Gramercy Pawnbrokers

Recently, we had cause to worry about Gramercy Pawnbrokers. After surviving the luxury NYU dorm-condo that dropped on top of it (literally, on top of it), the little holdout pawn shop had a For Rent sign on its facade.



Fear not. The pawnbrokers were only renting out a sliver of their shop. A reader sent in the following shot of the new tenant--no cupcakes, no frozen yogurt, no 7-Eleven. Just a humble barber shop.



I would have missed the antique signage on the 24th St. side, and the strange, sad, lovely windows with their dusty violins, outdated calculators, and unpolished jewelry.

Meatpacking Before & After

Last winter, when photographer Brian Rose shared his shots of the Meatpacking District in 1985, I begged him to go back and take "after" photos of the same shots. I guess a lot of other folks begged him, too, because the man has done it. The result is, as expected, amazing, a vivid look at the old world and the new, 1985 versus 2013.




all photos by Brian Rose

The old world was meatpackers. In 1974, there were 160 businesses handling meat on those streets. Under metal awnings, sides of beef hung on hooks, dripping blood and fat onto the sidewalks, where men in red-smeared white smocks toiled in the pre-dawn dark.

The old world was underground BDSM sex. In the 1970s, gay leather clubs opened shop—The Anvil, The Spike, The Hellfire, and The Mineshaft, whose dark corners were brought into the spotlight by Al Pacino in William Friedkin’s 1980 film Cruising.

The old world was transgender sex workers. The cobblestones were their stroll. They worked in packs for safety, took coffee breaks at Dizzy Izzy’s bagel shop (since 1938), bought their outfits at Lee’s Mardi Gras, a store that catered to crossdressers. The Meatpacking District was the muddy edge of Manhattan’s universe, and nobody much cared what happened there.





During the AIDS crisis, business plummeted at the leather clubs as regulars got sick and died off. In 1985, the state gave permission to Mayor Koch to padlock all of the city’s gay bathhouses, bars, and clubs where “high-risk sexual activities” were taking place. City inspectors ventured into The Mineshaft and witnessed “many patrons engaging in anal intercourse and fellatio,” and heard “sounds of whipping and moaning,” reported the Times. (After reviewing the inspectors’ report, Mayor Koch said, “It's tough stuff to read. It must be horrific, horrendous in its actuality to witness.'') That year the Department of Health closed The Mineshaft for “violating the new anti-AIDS regulations.” It was the first of many such closures.

That same year, Florent Morellet opened a French-American diner in a shuttered old luncheonette called the R&L. Florent became a sensation, an after-hours spot for the leathermen and trend-seeking slummers alike. Morellet credits his restaurant for bringing "the first bit of gentrification to the area."

In the 1990s, rent was cheap, and in came the artists. New queer clubs opened, like the gay Lure, along with part-time lesbian hangout Clit Club, and the weekly party Jackie 60, an anything goes, non-exclusive scene for drag, punk, performance art, and poetry. Hogs & Heifers came to the neighborhood, attracting celebrities like Julia Roberts, who danced on the bar and donated her brassiere to their growing collection.

It was the beginning of the end.





A tipping point came in 1999. That year, two fashionable restaurants opened in the area, Markt and Fressen. Reviewers were not all gung-ho for the idea of fine dining on streets that reeked of blood and rotting offal. At the Post, Steve Cuozzo wrote, “Take the Meatpacking District--please. The streets smell like one big pancreas.” But the smell of money was also strong.

Next came the high-fashion retailers and the Friends of the High Line. Then it was Keith McNally’s Pastis, the restaurant often blamed with the greasy old Meatpacking District’s death. The moment the bistro opened in early 2000, people were lining up to get in. McNally claimed that Pastis would be “bohemian and unfussy, a kind of workingman’s place.” It was decidedly neither.

From there, the floodgates opened and the old world quickly came to an end. The meatpacking plants were pushed out. The transgender sex workers were chased out. The rents shot from $400 to $40,000 per month. Florent's old building, once the R&L Luncheonette, just sold this week for $8.6 million.

Brian Rose's photos tell the story of the Meatpacking District's massive shift, one photo pairing at a time--from quiet to crowds, low-rise to high-rise, rusted awnings to fresh coats of paint, meat houses to high-end boutiques, clunkers to luxury cars, poultry trucks to artisanal ice-cream trucks. Visit his website to see much more.

An Ode to the Urban Laundromat

We've talked to photographers obsessed with capturing the city's vanishing newsstands, its disappearing bodegas, and its fading storefronts. Now we meet one who has taken on the photographic preservation of its diminishing laundromats.

Snorri Sturluson is an Icelandic photographer living in New York City. With Powerhouse Books, he recently published Laundromat, a collection of photos of the city's laundromats, all taken from 2008 to 2012, in all five boroughs. In addition, the Introduction to the book, written by author D. Foy, provides a detailed account of laundromat lore.

I asked the photographer a few questions about his work.


All photos by Snorri Sturluson

Q: What drew you to the laundromats of the city?

A: As a photographer my initial interest in a story or subject is usually visual. I found the design, the look, the colors, the similarities and the differences in the Laundromats in NYC intriguing. So that was the initial draw. As often happens in art, the project took over and formed its own narrative.

The real subtext of the Laundromats, the true spirit, if you will, started to reveal itself. The Laundromat as an "oasis of despair" as my friend D. Foy puts it in the afterword is what really became the story. A Laundromat is not where most people prefer to spend their time. If we can avoid going there we will (most of us, at least). So the book really shows this utilitarian layer of New York that I think is familiar to many but also hidden to others, and there's an invisible line drawn there that is a bit of a social divide. That's what I think the narrative became. The poorer people spend time at Laundromats, the richer can afford a different solution (there are, of course, exceptions to this).



Q: How do the laundromats of New York compare to those in your home country of Iceland?

A: There are no Laundromats in Iceland, which is partly what made them interesting to me in the first place.

Q: Why do you think the laundromat has been such a victim of gentrification?

A: I think it's all tied in with the fact that we are becoming more and more sanitized and insular as a culture. Our lives are increasingly lived behind closed doors, figuratively and symbolically in our virtual, online realities. The distance between people increases as their wealth increases, and having money introduces different lifestyles. The Laundromat represents an old way of life, one where you are forced to air your dirty laundry in public, rub shoulders with your neighbors, be exposed to their dirty laundry and have an uncomfortable "closeness" with their being, and vice versa.

There's also a simpler answer, Laundromats in their essence, are a utilitarian service with low margins and can't survive on higher rents. Therefore, they're doomed to vanish as the cost of living goes up in a neighborhood and the residents prefer Dry Cleaners, full service laundry, and have access to laundry services in their luxury condo buildings (new or renovated).

There are still a lot of Laundromats in New York City (thousands), but I have noticed that in affluent neighborhoods that used to be less so, they are hard to find. In the poorer, older neighborhoods they're all over the place. Also, newer housing developments (poor and rich) tend to have laundry facilities in the buildings, so it's not only gentrification that's doing the Laundromats in; e.g., in areas of all the Boroughs where there is a lot of low income housing projects, there are actually no Laundromats.



Q: What do you worry we will lose when all the laundromats have vanished from the city?

A: There's a lot of character in all small businesses. Mom and pop shops give any neighborhood a distinct "Main Street/Neighborhood Flavor." The more New York City loses those unique and eccentric places to national or global chains like Starbucks, Pinkberry, and Whole Foods, the more homogenized the city becomes. I don't know that the Laundromats as such play an important community role--maybe they do, it's hard to say--but the disappearance of Laundromats is definitely part of a larger trend of gentrification.

However, I'm not all doom and gloom in this respect, and my job is really not to judge the inevitable process of change. I have simply tried to capture a moment in time with my photographs and only time will tell what is lost, or gained.




You can buy the book directly from Powerhouse, or find it at your local independent book shop.

W. 46th Tower to Come

When last we checked with 301 West 46th, on 8th Avenue, it was being readied for demolition. Since then, it's almost vanished.

Old plans for a new tower here were obsolete, scrapped when the market crashed. Now we hear about the new plan coming to replace it. New York Yimby has a photo:



And Crain's reports:

"The Mallorca-based hotelier RIU Hotels & Resorts is nearly done demolishing a derelict residential property at 301 W. 42nd St. on the multiparcel site. The site includes an adjacent vacant lot on Eighth Avenue just north of that building as well as one to the west along Restaurant Row. According to previous reports, RIU plans to build a 600-room, roughly 300,000-square-foot tower. Currently work on the five-story 301 W. 42nd St., an eyesore whose boarded up windows, ground floor porn shop and graffiti scrawled exterior made it look like a throwback to the avenue's gritty days decades ago, has reduced it to its second floor."


2007

Again, something colorful, low-rise, accessible, with a fascinating history, is being replaced by something dull, big, exclusive, with no history at all.

*Everyday Chatter

Wednesday, Aug 28, rally to keep Quinnberg out of office--5pm at 7th Ave and Greenwich. [FB]

Greenpoint to get a massive condo tower complex complete with Poor Door. [NYS]

A review of the Bloomberg years. [NYer]

Cool and horrifying maps on how Bloomberg reshaped New York. [NYT]

The truth about Bloomberg's record on affordable housing. [Awl]

Even the milk is getting too expensive in East Harlem. [NYP]

Confessions of a Harlem gentrifier. [Salon]

Inside Red Hook's abandoned grain terminal. [Curbed]

Cats in windows. [TGL]

The ramen place that replaced 42-year-old Love Saves the Day has closed, after just a few years. And that's how this goes. [EVG]

New murals and graffiti photos from NYC in the 90s. [NYC90s]

Bleecker Street Records

After more than 20 years in business, Bleecker Street Records will be vanishing from Bleecker Street.



But it will be reappearing right around the corner, in a new space at 188 West 4th St., between Jones and Barrow.



Earlier this year we heard they might be shuttering, maybe vanishing for good. Reported 1010 WINS: "the store will probably close in April, because the new landlord plans to jack up the rent to $27,000 a month. Chris Simunek believes that trend is running the Village. 'It’s absurd,' he said. 'You know, what’s going to go in there is a Starbucks or something, or just something that we already have plenty of.'"

More likely, it will be a frozen yogurt shop or candy store for adults--more of those are opening on Bleecker every day, as the street completes its total transformation into a cultural dead zone. (Bleecker Bob's has not been resurrected.)



Let's hope the record shop's new landlord lets them keep Skuzzball and Creeper, the store's ginormous cats, one of whom graces their T-shirt--which, by the way, is currently available in a very cool purple on black.

This is your last chance to buy the Bleecker Street Records shirt while it's still on Bleecker Street.

Greenwich Laundromat

VANISHED

When the Torrisi company announced their takeover of Rocco's restaurant on Thompson Street, I took a look at the neighboring Greenwich Laundromat and thought, "That's not going to last."



It had that look--the look of the vulnerable. Maybe it was the sign--hand-painted, faded, plenty of character.

Well, it's gone.



This often happens when upscale businesses move nearby. Property values go up and older, smaller businesses get the boot. Of course, we don't know exactly what happened here. Maybe it was just a coincidence and the Greenwich Laundromat people were ready to retire. Maybe they're moving on to greener pastures. But we also heard from a reader that Carbone might be expanding their space.

If anyone knows the story here, please let us know.