*Everyday Chatter

With the Wall Street crash, I may be reporting on a whole different kind of vanishing. And here's one now: Whole Foods is dead in the toxic waters of Gowanus. [Curbed]

Now if only the Whole Foods in Union Square would close in time to let the 89-year-old Jefferson Market take a breath. The neighborhood shop is on the verge of vanishing. [Times]

How can you tell the health of seedy old Times Square? Like sea turtles in a revived East River, prostitutes have been discovered at 42nd and 8th. [Curbed]

65-year-old Emerald Inn to close due to massively rising rents. [EVG]

UWS theme-dive bar Yogi's is closing on 10/4--girls, pick up your brassieres and go home. [NYBarfly]

Can we all agree to start using the term "Meatpuking"? [Grub]

A burly bouncer guards the potted bamboo at the Cooper Square Hotel--or maybe they just know 98% of the neighborhood would love to hurl a brick through the joint:


New York Magazine's 40th Anniversary edition is chock-full of good stuff. Here's a sampler:

The yuppies have won, says Jay McInerney: "yuppie culture has become the culture, if not in reality, then aspirationally. The pods have pretty much taken over the world. The ideal of connoisseurship, the worship of brand names and designer labels, the pursuit of physical perfection through exercise and surgery—do these sound like the quaint habits of an extinct clan?"

Woody Allen mourns vanishing New York: "There are times where I’d finish a movie, like Everyone Says I Love You, and five places in the movie would be gone before it came out. Le Cirque would be gone. The bookstore on Madison Avenue would be gone. I couldn’t keep up with the rate of change, and the change was always the progression, really, of opulence."

Remembering old Times Square with one of Show World's former "jizz moppers," who says, "To me, wholesomeness—especially in the Times Square area—that’s what’s disgusting."

The New York Jew has vanished: But after the crash, "We can reopen the delis and bakeries, and celebrate the wisdom of our sages who knew that worldly success is fleeting, and that the secret to happiness is fear of God, a bowl of hot chicken soup, and a rent-controlled apartment in Brooklyn."

Philip Glass' biggest New York fear ("That it might become an ordinary place") is kind of the same as Sarah Jessica Parker's ("That all the bodegas, Korean markets, and delis will close and I’ll have to get my paper and milk at CVS").

Richard Price has hope for the LES: "Everybody thinks it’s a done deal and it’s all yuppie. Man, that thing, I mean, there’s more afterbirth than rebirth. You go half a block, and you’re in China. You’re not even in China, you’re in Fujian Province. And then you go into the projects and you’re in black-and-Hispanicsville. And then you go over here and you’re in Orthodox Jewville. And then you got the kids that, it’s like they’re in Rent but they have credit cards. So they don’t have to say, 'Ooh, light my candle.' They’ll go to Restoration Hardware and buy a fucking lamp."