"Nolita" asserts its power over Little Italy--aim to squeeze the 85-year-old San Gennaro Feast until it dies. Pricey handbags must be sold! [DNA]
A photographic look back at the East Village of 1987. [EVG]
Today in Washington Square Park:
A hoarder at the National Arts Club. [Gothamist]
The Knickerbocker door returns. [LC]
Existential messages appear on subway signage. [RS]
Elaine's apartment on the market. [CR]
I like a deli cat. [EVC]
2 comments:
I'm not exactly pro-$400 handbags, but the current incarnation of San Gennaro is a joke that serves to profit a few companies that are not based in the neighborhood and that run multiple identical stalls (i.e. I'm pretty sure most of the sausage etc...stalls are all owned/run by the same company). It's indistinguishable from the other crappy street fairs with low quality banal food options and cheap trinkets. The conflict isn't between new guard business/gentrifiers and native residents - it's between entrenched business interests and emergent business interests, so the issue requires a little nuance.
It seems to me that the solution is for the city to strictly limit the number of vendor permits, perhaps limiting a given company to a certain number of stalls at the fair, and promote a wider diversity of vendors. I'm sorry, but we need to get rid of the tube sock guy and the cheap CD people (along with the, more recently, corporate stalls such as verizon, though I might be mixing up San Gennaro with a different festival on that one).
Obviously, the companies who profit from the festival in its current form are going to bemoan the lose of culture etc...that they themselves caused by commercializing the festival, as if a decline in the number of funnel cake stalls triggers a decline in the festival's cultural import.
I'd like to hear from the old hold-out little italy residents (of which there are few); my guess is that they aren't very big fans of the festival as it's nothing like it was during their formative years.
Here's a much more reasonable take on San Gennaro that contrasts nicely with your kneejerk nostalgia.
www.gothamist.com/2011/01/26/neighbors_try_to_cut_san_gennaro_of.php
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