On Hats & Hatters

A couple of months ago, JJ Hat Center was featured in the Times, complete with a beautiful slideshow of photos. I don't go into JJ often, mostly because I can't afford their hats and trying them on is just a performance with no likelihood of becoming a reality. If I'm in the market for a porkpie or a straw fedora, I'll probably head to Arnold Hatters and deal with brothers Mark and Peter, whose prices are lower. But a trip to JJ Hat Center, just to window shop, is worth it all the same.



In business since 1911, JJ was forced out of a previous location and moved into its current spot, which happens to have been IBM's first New York showroom. It's a gorgeous place, with decorated plasterwork on the walls, and looks like it was made for hats.

They have a few ancient hat-related machines in the shop that still work. One of them, which I found particularly fascinating, is this 70-year-old embossing machine that stamps your initials in gold along the inner band of your hat.





The machine was made by the Roberts Cushman Co. sometime in the 1930s. They hold patents for several embossing machines--this is just one of them, but I add it here because I like the elegance of the old diagram:



Inspired by the hat-sprucing machines, I went searching for a man known as Mr. Horace who ran the Peter & Irving workshop on 38th Street, upstairs in one of the old Garment District buildings where wholesalers sell things like feathers, trimmings, and buttons.

Born in Mississippi in 1928, Horace Weeks came to New York City in 1948 and began working at Peter & Irving, in business since 1935. He became the owner in the 1970s and continued designing, making, and restoring hats in the shop.


photo from RuthShopsNY

I visited Mr. Horace once, maybe five years ago, to see about blocking my old fedora. I remember stepping into a dusty room piled high with wooden hat blocks and straw hats in sherbet shades of pink and lavender and pistachio, the fancy kind worn by Harlem's church ladies on Sundays.

Mr. Horace was standing across the dark workshop in the half-light of an open window overlooking an airshaft. It was summer, a fan was turning, and he wore a sweaty undershirt as he toiled over a heavy black machine. I watched him work for a minute, wanting to talk to him, but he seemed busy and, intimidated, I left without a word.

I have always wanted to go back. But when I went to find him this week, he had vanished. If anybody knows where he went, please let me know. I need him to restore the shape of my hat.

*Everyday Chatter

Last night was the 6B Garden goodbye party for Eddie Boros' Tower of Toys. People came bearing cameras--at least 100 showed--and the press is all over it. The story made it to 1010 WINS (the first thing I heard yesterday morning when my clock radio went off), WNYC was there, and The Times did a story on this "sad, dilapidated memorial to a time gone by.” Bob Arihood has pics and so does Lorcan Otway. And here's a link to mine.


While karaokers were singing "Tiny Dancer" a man was shot this weekend at Sing Sing on 6th and A. (He's OK.) If you think this means the EV is going back to its wild west ways, let me say it again: "Tiny Dancer." [Grieve]

Speaking of the old EV, visit 2nd and B back in the day. [FlamingP]

Stroller nazis of Park Slope cut the line and demand on-the-spot flat fixes. [Curbed]

Ready to drop $50,000 for a Circle Line cruise? This "Gold Plate" special has everything a multimillionaire could want--almost. Why no gold-shit pills? [Gothamist]

As the EV is turned into a frat house block by block, the frat-boyification knows no bounds--here's a young guy who works a lot, has a lot of space in his apartment, and therefore requires a girl roomie to walk around in her underpants. [E in NY]

Time Out names the Avalon Chrystie fishbowl as one of the best places in the city to watch people having sex. Maybe those glass condos are good for something:

Pre-Glasnost NY

It never ceases to amaze me what people will stand in line for in this city. For example, groceries at Trader Joe's, where one shopper calls it a "pre-glasnost Soviet grocery store." People complain about the line, but I think they like it. In fact, I think the line is the whole point.

It seems some people really enjoy being in certain lines. Lines are hot. The line outside the Magnolia cupcake bakery is hot. And the recently opened Grom gelato store this weekend had people standing out on the street to get, um, gelato in 50-degree weather. So the Grom line must also be hot.



But the hottest line to be in has got to be Shake Shack's, where people wait forever (like hours) to get burgers and fries and say "totally worth it." Why do they do this?

People like being pressed up against each other. Have you ever noticed how, though there are two down escalators exiting the Union Square Regal megaplex, every single person flooding out of a movie crams onto the same escalator and nobody but nobody goes down the empty one?



Since waiting in line is fun, the Shake Shack line comes with posters instructing people waiting to do "Shack-cercises." I didn't see anybody actually doing them, though. And if you ever feel lonely for the Shake Shack line, you can always watch it from home or work on the SS webcam.



Celebrating this most popular and possibly longest line in town, Shake Shack sells a t-shirt featuring the line itself. As if the line were an attraction. Which, let's admit, it is. And instead of loving NY, the t-shirt says, "I Shake-Shack NY."

Which I guess is the goal of every chain--to turn itself into a verb and then "do it" to the city. Shake Shack is spreading rapidly, heading to 77th and Columbus next, then possibly Citi Field.



Maybe what the mom-and-pops need are lines. Here's an idea for some ambitious group of performance artists: Dress up like Sex & the City girls and make lines outside of the most unfashionable places. Do it outside Met Foods. Do it at the Sweet Banana Candy Store. Do it at the Donut Pub. Do it at Show World.

P.S. Already, they are clamoring to get in line for Ikea, as if they've never been to the one in Jersey. Ikea has had to issue a warning to potential liner-uppers, says City Room, "Customers will not be allowed to line up outside the new Ikea in Red Hook, Brooklyn, until 48 hours before the grand opening."

A Blondie on the Bowery

The Best of Blondie (on 8-track) was the first album I ever picked out and bought for myself; at 12 years old, the most thrillingly sexy song in my pubescent world was “Rapture.” So it was a special treat recently to find myself talking with Blondie co-founder and guitarist Chris Stein about the Bowery, CBGB, NYU, and the coming of Blade Runner.

I asked him what he thinks about Varvatos moving into CBGB and he replied, “Ah, what the fuck. What are you gonna complain about that for? The issue is much bigger. The Lower East Side, the city--it's all dead. I’m just waiting for economic collapse. It’s gonna be full-on Blade Runner.”

While the CBGB-to-Varvatos shift doesn't particularly trouble him, he said, “I’m not okay with what happened to the whole city. It’s a drag. Look at the fucking Fillmore, it’s a fucking bank. NYU, man. I protested when they tore down Edgar Allen Poe’s house. Edgar Allen Poe! You’d think any university would be thrilled to have that on their campus. NYU is fucking demented.”

"Everybody who helped add to the cachet of the city can’t live there anymore. The biggest shame is that everybody’s gotta have a job to live in the city now. There’s no time to make art. How can you keep your credibility if you have some stupid job you hate and still be a radical? I never had a job ever. I painted a bathroom once and that was it. I was in the band for 30 years.”


photo: Roberta Bayley

In the 1970s Chris lived on the Bowery, over a liquor store and across from what is now, as he puts it, “that museum thing.” He started going to hear music at CBGB before he met Debbie Harry, back in the summer before CB’s opened in 1973, maybe in 1972, when the place was still Hilly’s on the Bowery. There he saw Eric Emerson, Warhol star and member of The Magic Tramps. By the mid-70s he was a CBGB regular, playing with Harry. I asked him what he misses most about the old Bowery.

“Dead bodies and drugs!” he answered without hesitation, “I miss having to watch your back—it keeps you in a heightened state.”

Chris lives in a different heightened state these days, upstate with his wife and kids. But he still returns to his place in the East Village. While he enjoys wandering around the city now, he finds it’s “getting more and more Walt Disney.” And the people on the streets just aren’t the same. “Everyone’s got a driven aggressiveness, all these young people with an ‘I’m gonna get somewhere’ attitude. Everybody’s money conscious, materialistic."


photo: Marcia Resnick

He talked about what he calls the “everyone is hip syndrome,” saying, “There are so many people in the city who exude this false hipness that’s mostly based on what they are wearing or their hairdo or tattoos--a lot of just plain old straight people who are 'styled.’ The reason that the beats and maybe the punks could qualify for a less transient hipness is that they were a fucking minority."

So what's the solution to all this rampant false hipness and aggressive consumerism?

"We need a recession, it’s good for the arts. Man, I’d like it to be like Blade Runner, everything on the verge of collapse.” And the Blade Runner days will come, Chris says, when China and other foreign markets rise to economic power and take over the city. But on the other hand, “Like, 50% of the world has never made a phone call.”

Cue the opening riff of “Call Me” as Chris hustles off the phone to chase his little girls outside into the sunshine of a beautiful day far, far away from the vanishing New York.

• Bowery Flops
• Remains of CBGB's
• Another Bowery Tower

*Everyday Chatter

Mike Albo visits the Varvatos store on Bowery, finds some things "amazing" and some "downright offensive," and says, "now we live in a city of aspirations and replicated cool. N.Y.U. students come in and imagine how great they will look when they get their six-figure jobs, and six-figure-salary guys come in to buy clothes so they can look as if they moshed." [NYT]

From avant-garde to credit cards, where once was theater on the Bowery, there now is high-end shopping. [Racked]

Now the birds are imitating cell-phone rings. When will it end? [NYO]

Somebody please tell me where I can get my very own "I Miss NY" t-shirt! [Gothamist]

"Gay Chelsea's ground zero" Food Bar is closed. Why? Signs plastered in the windows today say "It is all about the R-E-N-T." The closure has inspired funereal candlelit memorials and a "gay Italian entrepreneur" (according to a Towleroad commenter) flying in with a suitcase full of Euros to save the joint:




Yes, NY Mag, those models on Stuyvesant Town's new marketing site are indeed hateful. And so is the copy: Downtown is their town and they don't have to commute to their nightlife in the EV--where they come to my block to scream all night and puke on my doorstep. [Daily Intel]

And a dorm is born in the EV for yunnie kids who want to party til they puke in their fishbowl apartments--wait, is that a plastic-mattressed communal bed on the roof? [Curbed]

More scoop on the Stuyvesant Polyclinic and its defacement by developers--those "Buy This Mansion" signs were "in gross violation of the Landmarks Law." The interior is being demolished at this moment. [Villager]

Bowling sounds its death rattle as it vanishes, lane by lane, from the new New York. [Gothamist]

Pics of LES Jewels flashing his penis on Avenue A give me hope for the city yet. (Not so work safe.) [NMNL]

Lichtenstein's Signs

I've been worried about these old signs at 55 Delancey. Now, BoweryBoogie, a member of the Vanishing New York flickr group, alerts us that they've vanished.





That lovely gold lettering (WOOLENS! TAILORS' TRIMMINGS!) has been scraped from the windows and washed away. And Lichtenstein's sign, along with Singer Woolens, has been covered with black paint.


photo: BoweryBoogie

55 Delancey, it turns out, has a rather sordid recent history, according to Chinatown advocacy group CAAAV, which reports that when this and another building were bought in 2001, the new landlords "evicted almost half of the original tenants" and earned themselves "more than 500 HPD (Department of Housing Preservation and Development) violations." CAAAV reports in a follow up that the tenants got together to fight the new landlord and won. (More at Metro.)

Apparently, Lichtenstein & Co. had already moved on--up to 95 Delancey, where you can still find them. I went in last fall just to check out the experience of being in a tailor supply shop.



I bought a pea-coat button and an ancient set of Clik-Tite snap fasteners that look like they probably came over from the old Lichtenstein's (love that packaging design). Wish the signage had come too.

*Everyday Chatter

VNY reader BaHa offers a taste of Economy Candy, one of the last old holdouts of the LES. [ELE]

Woody's filming in NYC again after a long hiatus from our deadened city. He said, "There are certain areas that have not been encroached upon too much... But once they put up those big new buildings, it looks the same as Houston." That's Houston, Texas, not Houston Street. Oh, is there a difference? [Urbanite]

This stuff about Veniero's (temporary!) closure--where in NYC are there not mouse droppings? [Eater]

Gotta love this Oniony Stuy-Town satire. [StuyTown] via [Curbed]

Whatever you do, do not sit on any wooden subway benches! [NYShitty]

May 22: Join the save Coney Island freak show/protest. [Gothamist]

The graffiti additions to this ad make a pic too good to ignore, concealing as it does an old Kelvinator ghost sign. Looks like someone's a little nipplephobic: