Adding to the ever dwindling number of gay businesses on Chelsea's 8th Avenue, The Starting Line will be closing.
They've been in business here for about 26 years, according to tipster TJ. Currently, they're having a 30% off everything sale, and will likely be gone in about a month.
photo: NY Mag
Previously vanished along 8th Ave:
Camouflage
Rainbows & Triangles
The Unicorn
The Rawhide
this is about small business not a gay business. it will be replaced w/a chain store. maybe an upscale restaurant owned by gays or straights. its about who can pay the highest rent.
ReplyDeleteYou've hit the nail on head. Its not about sexuality race or gender. It's about a corrupt capitalist system greedy until the end.
DeleteOh my god that's so sad
ReplyDelete3:53 - It may be a "gay" business and a small business. It is another loss of a physical storefront along 8th Ave that had a gay theme. Is Chelsea a gay mecca like it was in the 90s and early 2000s? Looking around 8th Ave you might not think that anymore.
ReplyDeleteAs a resident of the neighborhood, it's hard to see what becomes of 8th Avenue other than a Google-friendly, tourist-focused strip of overpriced (and mostly mediocre) restaurants and chain stores. It has hollowed out significantly since Google and the High Line opened, and moreso since hundreds of wealthy families migrated in.
ReplyDeleteI (literally) pray for the gay bars such as Barracuda and Gym and G Lounge, the only hold outs from the gay ghetto of two decades ago. Sometimes I walk past, and they seem too out of place to survive the onslaught of young moms and dads who want the neighborhood "cleaned up". Or the landlords who get excited that they, too, might have a bank as a tenant.
The sad part is that doesn't have to be so awful; a little bit of planning would go a very long way. In the interim, 8th Ave is still good for the A, C and E subways...
Our gay "mecca" is not a fixed spot. In the 3rd through 5th decade of the 20th century, fashionable gays lived in the West Village or the East 50s; roughly 1960-1985 saw heavier concentration on the Upper West Side, with holdouts in the West Village and more bohemian types in the East Village, and the beginning of the self-proclaimed "A-List" center in Chelsea (which was never really "A-List"). The last 20 years have seen an increased marked predilection for parts of Brooklyn and Hell's Kitchen.
ReplyDeleteWho knows where our next "mecca" will be? All we can know (if history is a teacher) is that it will move sometime, somewhere.
chelsea is a johnny come lately as gay ghettos go. the far west village has been around for more than a century. (i mean really far down christopher st). you will survive. gays always survive, they find another place. im not a gay man but i never saw the charm in chelsea.
ReplyDeleteYes Chelsea is the latest, so where is it now in NYC? Perhaps there is no longer a need for such a concentrated population to gather in one neighborhood.
DeleteHell's Kitchen
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