Chelsea Flea

VANISHED

On a recent walk past the corner of 17th Street and 6th Avenue, I discovered a new-looking fence around the parking lot that held the Chelsea Antique & Collectible Flea Market.



The fence has no gate, and the sign rather aggressively states "Private Property." I made a phone call to the number on the vanished flea market sign and was told that the flea closed this month and won't be returning "any time soon."


old sign, photo: Javier at Yelp

According to the blog Here Be Old Things, the parking lot is owned by a Catholic institution, the New York Foundling Hospital, located across the street. Two years ago, when Chelsea's Antiques Garage was rumored to close, a dealer at the little 17th Street market told the blogger, "If the Archdiocese kicked us out, I'd march right down and talk to the Cardinal about it."

Recent news in Chelsea Now tells us the Garage is staying put. But what happened to its smaller neighbor down the street? Was it shut down by the Foundling Hospital--and what does the Cardinal have to say about it?

*Everyday Chatter

Orchard Street is organizing to Stop the Noise. [BB]

Don't forget to check out the latest Vanishing City event 9/28. [CR]

Tomorrow 9/24 at 8 PM: Join Union Square Not for Sale in a "Funky Protest Cheese Party to interrupt Union Square Partnership’s Harvest in the Square, an annual private self-congratulatory dinner for Those Who Would Privatize the Pavilion."

What does it mean when the EV is invaded by the pink shirts? [EVG]

See Robert Frank's The Americans at the Met.

One of my favorite dives--the distinguished Wakamba Lounge. [GVDP]

Scout introduces "New York, You've Changed," as seen through the movies. [SNY]

Times Square 90s

I finally found a packet of photographs I'd long feared lost--a handful of black-and-white images of a vanished Times Square that I took one day in the early 1990s.



I used to love walking up and down 42nd Street between Broadway and 8th. The sidewalks were unclogged by tourists and there were no peddlers begging to sketch your caricature or write your name on a grain of rice. The only barkers barking called out, "Girls, girls, girls, one dolla, one dolla, one dolla."

Ancient marquees provided shade with their canopies of busted bulbs. Lunch was best at the Grand Luncheonette. I've written about it all here before.



The buildings back then were low and made of brick. They were human-sized, manageable. They contained hot-sheet hotels ("Couples Welcome"), cheap eateries ("Flame Steaks"), tobacco shops, arcades, adult bookstores, peepshows, and the like.



I took these photos with a chunky 1970 Nikon F that had spent some time, before my time, in the Vietnam War. It was a big, conspicuous camera with its long lens. On 8th Avenue, as I was taking this photo of The Eros gay porn theater (closed around 1996, today the Playwright Tavern), I noticed I was being shadowed by a shadowy figure with eyes for my camera.



I dodged him, but he kept following. I could not shake him. Before he could make a grab, I hopped on a bus to escape, camera still safely around my neck.

With that outing cut short, I only got about a dozen photos of the Deuce that day. Black-and-white film was expensive, so I didn't shoot much or often, and these are all I have. Now that they've been scanned into electronic format, you can see them all here on my flickr page.

*Everyday Chatter

In Fort Greene, the Greenlight Bookstore is coming along:


Robert Frank's elevator girl finds herself years later. [NPR]

Bitchcakes visits the deep secrets of Grand Central Terminal. [BCC]

Stirring up my own real-estate envy, two townhouses on 10th. [EVG]

Orchard to get even more attitude--as if that's needed. [BB]

Fight over Jane Hotel steps it up from the days of a few lone protesters. [Curbed]

Barneys sells homeless chic. [Racked]

Mr. Softie hits hard against Van Leeuwen artisanal ice-cream. [Grub]

Tosca in Times Square

Last night, Times Square lay blanketed beneath an eerie hush, its crowd corralled into chairs on a red carpet, while the sounds of Puccini's "Tosca" echoed off the glassy towers. On the NASDAQ screen, on the Jumbotron, and MTV's big TV, the Metropolitan Opera broadcast their opening-night gala performance.





With no cars on Broadway, Times Square felt like a weird auditorium, oddly hollow, day-lit at night by countless TV screens flashing epileptically. Among the grinning M&Ms, the stretched-out supermodels in designer jeans, and guzzlers of Coca-Cola, there was soprano Karita Mattila and her heaving bosom, singing the aria "Vissi d'arte."



Over the Military Recruitment Station, where their own giant TV showed the bomb blasts of war as glorious temptations, Tosca begged for her lover's life to be spared, singing, "I lived for art, I lived for love, I never did harm to a living soul!"



On the sidewalks and in the streets, leaning against mailboxes and lampposts, sitting in those controversial chairs, people stayed still, gazing upwards in silence, hypnotized by the singer's voice. And her red dress.



Meanwhile, as the CNN ticker reminded us, more and more troops were being called to war.

*Everyday Chatter

Locals fight Soho Hollister store with stink bombs. [NYP]

Brownstone Brooklyn embraces "the chain that is distinctly, even aggressively, local." [NYT]

Visiting the flophouse above JG Melon's. [NYT]

9/22: A panel discussion of Storefront with Jim and Karla Murray. [Clic]

A journalist digs in to the Post's plundering of the blogosphere. [SJ]

A snapshot of life in the Oro Condos in Downtown Brooklyn--a couple ignoring each other, a mother on her cell phone, a baby gazing blankly behind her, into the emptiness of the floor-to-ceiling window. As a portrait of domestic alienation, it's a modern Edward Hopper:


Why is NYC filled with the beautiful people? [TGW]

The Mary Help of Christians "Spay and Neuter" Your Pet mural has been whitewashed. [EVG]

Another good vintage sign vanishes from the LES. [BB]

One other detail from the minutes: "There has been a large increase in residential burglaries...75% of incidents occurred thru open windows/unlocked windows and doors." Who is leaving their windows open and doors unlocked in the city?

Left Bank Books

With the coming takeover of the nearby Biography Bookshop space by Marc Jacobs and the closure of neighbor Lee's Laundry, my more or less consistent, low-grade concern about Left Bank Books has been goosed.



Remarkably, though it looks like it's been there since the young Bob Dylan strolled 4th Street, the shop was opened in 1992 by Arthur Farrier, who called it Bookleaves.

Wrote the Times in 2003, "Stocked with out-of-print books, it is a browser's nirvana. People bring in dusty boxes, and the owner, Arthur Farrier, sorts them. 'I have the smallest inventory in the Western world,' said Mr. Farrier, who spent 20 years driving a cab before he got tired of complaining about disappearing bookshops and opened one of his own. 'The odds against finding a book here are tremendous.' Mr. Farrier is in danger of becoming a Village character. He affects a beret over a mane of white hair--he calls it a poor man's toupee--and he is a mine of Greenwich Village lore."



Farrier sold the shop in 2005, but not much changed. The name became Left Bank, but the new owner, Kim Herzinger, didn't rush to change the sign. The shop is still packed with books. The window display is tantalizing, filled with rare books and signed books. They keep up an online list of their new arrivals.

The West Village used to be filled with bookshops, but in the past, deadly decade, they've been dwindling fast. The Examiner took a look at what's left, but we keep losing them. Oscar Wilde shuttered. Biography is staying on Bleecker, but moving much farther east. It's a mass extinction.

I have found many a hard-to-find book at this shop. It is a bright spot on an increasingly bleak block, where characters like Farrier are now deemed "obsolete" in what has become the luxury doldrums.


scene across the street from Left Bank