Meatpackers & Meat

VANISHING


meatpackers with bloody aprons vanish under luxe towers

Visiting the Meatpacking District, I skipped Pastis and ate some fresh meat at Hector's, where the burger is bought twice a day from local packers. Hector's has been tucked under the High Line for more than 20 years, the owner (whose name is not Hector) told me, but the building has been a restaurant for close to 100. They used to serve a crowd of meatpackers, but the meat guys are vanishing. Now the place is filled with construction workers, all of them laboring to wipe out the meatpackers, replacing their plants with luxury high-rises. When the building is done and the meat guys and construction workers have gone, who's going to eat Hector's burgers deluxe and piles of roast beef?



This area has been the site of overwhelming, lightning-fast, preposterous change. The punks, leather-daddies, and transgender hookers have all been swept away. Not everyone is happy about it. Chelsea Now reported that residents of the area are sick of the “Gaggles of drunk girls in those heels,” and being "overrun by screaming, drunken children all night long." The tranny hookers provided protection and camaraderie to a once-quiet neighborhood where now it's every screaming girl and boy for themselves.

What else, besides meatpackers and sexual outlaws, is being lost in the destruction of this neighborhood? Heaps and heaps of exposed meat. Why is this a loss we should mourn?



Because when you walk past a bucket of meat, buzzing with flies, when you breathe in the stink of death--a biting, visceral odor that lingers in your nose for the rest of the day--when your shoes slide across cobblestones slick with blood and liquified fat, it feels real. It feels real because it is real. And it reminds you of your own meatiness, your own mortality. It reminds you that you are human and not a glittering piece of plastic. You are vulnerable and won't last forever.

These are important facts to be reminded of, but they are being bulldozed under the sleek glass and steel of hubris, under oblivious spiked heels, under the precious perfume that the new boutiques furiously pump out from their front doors, trying frantically to cover up the pervasive stink of a reality their customers cannot bear to face.


the face of hubris

more meatpacking pics on my flickr

Like Pigs in Shit

Balazs hotel rises over buckets of bloody, rotting meat

A VanishingNY reader sent in this satire from the Onion, which I think is poking a bit of fun, but does beg the question: When and why did the wealthy start desiring to live, work, and play in the city's most undesirable locations?
A glassy undulation is coming to the malodorous Gowanus [Gowanus Lounge], Balazs' Standard Hotel squats over buckets of bloody offal in the Meatpacking District [my flickr] [NYMag], and in the midst of Holland Tunnel onramp traffic sprouts the Zinc Building [my flickr] [Curbed].


Fashion model and photogs saunter past buckets of melting animal fat

When the Diane von Furstenberg store opened recently in the now super-chic Meatpacking District, abutting a packing plant that hauls giant buckets of bloody, fly-buzzed offal to the body-fluid-slick sidewalk each day, I am sure that the DVF people just figured the meat would be gone in no time. Meanwhile, just pretend the air doesn't stink of rotting death. And they'll be proven right.


DVF Store (with Bentley in garage) abuts fetid, blood-smeared packing plant

Hilly Kristal of CBGB's

VANISHED


tonight i passed by this spontaneous memorial at the shuttered CBGB's

CBGB's founder Hilly Kristal has passed on to rock heaven. (Read his last interview.) According to AM New York, the East Village is quickly following him to his grave:

"When owner Hilly Kristal opened the club in 1973, his rent was about $600 per month.... By 2004, Kristal was paying $19,000 a month. Last year his landlord...evicted Kristal and raised the rent to $65,000 a month.

'The Bowery is what the Meatpacking District was three years ago,' [the broker] said. 'With the opening of new retail tenants in [nearby] Avalon Bay, the level of luxury is getting very high. Within the next six months to year, the neighborhood will look more like [the West Village.] Within two years you'll see that almost all the retail businesses there will have changed.'"

10th Street Gallery Buildings

VANISHING?

Some very scary news--or, hopefully, "wildly unconfirmed rumor mongering," from Curbed: The low-rise buildings at 90, 86, and 84 East 10th are being bought by a developer to be razed for big-box construction.

That block of buildings between Third and Fourth Avenues was the epicenter of the Abstract Expressionist movement in the 1950s. Willem DeKooning lived and painted where the Jillery gift shop is now. Franz Kline was there. The block was filled with avant-garde galleries like the Tanager (now Danal restaurant). Is this another piece of the East Village's soul being demolished for condos and Starbucks?


DeKooning by Fred McDarrah

Dick's Bar

VANISHED: July 2007



Made a visit to Dick's the other day on my personal tour of the MTA's list of doomed buildings, slated to be snatched by eminent domain for the new Second Avenue subway line.

Dick's shutter is down and it's down for good, according to a tip from Eater, and the phone's been disconnected.


Photo from New York Magazine

I guess that's it for Dick's, a good old gay dive bar, described by New York Magazine thusly: "With its concept-free amalgam of bar, pool table, jukebox and pinball machine, Dick's is to most East Village gay bars what Edith Piaf is to Cher."

Everyday Chatter

Take a tour of 8th Avenue's porn shops before there's nothing left to see [Forgotten NY]

See NYC pre-1996, before it all started going to hell, in the Midtown Y photo gallery show -- includes the work of Peter Hujar who captured the meatpacking district when it still packed meat, not fashion models, and the East Village when (in the words of Gary Indiana) "it still had the narcoleptic desuetude of downtown Detroit" [NYPL]

Take a surprising look at NYC from on high [kottke]

Read about the nuptial love between two anti-Atlantic Yards activists -- the Voice reports and No Land Grab sets the record straight

Immigrants an easy mark as Hotel Breslin's tenants get the boot [Chelsea Now]

10th Street Baths

RENOVATING

I've been wondering and worried about what's happening at the Russian & Turkish baths on 10th Street. New York reports they're getting prettied up after 115 years. Which hopefully does not translate to "robbed of all that was wonderfully decrepit so the carpetbaggers of the new East Village can feel more spa-like when they schvitz."

The Baths certainly got trendy in recent years, but let's pray they don't lose their steamy soul in the process. I'd hate to walk by and find the place covered in undulating glass.



Here's a bit of history from the New York Times:

Steaming to Serenity At the Turkish Baths
by Douglas Martin
May 10, 1991

Timelessness because nothing seems to change in the dank, dark room. People move up and down the tiers of seats, but somehow don't seem to really move at all. Some leave to jump in the cold water pool just outside, or the more civilized whirlpool. Others enter, gasping at first. The bare light bulbs seem ancient enough to have been installed by Edison. Water runs continously into the plastic pickled herring buckets placed around the room. The wet floor glistens like a million diamonds.

It is easy to remember the legends of this place, some of which may even be true. How in the old days all the masseurs could neither hear nor speak so presumably they could tell no tales. (One remains.) How there was a special room for gangsters to check Tommy guns. How Jake, a chef and John Belushi's treasured chum, would concoct feasts with a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

The place changed when Big Al Modlinz, the last owner, died on the job, while scrubbing a patron with oak leaves. He was unbelievably rude, but had clung to the old Lower East Side ways....