Wholesale District

VANISHING

For the past decade, ever since the Ace Hotel took over the Breslin SRO hotel on Broadway and 29th Street, I've been watching the Wholesale District vanish. It is not dying. It is being murdered, shop by shop, building by building, all to create the fake "neighborhood" known as NoMad.

Hanging by a thread, it recently took a turn for the worse.

A major center of wholesalers on Broadway has just been wiped out in one fell swoop. Along the west side of Broadway in the upper 20s, the sudden mass erasure of so many small businesses is staggering.


1165 Broadway Before (taken in 2016)


1165 Broadway Today, 2019

Between 27th and 28th Streets, 1165 Broadway housed several small wholesale businesses, selling perfume, jewelry, handbags, African-American hair products, clothing, and more. For years, I have walked by it every week, lingering to admire what I cannot fully participate in, but appreciate nonetheless.

The small businesses attracted a diversity of people, many of them immigrants from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. With them came gray-market dealers, ice-cream trucks, sidewalk vendors, and lots of Halal food carts. It was a lively, colorful block that always felt like the real New York, unruly, surprising, and rough around the edges.

But this is not allowed in the new New York.

Today, 1165 is scaffolded and shrouded. All of the shops have been shuttered and sealed behind green plywood. The building will be scrubbed clean, disemboweled and sanitized for white capitalist triumphalism, reamed with a luxury glass tower.


1165 Broadway Tomorrow (toasting colonialism's triumph on the rooftop)

It's not just this building. We're in the midst of a mass extinction event.

One block up Broadway, across 28th Street, low-rise buildings full of small businesses were wiped out for another tower. The site sat demolished and empty for a few years. I watched tomato plants grow lush, red fruit along the edge of the lot, presumably from people at the nearby food cart tossing tomatoes and accidentally seeding a wild garden.

Construction has now begun.


Northwest corner of 28th & Broadway, 2015


Northwest corner of 28th & Broadway, 2019

Heading up to 29th Street, the remaining building on that same block, also once full of small businesses, has also been emptied and plywooded.

The sidewalk is now dead.


Southwest corner of 29th & Broadway, Before (Google Maps, 2017)


Southwest corner of 29th & Broadway, Today

Step right across the street at 29th and you'll find the future--another block wiped out, another glass monstrosity like all the other glass monstrosities, soulless and banal, inspiring nothing, inhumane.


Northwest corner of 29th and Broadway, today

When all of this evicting and destroying is done, all we will have are glass towers into which no small businesses will go. A thriving cultural ecosystem is being eradicated, and it's by design.

What we are losing has gone largely uncelebrated in the mainstream conversation. The Wholesale District caters mostly to black and brown working-class people, many of them immigrants. It is scruffy and unfashionable. That makes it easy to kill. And then easy to forget.

But we must remember what happened here. The Wholesale District's death is not a natural one.


vanished

When the neighborhood's destruction began about a decade ago, the name "NoMad" was invented by the CEO of GFI Development, the company that took over the Breslin Hotel. That's where it started.

For many years, the Breslin served as a rent-stabilized haven for artists--along with writers, transgender women, glove makers, people with AIDS, anyone who might not easily find a comfortable and affordable home elsewhere in the city. When it was taken over, tenants reported harassment, got organized, and posted signs on their doors that read: “We will not move.” They went to court and lost. In 2008 the Breslin became Ace Hotel New York. The fights went on. Soon, all of the old ground-floor businesses vanished. That year, I walked around the block and counted 17 small businesses gone from the building. Part of the Wholesale District's hubbub, they were replaced by upscale hipster mini-chains like Portland’s Stumptown Coffee Roasters and Seattle-born Rudy’s Barber Shop, along with an oyster bar and gastro-pub that took the Breslin name.

The virus spread. Over the years, I've watched the eastern side of Broadway become evermore hip, expensive, and white. A wig shop became a matcha bar. In went places like Want Apothecary, Dig Inn, Black Seed, Opening Ceremony, and Sweetgreen. All cater to a higher class. Many don't take cash.



Often, when I made my weekly visit, I would stand on the median in the middle of Broadway and watch the tale of two cities unfold around me.

On the east side, in the crowd streaming past, almost everyone was white and middle to upper class, many of them tourists. On the west side, the crowd was mixed, with many black and brown people, immigrants, and members of the working class.

You could see it was only a matter of time before the whole corridor was whitewashed. It's hard to deny the colonization here, and not just as metaphor.


East side of Broadway at 29th


West side of Broadway at 29th

In her book Harlem Is Nowhere, writing about gentrification, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts refers to the “exuberant myopia common to colonists,” people who speak of usually black and brown, working-class neighborhoods as if nothing and no one was there before the upper-class white people came. We hear it all the time when gentrification happens. It appeared in a 2010 story about the birth of NoMad from New York magazine.

"Close your eyes and picture Broadway between 23rd and 30th Streets," it begins. "There’s a good chance you’re either drawing a blank or you’re envisioning a long strip of wholesale perfume retailers, luggage liquidators, and stores that specialize in human-hair wigs. This is not the most picturesque area in the city, nor the most easily romanticized." The area is called nameless, "a nondescript no-man’s-land" dubbed "the Brown Zone" by one critic because it showed up as a brown rectangle on maps. But it also was, and is, brown in its people.



Why is it not picturesque or easily romanticized? Why is it thought of as nondescript, blank, a no-man's land? There was so much here. African women walking down the street in brightly colored dresses and head wraps. Shoppers striding through with armfuls of flowers from the (also vanishing) Flower District. The sidewalks lively with tables full of wares. Windows bright with bottles of body oils with names like Lick Me All Over. In summer, women selling ices in mango and coconut. Men calling out the bargains, barking their deals to passersby.

You could feel the aliveness, the giddy chaos of a street that was not engineered and designed by hyper-capitalists in remote offices. We need places like the Wholesale District. They are good for the soul--and for the city.

Now so much is gone. The shutters are down, the police are on guard. More dead towers are rising. There is more to save--but who with the power is willing?

More Hotels, Fewer Flowers

In the Flower District, along West 28th Street between 6th and 7th, the fragrant green jungle of the sidewalks continues to vanish.

Another hotel is coming.



It's a big one: 45 stories, 146,000 square feet, 522 rooms. Said architect Gene Kaufman, “The demand for hotel rooms in Chelsea continues to grow, with ever larger and ever-taller hotels being constructed to accommodate the number of tourists wishing to stay in this vibrant neighborhood."

This glass behemoth joins several more new tourist hotels here. In fact, the block is becoming nothing but hotels. I can't think of a worse death for what was a wonderful and unique little district.

Ten years ago, I talked to some of the plant sellers. One 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.”



There are only a few green sections left. I walk through as often as I can, taking my time to smell the flowers. Literally. Right now, the place smells of gardenia.



And there are the Flower District cats, at least six that I've counted, lounging among the succulents and orchids.



This is life. This is real. This is New York. And it's being destroyed, like everywhere else, replaced by the dull and the dead. But it doesn't have to be this way. There are alternatives.

Dafuture

Sometime in the early morning hours, an artist known as #stickntwisted installed a "pop-up gallery" on an old fence on West 28th Street just off 12th Avenue. On Instagram, they write, "Come see The City Of Dafuture. Not sure how long it will last. Depends on the kindness of strangers."



In the rising luxury shadows of Hudson Yards, under a coil of razor wire, the miniature foam city known as Dafuture shows pipe-cleaner stick figures living their urban zombie lives, leashed to smartphones.

Colorful signs narrate the goings on, where "Technology is turning humanity into self-absorbed machines."



The mom and pop shops have been shuttered and the city has become big-boxed and homogenized.



A mega-store called Messy's has taken over and left behind high-rent blight.

On this piece, the artist writes: "What was once the town's fashion epicenter, Ma & Pa's Fashion Hut was wiped away back in the 90's when Federated started buying out all the local retailers and then converted all of them into Messy's...home of the forever on going 1 day sale. Now that they have put all the other stores away, they are closing the Dafuture store and leaving them with nothing. Thanks Messy's for being great neighbors."



There's a queer theme here, too. "In all the excitement in gaining equal rights in marriage," one sign reads, "we lost our self-respect and caring for our community."

In a gay sex club, stick figures in black chaps take selfies of their asses in front of pictures of stick-figure Tom of Finland posters.



In a lonely apartment, bedecked in pink, a resident celebrates alone, "Happy Birthday to Me." Next door, above a bank, the neighbor has hanged himself because he didn't get any social media messages.



The public library is "permanently closed," because no one wants books anymore. They want donuts instead.

A UFO appears to be taking a cow into space.

A homeless man advertises his GoFundMe page and his "Faceless Book" profile, but adds: "Don't follow me. I get paranoid."

Meanwhile, several citizens of Dafuture have fallen down a manhole, too absorbed in their phones to see the danger.



Go see it.

Before it's gone.

Merchants

VANISHED


photo by Brian

Brian writes in about the closure of Merchants, a popular Chelsea restaurant that had been at 17th Street and 7th Avenue for 25 years:

"The owner was papering up the place because they closed on the 28th. I knew that the day was coming because a developer bought the corner of that block and shuttered the health food grill and the bodega last year. In fact, the bodega owner I’d known for 16 years was so upset that he went home and died of a heart attack. They had just put money into remodeling, a brand new awning, and repainting. Now it’s a graffiti magnet."

I reported on the bodega's closure in July. It is, indeed, still sitting empty, more high-rent blight, collecting graffiti and garbage. The new awning has been carved up, the name of the store removed.



Brian continues:

"I spoke with the owner of Merchants and he told me landlords in the area are using the new Barney’s as a benchmark for their rents, meaning they’re not going to be affordable to the average non-corporate lessee. You need Walgreens or Red Lobster dollars to afford to open. He’s been looking to stay in Chelsea but says the prices are so high he’d have to do something beyond selling food and drink to actually make money."



And, as with many closures, there's a goodbye sign on the door. This one encircled with a glitter heart.

W. 28th Street View: 2010 - Today

For years, the block of West 28th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues was a quiet one, wide open and low rising. It was auto-body shops, a scrap yard, a place to get a slice of pizza, and the Eagle gay bar. Then the new High Line came.

Immediately, a big chunk of the block was flattened. Small construction businesses moved out. The +ART condo went up across the street in 2010.



The second section of the High Line opened in 2011. Construction began for Avalon Bay's AVA High Line.

In 2012, the one-story nightclub in the bottom right of this photo was demolished.



The scrap yard (left side, with yellow machine) kept scrapping. Life went on. Then residents of the +ART condo started complaining about the Folsom East fetish fair. Christian right-wingers stood on the High Line with signs telling the fairgoers they were sinners. Tourists gawked.

The fair was cancelled and eventually moved.



AVA got bigger and bigger and bigger.



Then the scrap yard went in 2013, sold for millions after doing business since 1927. All of the auto-body shops closed. Digging began immediately for the foundation of Zaha Hadid's ultra-luxe, space-age condo.



As Hadid's building rose (left), so did another directly across the street.



And now another is rising, right behind the Hadid.

On the other side of the High Line, behind this view, a little tenement with a bodega was recently demolished. Something else will be rising there. It will certainly be made of glass and shimmer and money.



This all took just six years.

One little block, sun-lit and wide open, is now as dark and suffocating as a sarcophagus. Walking on it used to be a pleasure. No more.

I've quoted this before, and I'll quote it again. In 2011, Philip Lopate wrote a love letter to the High Line. He concluded:

“Much of the High Line’s present magic stems from its passing though an historic industrial cityscape roughly the same age as the viaduct, supplemented by private tenement backyards and the poetic grunge of taxi garages. It would make a huge difference if High Line walkers were to feel trapped in a canyon of spanking new high-rise condos, providing antlike visual entertainment for one’s financial betters lolling on balconies."

It would. And it did.

Greek Corner Coffee Shop Diner

VANISHED

Late last week, I headed to the Greek Corner Coffee Shop Diner, as I often do, looking forward to a cup of coffee at the pistachio green counter. Instead, I found it gone. I was heartbroken.



A goodbye sign in the window said they'd closed on December 31--"After exactly 36 years, 5 months, and 15 days." They'd been on the corner of 7th Avenue and 28th Street since 1980.



Back in March, I shared the rumor that the place was going to close, but I could not confirm it. I was told: The building has been sold. The building might be sold. There are holdouts who won't budge. The building won't be sold. Everything will be okay. Who knows?

There's no notice of a recent sale in the online building records, but it could be imminent. Was the coffee shop pushed out or did they just decide it's time to go? In their goodbye sign they say they're opening a new place in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, called Blue Door Souvlakia. It looks nice, but nothing like the coffee shop.

I'm going to miss the Greek Corner. It was one of my oases. And another authentic New York coffee shop that has gone.


March 2016

Child's Seahorses

The McDonald's on 6th Avenue and 28th Street is getting a gut renovation.



This would not be newsworthy, except for the fact that this McDonald's was once a Child's restaurant, a chain of long ago, beloved by urban historians, and this renovation has so far included the destruction of the antique terra-cotta decoration around the top of the 1930 building.



The motif includes intertwined seahorses, Child's signature style, with some creatures that look like bears.

A large portion has been scraped off so far.

In Coney Island, the Child's was landmarked. This one won't be worthy of preservation once all the seahorses are destroyed. Is this an intentional scalp job?

Greek Corner

There have been some rumors going around that the Greek Corner Coffee Shop -- which I first wrote about here -- is on its way out.

So I went in and asked around.



The place is located on 7th Avenue and 28th Street. It's been there since 1980. It's one of those New York places--cheap, simple, local--that's vanishing without relent.

When I went in for lunch, a bunch of tourists standing around outside harangued me. They were trying to decide whether to eat there or at one of the many national chains nearby.

"Do you like it?" they asked. Yes. "Is it clean? Is it clean?" They kept repeating this stupid question. "Is it clean?" I did not respond. They went away.



I ordered a BLT and talked to the people in the coffee shop. Here's what I learned: The building has been sold. The building might be sold. There are holdouts who won't budge. The building won't be sold. Everything will be okay. Who knows?



This whole neighborhood, just south of Penn Station, is going through a major upheaval. Old buildings are coming down and new ones are going up at a frenetic pace. Most of the new buildings are tourist hotels.

Specialty coffee bars are moving in between the odd little wholesale shops and the silk flower shops and the places that embroider ball caps and roll cigars and unpack ginseng from cardboard barrels.

We don't need more hotels. The city has become glutted with them. In 2011, Mayor Bloomberg announced that New York would soon reach a record number of hotel rooms--90,000--a 24 percent increase since he began his tourist-driving initiative in 2006. Leisure and Hospitality became the fastest growing industry, increasing at a rate of 27.4 percent, far outpacing health, information, and the financial services. We have rapidly become a city of servants, towel replenishers, and toilet paper folders.

But, above the Greek Corner Coffee Shop, we still have some industry.



I love the second-story windows of this building. I love walking by at night and seeing the inside lit up. The silhouettes of radiators and dressmaker's dummies. A woman bends over a table, cutting or ironing fabric. This is the home of Timberlake Studios, since 1986. They make costumes for theatre, dance, and opera.

In the 1970s, the studio's founder, Betty Williams, set out to save commercial garment patterns. From the website: "Encouraged by the Smithsonian, she started a drive to save patterns. It developed into a nationwide network of women (once called 'Betty's Brigade') that searched for patterns in attics, church bazaars, and estate sales. This led to a collection of patterns called The Commercial Pattern Archive, together with tailoring magazines and sewing instruction material dating to the 19th Century. It is a major resource for theatre and fashion designers and a permanent record of one phase of women's lives for sociologists and historians."



I don't know what's going to happen to this building. It holds pieces of the real New York, the city that is being wiped out and homogenized. So let's all keep an eye on it.

The Chelsea Stone

The Chelsea Stone
Restoring St. Peter’s Chelsea

Guest post by Romy Ashby



One of my favorite neighborhood places is St. Peter’s, the pretty old stone church on West 20th between 8th and 9th Avenues where it has stood since 1837.

It has a wonderful history, and I love the sight of it on misty nights when the tower all but disappears, leaving just the glowing clock. In nice weather I like to sit on the steps in the evening and read a book. Sometimes the mysterious black-and-white churchyard cat emerges from the shadows, at the magic hour before dusk, to examine the glass bowls set out for her at the side of the rectory. That’s a moment when I can feel flooded with quiet love for New York, and all feels right in that little corner of the world.

I love the interior as much as the outside of the church--the original pews with their little doors and latches, the Tiffany windows, the wooden balconies, the two magnificent organs, both built by prominent local organ builders of the day, Henry Erben and the Roosevelt Organ Company.

The church bell in the tower was made locally as well, by the F.A. Allaire ironworks company, and the original mechanism that turned all four clock faces at once, made by Seth Thomas, is still in place, although the clock now works on a computer. Reverend Stephen Harding, the interim pastor of St. Peter’s, has climbed up into the old tower to make little videos and then posted them on YouTube so all the world can see its marvelous secrets.

Pastor Harding is one of eight FDNY chaplains, and he personifies the welcoming kindness of the church itself. When he first came in 2013, he saw how bad the old church was feeling, with some of the symptoms hazardous. “The plaster underneath the balcony started to crack in a significant way, and the ceiling in the corners of the church were starting to fall,” he told me. “So I said to the vestry, ‘We have to do something, whether it’s fix the plaster so that it doesn’t drop on anybody and kill them, or fix the piers. It doesn’t matter. But we have to start.’ The vestry approved the hiring of William Stivale, who had done the work on our bell tower in 1990 and actually saved it, because it was about to fall apart.” Now that the four piers have been safely restored, the original tin roof of 1837 is about to be replaced.

“St. Peter’s has a pitched roof,” Pastor Harding explained, “and underneath the roof there’s an attic, and then there is the church ceiling with a catwalk over it. So when we’re in the church and we look up, we see the church ceiling, which is actually suspended from the roof. The worst-case scenario would be the plaster getting wet and then drying, adding an enormous amount of weight to the load the roof is holding, and then falling.”

The other vital project getting underway is the repointing of the stones--made of Manhattan Schist from Spuyten Duyvil--which means scraping out the old mortar and replacing it so that the stones don’t shift. Pastor Harding said he hopes that a high school or college group looking for a project might take on the restoration of the Henry Erben organ under supervision. “It’s a mechanical instrument, which means there’s no electricity in it,” he said. “You push here and something happens over there. It’s the one that Clement Moore played when he played the organ at St. Peter’s.”

Almost everything about the old church needs restoring or repair, and the same goes for the rectory next door. A little over two million dollars has already been raised so far, and Pastor Harding has said another thirteen million is needed.



Sometimes I volunteer in the church rectory, doing whatever task is at hand, and recently I’ve been going through old papers forgotten for decades in the time capsule of an old file cabinet. I’ve found all kinds of interesting things jumbled together there.

Beautifully printed 19th-century bulletins, flyers and newsletters from the ‘60s and early ‘70s announcing fights against evictions in Chelsea, anti-war events, a feminist costume ball, a theatrical performance called “Shades of Lavender” benefiting an early gay rights discussion group, and a demonstration planned before the Brazilian Consulate on Fifth Avenue to demand the release of Judith Malina, Julian Beck, and other members of the Living Theatre from prison in Brazil.



I found receipts from 1959 and 1960 for every imaginable church expense. For incense from the Ave Maria shop at 11 Barclay Street, hymnals from the Church Hymnal Corporation at 20 Exchange Place, furniture from the Lehigh Chair Company at 106 Duane Street, sheet music for William Byrd’s “O Magnum Mysterium” from H.W. Gray at 159 E 48th Street, letterhead from the Speed-O-Lite Offset Corporation at 121 W. 17th Street.





Beanies from Magnus Craft Materials at 108 Franklin Street, deposit slips from the Chelsea National Bank, and receipts for palm leaves sent over from the Kervan Company at 119 West 28th Street, where a huge new Hilton Hotel now stands. There were too many to list. In 1960, everything was bought and mostly made locally. I felt a pang looking at all this tangible evidence of the kind of self-sufficiency being championed by Jane Jacobs at that time.





Not long ago, on my way to the rectory, I stopped into a clearing-out sale at La Lunchonette, the charming little restaurant on 10th Avenue and 18th Street there since 1988. It closed recently, not because the owners wanted to close, but for the now unremarkable reason that the landlord had sold the building to a developer. It will be demolished along with several others--including two little ones on 18th Street once photographed by Berenice Abbott--to make way for a new condo building. I bought a few glasses, just to have something to remember it by, and left feeling terribly sad that La Lunchonette and the pretty buildings of that corner will no longer exist. Sometimes living in New York can feel like being in a state of perpetual mourning.

I asked Pastor Harding if he too notices how much of the city is disappearing. “Yes,” he said. “And it seems overnight. I grew up in the city in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and I’ve been living here since 1980 as an adult. And some days I walk in Manhattan and I think I’m in a theme park.” One of his reasons for taking on this huge project to restore the church building is so that St. Peter’s can once again be a force for good in the neighborhood. “We aren’t just making a museum out of it,” he said. “Our mission for the next four and a half years is to connect with our neighbors and the neighborhood.”

One of his ideas for how to raise money was to create the Adopt a Stone from St. Peter’s Campaign, where one can adopt a stone for $25, $50 or $100, and take stewardship of preserving an actual part of the church. Shortly after he told me about the idea, I excavated from the old filing cabinet a fragile collection of letters, papers and clippings. A printed sheet entitled “The Chelsea Stone,” dated “Advent—A.D. 1936,” caught my eye, announcing that a fragment of stone from the Chelsea Old Church on the Thames in London had been brought to New York and set in a wall of St. Peter’s (where it is today). The occasion was written about in the New York Sun. Then I read a letter dated October 23, 1946, sent to the rector of St. Peter’s from the incumbent of Chelsea Old Church in London, which was destroyed by bombing in 1941. “Its quiet beauty and charm, and its great historical interest drew many thousands of visitors to it before the war,” he wrote, “including many from the USA.” A decision had been made to rebuild the church, and what he wrote next I found particularly moving:

“We understand that the Government, through the War Damage Commission, will contribute largely to the cost of rebuilding, but it seems clear that a considerable sum of money will have to be raised by us, over and above whatever we may receive from this source. Historical and sentimental ties bind together your parish and ours, which the piece of stone from our Old Church, built into the fabric of yours, is a symbol: and it is on these grounds, as well as on those of the many strong bonds between the peoples of the USA and of Britain, that I am venturing to write this exploratory letter to enquire whether you feel that the people of your Chelsea would be willing to assist the people of ours to rebuild our famous and beloved Old Church.”



As part of a historic district, St. Peter’s Chelsea is landmarked. But such a designation doesn’t come with funds or guarantees. It may be safe right now from a fate like that of some of the churches demolished in recent years to make way for condo buildings, but were it to crumble, anything could happen. The only sure way to guarantee St. Peter’s safety and longevity is to restore it to health, and we hope that many people will be willing to assist in rebuilding our own famous and beloved old church. As Pastor Harding put it, “Our footprint is one of the only connections that exists to Clement Clarke Moore’s apple orchard. Here’s something you can do to keep this link to Clement Moore’s Chelsea alive,” he offered: “Help us preserve St. Peter’s by adopting a stone. Your participation in this campaign will help us repoint the walls of the church and keep it standing.”

To adopt a stone, visit the contributions page on the St. Peter’s Chelsea website or text xmaschurch to 50155. If you would like to make a larger contribution please contact Fr. Harding at sharding@stpeterschelsea.org.



Romy Ashby is the author of several books, most recently Stink. She also writes the blog Walkers in the City. You can find her at her website, RomyAshby.com.