing plant that hauls giant buckets of bloody, fly-buzzed offal to the body-fluid-slick sidewalk each day, I am sure that the DVF people just figured the meat would be gone in no time. Meanwhile, just pretend the air doesn't stink of rotting death. And they'll be proven right. Because they are the winners.


DVF Store (with Bentley in garage) abuts fetid, blood-smeared packing plant

In the end, they will win the entire city--not just Manhattan--they're coming for Brooklyn every day, they're coming for Queens, they've renamed the South Bronx trendy "SoBro." So if you think you're safe in your borough, with all the lovely diversity and crappy smells, think again. In five years, your neighborhood will be vanishing, just like mine is now.

Manhattan is the dead canary in the coal mine of our city. The tunnels stretch for miles and we're all trapped inside together.

Hilly Kristal of CBGB's

VANISHED


tonight i passed by this spontaneous memorial at the shuttered CBGB's

CBGB's founder Hilly Kristal has passed on to rock heaven. (Read his last interview.) According to AM New York, the East Village is quickly following him to his grave:

"When owner Hilly Kristal opened the club in 1973, his rent was about $600 per month.... By 2004, Kristal was paying $19,000 a month. Last year his landlord...evicted Kristal and raised the rent to $65,000 a month.

'The Bowery is what the Meatpacking District was three years ago,' [the broker] said. 'With the opening of new retail tenants in [nearby] Avalon Bay, the level of luxury is getting very high. Within the next six months to year, the neighborhood will look more like [the West Village.] Within two years you'll see that almost all the retail businesses there will have changed.'"

10th Street Gallery Buildings

VANISHING?

Some very scary news--or, hopefully, "wildly unconfirmed rumor mongering," from Curbed: The low-rise buildings at 90, 86, and 84 East 10th are being bought by a developer to be razed for big-box construction.

That block of buildings between Third and Fourth Avenues was the epicenter of the Abstract Expressionist movement in the 1950s. Willem DeKooning lived and painted where the Jillery gift shop is now. Franz Kline was there. The block was filled with avant-garde galleries like the Tanager (now Danal restaurant). Is this another piece of the East Village's soul being demolished for condos and Starbucks?


DeKooning by Fred McDarrah

Dick's Bar

VANISHED: July 2007



Made a visit to Dick's the other day on my personal tour of the MTA's list of doomed buildings, slated to be snatched by eminent domain so the new Second Avenue subway line can cart all the yupsters from their condos on the Lower East Side to their parents' townhouses on the Upper East. (Better check your own address.)

Dick's shutter is down and it's down for good, according to a tip from Eater, and the phone's been disconnected.


Photo from New York Magazine

I guess that's it for Dick's, a good old gay dive bar, described by New York Magazine thusly: "With its concept-free amalgam of bar, pool table, jukebox and pinball machine, Dick's is to most East Village gay bars what Edith Piaf is to Cher."

Gawker asks: Which EV institution is the next bank branch? I gotta vote for Dick's. Our only consolation is the knowledge that whatever bank, Starbucks, or trendy eatery takes its place will ultimately fall to the Second Ave subway.

Porn, Pics, Domino Sugar

Take a tour of 8th Avenue's porn shops before there's nothing left to see [Forgotten NY]

See NYC pre-1996, before it all started going to hell, in the Midtown Y photo gallery show -- includes the work of Peter Hujar who captured the meatpacking district when it still packed meat, not fashion models, and the East Village when (in the words of Gary Indiana) "it still had the narcoleptic desuetude of downtown Detroit" [NYPL]

Take a surprising look at NYC from on high [kottke]

Read about the nuptial love between two anti-Atlantic Yards activists -- the Voice reports and No Land Grab sets the record straight

Curbed calls the hopeful plan to turn the Domino Sugar plant into an art museum a "pipe dream" and I have to agree -- it's not a bad dream, but the condos will always win in the new New York [Domino Sugar]

Immigrants an easy mark as Hotel Breslin's tenants get the boot [Chelsea Now]

10th Street Baths

RENOVATING

I've been wondering and worried about what's happening at the Russian & Turkish baths on 10th Street. New York reports they're getting prettied up after 115 years. Which hopefully does not translate to "robbed of all that was wonderfully decrepit so the carpetbaggers of the new East Village can feel more spa-like when they schvitz."

The Baths certainly got trendy in recent years, but let's pray they don't lose their steamy soul in the process. I'd hate to walk by and find the place covered in undulating glass.



Here's a bit of history from the New York Times:

Steaming to Serenity At the Turkish Baths
by Douglas Martin
May 10, 1991

Timelessness because nothing seems to change in the dank, dark room. People move up and down the tiers of seats, but somehow don't seem to really move at all. Some leave to jump in the cold water pool just outside, or the more civilized whirlpool. Others enter, gasping at first. The bare light bulbs seem ancient enough to have been installed by Edison. Water runs continously into the plastic pickled herring buckets placed around the room. The wet floor glistens like a million diamonds.

It is easy to remember the legends of this place, some of which may even be true. How in the old days all the masseurs could neither hear nor speak so presumably they could tell no tales. (One remains.) How there was a special room for gangsters to check Tommy guns. How Jake, a chef and John Belushi's treasured chum, would concoct feasts with a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

The place changed when Big Al Modlinz, the last owner, died on the job, while scrubbing a patron with oak leaves. He was unbelievably rude, but had clung to the old Lower East Side ways....

*Everyday Chatter

El Barrio residents protest gentrification--good luck with that [AMNY]

Check out the vintage photos of New York's bridges and other structures by Eugene de Salignac at the Museum of the City of New York [NYMag]

There's still time to see the New York Historical Society's Chelsea Jeans Memorial, a very weird installation -- 9/11 dust heaped on piles of denim. [NYHS]

When the assholes start killing each other, might our city be saved? [Gothamist] Get in on the Times' discussion about narcissistic gym grunters [City Room]

NYU Student Dis-Orientation

It's that time of year again. Gothamist and the New York Sun report on the return of NYU's freshmen to the streets of New York. I must echo the following sentiment of one Greenwich Village resident quoted in the Sun: "My first thought this morning was oh my god, they're back...they don't know how to walk, they take up five abreast on the sidewalk, it's nerve-racking. They should have a class on how to live in the city."

Walking home tonight, though I dodged and weaved like a pro, I was unable to avoid crashing into about a dozen of these oblivious kiddies. Shopping at the corner bodega, I placed my basket beside me on the floor (while using a reacher to grab for high-shelved TP) and two NYU kids helped themselves to my produce selections. I told them to please not steal from my basket and they ran away giggling.

Dear NYU, if you're going to crowd our neighborhoods with more and more freshman dorms, please, for the love of God, educate your incoming first-years on city etiquette. At the very least, provide them with the following orientation:

1. On the sidewalk, stay to the right and pass on the left. It's just like driving a car (in the U.S.).

2. Do not walk more than two abreast. When you do walk two abreast, compress to single file to make room for passing traffic.

3. Do not stop short.

4. Do not stop in the middle of the sidewalk to make phone calls or chat with friends. Move to the side to socialize. Again, it's like driving on the highway--if you must stop, move into the breakdown lane.

5. It's useless to ask that you not walk and talk on the phone, because you're going to do it anyway, but please keep your voice down, especially when walking close to other people. If you must text on the sidewalk, just move aside.

6. Upon reaching the top or bottom of escalators or subway stairs, do not stop, keep moving.

7. When you exit a building, slow down and yield to the flow of traffic. Moving pedestrians have the right of way.

Bad urban etiquette is not just an NYU problem. Many New Yorkers could use a primer, a topic the Times tackled a few years ago. If any readers would like to add to this list of guidelines, please leave a comment to help keep our sidewalks sane.

Coney Island with Charles Denson

This past weekend may have been my last chance to enjoy a summer day at Coney Island before it falls to Thor’s mighty hammer. I visited my old favorite spots and one new spot, a little storefront wedged beneath the Cyclone. It used to house the two-headed baby in a jar, but now it’s the exhibition center of The Coney Island History Project.

Charles Denson, native Coney Islander, historian, and author of Coney Island: Lost and Found was kind enough to give me a few minutes of his time.


Denson with authentic Steeplechase horse

We sat in a back room where the window looks directly onto the underbelly of the Cyclone’s tracks. Periodically, as we talked, the room would tremble Annie Hall-style as the cars roared down from overhead. I asked Denson what he thinks about what's happening to Coney -- and what he wishes would happen. Here’s what he told me:

“Joe Sitt is holding Coney Island hostage. Historic preservation is not in his vocabulary. He’s a shopping mall developer. He's not an evil guy, but he is a liar. He says he’s going to have blimps landing out here. That's illegal. I called the FAA and they told me that 747’s have a better chance of landing on Surf Avenue than blimps.

Sitt wants to put up 40-story high-rises. Coney Island should be all low-rise: restaurants, theaters, amusements. I’d like to see historic rides come back. Whip rides, Thompson rollercoasters, the old arcade games—simple mechanical games would be a real novelty. I’d like to see the Henderson Building and Grasshorn Building restored. The city is negotiating right now to bring back the B&B Carousell. They bought it at the eleventh hour and it’s in storage out at the Brooklyn Army Terminal.

I’m not opposed to change. We want new and wonderful things for Coney Island. We want evolution. Low-rise amusements permit evolution, but nothing will change if you put up high-rises. High-rises are there forever. Once you put them up, it’s over.”

Ruby's Bar of Coney Island

VANISHING?

Ruby’s Old Time Bar was opened by Rubin “Ruby” Jacobs just a few decades ago, yet it looks like it’s been on the boardwalk forever. Maybe that’s because Ruby had been there all his life, first selling knishes on the sand then operating Coney’s last bathhouses, Stauch’s, Claret’s, and Bushman’s. Souvenir ticket stubs and photographs from the bathhouses line the walls of Ruby’s bar, along with hundreds of photos from Coney’s glorious past.

Ruby died in 2000 and now his legendary bar is about to join him, thanks to Joe Sitt, who sees himself as comic-book hero Thor, "protector of the cities."


painting in photo by robert leach

When you ask Coney people if they'll be there next year, they shrug and say, "Who knows?" A counterman at Gregory & Paul's responded by calling out, "Who knows, who knows, only the nose knows! Step right up for ice-cold beer here!"

At Ruby's, I asked Frank the bartender if he thought they’d have another season on the beach. He told me, “Sometimes I get a good feeling and sometimes I get a bad feeling. Maybe we’ll get another year, but I wouldn’t put my money on it. Why would someone pay millions of dollars for this property and then let us stay? I’m just taking it one day at a time. Like an alcoholic, or a drug addict.”

Mrs. Stahl's Knishes

VANISHED: 2005...or maybe 2004


photo credit: michael frucht

Since 1935, Mrs. Stahl's served knishes under the El at the corner of Coney Island Ave and Brighton Beach. It's been awhile since I was last there and I went in search of it today. I asked a couple of older Jewish ladies if they knew where I could find it.

"Oh, Mrs. Stahl's," said one wistfully, "I've been taking her since I was a little girl."

"It's gone," said the second lady, "It closed two years ago."

"No, it was three years ago."

"Was it three? Well, it's a Blimpie now."

"It's not a Blimpie. It's a Subway."

"Blimpie, Subway," the second lady shrugged, waving her cigarette, "What's the difference?"

Enough said.

7th Ave Books Revisited: The Joy of the Hunt

VANISHING

Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn has a great interview with Tom Simon of Park Slope's 7th Ave Books, which will be having a blowout sale starting today as it prepares for closing on August 31. Tom has some interesting things to say, including:

"For close to fifteen years, I held executive positions at both Waldenbooks and Barnesandnoble.com. No doubt I contributed to the demise of many an independent bookseller.... from what I have pieced together, the four independent Park Slope book stores combined gross sales are only 25% of our local Barnes & Noble's. Pretty astonishing and to many disheartening. And I helped this happen, not just in Park Slope, but all across the country."



It's got me thinking about how this culture of corporatization, suburbanization--I'm not sure what to call it, a friend once used a German term, Gleichmacherei, which translates literally to "same makery," or that which makes everything the same--how it is so alluring to us. How inescapable it is. Built and supported with the ideas of psychologists and sociologists, these big chain stores are created to reach us on deeply unconscious levels, where our reptilian brain craves safety, predictability, and abundance. Few of us are immune.

If Tom can admit to contributing to the demise of independent bookshops all across America, then I can admit to doing the same. I sometimes shop at Barnes & Noble. Yes, it's true. I, too, have a reptilian brain that hungers for abundance.

I am grateful that I can also move beyond that most primitive part of myself and take pleasure in the unfamiliar, the unsafe, the unpredictable, the scarce. It was that part that brought me to New York City many years ago to find like-minded people. It is that part that mourns the passing of Tom's shop, where I could never be sure I would find the book I was searching for, but I could enjoy the hunt.

It's that joy of the hunt we're losing as the city fills up with Gleichmachers. When all of our desires are met, what happens to desire? When the city is overrun by reptilian thinkers, how will the rest of us live? Hopefully, more people like Tom will leave the big boxes behind and create places like 7th Ave Books, places where you never know what you're going to find.

Teresa's Gutted

Walked by Teresa's today, the defunct Ukrainian restaurant on 1st Ave between 6th and 7th where I've spent the past several years dining on bacon and babka french toast. The awning's been torn down and the papered-over door was open for the first time in weeks. The inside is in mid-gutting.

I took a peek as a guy in a suit was coming out. He had a proprietary way about him, so I asked what will be going into the space. He said, "A bar," then climbed into a 2008 Mercedes G55 SUV (retail price $110,675) and drove off.

Lower East Side Satisfaction

VANISHING



Today, after a visit to Katz's deli (you never when it's going to go), I ventured into the belly of the beast. Whole Foods on Bowery. The sign outside sums it up: EVERYthing You EVER Wanted To EAT And Still MORE To Discover.

I think Whole Foods might be the loneliest place on earth. The hopeful Beer Room, which opened today, was vacant and sterile. Everyone in the joint looks the same, most of them engaging in personal conversations on cell phones while they listlessly push their shopping carriages from aisle to empty aisle. I watched one woman take ten minutes to select a bottle of olive oil.



She would take one down, gaze at it, then put it back. One after the other, this arduous selection process continued. In the end, she was unable to choose and so turned away empty-handed. She is an example of a maximizer, someone who, in her search for the impossible ideal, can never be satisfied. Paralyzed by a proliferation of choices, she can only turn in dizzy circles.

This is most certainly a kind of death.



Contrary to what Whole Foods would like us to believe, more choices do not make people happier.

This is from psychologist Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice. He says in this article that maximizers:

"engage in more product comparisons...take longer to decide what to buy...exert enormous effort reading labels, checking out consumer magazines and trying new products....As might be expected, individuals with high maximization scores experienced less satisfaction with life and were less happy, less optimistic and more depressed than people with low maximization scores. Indeed, those with extreme maximization ratings had depression scores that placed them in the borderline clinical range."

Bloomberg

He's not vanishing yet, but he did do a great disappearing act this evening outside St. Vincent's Hospital. I was walking by when I saw a gang of journalists and newscameras waiting for him to emerge and make a statement about the two injured firefighters who were hit by a falling jackhammer at the Deutsche Bank Building today. The firefighters were taken to the hospital earlier.



Bloomberg breezed right by without a word, sending the media and onlookers into a frenzy. One angry man waved the New York Times in the air and shouted, "Who is John Galt? Who is John Galt?" quoting the Ayn Rand line and referring to the mysterious "corporate entity" that was hired to dismantle the Deutsche Bank Building.



After Bloomberg zoomed away in his big Chevy Suburban, his PR guy (called a "lapdog" by one of the irate journalists) said that the mayor never speaks publicly on the day of a funeral, meaning the funeral for firefighter Graffagnino of the Deutsche Bank fire. "Is the firefighter with the head injury alive?" one of the journalists asked. The PR guy wouldn't say, instituting what another newsguy grumblingly called a "24-hour blackout."

Lou Young of CBS News (who was there today joking about the popularity of his youtube fall) reports tonight that both firefighters are alive and in stable condition.


"who is john galt?"

Black People

VANISHING

This week Time Out NY passes on the news that the black population of New York is decreasing for the first time. In the past 6 years, more than 40,000 African-Americans have fled the city. In Manhattan alone the black population is down 4.2% while the numbers of white people have increased by 5.3%.

The reason for this "black flight"? The rising cost of living. Affluent white people are pushing them out. Harlem, in particular, is being bulldozed and white-washed. Among the latest victims are neighborhood legends Bobby Robinson and Calvin Copeland.


map from ny post (click image to enlarge)

Where will all the black people go? Maybe they will become invisible, like Ellison's Invisible Man, and go underground to live "rent-free in a building rented strictly to whites, in a section of the basement that was shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth century."

Even the remnants of the Underground Railroad are being railroaded right out of town. Here's more info about the declining black population in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens.

Suburbanization of New York

This week, The New York Times City Room hosted a Q&A with Jerilou Hammett and Kingsley Hammett, the editors of The Suburbanization of New York: Is the World’s Greatest City Becoming Just Another Town? I asked a couple of questions and they answered.



Jeremiah Moss: I run the blog Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, which chronicles the changes that have been steamrolling New York for the past several years. Like global warming, this trend is not just the natural shifting the city has always managed, but a major demolition that is, in large part, irreversible.

The fantasy that New York is not changing any more than it ever has is an illusion, just like the illusion that the global climate is not taking a cataclysmic nosedive. It’s a fantasy that people use to comfort themselves or to justify their way of life.

People ask me what can be done to stop the overwhelming destruction of this city. I hope the editors of this book might offer some solutions.

Mr. and Mrs. Hammett: Thanks for your great comments. The first step is to analyze what this change is really all about, who is benefiting, at whose expense, and how the city’s largess is being used to support change that serves only a small percentage of the city’s population.

Jeremiah Moss: I own this book and enjoyed reading it. I wish the writers had gone further in analyzing why New York is being suburbanized. What is the psychology of this new wave of suburbanizers? What do they fear and what do they desire? Why is it happening to the city now?

Is it due to a generation of narcissists moving in? Is it the ultimate triumph of free-market capitalism? It seems like a quintessentially American evolution. Just when did New York become Americanized and provincialized? Did 9/11, when New York was embraced by middle America, push it over the edge?

Mr. and Mrs. Hammett: We too wish the analysis had gone further. But at the time we started the book few people were openly critiquing the changes that have engulfed the city. So we felt that opening the debate was the best we could do. We hope it will deepen. As for why New York went in this direction, you have to look back to the post-war era when much of the white population fled to the suburbs and the city was left for dead. In 1982, Mayor Koch was already trying to lure that suburban money back when he said, “We’re not catering to the poor anymore … there are four other boroughs they can live in. They don’t have to live in Manhattan.” What you’re seeing today are the results of that strategy.
...
And with that in mind, here's a quote one of Vanishing's readers sent in recently:
"The city has twice been humiliated by the suburbs: once upon the loss of its constituents to the suburbs and again upon that constituency's return. These prodigal citizens brought back with them their mutated suburban values of predictability and control." --Harvard Project on the City, Mutations


astor place: here's a barnes & noble, a walgreens, & a starbucks in one shot -- can you find all the cell phones? (hint: there are at least 5)

Manhattan Apocalypse

Planet of the Apes

Sometimes, in my darkest moments with this vanishing city, when I am deep into grief over my lost love, I wish New York would just disappear completely. We all feel it from time to time, that collective, usually unconscious death wish that finds expression in those many New York destruction movies, from Planet of the Apes to this year's I Am Legend.


I Am Legend


Independence Day

The terrible events of 9/11 roused within many of us an unspeakable guilt -- our most unacceptable repressed wish for this city was reified. We can deny it, but while we may not be conscious of it, the wish is there, deep below the surface. Or else those cathartic movies would not exist and could not make millions of dollars.



Now we can watch this apocalyptic slideshow. I've been looking forward to reading Alan Weisman's The World Without Us for months. There is something oddly relieving to imagine our city empty of humans, as if in the wake of the apocalypse our dreamed-of ideal New York might rise from the rubble.


Art by Kenn Brown, mondolithic media
(this image reminds me of the old thunderbolt coaster at coney, how green it was in summer, like a hanging garden, its rails blossoming with white moonflowers.)

This New York Times article states it well:
Who dreams of the apocalypse? Why do they dream of it? Polls indicate that up to 50 percent of Americans believe that the Book of Revelation is a true, prophetic document, meaning they fully expect the predictions of “Rapture,” “Tribulation” and “Armageddon” to be fulfilled. There is a paradox built into end-time theologies in that imminent catastrophe often brings comfort; according to Paul S. Boyer, an authority on prophecy belief in American culture and an emeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the apocalypse is an appealing idea because it promises salvation to a select group — all of whom share secret knowledge — and a world redeemed and delivered from evil.

Wyoming Loves the Moondance

To update a previous post:
Newsday reports that the Moondance Diner has safely arrived in its new home, home on the range. The diner traveled for 7 days, went through 9 states, and suffered only a few broken windows.

The local paper calls it "Wyoming's newest landmark," and quotes a resident who says, "I think this is about the coolest thing I've ever seen...I just love the idea of it and I can't wait until they get the Moondance open." And new owner Cheryl Pierce promises to give it "a little Wyoming love" and "shine it up like a new penny."

This poignant video of the diner arriving in Wyoming brings tears to my eyes. It's so good to see that the true New York will still be loved -- if not in our own city, then somewhere in the world.

Lincoln Plaza Hotel

VANISHED


photo from brownstoner

Curbed announces the conversion of Park Slope's 120-year-old hotel and former brothel to luxury condos.

The Times recounts several personal stories about the "hot sheets" hotel.

And Wendy Bryan in the Village Voice waxes nostalgic about her crush on this beautiful if bedraggled "neighborhood slut," imagining a pathetic future when "a few years from now, the building's new residents will hang their flat-screen television sets and watch Sex and the City reruns. The building remains the same, but the neighborhood has surely lost a conversation piece—not to mention a form of live local entertainment. And I have forever lost my crush."

I hear you Wendy.

Clover Barber Shop

VANISHING? Not yet.


my flickr

"I been a barber since seven," Ercole Riccardelli tells me in his thick Neapolitan accent as he holds a buzzing set of clippers over my head, "I was short. My grandfather gave me a step. I stood on it and put on the soap with the brush. When I was fourteen, I shaved the customers."

He's 84 now and plans to live as long as his grandfather, a man who made it to 99 (and 7 months) by never once seeing a doctor and by drinking a glass of Brioschi with lemon every morning then smoking a pipe while he watched the Naples fishermen fish before he opened his barber shop for the day.


photo by axlotl

If you go to the Clover Barbershop in Park Slope, be prepared to spend some time. Mr. Riccardelli moves very, very slowly. But his lines are straight and his hand is steady on the razor blade. When he finishes the hot-foam shave, he slaps your face with Osage oil and fans you coolingly with his towel. There aren't many places left where you can get treatment like this for little money.

Italian barbers might be the best. I used to see Sal on Mott Street, but a few years ago he closed up. First he stopped giving shaves because his hands got shaky. The next time I went back, he was gone. An upscale salon took his place. Then there's an amazing shop run by Harry Fini, but you have to go all the way to Philly for his hot towels, talk of Frank Sinatra, and the sign outside that says, "Enjoy barbering as did your dad."


Sal on Mott from Mr. Beller's


Harry's Shop from my flickr stream

Back in Brooklyn, Mr. Riccardelli's daughter has been urging him to close up shop and move to Florida, where he can enjoy the beach and swim in water as warm as the Mediterranean he longs for. But he's not ready to go just yet. "As long as my hands are good," he says, "I'll be right here."

Let's hope he lasts as long as his grandfather did.

Deutsche Bank Building

VANISHING (in flames as we speak)





While riding the Water Taxi back from Red Hook today (visiting the vanishing ballfield food vendors) we saw a dark cloud of smoke over Lower Manhattan. It had that 9/11 look and smell -- and feeling.



It turned out not to be a terrorist attack, as we feared, but the Deutsche Bank Building burning. We stood and watched the blaze, a 7-alarm fire. Every few minutes we could hear debris collapsing inside and see flaming chunks dropping to the streets. Firefighters rode up the side of the building in external construction elevators. Two firefighters have now been reported dead.



At the margin of Battery Park City, families sat in the grass with dogs and kids, watching the fire. It looked like a 4th of July picnic. We stood with crowds on Greenwich and Rector. I spoke to a Newsday reporter who said the rumor is that the fire might be "suspicious." Maybe someone doesn't want to go through the very expensive and painstaking process of dismantling this building piece by piece.





The West Side Highway was a river of red rescue vehicles. Collapse units were on site because the building was severely damaged on 9/11 and is unstable. Hundreds of human remains have been found there since 2001. Huffington Post has more news about the possible toxins we were breathing. The whole scene did bring back that familiar, eerie feeling.


All photos from my flickr stream

Urban Public Space

VANISHING

In his essay "Imperial Bedroom," Jonathan Franzen writes about the near extinction of the genuine public space, where "every citizen is welcome to be present and where the purely private is excluded or restricted." The public space is a place to promenade, to see and be seen, without other people's privacy intruding on us.


photo by Phil Sharp

I used to enjoy walking these streets. The jostle of crowds, honking of horns, and taxi-cab dodgems had a pleasant energy. New York was a thrilling mixture of potential dangers, unexpected human connections, and inner solitude.

It is nearly impossible to walk the streets and enjoy the interchange of one's private thoughts with the public scene. Every day, people with ears and mouths welded to cell phones, rob us of this critical way of being with the world.


photo by Svedek

Some people claim to love the city, but they do not. Through their actions, they reveal their deep fear and hatred for true urban life. The city frightens them because it is out of their control. Like nervous colonists in an untamed wilderness, they feel compelled to chop it down and domesticate it.

***The editors of The Suburbanization of New York will be taking questions next week from readers via the Times. Here's a chance to get in on a crucial conversation.***



The New York Times
August 29, 2004
“No, You Can't Walk And Talk at the Same Time”
By Ken Belson

...Their minds elsewhere, cell walkers are more likely to step into traffic without looking, cut off and bump into other pedestrians and even confuse passers-by with their very public conversations -- all of which can hinder the natural flow of human traffic along sidewalks.

And as cell-free walkers grudgingly adjust to the unpredictable ambulations of their distracted brethren, the communal bond that once linked pedestrians brushing elbows on crowded city streets, some experts say, is evaporating.

… The proliferation of cellphone use on city streets is also contributing to what urban planners have come to call the privatization of public space. Whether they are making calls out of a sense of necessity or as a simple means of escape, cellphone walkers are less likely to help a stranger in need, for instance, or to exchange pleasantries with passers-by. They are effectively cutting themselves off from the random encounters in public spaces that used to invigorate city living.

''The charm and excitement of the city is that it allows you to exercise freedom you can't get at the shopping mall,'' said Kenneth T. Jackson, a professor of history at Columbia University and a former president of the New-York Historical Society.

The incursion of technology into public spaces -- cellphones, iPods, security cameras -- is causing cities to resemble more closely the controlled environments of suburban towns.

''The city needs to be something else,'' Mr. Jackson said.

...cities like New York depend on the civility of their citizens, whether they are in a bus, an elevator or simply walking down the street. By sealing themselves on their phones, cellphone walkers might well be encumbering their phone-free counterparts twice: first by forcing them to duck, dodge and otherwise adjust to meandering callers, and again by robbing them of one more engaged neighbor.

''Anything that separates people from their surroundings is antithetical to the idea of a public realm,'' said Jerold S. Kayden, professor of urban planning and design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. ''Every little brick added to the walls around people creates less of a common cause, and I don't think we need to be adding bricks.''

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Tower Records

VANISHED


Painting by Sharon Florin

I feel a bit of ambivalence memorializing a chain store here, but Tower was sort of special. Quotes Wikipedia: "The store in Greenwich Village was famous in the 1980s for selling albums of European New Wave bands not yet popular in the U.S. and was a noted hangout for teenagers from throughout the metropolitan area."

Now Racked reports the 4th Street site will become a Toys R Us.