Eisenberg's? U-Bet!

I went back to Eisenberg’s recently for yet another perfect tuna sandwich on toasted rye. This time, owner Josh Konecky was there, presiding over the cash register in Hawaiian-style shirt, writing out to-go orders on brown paper bags. I had one question I really wanted to ask him: “Most people nowadays when they buy a place, they change it,” I said, “Why did you keep this place the same?”

He looked at me like I had just asked the most ridiculous question in the world, then he shrugged and said, “Why change it? When I bought the place, people kept saying, you’re not gonna change it, are you? I told them, I’m just gonna clean it up a bit. And they’d say, Don’t clean it up too much!”



Josh did have to make a few changes. The exhaust system used to blow out the front and legally it has to blow out the back, which is too bad, because blowing out the front was good for business. “Fifteen years ago it was the smell of bacon on the street that brought me in,” Josh said. He’s also got a broken seltzer fountain that he’s trying to get replaced without losing the vintage 1940s look of it. Sadly, that means (for now anyway) all egg creams have to be made with bottled seltzer. But what syrup does Eisenberg’s use?

“Fox’s, of course. U-Bet,” Josh told me, as if there could be no other syrup.
“Did you know," I said conspiratorially, "the Stage Deli uses Hershey’s."
“Hershey’s?” he said, incredulous, “And what do they charge, four dollars for an egg cream?”

• Eisenberg's Sandwich Shop
• Stage Deli
• Jewish Delicatessens
• Fox's U-Bet
  

*Everyday Chatter

One of my faithful tipsters, Kingofnycabbies, sent in a few news items, including one about another long-time restaurant shutting due to quintupling (!) rent. After 37 years, the Delphi Restaurant in Tribeca has closed. Again, a place and people with strong ties to the community, in good relation with the neighborhood, must fall to make room for the upscale and the oversaturated. [NY Sun]

Queens residents are kicking themselves for not landmarking the LIC Savings Bank gem. [NYDN]

They're trying to evict a long-time resident musician from one-time artist enclave Manhattan Plaza for being too noisy. [NYDN]

Some good news: The city is set to landmark 7 buildings -- and 2007 has the highest number of preservations since the good old year of 1990: "it is the very speed of development that may have sparked the current wave of landmarking activity." [AMNY]

How about a little vanishing San Francisco? "Gayborhoods" like the Castro and NYC's West Village are vanishing as young queers seek cheap rents outside the city centers and the dominant monoculture rolls in like the Blob, swallowing all in its path. Such is life in America's melting pot. [NY Times]

The Condo-pocalypse Is Coming

after the condo-pocalypse...

I love a New York City apocalypse fantasy and these images by photographer Lori Nix are right up there. They're from an article in this week's New York Magazine in which they enumerate the ways in which our exuberant economy might be tanking. To the catastrophists, they say, "it sure smells like the seventies all over again."



My dream? To see these luxury condos fall vacant then fill up again, but this time with working class families, artists, small business owners, novelists, filmmakers, teachers, nurses, PhD students, a few trust-funders trying to make it on their own, poets just bussed in from small American towns, the bus drivers, too, and blind piano players, crazy cat ladies, neo-burlesque dancers, retired vaudevillians, feeders of pigeons and wearers of tinfoil hats, drag queens and kings, taxi drivers, butchers, bakers.

In short, New Yorkers, the people who live here -- whether born here or drawn here -- not because they want to live in a shopping mall, but because, of all the places on this planet, New York is the only place where they can truly feel at home.

*Everyday Chatter

Chase Bank hires a friendly fursuiter to attract customers and Trader Joe's uses cute artsy kids to do the same. Somehow, the two don't seem so different to me. [Racked] [NY Mag]

Here's a New Yorker after my own heart, "I see a city that's losing its texture, its character, its grit. Yes, New York City is still the greatest city in the world. But it is no longer the most exciting and surely, it now ranks as the most heartbreaking." [NYDN]

Over 100 Harlem residents got together this weekend to protest the destruction of their neighborhood by Kimco, set to demolish over a dozen shops. Fox 5 News showed a brief clip of angry people carrying signs that said: "Stop cultural genocide." [Columbia S.]

After 80 years, the city decides this newsstand is suddenly in the way -- but the neighbors aren't having it. [NY Post]

A landmarked building -- and piece of city history -- collapsed in Chelsea. You just know some condo developer is jumping for joy. [Video on News 7]

Arnold Hatters Revisited

I was thinking it might be time for a new hat, so I went to the best place to buy such an item in this city: Arnold Hatters. I used to go there when the shop was on 8th Avenue between 40th and 41st Streets, right where it had been for the past several decades, until the government declared the entire block blighted, seized it, and passed the property on to the New York Times in a sweetheart deal.

As Times writer Dan Barry wrote, “Someone invoked those magical words, ‘eminent domain,’ and presto: say goodbye to several small businesses on Eighth Avenue.” Thankfully, for Arnold Hatters that goodbye didn’t mean forever. The shop moved to 8th and 37th in the shadow of the Times tower that displaced it.


Times tower risen

I tried on a herringbone fedora and talked about the blighting with Peter Rubin, son of Arnold Rubin, after whom the shop is named.

“I never used to be political,” Peter told me, “I voted and figured everything just took care of itself. But then this happened. It’s changed everything for me.” Disillusioned, betrayed by the city of his birth and a government that bulldozes small business owners, he reminisced about the former shop.

“My great uncle built all the shelves in the old place. They were solid. If you fell against them, you felt how solid they were. He made them with white oak. We wanted to take them, for the new place, but the city wouldn’t let us. They said the shelves were permanent fixtures and we’d have to buy them back.”

The Rubins didn’t go for that ridiculous deal and their great uncle’s solid white-oak shelves were destroyed in the demolition. “I wish I was the city,” Peter said, “I wouldn’t do stuff like this. A lot of people would be mad at me, but not the people who live and work in this town.”



His brother Mark finished up with a customer and came over to join us, unlit cigarette in hand. I asked him how business was doing since the move. He told me they still get the theater people and the faithful customers, but they’ve lost the important Port Authority traffic. “Manhattan’s funny,” Mark said, “We’re just four blocks away, but it’s another world down here. We’re down 40% of what we did in our last year in the old location.”

Mark, Peter, and their father Arnold were all named Rubin, but that was also a forced change. Their family name was originally something very Eastern European and difficult to pronounce, so the officials at Ellis Island decided to make it easier on themselves.

“The city screwed us back then, too,” the brothers joked, trying to see the humor in it all.


Mark wearing the Arnold Hatters "Raider"
Peter in the Stefeno Cagney

JVNY Links:

• Arnold Hatters, part 1
• 8th Ave Between 40th and 41st
  

Outside Links:

• On Broadway, Men Still Wear Hats
• Blight Me!
• The Paper of Wreckage
• The Lease
  

Vanishing NY in the NY Times

October 28, 2007
New York Times, City Section
Witness to What Was, Skeptic of What’s New

By Paul Berger

From the island at the center of Astor Place, a frustrated man who goes by the name of Jeremiah Moss can see three Starbucks. Towering overhead is Charles Gwathmey’s Sculpture for Living, a 21-story, aquamarine-tinted glass building shaped like a wave. Almost directly opposite, on the former site of St. Ann’s Church, rises a steel-and-concrete skeleton soon to be a 26-story New York University dorm.

Fifteen years ago, when Mr. Moss moved to the East Village from Massachusetts, the island at the center of Astor Place was a hangout for squatters and punk rockers. Now, the rapid loss of such places fuels a despairing blog called Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York that offers a running commentary on what many regard as the city’s grim metamorphosis.

The scheduled departure of Astroland from Coney Island, the move from Greenwich Village of the fabled Shopsin’s restaurant, the ouster of the Playpen sex shop from Times Square — the gentrification of swaths of New York is hardly new. But when the changes are chronicled in one place, their pace is staggering and, seen through Mr. Moss’s eyes, alarming and depressing.

Those who contend that an unprecedented influx of money, combined with rapid development, is causing the city to lose its soul need look no further for evidence than Mr. Moss’s blog. It reads like an obituary to a disappearing city, with Astor Place as the “epicenter of evil.”

Until a few years ago, Mr. Moss used to exit the No. 6 train at Astor Place. On his way to his apartment on First Avenue and Seventh Street, he cut through a parking lot where the Sculpture for Living now stands, past a stall selling secondhand pornography and vintage men’s magazines.

"There used to be such a great view from here, and now there is this glass wall,” says Mr. Moss, who is 36 and who conceals himself behind a pair of tortoise-shell sunglasses and a gray Fedora, bought 15 years ago in a store in the Village. (“The shop has gone,” he said, “but the hat remains.”)



He also conceals his real name, worried that disclosing it will jeopardize his day job as a freelance writer. He chose the first part of his pseudonym, he said, because Jeremiah “was the prophet of doom who nobody listened to until it was too late.”

In recent years, still more of Astor Place has changed. The first floor of Astor Place Hairstylists has been replaced by a Cold Stone Creamery. Astor Wines and Spirits has moved down Lafayette Street, to be replaced as early as next month by a Walgreens.

One of the only holdouts from Mr. Moss’s quirky Astor-Place-of-old is Jim Power, a homeless mosaic artist who is often found working next to the huge cube-shaped sculpture on Astor Place titled, perhaps fittingly, “Alamo.”

As Mr. Moss wanders the neighborhood pointing out landmarks on his Vanishing New York “death watch” — the Polish-Ukrainian East Village Meat Market on Second Avenue and the B & H Dairy restaurant one block away, “another last of the Mohicans” — he ponders the most unfathomable aspect of it all.

“These places are always packed, and then you walk by one day and they are gone,” he said. “How can that be possible?”

Copyright New York Times, 2007

Condoschmerz

I am hereby coining a new word: Condoschmerz. Literally "condo pain" or "condo weariness." Inspired by the German Weltschmerz. Describes the psychological pain and existential hopelessness experienced when one's city is overcome by rapid, ubiquitous, luxury condo development. Often accompanied by disorientation due to a suddenly changing, once-familiar landscape. Before depression sets in, can initially lead to a sense of powerless rage which may inspire those suffering from Condoschmerz to perform acts of vandalism.

Which leads me to this latest find. Clearly, a Chelsea neighbor suffering from Condoschmerz has become tired of the pain caused by the condo at 18th and 8th. They have used some kind of massively sticky goo (perhaps egg yolk?) to paste these notes to the front doors:



The barriers have been up for some time, originally erected to keep the nearby high-school kids from congregating. The tactic has failed. The kids still congregate and the barriers have become a haven for junkies on the nod, drunk homeless guys, and weary dogwalkers looking for a place to rest. The condo continues to use the sidewalk as its personal garbage dump.



Another prime example of the manifestation of Condoschmerz is the current rash of anti-condo graffiti in Williamsburg. At some point, however, these protesters will give up. Once Condoschmerz reaches a certain critical level for an individual, the existential dread felt by its sufferer leads only to inaction, malaise, and a crippling sense of alienation.

• See also: Featureschmerz
  
• Kids on a Condo
• 2 Condo Predictions
  

*Everyday Chatter

Another good bar, the All State Cafe, gets crushed beneath the bootheels of progress. Read these testimonials and weep. [City Room]

Rejoice! Coney gets one more summer...but next August we'll be sobbing again. [Kinetic C]

I've been trying to remember what they demolished on the corner where the 8 Union Square South condo now stands. Oh, yeah...it was that funny little Paterson Silk building.

...and on the opposite corner: Here's an old TV commercial for New York's now-defunct J.W. Mays department store. There used to be one in Union Square, where the Whole Foods is today. [Malls of America]

Finally, high-end Hamptons shop Blue & Cream moves into the Avalon Chrystie and puts up a bunch of posters in their window filled with photos of grinning, toothy consumers: my flickr. Over the door it says, "Welcome to the Bowery."

The Condo Shall Inherit the Earth

When you take a walk around the western edge of Chelsea, you can feel the ground shake with the rising of condo towers. Every day, more and more. Here is a selection seen while walking from 10th Ave. and 18th St. to 11th Ave. to 24th St. and down again. Just a few short blocks, but oh so many ticky-tacky glass boxes. More heave up from the south, the north, the east. If they could, I am sure they would rise from the Hudson's riverbed. They sprout like an overnight invasion of fungi. So I'll let Sylvia Plath say the rest with her creepy poem "Mushrooms."


Chelsea Modern

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.


459 W. 18th

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.


unmarked site guarded by svedka fembot

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,


Nouvel Chelsea with "mechanized oculi and veils of glass and steel."

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!


200 11th Ave.

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.


245 10th Ave.

La-Rosa Cubana Cigars

Much is changing along 6th Avenue in the upper 20s and lower 30s, but there remains a fascinating assemblage of small businesses -- holdout flower shops, wig shops, and assorted wholesalers. Sadly, many of them are vanishing as luxury hotels, condos, and retail towers flatten the neighborhood.

On the second floor of 862 6th Avenue is a small cigar factory and shop that’s been in the area since 1958. La-Rosa Cubana Cigars was founded by A. Antonio Almanzar, a cigar maker from the Dominican Republic. It is now run by his son Frank.

When you step inside the shop, you are pleasantly overcome by the deliciously strong, organic fragrance of tobacco leaves. It feels like another place, another time. Bales of tobacco just shipped from the Caribbean wait by the door. Three master rollers make cigars in stages. Their work area is littered with brown leaves and brings to mind images from Lewis Hine’s Lower East Side, though La Rosa’s shop is more cheerful -- and those old Lower East Siders didn’t have posters of pin-up girls on their walls to keep them company.



La-Rosa has a packed humidor and 70-year-old wooden molds that belonged to Frank's father. Once inside the molds, the cigars are pressed for about an hour then wrapped in a sheet of Connecticut light, a soft leaf that feels like silk from being aged for five years. “Tobacco is like wine,” Frank told me, “When you age it, it gets a vintage taste.”

Frank knows cigars. He began working in his father’s shop when he was 9 years old. His job was to vein-strip the leaves until he learned to roll, beginning with mini-torpedoes. He still enjoys rolling these mild little cigars and generously gave me a handful. We lit up in the shop and it was a treat to smoke indoors. Since Bloomberg’s smoking ban went into effect, Frank has had to cut his production — and his workers. He used to have 7 rollers, now it’s just the 3.


Frank holding mini-torpedoes before a photo of his father

The view outside his window is changing, too. Where once there stood a mixed assemblage of low-rise buildings, there soon will rise a glass tower, with yet another giant coming one block north and several more just to the south. Like many of New York's remaining small businesses and longtime residents, La-Rosa is rapidly being surrounded by "revitalization." But what could be more vital to our city than shops like Frank Almanzar's?

• More photos of La Rosa on my flickr
• La-Rosa cigar rolling video
• La-Rosa in Cigar Aficionado
  

The Flower District & Superior Florists

Walking down 28th Street in the flower district is like walking through a tropical jungle – you duck under broad green leaves and breathe in the earthy smells – but it’s a jungle that’s being mercilessly clearcut for development. I wondered about the rumor that this traditional Manhattan market might be moving to the Bronx, so I asked around.



One longtime plant seller told me, “10 to 15 years ago, it was all flowers. Now it’s dead. They’re putting up 22 new hotels in a 5-block radius. Only those of us with a good lease will stay.” Another echoed the sentiment, “Some will leave, some will stay. All the city wants is big business. There are 3 hotels going up on this block.”


once a garden, now the Hilton Garden Inn...
and another one coming...


Thankfully, Superior Florists isn’t going anywhere. The shop has been in the same building since the 1940s and they own the property. “That’s the only reason we’re still here,” owner Steve Rosenberg told me.

Steve remembers when his whole block, from north to south, and 28th Street from Broadway to 7th Avenue, was all flowers. He remembers the characters, men who were like family, men who shouted curses and tossed their wares from one side of the street to the other. And he remembers the colors, “flowers piled up as far as the eye could see.”



His grandfather, Louie, opened the business in 1930. When I asked him how long he’s been working in the shop, Steve said, “Since I’m in diapers.” He started out sweeping the floors, then moved up to folding rose boxes and wiring flowers. He loved the shop and went there every chance he got, stopping in after school and later going home with his father, Sam, sometimes not until midnight on a Friday after spending hours “making weddings.” He wonders if he learned more in the shop and on those streets than he ever did in school. “You learned how to haggle,” he told me, “You learned when to open your mouth and when to keep it shut.”


Louie Rosenberg, founder

Haggling was a sport and an art. Steve used to go out early in the morning with his father and grandfather to buy from the wholesalers. “If a guy told you a dollar, you told him 50 cents and you walked away. The guy always came running after you, shouting, Okay, okay, 50 cents!” But there’s no haggling in the flower market today.

“The whole neighborhood,” Steve said, “has lost its character.”

*Everyday Chatter

CBGB's gallery space is to become a John Varvatos store. That means high-end fashion from the same gigantic corporation that brings the world Lee jeans, Wrangler, and Rustler -- so I guess it really is a piece of Wal-Mart right here in the big city. [Post] [Racked]

I went by to check out the CBGB gutting the other day, but all I found were these giddy Chase suits, deliriously shoving flyers in my face and announcing that "a new Chase is coming," like it's cause for celebration.


pic from my flickr

Remember the old Second Avenue Deli and welcome in the new with the Lebewohl family. [NY Times]

This may have finally been the final weekend for the endangered Red Hook ballfield vendors. [Gothamist]

Cooper Union has sold the remaining soul of Bowery between 5th and 6th to the Cooper Square Hotel moguls. What does this mean for the Federalist building at #35 and what about Hettie Jones? [Daily Intel] [JVNY]

Something's going up in the empty lot on East 13th [Curbed]. Here's a peek behind the wooden fence -- whatever's coming will blot out the graffitied Dominican flag and no doubt contribute to the blotting out of the Dominican people in the neighborhood. Unless, of course, it's affordable housing (cue the evil madman laugh).


more pics on my flickr

Chatty Conductors & Ferry Shines

There are those who make our dreary daily commutes a little more interesting. Surrounded by androids tuned out on ipods and handheld video games, cell phones and Blackberries, a flash of humanity can mean a lot.

Conductor Jason Lewis has been making life on the #2 train more human by adding his own words to those of the automated robot voices, wishing his riders good morning as he cracks jokes and waxes philosophic. This all may end, however, as he was passed over for a job as dedicated announcer. The MTA was afraid he would not conform to their official script. "I'm done," Jason told the New York Times.



In 2003 Carmine Rizzo said he was done, after shining shoes on the Staten Island Ferry for 35 years. He was the last of the ferryboat shoeshine men. I remember him as a stooped little man with an oily wooden box in his hand and a tired voice that called out, "Shine, shine, shine." He said not another word to me when I got a shoeshine from him, but it was a pleasure to prop my foot on his box and feel the thrum of his brushes while I watched the harbor flow past.

I haven't thought much about that man until this weekend when I visited the Staten Island Museum's ferry exhibit where they have Carmine's retired box and brushes on display.



Although the newspapers all say Carmine quit, the guy taking admission at the museum told me he was more or less pushed out by Bloomberg's post-9/11 city and its need for monotony in the name of security. The bands that used to play on the ferries were banned and so was the "rhyming salesman," deemed a "quality-of-life problem" according to SI Live.

New York used to be full of characters, but these days not everyone wants a city with character. Some commuters on the #2 train wish the happy conductor would just shut up and at least one ferry rider had this to say about the shoeshine men, "To me, it just gets annoying putting up with them yelling 'Shine' all the time...I'm glad to see them go."

Such is life in today's vanishing New York. I wish Carmine would come back.

• All Feet on Deck, Forlorn
• Carmine on retirement

ferry sketch with shine man by Cecil C. Bell

Westpfal's, Continental Die, Lamp 25

I took a walk today down West 25th Street and stumbled back into what has to be one of the last holdouts of the Industrial Revolution in Manhattan. A giant pair of scissors gleaming over the street pulled me in to Henry Westpfal’s, a company that has been sharpening and selling cutlery since 1874. They began on Houston Street and until this summer had a shop on 30th Street, but a massive retail/condo complex is going in, so they had to move.

I found them at 115 West 25th in an odd little space shared with two other anachronistic businesses, Continental Die, Inc., and Lamp 25. The lamp repair shop is moving soon and Westpfal will expand from its current cubby, a counter jam-packed with scissors, nippers, and other sharp things, including Wusthof knives and C.S. Osborne leatherworking tools, objects with ancient names like awl, haft, and stippler.


Carmela and her red-handled bestselling shears

Carmela Wiegmann has been working at Westpfal for over 50 years. “We sharpen the old-fashioned way,” she told me, “using the wet method, with water running over big wheels just like in the 1800s. We’re the last ones to do it that way.” Dry sharpening is no good because you can burn the blade, take the temper out, and then it’s too soft to cut properly. When sharpening scissors, they don’t just open the scissor and run it over the wheel, they do it right, they take out the screw.

Their customers are often chefs who come in with rolls of knives for sharpening, manicurists with dulled cuticle nippers, guys who like to use straight razors, and fashion people who work with fabric and leather. Their bestselling scissor is the Mundial 8” pair of dressmaker shears. Carmela had me use them to cut first through a hunk of leather, then a wad of fabric two inches thick. It went through just like butter. Said Carmela, “This is a wonderful, wonderful scissor.” It sells for $32, but Carmela will let you have it for $28.50.



Continental Die, Inc., (“manufacturers of labor saving devices”) occupies the bulk of 115 West 25th, just behind Westpfal’s. It’s been run for the past 23 years by a Korean man named Mr. Yi. Carmela Wiegmann introduced me and sang the praises of her neighbor’s tool and die. “Mr. Yi has a very fine reputation,” she told me, “He’s known as an honest and reliable man.” Mr. Yi smiled and showed me around his clanking shop, a crowded place with a tin ceiling and big machines that seem to have come straight out of an older New York.

Customers bring Mr. Yi rough, hand-drawn sketches of the dies they want and he creates them. He just finished a job for a menu manufacturer. You know those little filigreed metal corners that come on plastic menus? They’re the sort of thing you rarely notice. Mr. Yi makes the die that stamps those corners into existence. He also makes dies for stamping leather belts and handbags, ornamental doorknobs, novelties, and the tiny rivets on denim jeans.


Mr. Yi with his menu-corner stamping die

While Westpfal's and Continental seem to be doing alright, I can't say the same for Lamp 25. As Carmela told me, "It's a real gem. I mean, where do you find a lamp repair shop like this one anymore? You don't. Now everything's Duane Reades and banks. But there's not enough business. The lamp man will be gone by the end of the month."


vanishing lamps

Unstolen Bike

When I saw the young woman park her bike against the outside wall of the Chase bank (formerly the Second Avenue Deli) then go inside to withdraw cash without locking the bike I thought it was strange that she felt so secure. But since she could easily turn around and see her bike from the ATM, maybe she figured she could keep an eye on it.

After she took out her cash, however, she breezed right past the bike and headed across the avenue to the farmer's market in the courtyard of St. Mark's Church (called Abe Lebewohl Park after the Second Avenue Deli owner who was murdered nearby in 1996). She shopped among the apples and squashes for 10 or 15 minutes and never looked back to check on her bike.



She owns locks--you can see them (more than one) in these photos--so she cares about keeping her bike, but she obviously doesn't believe she needs to use the locks in the East Village.

I felt an inexplicable rage at her blithe sense of security and must admit, I was incredibly tempted to hop on that bike and pedal away, just to teach the girl a lesson. The East Village is not Mayberry, where you lean your bike against the drugstore without locking it and go inside for a Slush Puppy and a lazy browse among the comic books. But what if I am wrong about that?

I didn't steal that bike and neither did anyone else. The girl came back, her basket laden with greenmarket produce and flowers, climbed on her unlocked bike and rode away, blonde ponytail streaming behind her, not a worry in the world.

Welcome to Mayberry.

Sense of Direction

The Times reported yesterday that the city is experimenting with compass decals placed at subway exits so we know which way to go when we emerge from underground. But most New Yorkers have plenty of clever ways for figuring this out without benefit of instruction. As one recent commenter here pointed out, it's "another step in making this city friendly for tourists and yunnies."

That answers the question: Why now, after years of successful orientation, should these compass decals appear? Because they are meant for new New Yorkers. In the article, all of the destinations people are trying to get to are soulless places -- Brooks Brothers, Pfizer pharmaceuticals, Toys R Us -- located in a sea of Starbucks, Foot Lockers, etc. No wonder everyone's lost -- everything looks exactly the same. Another reason why maybe we all need a compass.


where am I? who am I? which way do I go?

As the article states, we now live on "streets where there are no easily identifiable landmarks and where the drugstore, coffee shop and bank at one end of the block look much like the drugstore, coffee shop and bank at the other end."

You can let the city know what you think of their decals by taking their survey. Bonus: By filling out the survey you enter yourself in a contest to win dinner for two at Salute, an upscale Italian restaurant owned by the same people who brought 900 Sbarro pizza chains to the world, 9 of which are in Manhattan.

Autumn in New York

It's warm again. 74 degrees today. It's mid-October and the air ought to be crisp, but it's muggy. With global warming ramping up, what will happen to autumn in New York?



Diesel answers that question with their image of a vanished city -- and a vanished world -- in their new ad campaign. Gothamist comments on Wired's open question: Are these ads evil or fun? I think the answer to that is obvious.

The campaign's website features a video that outlines the dire consequences of global warming then says, "Hold on! Global warming cannot stop our lives." Cue the party music. Just like George Bush's hideous insistence that if Americans stop shopping and going to Disneyland then "the terrorists win." Now Diesel tells us: If you stop partying (e.g., burning fossil fuels) then you're letting global warming win.

This ad campaign gives us further insight into the minds of young urban narcissists. They have no desire to co-exist with anyone or anything that differs from them. Mono-culture must rule. And the way to ensure domination of their mono-culture is to destroy all other cultures, what a recent commenter to this blog rightly called "sociocide."

The evidence of this is clear in the block-by-block destruction of New York and is beautifully illustrated in the disturbing images on Diesel's website. They show a collection of androids frolicking in a ruined world where only the rich and narcissistic have survived.

• The Washington Post mocks, "You can't be too well-dressed for the apocalypse."
• Torontoist calls the images "vomit-inducing adverts for the masses."

*Everyday Chatter

Here's coverage of Brooklyn's hotel development panel, where Le Bleu's manager cries sour grapes at bloggers who, he thinks, are critical only because they can't afford the $400 rates. [Brownstoner]

A movie about the death of Coney Island. [Hotel Chelsea]

More trees are scheduled to die in Queens. [Queens Crap]

H.W. Ramberg, Brooklyn ship repairer since 1925, is leaving its Red Hook home for Jersey now that Ikea's come to town. As Ikea says, "Home is the most important place in the world." Right. [Gowanus Lounge]

A little homage to Brooklyn's Schrafft's. [mcbrooklyn]

A choice quote from Reverend Billy: "In 2007, in New York City, a healthy neighborhood is radical. The law firm of Bloomberg, Doctoroff and Kelly are dedicated to the swallowing of neighborhoods by the mono-culture. We’re turning into a traffic jam next to a glassy tony condo-front. But we love the apple for the bluster and bombast and gossip and happy lies – all that comes from bodies colliding on sidewalks, a lazy hour on a stoop, shouting first names in doorways. Eccentric proprietors of shops that maybe need a wash. The mono-culture that fills the streets with packs of 28 year old stockbrokers is then the same issue exactly as bombing Iraq and heating the arctic." [Gothamist]

Times Square Sleaze

In a recent interview with Time Out New York, director Ang Lee lamented, "I feel ashamed to say this, but I miss the old Times Square. It was sleazy. But I miss that. I hate what happened. I absolutely hate this, this...Times Square Land."

Don't be ashamed, Ang Lee, you are not alone. Many of us miss the sleaze of the old Deuce. Over the past couple of weekends, I have ventured into the nightmare of Times Square Land searching for a little sleaze. And that's what I found. Just a little.


the playpen: handbags instead of handjobs

I visited the Playpen, but the exterior demolition had begun. The marquee was gone, the scaffolding was up, and the "watch out for fleeing rats" signs had been hung. In front of the former sleaze palace, a street fair attracted tourists and families, inviting them to stuff their faces with funnel cakes and shop for socks and knock-off handbags.

Down the block, I managed to spot this rare specimen of whitefish. An endangered species, now almost extinct, the Times Square breed of whitefish once swam by the multitudes along this thoroughfare. Today, their numbers have dwindled considerably.


Times Square whitefish

As I was lamenting the loss of sleaze, a guy dressed in denim from head to toe asked a young backpack-toting fella if he was looking for call girls. He was. "You don't know about Joe's?" the denim guy asked the john. Apparently not. They took off together heading uptown and I followed on the sly.

They turned into the Edison Hotel and stopped at the hallway pay phones. "Sixty," the denim guy said to the john, "Now I gotta get the ticket so you can get in. Don't worry! You're gonna go where all these other guys are going and nobody's gonna stop you."

I loitered in the lobby among the beached tourists and waited for the two guys to head for the elevators. Finally, some real-life sleaze! There are still prostitutes in Times Square -- maybe even right here, in the family-friendly Hotel Edison! But the john chickened out and the deal did not go through. I headed back outside, bereft.


sexy sadie and her lovely lumps

On 42nd Street, amid the Disney theaters and chain stores, with Hello Kitty and Applebee's, I encountered this scene at the new Ripley's, all that's left of the Deuce's old freak show: an animatronic bearded fat lady and her bionic geriatric buddy. They were lip-syncing to the Black Eyed Peas.

As children and their parents looked on with delight, the old coot asked, "What you gon' do with all that junk? All that junk inside your trunk?"

And Sexy Sadie responded, "I'ma get, get, get, get, you drunk, get you love drunk off my hump. My hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my lovely little lumps."

It was the sleaziest show in town.

• Gaiety Burlesk
• Playpen Closing
  
• Grand Luncheonette
• Flickr pics of still-sleazy spots
  

Jade Mountain Update

Something is happening at Jade Mountain, the former beloved Chinese restaurant on Second Avenue. For the past several mornings there has been quiet activity going on behind the metal shutter. Yesterday I was able to ask one of the workmen what's in store for the old favorite.


a peek inside jade mountain

"It's going to be a restaurant," he told me, but he didn't know what kind. I hope it's another Chinese joint and that they keep the beautiful neon signage. Either way, let's be thankful it's not turning into yet another bank or Starbucks.

Sally Young & Cooper Square

cool stuff from sally

Artist Sally Young makes t-shirts, stickers, postcards, and lots of other things -- including what she calls “goofy little pamphlets” -- about the destruction of the East Village where she has lived for the past 27 years. And while she is currently putting together an accordion book of images taken from the demolition of Cooper Union’s Hewitt Building, she’s been most interested lately in researching a building that was destroyed to make way for the Cooper Square Hotel, that glassy monstrosity at 5th and Bowery.


the hotel today, a giant above the bricks
click to see chimney stains on left-most building

Previously owned by Peter Cooper and built on the Stuyvesant Farm property, Sally told me, the building was once a Colonial. After it came down and before the hotel went up, you could see the outline of its gambrel roof. The demolition also revealed wooden walls and stone foundations. A pair of dark smoke stains from the building’s twin chimneys could be seen snaking up the bricks of the house next door, artifacts from long-ago nights spent by the fire.

Sally took photographs of these revelations before they disappeared. She loves the rich history of the neighborhood and has created a little book called Deconstructing Bowery in which she has listed the names and occupations of the people who made Bowery their home in 1825. It’s a collection of chairmakers and watchmakers, butchers and bakers, hatters, tobacconists, and makers of sandpaper.


27 Cooper Sq, future nightclub

When towers go up, we lose all of our history, near and far. Poet Hettie Jones (ex-wife of Amiri Baraka and one of the last beatniks) lives at 27 Cooper Square, one of two still-standing original buildings on the block. She refused to leave when the hotel came, so the hotel built around her. Her little brick tenement looks like it’s being ingested by glass and steel.

There are controversial plans to install a club and two bars in the hotel, one of which will be outdoors and end just 30 inches from a neighboring building's windows. The hotel lounge is going into the tenement's first floor space, currently shored up by wooden beams. This amoeba-like incorporation of the smaller building is a potent symbol of the way development is devouring, decapitating, and disemboweling our city.

Like Sally Young’s t-shirts say, visit the East Village and “come see what’s left.” Every day, there is less and less to see of what the neighborhood used to be. What will remain to remind us of how we got here and the people who came before us? Without a past, how will we even know ourselves?

You can order your own t-shirts and more by contacting Sally at aloysious@mindspring.com.

• High-Rise Eats Tenement
• Sally Young at the Howl Fest
  

*Everyday Chatter

Giuliani admits guilt (or takes credit) for murdering the soul of New York City. (P.S. Avoiding eye contact is still a good idea.) [NYT] [Gothamist]

Harlem braces for Bloomie's big rezoning bomb. [NY Sun]

Here are two ways to avoid eviction when Barb Corcoran's breathing down your neck: drop dead or move to New Jersey. I'm not sure which choice is better. [NYDN]

Mosaic Man Jim Power has sold his URL, eastvillage.com, to a real estate company. Jim desperately needs the money so he can rent some real estate of his own and stop sleeping outside. The irony of this situation is painful. [Scoopy's]

The Pennsylvania Hotel, the one that inspired Glenn Miller's "Pennsylvania 6-5000," is coming down and only, like, two people care. [NYO]

With all the talk of Manhattan's soul these days, what about Brooklyn's? [Kinetic C]

Stage Deli

The Stage Deli is celebrating its 70th anniversary tomorrow with klezmer music and reduced prices on its astronomically priced sandwiches. That's good because who in their right mind pays 20 bucks for a pastrami on rye? Anyway, the place has been around for 70 years and that's saying something, but I was not impressed on my visit this past weekend.

The waitstaff is seasoned, but the "flair" on their vest fronts reminded me of the kids at TGI Friday's. In fact, the whole place kind of reminded me of a suburbanite's idea of "New York deli." The counter, where I sat, was not a lunch counter. There was no Formica, no chrome swivel stools. It was a shellacked wooden bar with high chairs, the kind of setup you find in an Outback Steakhouse.


deli lunch counter? or the bar at outback?

And the joint is lousy with tourists. They line up around the block so they can order matzo ball soup and talk about it like it's something exotic. The Mom seated next to me could not stand the fact that the sullen counterman had failed to inquire about which state in the union she hailed from.

"Don't you ever like to ask people where they're from?" she asked.
"Sometimes, but not all the time," said the counterman, mixing an egg cream with Hershey's chocolate syrup. (Wait a minute -- Hershey's?!*)
"But aren't you curious?" she pressed.
"I know where you're from," he said, "I can read your t-shirt."
"We're not from Boston," she gloated, "I got this shirt on a vacation. We're from the capital of the United States of America. You know, Washington, D.C."
The counterman looked suitably unimpressed.



According to Time Out, the Stage pays about a million dollars a year in rent, so I guess they really do need to sell those pastrami sandwiches for $20. And I realize that many people love the Stage. I, however, would rather eat at Katz's.

*Hershey's does not make an authentic New York egg cream. The stuff to use is Fox's U-Bet. Why the people at the Stage Deli don't know this I am unable to fathom.

*Everyday Chatter

My heart is breaking as, after the gutting, the exterior demolition of the Playpen begins. [Curbed]

I have long fantasized about visiting the potter's field out on Hart Island. Watching this movie is probably the closest I'll ever get. [City Room]

Sewell Chan moderated the latest discussion in the Jane Jacobs Future of NY series. With Gay Talese, Norman Oder of Atlantic Yards Report, and others, he explored the role blogs might play in crusading for the preservation of urban public space. [City Room]

Here's a video of those fabulous, but sadly vanishing Ukrainian ladies of 7th Street. [NYT]

Chelsea goes the Soho way as art galleries prepare to fall before the bulldozer of the affluence they invariably attract. “They are looking at much higher renewals of their leases...Fifteen years ago when I showed spaces, I’d be bothered by drug dealers and prostitutes, but now it’s little yapping dogs that a collector has brought along as they look at art.” [NY Mag]

The Bowery Boys tell the sordid tale of McGurk's Suicide Hall -- later feminist Kate Millett's place, which she then got kicked out of so we could enjoy yet another glass box. [BB's]

A Curbed reader notes that condo life is boring as hell. Says the reader, "the atmosphere in the building is one of dullness and boredom. I might as well be living in the suburbs!" [Curbed]

A Healthy Dose of Fear

This morning, 1010 WINS woke me with a story about a fatal stabbing in Greenwich Village and a mugging in Central Park. I thought maybe I was dreaming, cast back to 1993. But it's no dream. Is crime returning to the city -- or did it never go away?



A couple of weeks ago I went to see The Brave One, in which little Iris turns into Travis Bickle as Jodie Foster plays a woman who writes and speaks about a gentrifying New York that is "disappearing before our eyes." (A woman after my own heart.) And yet, lulled by the supposedly Disney-safe New York, she and her fiancé blithely stroll through nighttime Central Park where they head down one of those creepy tunnels and come face to face with the horrible truth: New York is not the secure little suburb many people think it is.

Evidence of that is everywhere. A young couple was robbed at gunpoint recently in Central Park after dark. Young women have been sexually assaulted all over the brightly lit, well-trafficked East Village. Drunk kids are being mugged like crazy in Williamsburg.



Crime is certainly not always avoidable, but you have a better chance of avoiding it if you pay attention, and people don't seem to be paying attention. Especially when strapped into ipods and other pricey devices that not only serve to distract your attention, but also attract the attention of trouble.



There seems to be an epidemic false sense of security in New York these days. Yes, the city is safer than it used to be, but it's still a city. It's not a virtual world where you live out your consumer fantasies, and it's not a television show, though it has begun to resemble both.

On East Village Idiot, where the blogger is invited to his neighbor's apartment for cookies, I find the reader comments most telling. For example, Courtney says, "There’s been an interesting dynamic in my building of all the older people moving out and young people moving in. Then, we actually become friends. It blows my mind, we sometimes even hang out! It’s getting all Friends all up in this joint." More evidence that the newest New Yorkers believe the city has turned into the television version of itself?



Since "all the older people" are moving out, leaving few with real-life experience to tell the cookie-munching young folks how it is, I thought I'd offer a few words of warning, especially now that school's back in session.

Do not:
- leave your apartment door unlocked like the characters on Friends, ever -- even when you're home inside
- talk on the phone while rummaging through your open purse
- flash your money or flaunt your pricey gadgets
- walk on dark streets while listening to your ipod
- leave your fire-escape windows open, unlocked, or ungated
- hang out in the park, any park, when it’s after dark (and don't go down those tunnels)

Do:
- keep your backpacks and bags zipped
- carry your wallet in your front jeans pocket
- pay attention and listen for approaching footsteps on dark streets
- look behind you before entering your building's front door
- be polite to armed muggers and give them what they ask for

It seems like after every shooting, stabbing, and rape in gentrified Manhattan, the TV news interviews kids who say, "I can't believe it could happen here." Well, it can and it does. And it always will.

Treats Truck

Apparently, this blog has a bit of a reputation for being "dark." Well, these are dark days in New York City. However, now and then, there is a ray of light. Yesterday that ray of light came in the shape of the Treats Truck. Parked on 6th Ave between 13th and 14th, the Treats Truck, a.k.a. "Sugar," lured me over with its pronouncement of "Treats are good!" and I could not resist tasting a few samples offered by treat lady Kim Ima. I recommend the caramel creme sandwiches.

What I like about the Treats Truck is that it's not a major chain store, it's a local small business, and it feels a bit like a cousin of the New York pushcart tradition. As Ima told me, "People are tired of seeing nothing but chains everywhere." Amen to that--and keep on truckin. Find the Treats Truck today.

The Gaiety Theater

VANISHED: 2005

When we tragically lost the Howard Johnson's in Times Square, we also lost the gay burlesque that lived on its second floor. The building was just demolished and last week's visit to the site revealed the zig-zag vestigial trace of the stairs you used to climb to reach the Gaiety.


my flickr

At the top of those stairs was a ticket booth where a woman sat behind the glass and took your $17 admission through a slot. That price was good for an all-day show. The theater was small and had a stage with a runway that reached out into the audience. The dancers, most of them muscled and tanned, would come out on stage and strip, then disappear behind the blue tinsel curtain. The audience would wait. And wait. Sometimes a movie screen came down to entertain with a film.

Finally, minutes later, the dancer would emerge fully erect, the audience would applaud his hydraulic achievement, and the dance would go on. If you were next to the runway, for the price of a dollar tip, you could sit like Tantalus beneath the fruit tree as the dancer dangled his family jewels over your upturned face, just out of reach. After the performance, you could take a break in the snack room, where boys leaned against the vending machines and chatted while munching bags of Doritos.


painting of the Gaiety by Patrick Angus

Gay New York -- and all lovers of burlesque and Times Square's sordid history -- lost a touchstone when the Gaiety closed. The building it shared with Howard Johnson's, now a pile of bricks, once housed the Orpheum "dime-a-dance" Dance Palace. It originally opened in 1917. Henry Miller danced with the girls there. In the 1970s it became the New Paris, where live sex acts were performed on soiled mattresses.

A visit to those bricks today won't make them talk, but we can still imagine the many stories they'd have to tell.



From The New York Times
April 24, 2005 Sunday
Quietly, a Bawdy Gay Beacon Goes Dark
By KATHRYN BELGIORNO

Most of the pedestrians who stream past the building at 201 West 46th Street, on Broadway, do not notice that its tenant has moved out. Then again, most of them probably had no idea who was there in the first place.

Only a flight of stairs is visible through a glass door. A black awning says, simply, ''Gaiety Theater.'' The small hand-lettered sign on the door is little help: ''The Gaiety Theater is closed. Thank you for your patronage. The Management.'' Scrawled like an afterthought are the words: ''Please see the G. publications for possible relocation address.''

The sign, so modest that the letter G must stand in for the word gay, is a fitting symbol of a 30-year-old salute to immodesty, the city's last surviving all-male burlesque house and the only remaining strip theater where performers danced completely nude.

What the sign doesn't illuminate is the lore that set the Gaiety apart from other clubs: the mainstream attention it attracted after photos of Madonna and some of the club's dancers were included in her 1992 book, ''Sex''; the cachet of visitors like John Waters, Andy Warhol and Shirley MacLaine; and the club's unrivaled ability to survive, despite the strict zoning laws instituted during the Giuliani administration, thanks to a location just outside a restricted area.

…What Gaiety patrons will do next is uncertain. ''I've seen a lot of customers standing there in shock,'' said John Galanopoulos, who operates a hot dog stand at 46th Street and Broadway. ''They're almost talking to themselves, like, 'What am I going to do now?'''

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Car-Vator

Although I've talked about this already, I seem to have more to say about the condo going up at 200 11th Avenue with its En Suite Sky Garage, an elevator that carries your car home with you, straight into your apartment where you can snuggle with it all night. Now Curbed reports that the City Council has granted the developers a permit to go ahead and build this contraption. Says Curbed, "we're that much closer to robots taking over the world."


200 11th rises from the riff-raff

Ah yes, robots. We are fighting the Clone Wars every day in this city. For another glimpse into clone life, take a look at the video for the Sky Garage. It shows a man driving into his condo building's car-vator, then stepping out of his car and into his apartment where his blonde wife greets him not with a kiss or an embrace. No hi-honey-I'm-home relating occurs between these two. He simply passes her the car key and she takes it. She then goes down in the car-vator and drives away (looking sort of like Martha Stewart). No one could ever accuse these two powerhouses of being co-dependent.


a cool clone-mate greeting

Of course I understand that the developers were simply trying to show how the car goes up and then comes down. But in the process they have shown us something far more illuminating. It may even be a selling feature of this condo and other developments like it. Namely, it's the idea that you don't ever have to get close to other people. Not only do you live high above them -- buffered by your 24-hour attendants, your glass balustrades, your tax abatements -- you also don't really live with them. You can simply pass each other, like two ships in the night, in the vast ocean of your luxury triplex.

• Suburbia in the sky
• Suburbanization & Anti-Semitism
• Clone Wars, part 1
• Clone Wars, part 2
  

Chelsea Antiques Garage

VANISHING



A few years ago, the decades-old Chelsea Flea Market was forced to move to Hell's Kitchen, pushed out by the bulldozer of luxury high-rise development. As flea market founder Alan Boss told the Voice, "We as Americans, having little or no culture, we figure that if you can build on two feet by four feet, you should have a building there, and screw anything that came before it." So far, business in the new location has been slow, as Chelsea Now recently reported. Like many small businesses that try to survive on new ground, it's been hard to get a grip.


the site of the former flea market

The market's move was part of a rezoning plan that was hatched back in 1995, a plan that continues to ravage Chelsea today. The soul of what remains of the market in Chelsea, the Antiques Garage at 112 W. 25th St., will likely be the plan's next victim. The building that houses it was sold to a developer for $42.7 million a few months ago. And we all know what that means.



I visited Chelsea's Antiques Garage and talked to some of the long-time vendors. One told me that he's certain 2008 will be the final year for the Garage -- info he said he got "straight from the owner." So maybe it's time to load up on vintage comic books, taxidermied deer trophies, baby-doll heads, Bakelite jewelry, Shriner fezzes, and all the other good stuff that serves to remind us that the past exists and continues along with us, no matter how hard the city's planners try to erase it from our memories.

2 Condo Predictions Come True

18th and 8th:


As predicted in my last post on the topic, the high-school kids who nest every day on the slate ledge of the new condo at 18th and 8th have not been stopped by The Man's fussy little caution-tape fence. Rather than be deterred by the fence, they have begun nesting on the deterrent itself, sitting and standing on the wooden base. At least they do until the cops come and chase them away. I can't wait to see what happens when the new residents move in.



Jackson Square:


I also predicted that the squalid little park known as Jackson Square would soon be "cleaned up" due to the now-rising presence of the undulating monster-condo One Jackson Square. Their sales office is opening on Greenwich and, coincidentally, a bunch of workers recently had the park emptied of homeless people and roped off so they could install a sprinkler system, no doubt for--get ready for my next amazing prediction--the lovely new plantings that will be coming.

The clean-up, by the way, has been funded by Armani Exchange. I guess it's a sort of welcome to all its new customers moving into the square.

*Everyday Chatter

At least two readers took Time Out NY to task for loading its "Has Manhattan Lost Its Soul" issue with luxury condo and chain-store ads. Asks one reader, "Why couldn't this issue also be devoted to the advertising of small businesses? Just one measly issue offering reduced-rate full-page ads for some of our good ol' homegrown New York entrepreneurs. For shame, TONY." This is an excellent suggestion, especially now that we know, from her passionate words at the Lost Soul MAS talk, that TONY president Alison Tocci longs for a city filled with thriving small businesses. Alison, are you listening?

A dream come true? New York considers a law against standing around like an idiot and gawking while blocking traffic on the sidewalks. I've got a few more suggestions for pedestrian behavior. [City Room]

Hooray for one mom who had this to say about uptight Village parents protesting the S/M leather fair this weekend: "This is the West Village. It's been like this for decades...Now all these families moving in trying to pretend it's the suburbs. If the culture of the West Village bugs them then move to New Jersey." Amen! [AMNY]

Take a tour of the Masonic Hall--anytime. [Blog Chelsea]

MAS sums up the press they got on their Jane Jacobs NY Soul discussion, including this blog's take, among many others. [MAS]

This guy is covering the vanishing downtown scene in his blog. It's good to see more people working to preserve our vanishing city--even if it's only in cyberspace. So give him a visit. [Flaming Pablum]

TV Crime Scenes

Permit me a gratuitous paparazzi moment as I share some pics taken this week of Mariska and child. I like Mariska Hargitay. I like her on TV and whenever I see her on a shoot for Law & Order SVU, she's always very animated and playful and seems like an all-around fun lady. She is also the daughter of blonde bombshell Jayne Mansfield and Mr. Universe Mickey Hargitay, and how could I not pay homage to the offspring of such a burlesque-style, over-the-top coupling?




photos from my flickr

I'm not sure how to tie this into my Vanishing New York theme, except that I have noticed over the years fewer and fewer crime-show shoots taking place in the East Village. I guess we just no longer have the crummy backdrops and authentic grittiness that these shows require.

Maybe NBC will have to come out with yet another Law & Order, this time the white-collar crime edition. And I don't think that's Olivia Benson's beat.

Jon Baltimore Music Co.

For years, musicians have traveled to 48th Street off Times Square when they needed to buy a new instrument or have their old one spruced up like new. And if they were horn players, they often went to Baltimore’s. The Jon Baltimore Music Company is the latest incarnation of Baltimore’s, a local shop that’s been on Music Row for over 35 years. I found it during a recent visit to the block when I went looking for history and what remains of this vanishing marketplace.

At Jon Baltimore’s I was greeted with warmth by salesman and musician Pete Miranda, a cat (in Pete’s lingo) who’s played with artists like Tito Puente, Celia Cruz, and The Temptations. When I told him I was interested in the history of the place, Pete walked me through the store, telling me about its famous customers, like Gerry Mulligan, Ornette Coleman, and Doc Cheatham.

He introduced me to Jon Baltimore who was busy at his workshop making repairs to a customer’s Buescher saxophone, a beautiful instrument covered with intricate scrollwork. The customer had come in needing a quick fix, he had a gig that night, and Jon was happy to oblige on the spot.



The four of us hung out and talked about old Times Square, Pete and Jon reminiscing about the days when cats would come to 48th to do their shopping then, just for the hell of it, stand on the corner to play. It didn’t matter that they were major musicians, they just loved the fun of playing on the street. Pete remembered the joy of being a kid in Times Square when 8th Ave was full of pawnshops, the windows packed with brass horns, and for a dime you could visit Hubert’s and watch fleas toss a football back and forth.

Jon started his career as an instrument repairman when he was 9 years old. He learned in his father’s shop, a kind of musician’s social club where he spent much of his childhood soaking in the often exciting and sometimes dicey atmosphere of New York’s nightclub scene in the 1970s. He recalled sleeping in a booth next to his father when the now-vanished Latin Quarter was raided and escaping through a back door. Four years ago, he bought the business from his father, who wanted to change the shop to appeal to tourists. But Jon wanted to keep it real, and he has.





The place feels like it’s been there forever, with its gleaming inventory, pictures of famous faces, and Jon’s workshop—a cluttered space of controlled chaos, tools that look like they were forged in the 19th century, windows hung with horns in various states of repair.

Today, he told me, he tries to run "an authentic shop, like in the old days, with no horseshit." Most of his customers are regulars. He treats them fairly and never charges more than he thinks is right. “You can still make money but do it in a righteous way,” he said, “Sell quality instruments and charge a realistic price.”

He spent at least half an hour working on the customer’s sax, replacing the pads and making sure every pin, key, and screw was in good shape. When he was done, the horn sounded smooth and ready to go. Jon charged the guy just 20 bucks.

“Music is a beautiful thing,” Jon said, “You want to inspire people.” His shop is definitely inspiring and worth a visit for anyone nostalgic for an authentic New York.

*Everyday Chatter

Has NYC Lost Its Soul? Everybody, everywhere seems to be asking this question right now. What does that tell us? Here it's the cover story, featuring the lost and lovely McHale's. [AMNY]

After reading the above-linked article, I can hardly express how creepy and disheartening it is to hear that New Yorkers continue to clamor for more and more Starbucks: "Starbucks chief executive Howard Schultz implied that New Yorkers were wholeheartedly embracing the changing character of their city. Asked just how many Starbucks locations he thinks the city can support, Schultz discussed the many emails he gets requesting new stores."



You know the soul of Greenwich Village is cold and dead when its citizens go on a suburban-style witch hunt, screaming hysterically about how the sight of S/M leather folks will damage their precious and infinitely sensitive children. I hope those parents all get their tight asses whipped black and blue by mobs of leather daddies. [Gothamist]

Maybe it's not too late to save what's left of the Bowery. Join the last-ditch effort next week. [Curbed]

Astor Place Facelift

This morning, a tipster sent me this shot of the Starbucks sign being trucked away. But don't rejoice yet--it's just going out for repairs and this Starbucks-of-many is not closing. I also got the sad news that the venerable old Astor Place newsstand has been replaced by a regulation glass box.



I went by to investigate and chatted with a guy who works the newsstand. "It looks just like that building," I said to him, pointing to the glassy green monster condo looming behind us.

He nodded and said, "It's supposed to."


the box is yet another billboard

He added that soon everything is going to look like this. Then he dropped the following bomb: Cooper Union, he said, plans to move its Engineering School to their new building going up on 7th St and 3rd Ave and then they're going to tear down the low-rise brick Engineering building on Astor Place and replace it with, you guessed it, another glassy high-rise. Maybe a hotel.

I'd like to say this is just a rumor, but it sure sounds plausible. When is this going to end?


astor place stand a couple weeks ago,
asking the question on many minds

Is New York Losing Its Soul?

Last night I went to this talk sponsored by the Municipal Art Society as part of their Jane Jacobs extravaganza. It was a sold-out full house with a line of ticketless people waiting for the chance to get in. A lot of New Yorkers wanted to be part of this discussion -- but most of the people, I noticed, had gray hair or no hair at all. The man sitting next to me wore one of those WWII vet baseball caps with the name of his battleship embroidered on the front. Quite a few folks hobbled in on walkers and canes. I hope this doesn't mean that the "Greatest Generation" will be the last to really care about the soul of our city.



The moderator was Clyde Haberman of the Times and the panelists were Alison Tocci of Time Out publications, Darren Walker of the Rockefeller Foundation, writer Tama Janowitz, and Rocco Landesman of Jujamcyn Theaters.

Haberman started off by saying there is an implied "yes" to the question of the night, New York is losing its soul. "You feel it in the relentless bulldozer of homogenization," he said, "as one small shop and one small restaurant after another are ground down and replaced by more banks and more Duane Reades. People on the Upper West Side are nearly in revolt, but they won't revolt because they'll just go to Starbucks and take care of that. ...We have an administration that hasn't yet met a developer to which it will say no."

Tocci thinks were losing NY's soul. "The volume of anger is so much more pronounced from small business people and artists--it's louder now than I've ever heard it before." Later she said, "How do you know you've died and gone to Hell? There's a Starbucks on every corner...If the Bloomberg administration were as aggressive in its support of small businesses as it is in its support of big developers, there might be more balance."

Walker worried that New York is losing "its organic messiness and controlled disorder. Unlike in the rest of America, where they talk about tolerating difference, here we actually celebrate difference. But there's been a growing inequality and for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, there's a widening gap between the rich and poor." He also worries about the loss of African-Americans and about homogenization, "When I go to Lenox Avenue, I want to see Lenox Avenue, not Columbus Avenue."

Janowitz talked about finding steel-cut oats at her Brooklyn supermarket, "a sign of gentrification." She sees resources and homes for artists and working-class people rapidly dwindling. "The city has time and again betrayed the people. It's not just that the glass is half full, it's totally empty." Then she hid behind her copious hair for much of the night.

Landesman (who, I must mention, wore banana-yellow reptile-skin cowboy boots) mourned the loss of Times Square's sex trade, "New York was always the sexiest city in the world and Times Square was the center of that. We're now experiencing a de-libidinization of our city." He said city planning has become prudish and the gentleman's clubs, where women dance topless now, are so tightly regulated and packaged, "they are no different than all the Duane Reades."

To which Clyde said, "So we're not just losing our souls, we're losing our bodies too."



I would agree with that--we're losing the fleshiness of this city, the way that bricks are fleshy and flawed, unlike glass and steel. We're turning into a robot city.

The panel offered no solutions, but a few came from the audience members who were invited to write questions on notecards that were then passed to Clyde. He skipped one important question, "Why does the New York Times partner with Bruce Ratner?" declining to answer by saying, "I'm just a wage slave." One audience member's card suggested a flip-tax on big businesses that would go to support small businesses. Another recommend rent-control for small businesses. But these were hardly discussed.

At 7:45, Haberman ended the session early. A woman in the audience objected, standing up in true New Yorker style to insist, "Why are you ending now, we're supposed to go until 8." So we continued. But the audience, seeing that their questions were not being answered, was becoming restless. They wanted to get in on the conversation. They waved their hands in the air. Some of them just shouted out. They clearly wanted a forum for their anger and their solutions--but this was not that forum.

There was a lot of passion in that (mostly) gray-haired crowd, and a lot of good ideas for how to regain New York's lost soul. These are our city's remaining rabble-rousers, with their walkers and their WWII mementos, they have the love for our city and they know the price of its loss. I hope that someone with the power to do it will organize a space in which these people can be heard -- before they all pass away or get pushed out of the city by rising rents.

For more on this event, the Times City Room followed up later today with their own coverage here.

*Everyday Chatter

The UWS continues to die an agonizing death, as the Apthorp goes condo and many of its long-term Jewish/lefty residents must hit the streets. [NY Mag]

Homeless teens will never move back in to Covenant House--it's recently been sold for yet another luxury Chelsea hotel. [Curbed]

Columbia's cherry gets popped. I'm not sure exactly what that means, but it's an interesting choice of phrasing. [NY Observer]

Victoria's Secret Student Center coming to Barnard's ivy-league campus. Well, hopefully not, but it's a possibility. Dear womyn of Barnard, this is not what post-feminism is all about. What would Gloria do? [NY Sun]

These EV Ukrainian ladies have been rolling out dumplings for years. I love to pass their windows in the morning and look through the lace curtains to see their hammy forearms working the dough on flour-dusted tables. It's a rare moment of nostalgic gratification in this otherwise vanishing city. [NY Times]

Eisenberg's Sandwich Shop

NOT VANISHING



Every now and then, I like to have lunch at Eisenberg’s Sandwich Shop, where the world’s most delicious tuna-salad sandwich can be found. Eisenberg’s has been around since 1929 and is no longer owned by the Eisenberg family. Remarkably, though the luncheonette has changed hands 4 or 5 times, it has never been tampered with—a miracle in this city of constant renovation. The current owner, Josh Konecky, is a self-proclaimed preservationist. This city needs more of those.

One little detail I love about the place is that they use Pechter’s bread, itself an anachronism of sorts, packaged not in plastic bags, but waxy paper sleeves. The bakery opened in 1929, the same year that Eisenberg’s debuted, and I’m willing to bet the two of them have been making beautiful sandwiches together since the beginning.



On my most recent trip to Eisenberg’s, I took a seat at the vintage counter and ordered the tuna on rye with a bag of chips and a chocolate egg cream. A guy named Pete D. asked me to sign a petition that he hopes will help him win an upcoming court case. The petition states that he is a respected, 30-year patron of the luncheonette, and a man of good character. I signed the paper and Pete told me the torturous tale of his impending eviction, a story that involves drug busts, illegal searches, back-room deals, and harassment from landlords. It’s a story that is becoming too common in the current New York age. If you’d like to support Pete, you can find him at the counter most days.



One of the countermen got in on our conversation. “You should settle,” he told Pete as he buttered slices of Pechter’s rye, “Get out while the getting’s good. You’re lucky the landlord’s name doesn’t end in a vowel, if you know what I mean. He could put a bullet in your head. How long do you want to fight this thing? And what if you win? You could end up in a box. People have done worse for real estate in this town.”

This is true. Thankfully, Eisenberg’s landlord seems like a real mensch—he dines at the counter himself and has given the current owner a good, long lease, securing those delicious tuna sandwiches into the 2020’s.

P.S. Pechter’s even turns up as an corny old joke in the Encyclopedia of Jewish Humor:

Adam & Yves

Yesterday, a worker was stapling up these lovely shrouds of self-promotional advertecture on Yves, one of the many, many condo buildings currently rising from the ashes of what was Chelsea.


photo: my flickr

Here I see a fantasy of the primordial, prototypical yunnies posing in their post-lapsarian world. Expelled from Paradise, they seek a return to the blue waters of mother's chilly womb. They look towards but not at each other. Separate, they can't touch. Like Narcissus, they may gaze at their own reflections in the pool, but human connection remains out of their reach.

Here is a portrait of the alienation that is washing over our city, an alienation that has somehow become admired and longed for, rather than critiqued. How long before there's no one here but these robots?

One-Handed Baby Strolling

I really wish this practice would vanish from the streets of New York, but regrettably, it's only going to get worse. A tipster from Michigan writes in that she's heard of a brand-new baby stroller made especially for one-handed steering:

"cool, i thought, until i realized that this innovation was not intended so much for parents carrying a child while pushing a stroller as parents talking on cell phones and/or drinking lattes while pushing a stroller."

This practice may work well on the scantily trafficked sidewalks and byways of suburban Michigan, but in New York it's a nightmare for the child-free among us. The maneuver generally means that the parent/caregiver is positioned to the side of the stroller, not directly behind it, thereby taking up double the space on the sidewalk. One-handed steering means less control over the stroller than two. Add to the mix the total obliviousness that comes with cell-phone yakking and accidents will happen.



I was recently sideswiped by a Chelsea dad pushing his baby stroller with one hand and cell-phoning with the other. The guy was in a hurry and almost took my elbow off. I was, in fact, bleeding. As I stood in shock, holding my skinned elbow, I watched the guy plow into traffic using his baby stroller as a mini-tank as he crossed against the light.

After a bit of research, I suspect that the one-handed stroller in question is the urban-friendly Bugaboo Bee, retailing at $530 and premiered last month. The Bugaboo site says the Bee is for "parents who live on the fly" and want to avoid life's obstacles with the Bee's "easy one-handed steering." (The site's movie of foppish urban dads deliriously racing around a freakily anthropomorphized city with their buzzy Bees is worth watching.)

*Everyday Chatter

There's a small exhibit of Frank Sinatra portraits at the Time-Warner Center mall. I checked it out, it's not worth the trip, unless you also need to pick up some decorative soaps at Crabtree & Evelyn. How Frank ended up in a shopping mall is a mystery I don't want to ponder. [NY Sun]



A better show is the movie about Sinatra's pallie Toots Shor. A delight for anyone who longs for a real New York experience, if only on the silver screen. [Quad]

Bryant Park, formerly known as Needle Park, is now the city's "jolly green whore." [Lost City]

At the Rapture Cafe, there will be a memorial Wednesday night for Dean Johnson, CBGB's "Rock & Roll Fag." [NY Post]

Chelsea Hotel & Linda Troeller

room 323, Monika Nicolle & Laurence Belotti-Sonnois

This weekend I was walking past the Chelsea Hotel and decided to take a stroll through the lobby, which is as far as I’d ever gotten inside. By chance, the POOL art fair was going on and I was free to roam the halls, entering rooms where artists had set up installations and gallery spaces. There were women lying on beds with broken eggs affixed to their abdomens, entire rooms wrapped in plastic, and bathtubs turned into dioramas containing thousands of pill bottles, pond vegetation, and one woman contemplating suicide.

As I climbed the ornate stairways where paintings lined the walls, I tried to imagine what the iconic hotel will be like after BD Hotels is done with it—or what it might become in the hands of luxury hotelier Andre Balazs. A little man in a red bathrobe shuffled down the hall in slippers. An elderly woman sat outside her room watching the goings-on as if from a front stoop. Somehow, I don’t think there will be room for people like these in the new Chelsea.



The art fair officially ended on the 5th floor and I considered leaving at that point, but signs led me up to the 9th where 12-year resident and photographer Linda Troeller had turned her room into a gallery space for the weekend. She was getting ready to leave, but when I told her about Vanishing New York, hoping for a quick interview, she said, “Are you Jeremiah? I asked you to come here today.” She pulled out a newspaper clipping about this blog in Chelsea Now, which I hadn't seen, and said she'd just emailed me that morning. But I was offline all day and didn’t get the message—or did I? (Cue the eerie music.)


linda in her room

“That is so weird,” I said.

“It’s not weird at all,” Linda told me, as if the whole course of the day’s serendipity were perfectly normal. Maybe it is normal in the Hotel Chelsea, where ghosts roam the halls and far, far weirder things have happened over the years. In an interview for Chelsea Now, Linda said, “When people come to the hotel, they do so knowing the place will open them up and guide them.” I guess, in this case, it guided me straight to Linda.



As I leafed through her book of evocative photographs, Atmosphere: An Artist’s Memoir of the Chelsea Hotel, NYC (which includes pictures of Rufus Wainwright, Ethan Hawke, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, as well as many other Chelsea habitues), Linda and I talked about the hotel and her mission to preserve the people and the place in images. “The hotel goes beyond physicality,” she said, “It is a worldwide symbol of the fresh dream,” the dream of artists who flock to the hotel. She has been photographing the place since 1994 and is currently documenting the changes that threaten to unravel that dream.



We didn’t have long to talk, so we promised to meet again. I am looking forward to it. In the meantime, to see Linda’s work and purchase her book, please visit the artist’s website. To find out everything there is to know about the current battle to save the Chelsea, go to Living with Legends.

*Everyday Chatter

I reported on this last week, but here's more on the new Chelsea condo just loaded with suburban amenities: "McMansions stacked high into Manhattan airspace!" [Voice]

Remarkably, a great horned owl has moved into the East Village. Does this signal a new flock of gentrifiers, the return of some very old natives, or does the suburbanized NYC appeal to country critters? [NMNL] I do wonder if the owl escaped from the falconry extravaganza in Central Park. [Gothamist]

Here's a new word: Manhattanifying. It's what's happening to the boroughs and it's synonymous now with suburbanization. It means golf, Starbucks, and lots of real estate brokers. If you think you're safe in Brooklyn, think again. I've said it before, the death of Manhattan means the death of all of NYC. It's only a matter of time. And time is running out fast. [Observer]

Speaking of which...

Money to lobbyists sweetened the Domino condo plan for developers. [NY Post]

It's too late to see the installation, but you can explore the Atlantic Yards Future Perfect video show online and see what's in store. [AYR]

But a journalist's visit to yet-ungentrified Sheepshead Bay sounds (to me) like a selling point for the area:
"This is what Williamsburg and the East Village looked like before they became cleaned-up advertisements for themselves," I say. "Postmodern," Bronson says. "When you advertise what you once were because you're no longer that." He glares at me. "You should read Don DeLillo instead of that police junk." [NY Sun]