Friday, December 7, 2012

*Everyday Chatter

Last night I dreamed about a second, overlooked newsstand perched above Gem Spa... (send in your dreams...). [DVNY]

An amazing photographic journey of the NYC subways in 1973--courtesy of the EPA. [Narratively]

Enjoy the wonderful neon of New York City. [Stupefaction]

Sal Mineo shops for smut in an adult bookstore of 1965 Times Square. [VS]

"The Shore Theater’s iconic sign will not be coming back to the landmarked Coney Island building, according to the property holder, who says that the Hurricane Sandy-mangled marquee is unfixable and will have to be replaced." [BD]

Inside the East Village Eye. [EVG]

Watch the Deli Man--as the delis of NYC keep vanishing. [vimeo]

Looking back at Manhattan's lost diners. [NY90s]

Take a walk through a (mostly vanished) Hell's Kitchen. [J&KM]


There's now a Brooklyn neighborhood being called "Rambo." [Curbed]

Where do all the new New Yorkers go? To the most expensive neighborhoods. [WNYC]

Press play on this bedbug map of NYC and watch the epidemic explode. [bdbgs]

When a cupcake shop scene is deleted from Girls, is that a good sign that cupcakes are losing their luster? [Eater]

"How could she be so into frozen yogurt? I wondered. How could anyone? This was a dessert, after all, that oozed out of self-serve machines. It was served in a tub. Like margarine. It was nicknamed fro-yo." [NYO]

Click the following link only if you would like to see a man in crotchless pantyhose flash his penis on the L train. [Gothamist]

2 comments:

vidvedg 417 said...

Less dreamin', more grumblin'.

Ed said...

The Observer article is excellent, and one of the commentators gave a shout out to this site.

Combined with the WNYC article, the impression is unmistakable that Manhattan has turned into a sort of carless suburb, in large part to the reversal of the exodus to the actual suburbs in the 1970s, but without any changes in values that prompted the parents of these people to move to the suburbs in the first place.

But the return of a sort of 50s style conformity and blandness is nationwide, and has been noted by other cultural commentators without reference to New York, where the change has simply been the most dramatic because parts of the city had been so at odds with the dominant culture. Which means that though I keep on wanting to run screaming from the city, I'm not sure if it would really be better elsewhere. You still stumble on surviving bits of pre-hypergentrification New York on occasion.