Mini Canal

Urban miniaturist Alan Wolfson, whom I interviewed here, has completed a new piece: Canal Street Cross Section. Here he preserves in miniature the beloved living artifact of a former world, the Canal Rubber signage, which looks exactly like the real thing.



Wolfson always adds his own fantasies to his pieces, so they are not exact duplicates of the city scene as it is--or ever was. Here he inserts a wayward massage parlor next to Canal Rubber. He says, "I decided to throw in the Chinese massage parlor both to give it a touch of Chinatown and also to spice it up a little."



Down below the street are two subterranean levels--the subway platform and the tracks where a graffiti-covered subway car is open and waiting.

Here, a Brobdingnagian quarter has been dropped into the scene, calling attention to the smallness of the turnstiles and newsstand.



To see more of this multi-layered piece of work, visit Wolfson's site.


For more on New York miniatures, see also:
Visiting the Panorama
Model New York
Little Bickle
Little Gritty City

*Everyday Chatter

Bloomberg's transportation commissioner tests new "Green Lane" on East Village street? While one stubborn old-school New Yorker refuses to do the right thing and ride a bicycle:


Acme Bar & Grill closing--but not really. [EVG]

Five minutes in 1980s' NO York City. [FP]

3/23: Attend the benefit for a victim of gay-bashing in Williamsburg. [NYS]

More robberies through unlocked doors and windows in Brooklyn Heights. No breaking, just entering. [BHB]

Avenue D back in the day: "I remember the rainy day when the back facade fell off the building behind the wreck and left a bathtub hanging in mid air 3 flights up." [Blah]

Embedded report from the Papaya King wars. [MAD]

Keith Haring's collaborator LA II at Dorian Grey Gallery. [EVC]

Poster boy, or his copycat, wonders what would Jesus buy in the East Village:

Manufacturers Trust 1955

About a month ago, the Landmarks Preservation Commission voted to protect the midcentury modern interior of the Manufacturers Trust bank building on Fifth Avenue. Now owner Vornado wants to do some demolishing and Landmarks said "try again."

The Municipal Art Society of New York sent along the building's welcome brochure from 1955, recently discovered in their archives.



Below, we see a panoramic Mad Mennish shot of the Main Banking Room on the second floor, featuring artist Harry Bertoia's "sculptured metal screen," measuring 70 feet long and 16 feet high, with 800 brass, copper, and nickel panels floating together at various depths.

Landmarking came too late to save the "floating screen," which was removed last year by owner JP Morgan Chase against much protest.



Here's a closer shot of the screen where "Every customer convenience and comfort amidst stimulating and friendly surroundings is provided for."



The bank's 30-ton doored Mosler vault is still in the building today, still "in full view of 8 million New Yorkers" on the street level. The brochure tells us that this door is "stronger, heavier and thicker than the two Mosler doors that successfully withstood the atom bomb at Hiroshima."

And here's a noirish shot of a man in overcoat and fedora, contemplating perhaps the riches within that not even an atom bomb will access.



Finally, a voyeuristic, Hopperesque view of a trio in an office. The man is a visiting out-of-town customer, according to the brochure. He is confident, taking up space with his arm stretched out across the sofa, his briefcase at his feet, fedora and overcoat resting on the opposite arm.

The banker's secretary is taking notes. She is in white, while the banker is in dark shadow, not much more than a pair of shoulders and a Brylcreemed head. What happens between them when the curtains are closed?

E. Rossi & Co.

Thanks to Roy Campolongo and Michele Campo for sending in the link to Closing Time*, Veronica Diaferia's 2006 documentary about the closure of E. Rossi & Co. After almost 100 years, they were forced out when new owners bought the property, asking for $25,000 rent per month.

(*The full video is hosted at Folkstreams, which seems to be having trouble at the moment.)


film still

In Diaferia's documentary, we watch the Rossi family pack up the shop, a daunting task with a century of inventory to go through, including shelves loaded with countless 78 records, pianola rolls, and Neapolitan sheet music.

Opened in 1910 by Ernesto Rossi as Rossi's Libreria, the shop began as a music store and publishing company.


film still

"Rossi's, in its last 20 years, 30 years," said Joseph Sciorra, assistant director of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute at Queens College, "had really become this kind of repository and archive for Italian-American popular culture. Its collection is unprecedented.''

"From this store in America," says Amore: The Story of Italian American Song, "Italian pop music, parlor songs, and opera would all come together" and be disseminated across the city and the country.



The closure of Rossi's happened at the same time as the closure of Paolucci's restaurant, opened in 1947, also driven out due to skyrocketing rent--from $3,500 to $20,000 per month. And there were others lost. As the Villager reported at the time, all this happened when real estate company, John Anthony Group, Inc., bought a package of buildings on Mulberry and Grand Streets, including 9 existing businesses.

In the documentary, Mr. Paolucci says a tearful goodbye to Little Italy. Today, at his restaurant's former address, there is now The Mulberry Project, which the Times recently called "a speakeasy-style lounge with mixologists, locavore plates and an in-crowd that revels in its erudite tastes."



Paolucci went on to open a new restaurant in Staten Island, but that has also closed. E. Rossi & Co. survived by relocating around the corner from their life-long location in Little Italy. The elder Mr. Rossi himself, however, did not last long after the move.

The son of Ernesto and father of Ernest, Luigi Rossi passed away a little more than a year after the move. The Times spoke to Robert Alleva of the neighboring cheese store, who said, ''You think of Little Italy, you think of Louie Rossi sitting there on his chair. There'd be like a gazillion things everywhere, and you would ask him for something from 1959. And he'd move a couple of boxes and pull it out."

''Him still being here was like Little Italy still existed,'' said Mr. Rossi's son. ''By seeing him, it was still here.''


Luigi Rossi, film still

This all happened a few years ago, and isn't news, but it is a look back at how a neighborhood can vanish and change in big chunks, just like that, like a glacier that's been slowly melting over the eons, then suddenly calves, crumbling into nothing, altering the ecosystem in an instant.

Right now, numbers 185, 187, and 189 Grand Street are on the market as one package, and we have to wonder what will happen to that chunk of Little Italy when it sells.

Watch the film here

*Everyday Chatter

Tension on Flatbush: "Maybe they are trying to bring a little bit of that Manhattan stuff to our neighborhood." [CNY]

New Brooklyn Magazine to feature column entitled "Self-Loathing Gentrifier." [NYO]

Visiting Bleecker Bob's record shop. [MAD]

Q&A with Miss Coney Island 2011. [ATZ]

When city businesses advertised on matchbook covers. [ENY]

The Lower East Side loses another poet. [EVG]

Rob Warren Books

I finally got the chance to catch up with the new incarnation of one of my favorite (lost) bookshops. Skyline Books has become Rob Warren Books, relocated to the Flower District, in a strange spot that is not easy to find.



At 51 West 28th Street, between Broadway and 6th Avenue, the bookshop is less a shop and more of a temporary holding pen for books. It takes up the first dozen square feet or so of a flower merchant's business, so that the room smells not of musty books, but of plant life, sort of muddy and green, vaguely tropical. Workmen go in and out, hauling flowers back and forth. Behind the books is a room full of florists, trimming flowers on tables.

The books are arranged in boxes and on incidental shelving. Some are stacked on Greek-style pedestals meant to hold potted plants. (No Linda the cat in sight.)

Deb Sperling, with the full story in the NY Press, said it well: "the sight of piles of used and rare books practically budding from the leaves in a florist’s window on this dumpy stretch of the neighborhood is at once inspiring—and heartbreaking. Although it’s a relief to see that something real still exists in this zone, it’s also crushing since it seems too fragile to withstand the harsh economic climate."

Still, it's inspiring to see this business hanging on and taking a creative approach to survival. And Mr. Warren has plans--he's looking for a space south of 14th Street where people will welcome a bookshop.

*Everyday Chatter

History theft on the rise as new businesses on the Lower East Side are giving themselves false cornerstones, claiming to be "founded in" years way before they existed. [EVG]

CB3 passes a resolution to save 35 Cooper Square. [BB]

CB3 says "no meat market" for the Astor Place pedestrian mall. [DNA]

The Eldridge club, with its fake bookstore front, is dead. [Eater]

At Bigelow drugstore, a lot of canes and a note from Marcel Proust:


Sifting through the remains of a life, piled in a Dumpster. [TGL]

March 15: See Ben Katchor with his new book at The Strand.

Inside Mendel Goldberg Fabrics: "This small, last-of-its-kind store, near the corner of Hester and Allen Streets, has not left family hands since...1890." [NYT]

Chinatown Fair: the documentary--coming soon. [Gothamist]

Discover the invention of Brownstone Brooklyn. [MCNY]