*Everyday Chatter

Dyke collective "Fierce Pussy" wheat-paste bombs Extra Place with erotica as it descends into mall-hood. [EVG]

More back to the 70s: Pelham 1974 vs. Pelham 2009. [NYM]

Cooper Square Hotel restaurant dubbed: "awkward, noisy... out-of-towner’s restaurant, designed by out-of-towners to give their out-of-town guests (including those from Long Island and New Jersey) the illusion that they’re actually dining in New York." Makes you feel like you're "back in Dallas" says one diner. [NYM]

Heroic plywood on 17th Street:

my flickr

Williamsburg "trustafarians" suffering in recession: “Most of them are moving back with parents." [NYT]

Trust-fundless woman opens indie Greenlight bookshop in Fort Greene. [Racked]

Emerald Inn goes "ersatz-swank." [FP]

EV noise wars: Get a better soundtrack. [Curbed]

A Walk with Bock

On a rainy day I took a walk through Gramercy with Charles Bock, author of the beautiful novel Beautiful Children. We talked about the neighborhood, the hyper-gentrification of the city, the fate of the New York novel, and the ruination of cupcakes.



Bock came to the city in 1993 and bounced around before settling near 23rd and 3rd. I asked him about the personality of this part of town and how it’s changed over the years. Under the looming glass box of an NYU dorm, he said, “There was nothing here then, and now there’s a less interesting nothing. It used to have an old mothbally personality. Now it’s just completely undefined. There’s absolutely nothing distinctive about it.”

That’s the sense you get when you walk through Gramercy. It feels like a nowhere place, filled with anonymous bodegas and cookie-cutter faux-Irish pubs. But here and there, you find a few touches of character. There's the Carlton Arms Hotel. And the dilapidated Gramercy Pawnbrokers that refused to move when that condo developer took over their block. Bock grew up in a pawnshop in Las Vegas, so I asked him to give me his impression of the windows.



“Well, first off, they need to polish this stuff,” he said, looking in at the tarnished wedding bands and depressing #1 Dad pendants. He recalled being a kid, emptying the windows of wares when it was time to shut the shop for the day. “I have an intimate familiarity with these velvet ring cases.”



La Delice, a pastry shop on the corner of 27th and 3rd, has been here for years. Bock lifted the pant leg on the baker statue out front to show me a rare pair of Spud Webb sneakers. Webb was a 5’6” basketball star known for his miraculous dunk. His sneakers never reached the popularity of Jordans, but they’ve become a collector’s item. Said Bock, “If these were in good shape, they'd be worth ass-loads of money on the vintage sneaker market.”

Inside La Delice, Bock briefly contemplated buying a cupcake, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. “I can’t buy a fucking cupcake,” he said, “Sex and the City ruined cupcakes for me. Think about this. The same year the Ramones put out their last album, that Sex and the City column showed up. It was the end of one type of New York and the beginning of another. There was a huge shift of mindset and aesthetic... There used to be room to be a freak.”



We passed up the cupcakes, forever spoiled by Carrie Bradshaw, and headed back out into the rain, talking about New York novels and if they still exist. Bock recommended Emily Barton’s Brookland and John Wray’s Lowboy. But Rick Moody’s Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven tops the list. Bock said, “It is New York, late 80s, East Village. There will never be anything better written about the certain way that world was. He gets a lot of criticism, but read that fucking novella and then come talk to me.”



At 24th Street, where Baruch College demolished a block once filled with fleabag hotels and men huddled around trashcan fires, Bock recalled, “This used to be a little Bowery. Nathanael West once managed a hotel on 23rd Street.” It might have been there, among the miserable people, that West found inspiration for his novella Miss Lonelyhearts.

Does today’s New York still have what it takes to inspire literature? I asked Bock if the city was less inspiring to him today than it used to be. With an infectious optimism, he told me, “The thing about New York is that anything can happen. There’s a sense of possibility that’s such a deep part of this city. Ideally, that’s not connected with cash or status. But even if it is, the moral questioning of that is interesting and makes for good substance.”

Even the vanishing city can be a source of inspiration.

“Because it pisses you off,” Bock said, “You see what’s happening and you want to get in there. You want to get in the fight.”

Visit Charles Bock's website

*Everyday Chatter

Rob Hollander reports you can help Save Ray's Candy: Sun, 6/7, 5:30 pm at C-Squat, 155 Ave C. Bring a $10 donation and your dancing shoes.

The Cooper Union Hive declared "great art" by the Times. [EVG]

The evicted Fifth Avenue Record and Tape Center in Park Slope gets a new lease on life! [Gothamist]

Looks like the demolition on 10th and 4th is beginning--does this mean another hotel is being built in this dead economy?--first they peeled off the gates, then they shrouded the building in white:




Chinatown's shoe man gets harassed off the streets by "Big Boss"--now who might that be? [NYDN]

One StuyTowner says no one really shits in the halls, others beg to disagree. [Curbed]

More on the wildings in Tompkins Square Park. [RS]

Luxury condos are turning into homeless shelters. [Gothamist]

Freakologist

In the New York Times, Nicolai Ouroussoff examined the new Times Square pedestrian mall, noting that those "apparently nostalgic for the seediness of the 1970s version of the square, denounced it as another step in New York’s transformation from the world’s greatest metropolis to a generic tourist trap." However, he reported, "the soul of Times Square remains intact," if soul only means neon, tourists, and the smell of junk food.

Meanwhile, at the Post, Andrea Peyser worries Times Square will now suffocate in a fart-cloud of tourists all gassed up on "Starbucks venti chocolate mint frappuccinos."

The fact is: Times Square is already too dead to die. Remarkably, however, in the middle of the new mall, I encountered some life in the old corpse.



Talking with a couple of tourists, he wore a worn-out leather biker's jacket and hat, with a pair of gold Elvis sunglasses. His jacket was covered with buttons and pins, including one that said: The Devil Made Me Do It. He was regaling, as only a true New York character can regale, so I went by to listen and he invited me to sit down. The tourists took this opportunity to make their escape.

I told the man, "You're the last interesting-looking person left in Times Square."

"You got that right," the man said and launched into tales of his 80 years. From his pocket, he took out a weary stack of photographs, each in a plastic casing wrapped in rubber bands, and showed me pictures of himself when he was a young man, handsome and muscular, posing shirtless in the Korean War.

"Look at that hair! I was a hair model," he said, "I was something."



With humor and warmth, he told me about the war and his youth in Brooklyn. As his stories went on, they became more fantastical and far-flung. They included millions of dollars lost to Bernie Madoff, a 6'4"-tall female CIA agent with size 11 shoes, mafia soldiers, and the secrets of freakology. He said, "I'm a freakologist. That's someone who takes care of a woman's most secret needs, the stuff she doesn't even tell her husband." There then followed details (and Polaroids) too obscene to chronicle here.

Feeling close to the un-touristy soul of old Times Square--crazy, dirty, a bit unnerving--I wanted to sit longer with the man, but I had somewhere to go and was already late. I asked him how long he's been hanging out in Times Square (61 years) and what he thought of the changes there.

He took his boisterous voice down to a whisper, touched my arm confidentially, and said, "You know, sometimes, not all change is for the better."

Anti-StuyTown Graffiti

The Stuyvesant Town advertisement in the First Avenue L-train station has been defaced by anti-yuppies. Living large and spending less (?) in the new lux-life StuyTown, two recession-era gals contemplate their recently constricted living situation.



"Can I afford this?" asks the woman on the couch. "Maybe we can sell this," she wonders, an arrow pointing to an "artwork" she picked up, possibly in the basement of Urban Outfitters.



"I really don't think so," says her pal from the dinette. "How about Daddy?"



Meanwhile, on the floor by the coffee table, a pair of shoes bids, "Bye bye." In this economy, two months rent is too much to spare for leopard-print stilettos.

Is life getting bad in the new StuyTown?

So bad, in fact, a resident reports that drunken college-students have resorted to taking shits in the hallways. Writes one StuyTowner, when he spotted the shitter, "The clearly inebriated young man just looked at me and said, 'Hey when ya gotta go ya gotta go.'"

*Everyday Chatter

A temporary art gallery pops up in the otherwise un-rented Dapper Dan space on 14th:


Ray's Candy Store reopens on Avenue A after shuttering. [NMNL]

See Michael Brown's LostLES exhibit--and read an interview with the artist here. [BB]

Peek inside Theatre 80 with owner Otway. [flickr]

More street violence in Alphabet City. [EVG]

Clothesline poles are vanishing from Brooklyn. [PMFA]

Read an interview with Lost City Brooks. [WWIB]

Coop Car Party

Last night, while the East Fifth Street Block Association held a neighborhood meeting to air grievances about the Cooper Square Hotel and its noise (see Grieve for the inside scoop), the hotel had a party of its own. Right across the street from the senior citizens' home where the community meeting was held, the hotel hosted an invitation-only product launch, the unveiling of Aston Martin's DBS Volante Convertible.



A fleet of four Aston Martins were parked and floodlit along the Bowery. Another sat dissected on the Coop's frontage, revealing its carbon-fiber bone structure. And a sixth convertible lay bathed in bright light on Fifth Street. Each car goes for about $285,000.

I asked a worker at the party if it was a charity auction. He laughed, "Charity? There's no charity at the Cooper Square Hotel."



As the disenfranchised neighbors stepped out of the senior center to continue their discussion on the sidewalk, airing their frustrations about the hotel, the music from the party poured over them. Limousines and Hummers disgorged slick-haired swells. Partiers flowed out of the packed outdoor patio and stood on the sidewalk smoking, sipping champagne, shouting into cell phones.

As one of the upstairs neighbors wrote to me, "Every once in a while, young women shriek in unison. Some idiot brought an air horn."

Noise pollution? What noise pollution?



Meanwhile, indifferent to it all, a powdery silver Aston Martin beamed and glinted. Men in swanky suits and long-legged women climbed inside. They stroked the sumptuous leather. They moaned with pleasure. They imagined feeling the wind in their hair.


See also:
Notes from the Backside 1, 2, and 3