Time Warp

There's a new zine in town. Time Warp, its editors say, will be "a sort of rallying cry, to pull people together and to inspire New Yorkers to create positive action against the forces consuming our home and creative culture."

The zine aims to "break through the paralyzing nostalgia for the old city." They write, "The condition of our gentrifying city will not improve if we let ourselves wallow in sadness, self pity, and nostalgia."



"Why Time Warp? Because PUNK IS NOT DEAD!! Because the situation facing our city (gentrification, class war, suburban invasion, cultural sterilization and parasitism) will not improve if we let ourselves be paralyzed by our longing for the past. We must realize that all is not lost. We must fight to PRESERVE what remains and to RESTORE what has been lost."

The editors are looking for stories and artwork about New York City from the 1960s to today. They are currently accepting submissions through the first week of April. For more information, check them out on Facebook. And contact them at timewarpzine@gmail.com.

The Lambs

The Lambs is America’s oldest professional theatrical club, founded in Manhattan in 1874. It is open to actors, writers, and other theater people. Members have included Fred Astaire, Irving Berlin, George M. Cohan, W.C. Fields, John Philip Sousa, along with thousands more.

The club has moved around quite a bit, especially in its early years, starting out at Delmonico’s Restaurant, settling on West 44th for most of the 20th century, and then finally ending up at their current location on West 51st Street in 1976.

But after 142 years, The Lambs may have come to the end of the road. Their landlord, the Women's National Republican Club, is hiking the rent -- and the future of this illustrious club is unknown in a city where the rent is too damn high.




I chatted via email with Marc Baron, Shepherd of the flock, about The Lambs' history and its possible future.

He explained: “The Lambs had a WW1 transport ship named in its honor, a train car in the 1920s (it still exists), a cigar, and a seat in the National Theater in Washington, DC. Our Lambs Foundation (founded in 1943) provides financial grants to non-profit theater companies, theatre charities, and education for the arts.

Any person working in theater, film, television, radio, music--whether a performer, writer, composer, producer--have had their lives touched by the actions of more than 6,660 Lambs over the Club's 140 years of existence.

Today, The Lambs continues in promoting new works of theater, and provides a congenial atmosphere where members enjoy the companionship of other professionals of the arts.”



The Lambs theatrical club is not to be confused with The Lambs Club restaurant.

After losing their own building on 44th Street, the structure was gutted and became a Chatwal Hotel. The hoteliers opened The Lambs Club restaurant in 2010. At the time, Sam Sifton called it "a clubbish offering from Geoffrey Zakarian, the silverback gorilla of Midtown hotel restaurateurs."

Marc Baron has others words for it. He says the restaurant is “feeding off our remarkable history and adding confusion that we are located elsewhere.” He wants to set that record straight.



As for the current space, Baron says, “Our lease expires July 1, and the landlord has asked for a 50% increase.”

That increase will force The Lambs to double their membership dues, likely causing them to lose members. They hope to increase membership and donations to stay alive.

“An increase of this size,” says Baron, “could force us to move, or worse, not find permanent quarters and, therefore, lead us to a horrible end.”


Keep up with The Lambs on Facebook

Greenwich Gallery Frame Shop

VANISHED

When Charlie Mom was forced to close last year, the building at the corner of 6th Avenue and 11th Street had just one street-level business left: The Greenwich Gallery Frame Shop.

Now it has none.

After 35 years in business, the Greenwich Gallery has shuttered.


photo: Richard Morgan

On one side of its empty storefront is the empty storefront of Charlie Mom. On the other side is the empty storefront that had once been the amazing Nikos Magazine Shop and has yet to become a Birdbath bakery.

More high-rent blight, all were shuttered--after decades in business--due to hiked rent. (I'm willing to bet that's the case here.) With no penalties and no regulations to stop them, the building owner has now emptied all the businesses from the first floor and is leaving them empty. Could they be hoping for a big-box chain store to take it all? 

Meanwhile, no one in city government is doing anything to stop the total destruction of New York's distinctive, local streetscape. We will become, in the end, one big suburban shopping mall.


2015

Preview Sandwich Shop

On West 53rd Street, under the green awning for the Hello Deli, located in the CBS building, is an old sign for a lost sandwich shop.



Rupert Jee's Hello Deli was famous for its proprietor's appearances on the David Letterman show. But what of the Preview Sandwich Shop?



Just look at that gorgeous typeface. What more is there to say?

Greek Corner

There have been some rumors going around that the Greek Corner Coffee Shop -- which I first wrote about here -- is on its way out.

So I went in and asked around.



The place is located on 7th Avenue and 28th Street. It's been there since 1980. It's one of those New York places--cheap, simple, local--that's vanishing without relent.

When I went in for lunch, a bunch of tourists standing around outside harangued me. They were trying to decide whether to eat there or at one of the many national chains nearby.

"Do you like it?" they asked. Yes. "Is it clean? Is it clean?" They kept repeating this stupid question. "Is it clean?" I did not respond. They went away.



I ordered a BLT and talked to the people in the coffee shop. Here's what I learned: The building has been sold. The building might be sold. There are holdouts who won't budge. The building won't be sold. Everything will be okay. Who knows?



This whole neighborhood, just south of Penn Station, is going through a major upheaval. Old buildings are coming down and new ones are going up at a frenetic pace. Most of the new buildings are tourist hotels.

Specialty coffee bars are moving in between the odd little wholesale shops and the silk flower shops and the places that embroider ball caps and roll cigars and unpack ginseng from cardboard barrels.

We don't need more hotels. The city has become glutted with them. In 2011, Mayor Bloomberg announced that New York would soon reach a record number of hotel rooms--90,000--a 24 percent increase since he began his tourist-driving initiative in 2006. Leisure and Hospitality became the fastest growing industry, increasing at a rate of 27.4 percent, far outpacing health, information, and the financial services. We have rapidly become a city of servants, towel replenishers, and toilet paper folders.

But, above the Greek Corner Coffee Shop, we still have some industry.



I love the second-story windows of this building. I love walking by at night and seeing the inside lit up. The silhouettes of radiators and dressmaker's dummies. A woman bends over a table, cutting or ironing fabric. This is the home of Timberlake Studios, since 1986. They make costumes for theatre, dance, and opera.

In the 1970s, the studio's founder, Betty Williams, set out to save commercial garment patterns. From the website: "Encouraged by the Smithsonian, she started a drive to save patterns. It developed into a nationwide network of women (once called 'Betty's Brigade') that searched for patterns in attics, church bazaars, and estate sales. This led to a collection of patterns called The Commercial Pattern Archive, together with tailoring magazines and sewing instruction material dating to the 19th Century. It is a major resource for theatre and fashion designers and a permanent record of one phase of women's lives for sociologists and historians."



I don't know what's going to happen to this building. It holds pieces of the real New York, the city that is being wiped out and homogenized. So let's all keep an eye on it.

Hogs & Heifers Today

Hogs & Heifers closed last year, after 23 years in the Meatpacking District.

As the Daily News reported at the time, "Thor Equities purchased the building on the corner of Washington and W. 13th Sts. in 2013 for about $100 million, and when Hogs’ lease expired last year, the proposed rent jumped to $60,000 a month, from $14,000."


photo: Orchard View

Here's what the once brassiere-cluttered and colorful honky-tonk bar looks like today.



And the inside...



Talking about Thor Equities and its boss, Joe Sitt, Hogs co-founder and owner Michelle Dell told the Daily News in 2015: “They don’t give a shit. At the end of the day Thor is a company that deals with chain brands. They make a big display of how honored they are to be in a historic neighborhood, but then they decimate everything that made it historic. What are you going to put in, another Le Pain Quotidien?”

Looks like it.

5 Pointz Pit

What a thrill it was to round the bend on the 7 train into Long Island City and see the crazy, vivid vista of 5 Pointz, covered in graffiti art. Through the scrim of the dirty train window, all that color.

You felt it in your chest. In your heart. That flutter. That sudden flooding of feeling. Remember that?


from Untapped Cities

Then they whitewashed it and demolished it.

And here's what it looks like now when you round that bend.



Just a muddy pit. The footprint of what will be more glass, for glitz, more generic towers for more generic life.

New York, we are fucking everything up.