*Everyday Chatter

Has NYC Lost Its Soul? Everybody, everywhere seems to be asking this question right now. What does that tell us? Here it's the cover story, featuring the lost and lovely McHale's. [AMNY]

After reading the above-linked article, I can hardly express how creepy and disheartening it is to hear that New Yorkers continue to clamor for more and more Starbucks: "Starbucks chief executive Howard Schultz implied that New Yorkers were wholeheartedly embracing the changing character of their city. Asked just how many Starbucks locations he thinks the city can support, Schultz discussed the many emails he gets requesting new stores."



You know the soul of Greenwich Village is cold and dead when its citizens go on a suburban-style witch hunt, screaming hysterically about how the sight of S/M leather folks will damage their precious and infinitely sensitive children. I hope those parents all get their tight asses whipped black and blue by mobs of leather daddies. [Gothamist]

Maybe it's not too late to save what's left of the Bowery. Join the last-ditch effort next week. [Curbed]

Astor Place Facelift

Today I got the sad news that the venerable old Astor Place newsstand has been replaced by a regulation glass box.



I went by to investigate and chatted with a guy who works the newsstand. "It looks just like that building," I said to him, pointing to the glassy green monster condo looming behind us.

He nodded and said, "It's supposed to."


the box is yet another billboard

He added that soon everything is going to look like this. Then he dropped the following bomb: Cooper Union, he said, plans to move its Engineering School to their new building going up on 7th St and 3rd Ave and then they're going to tear down the low-rise brick Engineering building on Astor Place and replace it with, you guessed it, another glassy high-rise. Maybe a hotel.

I'd like to say this is just a rumor, but it sure sounds plausible. When is this going to end?


astor place stand a couple weeks ago,
asking the question on many minds

Is New York Losing Its Soul?

Last night I went to this talk sponsored by the Municipal Art Society as part of their Jane Jacobs extravaganza. It was a sold-out full house with a line of ticketless people waiting for the chance to get in. A lot of New Yorkers wanted to be part of this discussion -- but most of the people, I noticed, had gray hair or no hair at all. The man sitting next to me wore one of those WWII vet baseball caps with the name of his battleship embroidered on the front. Quite a few folks hobbled in on walkers and canes. I hope this doesn't mean that the "Greatest Generation" will be the last to really care about the soul of our city.



The moderator was Clyde Haberman of the Times and the panelists were Alison Tocci of Time Out publications, Darren Walker of the Rockefeller Foundation, writer Tama Janowitz, and Rocco Landesman of Jujamcyn Theaters.

Haberman started off by saying there is an implied "yes" to the question of the night, New York is losing its soul. "You feel it in the relentless bulldozer of homogenization," he said, "as one small shop and one small restaurant after another are ground down and replaced by more banks and more Duane Reades. People on the Upper West Side are nearly in revolt, but they won't revolt because they'll just go to Starbucks and take care of that. ...We have an administration that hasn't yet met a developer to which it will say no."

Tocci thinks were losing NY's soul. "The volume of anger is so much more pronounced from small business people and artists--it's louder now than I've ever heard it before." Later she said, "How do you know you've died and gone to Hell? There's a Starbucks on every corner...If the Bloomberg administration were as aggressive in its support of small businesses as it is in its support of big developers, there might be more balance."

Walker worried that New York is losing "its organic messiness and controlled disorder. Unlike in the rest of America, where they talk about tolerating difference, here we actually celebrate difference. But there's been a growing inequality and for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, there's a widening gap between the rich and poor." He also worries about the loss of African-Americans and about homogenization, "When I go to Lenox Avenue, I want to see Lenox Avenue, not Columbus Avenue."

Janowitz talked about finding steel-cut oats at her Brooklyn supermarket, "a sign of gentrification." She sees resources and homes for artists and working-class people rapidly dwindling. "The city has time and again betrayed the people. It's not just that the glass is half full, it's totally empty." Then she hid behind her copious hair for much of the night.

Landesman (who, I must mention, wore banana-yellow reptile-skin cowboy boots) mourned the loss of Times Square's sex trade, "New York was always the sexiest city in the world and Times Square was the center of that. We're now experiencing a de-libidinization of our city." He said city planning has become prudish and the gentleman's clubs, where women dance topless now, are so tightly regulated and packaged, "they are no different than all the Duane Reades."

To which Clyde said, "So we're not just losing our souls, we're losing our bodies too."



I would agree with that--we're losing the fleshiness of this city, the way that bricks are fleshy and flawed, unlike glass and steel. We're turning into a robot city.

The panel offered no solutions, but a few came from the audience members who were invited to write questions on notecards that were then passed to Clyde. He skipped one important question, "Why does the New York Times partner with Bruce Ratner?" declining to answer by saying, "I'm just a wage slave." One audience member's card suggested a flip-tax on big businesses that would go to support small businesses. Another recommend rent-control for small businesses. But these were hardly discussed.

At 7:45, Haberman ended the session early. A woman in the audience objected, standing up in true New Yorker style to insist, "Why are you ending now, we're supposed to go until 8." So we continued. But the audience, seeing that their questions were not being answered, was becoming restless. They wanted to get in on the conversation. They waved their hands in the air. Some of them just shouted out. They clearly wanted a forum for their anger and their solutions--but this was not that forum.

There was a lot of passion in that (mostly) gray-haired crowd, and a lot of good ideas for how to regain New York's lost soul. These are our city's remaining rabble-rousers, with their walkers and their WWII mementos, they have the love for our city and they know the price of its loss. I hope that someone with the power to do it will organize a space in which these people can be heard -- before they all pass away or get pushed out of the city by rising rents.

For more on this event, the Times City Room followed up later today with their own coverage here.

Eisenberg's Sandwich Shop

NOT VANISHING



Every now and then, I like to have lunch at Eisenberg’s Sandwich Shop, where the world’s most delicious tuna-salad sandwich can be found. Eisenberg’s has been around since 1929 and is no longer owned by the Eisenberg family. Remarkably, though the luncheonette has changed hands 4 or 5 times, it has never been tampered with—a miracle in this city of constant renovation. The current owner, Josh Konecky, is a self-proclaimed preservationist. This city needs more of those.

One little detail I love about the place is that they use Pechter’s bread, itself an anachronism of sorts, packaged not in plastic bags, but waxy paper sleeves. The bakery opened in 1929, the same year that Eisenberg’s debuted, and I’m willing to bet the two of them have been making beautiful sandwiches together since the beginning.



On my most recent trip to Eisenberg’s, I took a seat at the vintage counter and ordered the tuna on rye with a bag of chips and a chocolate egg cream. A guy named Pete D. asked me to sign a petition that he hopes will help him win an upcoming court case. The petition states that he is a respected, 30-year patron of the luncheonette, and a man of good character. I signed the paper and Pete told me the torturous tale of his impending eviction, a story that involves drug busts, illegal searches, back-room deals, and harassment from landlords. It’s a story that is becoming too common in the current New York age. If you’d like to support Pete, you can find him at the counter most days.



One of the countermen got in on our conversation. “You should settle,” he told Pete as he buttered slices of Pechter’s rye, “Get out while the getting’s good. You’re lucky the landlord’s name doesn’t end in a vowel, if you know what I mean. He could put a bullet in your head. How long do you want to fight this thing? And what if you win? You could end up in a box. People have done worse for real estate in this town.”

This is true. Thankfully, Eisenberg’s landlord seems like a real mensch—he dines at the counter himself and has given the current owner a good, long lease, securing those delicious tuna sandwiches into the 2020’s.

P.S. Pechter’s even turns up as an corny old joke in the Encyclopedia of Jewish Humor:

Adam & Yves

Yesterday, a worker was stapling up these shrouds of self-promotional advertecture on Yves, one of the many, many condo buildings currently rising in Chelsea.


photo: my flickr

Here I see a fantasy of the primordial, prototypical yunnies posing in their post-lapsarian world. Expelled from Paradise, they seek a return to the blue waters of mother's chilly womb. They look towards but not at each other. Separate, they can't touch. Like Narcissus, they may gaze at their own reflections in the pool, but human connection remains out of their reach.

Here is a portrait of the alienation that is washing over our city, an alienation that has somehow become admired and longed for, rather than critiqued. How long before there's no one here but these robots?

Chelsea Hotel & Linda Troeller

room 323, Monika Nicolle & Laurence Belotti-Sonnois

This weekend I was walking past the Chelsea Hotel and decided to take a stroll through the lobby, which is as far as I’d ever gotten inside. By chance, the POOL art fair was going on and I was free to roam the halls, entering rooms where artists had set up installations and gallery spaces. There were women lying on beds with broken eggs affixed to their abdomens, entire rooms wrapped in plastic, and bathtubs turned into dioramas containing thousands of pill bottles, pond vegetation, and one woman contemplating suicide.

As I climbed the ornate stairways where paintings lined the walls, a little man in a red bathrobe shuffled down the hall in slippers. An elderly woman sat outside her room watching the goings-on as if from a front stoop.



The art fair officially ended on the 5th floor and I considered leaving at that point, but signs led me up to the 9th where 12-year resident and photographer Linda Troeller had turned her room into a gallery space for the weekend. She was getting ready to leave, but when I told her about Vanishing New York, hoping for a quick interview, she said, “Are you Jeremiah? I asked you to come here today.” She pulled out a newspaper clipping about this blog in Chelsea Now, which I hadn't seen, and said she'd just emailed me that morning. But I was offline all day and didn’t get the message—or did I? (Cue the eerie music.)


linda in her room

“That is so weird,” I said.

“It’s not weird at all,” Linda told me, as if the whole course of the day’s serendipity were perfectly normal. Maybe it is normal in the Hotel Chelsea, where ghosts roam the halls and far, far weirder things have happened over the years. In an interview for Chelsea Now, Linda said, “When people come to the hotel, they do so knowing the place will open them up and guide them.” I guess, in this case, it guided me straight to Linda.



As I leafed through her book of evocative photographs, Atmosphere: An Artist’s Memoir of the Chelsea Hotel, NYC (which includes pictures of Rufus Wainwright, Ethan Hawke, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, as well as many other Chelsea habitues), Linda and I talked about the hotel and her mission to preserve the people and the place in images. “The hotel goes beyond physicality,” she said, “It is a worldwide symbol of the fresh dream,” the dream of artists who flock to the hotel. She has been photographing the place since 1994 and is currently documenting the changes that threaten to unravel that dream.



We didn’t have long to talk, so we promised to meet again. I am looking forward to it. In the meantime, to see Linda’s work and purchase her book, please visit the artist’s website. To find out everything there is to know about the current battle to save the Chelsea, go to Living with Legends.

*Everyday Chatter

I reported on this last week, but here's more on the new Chelsea condo just loaded with suburban amenities: "McMansions stacked high into Manhattan airspace!" [Voice]

Remarkably, a great horned owl has moved into the East Village. Does this signal a new flock of gentrifiers, the return of some very old natives, or does the suburbanized NYC appeal to country critters? [NMNL] I do wonder if the owl escaped from the falconry extravaganza in Central Park. [Gothamist]

Here's a new word: Manhattanifying. It's what's happening to the boroughs and it's synonymous now with suburbanization. It means golf, Starbucks, and lots of real estate brokers. [Observer]

It's too late to see the installation, but you can explore the Atlantic Yards Future Perfect video show online and see what's in store. [AYR]