125th Street in Chains

The Pathmark supermarket on East Harlem's 125th Street closed this weekend amid controversy, more controversy, and the despair of 30,000 customers who have few places left to buy groceries.



After the Pathmark opened in 1999, a number of small grocers shut down, leaving residents dependent on the big supermarket.

The Times reported that the grocery store's intended role would be to increase development: "the Pathmark's popularity is having a big impact on the neighborhood. Not only has it altered the fortunes of the unsightly intersection where it is located, it is also helping to spur development across 125th Street."

At the time, Karen A. Phillips, chief executive of the Abyssinian Development Corporation, who put in the store, said the supermarket had "done what it was supposed to do -- inspire new commercial development" through the heart of Harlem.



Then, last year, Abyssinian sold the Pathmark site to mega-developer Extell for nearly $39 million. Extell, as you may know, is creating a giant luxury city at Hudson Yards, with hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks and other subsidies from Bloomberg.

Said Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito of the Abyssinian and Extell deal for Pathmark, “I believe they threw this community under the bus.”

A look inside the supermarket on Saturday evening revealed shelves already stripped bare, the registers closed, and the employees--200 of whom will now be out of work--gathering to say goodbye.



Also around 1999, the Abyssinian Development Corporation, with mega-developer Forest City Ratner (known for getting eminent domain land and subsidies from Bloomberg to develop Atlantic Yards), developed the Harlem Center to the west, a suburban-style shopping center with an Old Navy store, among other chains.

As promised, more development has come to 125th Street, especially after the major boost of Bloomberg's massive "river-to-river" rezoning in 2008, a brainchild of Amanda Burden, then director of the Department of City Planning.

The eureka moment came after a Roberta Flack concert at the Apollo, when Burden discovered there was simply nowhere to eat in Harlem--nowhere, not even at Sylvia’s or Manna’s or any of the other soul-food restaurants nearby. She realized that the neighborhood would have to change. “There should be a million different eateries around there,” she told the Times, “and this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to frame and control growth on 125th Street.”

Well, now Amanda Burden can eat at Red Lobster. There's one right next to the Apollo, just after the Banana Republic.



Since the rezoning, several mom-and-pops have been evicted and several chains have gone in.

How many?

I took a walk along 125th Street, from the Hudson River to the onramp of the Triborough Bridge. Along the way, I counted 77 national chains and 15 commercial banks -- even though Burden said that the rezoning would limit “bank exposure on the street level, positioning the banking floors on the second floor to encourage more vitality,” because "Banks can deaden an environment.”

The majority of those 92 chains and banks are located in the core of central 125th Street, which is maybe 7 blocks wide. That’s about 10 chains per block. And more keep coming. A new development under construction flies a banner that announces the future arrival of a Burlington Coat Factory.



As if the story can't get any worse for 125th Street, back on the easternmost end, just one block east of the Pathmark development, a group of businesses is under siege from the city government.
In 2009, the Bloomberg Administration blighted a whole block on 125th Street and 3rd Avenue, using eminent domain to claim it for a massive $700 million development project, the 1.7 million-square-foot East Harlem Media, Entertainment and Cultural Center, aka "MEC."

This, in addition to the eminent domain deal gifted to Columbia University at the westernmost end of 125th, means the street has been bookended in Bloomberg's land grabs.

Today this eastern, edge-of-the-earth block contains a dry cleaners, a hair braiding salon, a gas station, a flat-fix shop, an auto-body shop, a Baptist church, and other businesses. The city has already seized property, including a building from Demolition Depot. The owners are still fighting in court. Reported the Real Deal: "the de Blasio administration has not announced plans for the site, and is instead moving forward with the land seizure without defining a clear purpose for it."


blighted block

Call me crazy, but I don't think it's any coincidence that this block sits right over the Third Avenue Bridge from the waterfront of the South Bronx, where another Bloomberg rezoning helped to usher in major development.

Here, from Lugo's Flat Fix stand looking north, you can see clear to the so-called "Piano District," where luxury towers will soon be rising.

It would be naive to deny that it's all connected.

Help Jerry

A couple of years ago, I visited Jerry Ohlinger's amazing movie material store in the Garment District. In business since 1976, it was the last store in New York City dedicated to movie photos.



Struggling with the rent, Jerry closed his shop and moved most of his "one million and one hundred thousand" photos to a warehouse in New Jersey as he downsized to a much smaller shop on West 30th, with limited hours.

Now Jerry needs help. The items in the warehouse need to be moved again, and there's no money to do it. Visit his GoFundMe page and consider giving him a hand.

Read my whole story on Jerry's former shop at The New Yorker.

One-Thing Wonders

The following is a guest post by Mitch Broder, author and blogger.

It’s unlikely that nineteenth-century New York had an oatmeal saloon, but it reportedly had several hundred oyster saloons. The city more or less launched its food scene with its oyster joints, which set the stage for the present-day oatmeal joint, not to mention the present-day stuffed-bagel-ball joint.

In this century, spots like those two have been proliferating, not surprisingly as store rents have been tripling and sextupling. Non-billionaires who have a dream of opening a traditional city restaurant often find themselves scaling the dream down to, say, a city schnitzel spot.

This economic reality is what inspired me to write a book called New York’s One-Food Wonders: A Guide to the Big Apple’s Unique Single-Food Spots. The book tells the stories of all our offbeat one-food places, along with the stories of all our offbeat one-thing places.



My previous book, Discovering Vintage New York, covers the city’s classic old spots, but I’ve always seen the singular places as classics of their own. Like so many of the vintage spots, they keep originality — and peculiarity — in a cityscape that’s quickly and sadly losing both.

They also keep independence here. Nearly all of these spots were founded by passionate people, not by dispassionate investment groups. They’re a last stand for creativity — and some of the young ones are getting old. Peanut Butter & Co., the all-peanut-butter joint, is in its eighteenth year.

The places in the book range from far older to far younger. But this blog is city headquarters for the far older. So here, exclusively for Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, is my list of the elder statesmen — Manhattan’s ten oldest one-food and one-thing wonders.



1946: Fountain Pen Hospital (10 Warren St.) Though now more store than hospital, it’s still run by its founding family. And it’s the last major place to get pens that don’t come twenty to a blister pack.

1936: Kossar’s Bialys (367 Grand St.) This is the last major place for people who still know what bialys are. It’s run by two guys who took it over two years ago. Call first, since they’ve been renovating.

1932: Papaya King (179 E. 86th St. and 3 St. Mark’s Place) Hot dogs and tropical fruit drinks count as one thing, because in New York City they’re married — and this is the stand that married them.

1929: Marchi’s Restaurant (251 E. 31st St.) For the Marchis, I stretched the book’s concept; their single thing is their single meal. Every night they serve only the same five-course dinner they’ve been serving since the end of World War II.



1927: Gem Spa (131 Second Ave.) This newsstand actually has lots of things, but it’s famous for just one thing: its egg cream. The recipe for it is as closely guarded as the one for Coke.

1917: The Drama Book Shop (250 W. 40th St.) If it’s stardom you’re bound for, here’s where you find your vehicle. The shop stocks about ten thousand plays, and in 2011 it won its own Tony.

1913: Grand Central Oyster Bar & Restaurant (Grand Central Terminal) It’s a grand reminder of the city’s aforementioned oyster era. Also a grand reminder of what you can do with a ceiling.

1911: JJ Hat Center (310 Fifth Ave.) The last of the traditional men’s hat shops takes you back to a time when a gentleman was always topped off, and generally with something other than a baseball cap.

1910: Jean’s Silversmiths (16 W. 45th St.) It began as a curiosity shop, and a century later it still looks like one. (It was named for Jean Valjean, the celebrated silver collector.)

1910: Yonah Schimmel Knish Bakery (137 E. Houston St.) Even Yonah succumbed to economic reality, says the shop’s owner, Ellen Anistratov: “He wanted to teach people spirituality,” she says, “but there was no money in it.”

The Party's Over

Lately, there's been a reappearance of the infamous East Village graffiti symbol "The Party's Over," the upside-down martini glass created by Peter Missing to protest gentrification and development in the neighborhood.

You'll see them around if you look. There's one now on the plywood that wraps the construction of Ben "The Sledgehammer" Shaoul's 100 Avenue A, where the ground-floor retail space was just listed at $24.5 million.

In silver marker someone has written EAT THE RICH and MUG A YUPPIE.



"The martini glass became a symbol of causing trouble," radical comic book artist Seth Tobocman told the Times in 2002. "To a lot of people it said, 'Start something."

Is someone trying to start something today, in this new age of hyper-gentrification? Peter Missing replies on Facebook: "this is not my writing ,,,,nor would i ever write mug a yuppie ,,,,,,the sad side of people coopting my logo."

For history on this, check out "Cult of Rage," a 1988 news report on the "shadowy group" Missing Foundation and the early days of gentrification in the East Village. Witches! Yuppies! Mysterious satanic rituals! And for more on The Missing Foundation, visit Flaming Pablum.

The Lost Arcade

The Lost Arcade, a new documentary film by Kurt Vincent and Irene Chin, tells the story of the legendary Chinatown Fair.

On Mott Street since 1944, the arcade owners lost their lease in 2011 and made plans to move to Brooklyn.


New York Daily Photo

"Its very existence was an anachronism," said The Verge; "the lone hold-out of a culture that had been long since overshadowed by the meteoric rise of home consoles." The arcade managed to re-open in the same spot, but it wasn't the same. Co-owner Lonnie Sobel called it "a cross between Dave & Busters and Chuck E. Cheese."

"But as the neighborhood gentrified," the filmmakers write, "this haven for a diverse, unlikely community faced its strongest challenge, inspiring its biggest devotees to next-level greatness."

See The Lost Arcade at its world premier November 14 and 18 at IFC Center as part of DOC NYC. Click here for tickets.

Exclusively for Vanishing New York, the filmmakers have put together a clip featuring the history of Chinatown Fair--and the story of its famous dancing and tic tac toe-playing chickens:


The Lost Arcade (Exclusive Clip) from ArcadeMovie on Vimeo.

For more on the arcade's history and those chickens, check out:
DeNiro, Streep, Chicken
Chinatown Fair

Astoria Rexall

Norwood Rexall Drugs in Astoria has been in its spot for 60 years, but it was recently forced to move by a rent hike, according to a note in the window.

Reader Scott Levine sends in a photo of the letter to customers from owner Syed Naqvi, who's been running the shop since 1977. He explains that the building was purchased by TK Management. And then, "All of a sudden, the new owner wants to double the rent, plus add the real estate taxes, without giving us reasonable notice."


photo by Scott Levine

The storefront is an antique, with curved, deeply set window displays and a vintage Rexall sign on the glass.


2014 -- photo by Nancy A. Ruhling

Mr. Naqvi was featured in a HuffPo piece last year. He told Nancy Ruhling about his move from Pakistan, and how he worked hard to take over the drugstore and keep it going over the years.

"The price wasn't high because the owner was retiring," he said of the time, "and the shelves were bare because he had not kept up with the inventory in anticipation of leaving. I paid him $20,000 plus some notes, and it was mine. I had to borrow $5,000 from a friend."


today -- photo by Scott Levine

Goldsmith's Capital

This month, Verso Books publishes Kenneth Goldsmith's Capital, "a kaleidoscopic assemblage and poetic history of New York." Inspired by Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, Goldsmith has spent the past decade researching and assembling a super-abundance of quotes on New York City, and then organizing them into categories like Celebrity, Danger, Graffiti, and Sex. The result is far from a simple quote book, however. Reading Capital feels like walking the city, through time and space, jumping neighborhoods, going in and out of buildings, slipping through wormholes. It's a kind of exuberant eavesdropping on the muttering, shouting narrative of the twentieth-century city.

I asked Goldsmith a few questions. He answered.




Q: I've been enjoying Capital, but is it meant to be enjoyed? You've called yourself "the most boring writer that has ever lived." Capital is not boring. Does this book feel like a departure from previous work?

A: I actually stopped being a boring writer almost a decade ago when I got bored of being boring. I’m known for a book called Day, which was a transcription of The New York Times of September 1, 2000 into a 900-page book. That was boring. When the book was reviewed, most people mistakenly thought I had transcribed September 11, 2001. I thought that was a great idea and went ahead and transcribed the 9-11 New York Times—the one that everyone carried to work that day, not the 9-12 newspaper, when you saw the planes crashing into the towers. And as I was doing the transcription, I found my keyboard soaked in tears. I mean, I wasn’t doing anything different than straight transcription, but the content was so emotional, that I produced an emotional text. After that I stopped being boring and wanted to find hotter and more emotional texts, which led to Seven American Deaths & Disasters, which are transcriptions of media broadcasts of national tragedies.

So, for Capital, I changed the lens again from tragedy and emotion to beauty and romanticism and have produced a beautiful and romantic text about New York City in the 20th Century. But the process is identical: this book is nearly 1000 pages long but I haven’t written a word of it.

Q: In a related question, you've also said, “My books are better thought about than read. They’re insanely dull and unreadable.” Capital is readable, but maybe not in the traditional sense of moving from point A to point B. How do you imagine Capital being read?

A: I think its unreadability is like the unreadability of the city itself: it’s too damn big to read New York City; perhaps the only way we can interact with New York is to browse it.

Q: How do you personally "browse" New York City? In the physical -- and maybe in the psychic -- sense. This book has a flaneur feeling about it, the walker in the city, capturing moments, observations, as he or she goes. That things that happens as one walks, fragments making up a whole. I think also of Mondrian's "Broadway Boogie Woogie." Do you identify as a flaneur, of the body and/or mind?

A: Walking the city invokes a text, one that is instantaneously written while, at the same time, one that is instantaneously read. The urbanist philosopher Michel de Certeau says, "They walk—an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban 'text' they write without being able to read it." Walking, then, is an act of reading the city with our feet.

The city itself is an epic novel: each building a word, each street a sentence, each block a paragraph. De Certeau's claim for unreadability is hinged upon three facts: the blur of motion, the speed at which the tale is unwinding, and the sheer of immensity of the text. When we speak of hypertexts, we usually mean those which exist online, but we might think of the city as the ur-hypertext, a dynamic, analog, predigital model of complex intertextuality.

Q: What does it feel like for you to walk the streets of the city today? In my experience, the feeling of it has changed dramatically in the past decade or so.

A: We are going to disagree here but I love the city today as much as I’ve ever loved it. Every moment in New York is the best moment. Yes, the city has changed dramatically, but that doesn’t mean that it’s less, it just means that it’s different. We can’t look to what New York was — that’s gone — but what it is now, which is still radically inspiring, energetic, and quite frankly, utopian.

I travel around the world constantly, and the whole world has gone the way of New York, so if New York was always more interesting than anywhere else, it still is today. While the city may not resonate the same way with me as it did 40 years ago — yes, I was here 40 years ago — I still find it intriguing, mysterious, and sexy in ways that I find few other places on earth. I adore this city, still, in the twenty-first century.

Q: We don't completely disagree. I wouldn't be fighting for New York if I didn't still love it. Though I sometimes hate to love it. Would you call Capital your love letter to New York? Apologies for the cliche, but the book does feel affectionate.

A: Yes, this book is a completely romantic love letter to the city. I was able to pen the ultimate love letter to this city without having written a word of it, which is pretty much what Walter Benjamin did to Paris with the Arcades Project, the inspiration for this project.

Q: Finally, the obvious question: What about the Arcades Project inspired you to do a New York version?

A: When Benjamin’s book was published in English in 1999, I found it to be the most profoundly emotional book I’ve ever read written about a city. It was a book that told what the city felt like, sounded like, and smelled like, instead of narrating official histories—god knows there are enough of those books about Paris. I wanted to write the same book for New York, a city I’ve lived in for my entire adult life. I’ve also seen the city drastically change, so I wanted to remember, for instance, the smell of Orange Julius. My book is 1000 pages of citation; I didn’t write a word of it, but it turns out to be the most autobiographical book I could write. This city has made me what I am today. It is, indeed, a love song to New York.

Q: Anything else I didn't ask that you'd like to answer?

A: Yes one more thing. I wrote much of this book in the New York City collection of the Jefferson Market Library, a place that I found about through your blog. I would spend the entire day, say, researching the blocks around the Library—Patchin Place, Eighth Street, Christopher Street, etc.— in the twentieth century. But when I would leave the library, I would enter a city that bore little resemblance to where I was reading about. I really might as well have been researching the book in, say, Switzerland, instead of in Greenwich Village.