Bowery Kitchen Supplies

VANISHING

Bowery Kitchen Supplies has been doing business in Chelsea Market since 1996. Now they're closing.



"We have no choice but to close our doors," they write in their posted notice, listing the reasons: "The soaring rents and extra charges by corporate landlords, the rapid and dramatic changes in the retail landscape especially for 'brick and mortar' businesses and finally an aggressive NY state and city tax bureau."

Last week, they wrote on their Facebook page, "As a small business in NYC we struggle thru many crises, we ourselves thru 9/11, hurricanes, outages and on. Never any help from the government, just higher taxes. And now high rents and next day delivery are taking their toll on the few that survived."



Bowery Kitchen Supplies originally opened on the Bowery in 1975, founded by the Nourieli family.

Google purchased their home, Chelsea Market, for $2.4 billion in 2018, in what's been called "the second-largest full single-asset sale ever" in the city.

Chelsea Flea Market

VANISHING

The Chelsea Flea Market on 25th Street between 6th and Broadway has been in business since 1976. Now we hear it is coming to an end.



I went by one evening a few weeks ago and heard the rumor that the lease is up and the owners aren't renewing. Now a couple of tipsters confirm: Next weekend, December 28 and 29, will be the last for this popular and long-running flea.

Paul Jeromack writes, "There is a possibility it will get a reprieve," hoping someone might take it over from the current managers, Alan and Helene Boss -- a couple that the Post has said "rules city flea markets with an iron fist." However, he adds, "the church next door," which owns the parking lot "does not want to renew the lease."

That church is St. Sava Serbian Orthodox, burned down in a massive blaze in 2016. Around that time, there was also news of an 850-foot commercial tower going up on the flea's parking lot.

It doesn't look good.



Jeromack notes, "Some of my vendor friends told me if need be, they would migrate to the Columbus Avenue schoolyard market on 77th Street," but this may not be the solution for all the vendors.

"There are guys who are rag-pickers with piles of old clothes and pots and pans, who I am sure would not be approved for the uptown space. Where are they going to go?"



This is sad news for flea market fans. We already lost the great Antiques Garage in 2014 when their building was demolished for a luxury hotel tower. Not to mention the little Chelsea flea on 17th and 6th, shuttered in 2009.



Every day, in every way, we're living in a more and more overpriced, hollow, and disposable city.


photo via Joseph Burns Instagram

Bill's Flower Market

VANISHING

Bill's Flower Market opened in 1936. They are closing this month.



The sign in the window says the owners are retiring. It is another loss for the rapidly vanishing Flower District, which has been taken over and demolished by tourist hotels.

Reader Marjorie Ingall let me know about the closing. She writes, "Jim, Bill’s brother and co-owner, said he’s ready to retire and spend time with his grandkids in Nassau and Suffolk county, but high rent is a factor too. I bought a turkey made with real feathers that I will turn into a holiday centerpiece, two rolls of beautiful floral ribbon, and a tiny nest with two eggs and a sparrow. We both reminisced about when the Flower District went from 26th to 29th, Broadway to 7th Avenue. He said, 'It’s all fancy hotels now.'"



When I went by, Bill's was closed for the day, shutting down now at 3:00 in the afternoon, so I could not go in to see the artificial birds they are famous for. They used to have a sign that said something like "World's largest collection of artificial birds" and it was pleasant to go in and have a look at them.

Through the window I could see that most of the shop has been dismantled and emptied out. They're having a big sale on lucky bamboo and, while they still have a few birds for sale, the big displays are gone.

Here's what they looked like a few years ago:

Seido Karate

VANISHING

Guest Post written by William Hennelly, an editor/writer and Seido Karate black belt

Down the block from the Flatiron Building in Manhattan sits another local landmark — the headquarters of the World Seido Karate Organization. Since 1976, the school founded by Kaicho (“Grandmaster”) Tadashi Nakamura has trained thousands of martial arts practitioners at 61 West 23rd Street, where it also has operated the Seido Juku Benefit Foundation, a charitable nonprofit.

Nakamura, 77, is a revered karateka worldwide, particularly in his native Japan, a status he earned in 1962 by knocking out a muay thai fighter in Bangkok in a much publicized international clash of fighting styles. But now Kaicho and his son, Nidaime (“Successor”) Akira Nakamura, 44, who is Seido’s chief instructor, are faced with a daunting opponent outside the arena — the New York City real estate market.



The owners of the 1886 Italian Renaissance-style building that houses the headquarters — or “Honbu” in Japanese — are repurposing the building, and all existing tenants must vacate by year-end. The family that owns the luxury men’s fashion company Ermenegildo Zegna, based in Milan, Italy, along with Taconic Investment Partners LLC, a Manhattan-based real estate developer, bought the building in June 2016 for $65 million, according to The Real Deal. The previous owners were the Drachman family of Long Island and their relatives, who had the seven-story building for more than 50 years.

The search for a new Honbu has been underway for some time, and Nidaime is currently looking at three rental properties near the current 23rd Street location. Seido recently launched a GoFundMe.com campaign to raise $250,000 toward escrow, a heating, ventilation and air conditioning system, a new dojo floor, office and locker rooms with ADA-compliant bathrooms. Live and online auctions also are planned.


In his office at Honbu, Kaicho recently recounted how he would traverse the neighborhood in the 1970s, scouting locations, when he came across the building that would become Honbu. “In the daytime, not many people walking around, then very, very quiet at night,” he recalled of a neighborhood that was not as prosperous and desirable as it is now. It’s that desirability that has made the neighborhood a costly place to operate what is essentially a family business.

The New York dojo is something of a karate museum. Its gleaming wooden floor has been polished by decades of vigorous martial arts activity seven days a week. “We have a veterans program, we run a disabled program, a program for blind students with Seido Juku Benefit support,” Kaicho said. “Not many organizations do that. We are all proud of that. I hope people keep this kind of spirit... Lots of wonderful, different kinds of memories, which is our treasure. It’s almost a miracle, same location for 43 years.”



The dojo’s walls are festooned with various proclamations by US presidents and New York City mayors. Over the years, Seido students from across the globe have come to visit and train at Honbu, as have some celebrities. Dolph Lundgren, who played the Russian heavyweight boxer Ivan Drago in Rocky IV, stopped by once in the hopes of meeting Kaicho. In 2018, two of the stars of the 1984 movie The Karate Kid — Ralph Macchio, who portrayed Daniel LaRusso, and William Zabka, who was Daniel’s rival Johnny Lawrence — traveled to New York for an interview with AdWeek magazine to discuss Cobra Kai, the YouTube Red sequel to their movie franchise.

Seido also has stood witness to other events in history. In 2001, the Seido community was stunned by the loss of Sensei Pat Brown, a New York City fire captain who gave his life in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. In 2012, undaunted Seido karatekas practiced with no heat and electricity in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. And while Seido is proud of its illustrious past, it is up for a new challenge.

“The members of the organization must now take the time to reflect on the rich history of the space and appreciate the time left to train and grow there, but also look now to the future, to bring the same energy and dedication to bear in finding, securing and building a new home for the World Seido Honbu,” Nidaime wrote in a letter to members in June.

Wholesale District

VANISHING

For the past decade, ever since the Ace Hotel took over the Breslin SRO hotel on Broadway and 29th Street, I've been watching the Wholesale District vanish. It is not dying. It is being murdered, shop by shop, building by building, all to create the fake "neighborhood" known as NoMad.

Hanging by a thread, it recently took a turn for the worse.

A major center of wholesalers on Broadway has just been wiped out in one fell swoop. Along the west side of Broadway in the upper 20s, the sudden mass erasure of so many small businesses is staggering.


1165 Broadway Before (taken in 2016)


1165 Broadway Today, 2019

Between 27th and 28th Streets, 1165 Broadway housed several small wholesale businesses, selling perfume, jewelry, handbags, African-American hair products, clothing, and more. For years, I have walked by it every week, lingering to admire what I cannot fully participate in, but appreciate nonetheless.

The small businesses attracted a diversity of people, many of them immigrants from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. With them came gray-market dealers, ice-cream trucks, sidewalk vendors, and lots of Halal food carts. It was a lively, colorful block that always felt like the real New York, unruly, surprising, and rough around the edges.

But this is not allowed in the new New York.

Today, 1165 is scaffolded and shrouded. All of the shops have been shuttered and sealed behind green plywood. The building will be scrubbed clean, disemboweled and sanitized for white capitalist triumphalism, reamed with a luxury glass tower.


1165 Broadway Tomorrow (toasting colonialism's triumph on the rooftop)

It's not just this building. We're in the midst of a mass extinction event.

One block up Broadway, across 28th Street, low-rise buildings full of small businesses were wiped out for another tower. The site sat demolished and empty for a few years. I watched tomato plants grow lush, red fruit along the edge of the lot, presumably from people at the nearby food cart tossing tomatoes and accidentally seeding a wild garden.

Construction has now begun.


Northwest corner of 28th & Broadway, 2015


Northwest corner of 28th & Broadway, 2019

Heading up to 29th Street, the remaining building on that same block, also once full of small businesses, has also been emptied and plywooded.

The sidewalk is now dead.


Southwest corner of 29th & Broadway, Before (Google Maps, 2017)


Southwest corner of 29th & Broadway, Today

Step right across the street at 29th and you'll find the future--another block wiped out, another glass monstrosity like all the other glass monstrosities, soulless and banal, inspiring nothing, inhumane.


Northwest corner of 29th and Broadway, today

When all of this evicting and destroying is done, all we will have are glass towers into which no small businesses will go. A thriving cultural ecosystem is being eradicated, and it's by design.

What we are losing has gone largely uncelebrated in the mainstream conversation. The Wholesale District caters mostly to black and brown working-class people, many of them immigrants. It is scruffy and unfashionable. That makes it easy to kill. And then easy to forget.

But we must remember what happened here. The Wholesale District's death is not a natural one.


vanished

When the neighborhood's destruction began about a decade ago, the name "NoMad" was invented by the CEO of GFI Development, the company that took over the Breslin Hotel. That's where it started.

For many years, the Breslin served as a rent-stabilized haven for artists--along with writers, transgender women, glove makers, people with AIDS, anyone who might not easily find a comfortable and affordable home elsewhere in the city. When it was taken over, tenants reported harassment, got organized, and posted signs on their doors that read: “We will not move.” They went to court and lost. In 2008 the Breslin became Ace Hotel New York. The fights went on. Soon, all of the old ground-floor businesses vanished. That year, I walked around the block and counted 17 small businesses gone from the building. Part of the Wholesale District's hubbub, they were replaced by upscale hipster mini-chains like Portland’s Stumptown Coffee Roasters and Seattle-born Rudy’s Barber Shop, along with an oyster bar and gastro-pub that took the Breslin name.

The virus spread. Over the years, I've watched the eastern side of Broadway become evermore hip, expensive, and white. A wig shop became a matcha bar. In went places like Want Apothecary, Dig Inn, Black Seed, Opening Ceremony, and Sweetgreen. All cater to a higher class. Many don't take cash.



Often, when I made my weekly visit, I would stand on the median in the middle of Broadway and watch the tale of two cities unfold around me.

On the east side, in the crowd streaming past, almost everyone was white and middle to upper class, many of them tourists. On the west side, the crowd was mixed, with many black and brown people, immigrants, and members of the working class.

You could see it was only a matter of time before the whole corridor was whitewashed. It's hard to deny the colonization here, and not just as metaphor.


East side of Broadway at 29th


West side of Broadway at 29th

In her book Harlem Is Nowhere, writing about gentrification, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts refers to the “exuberant myopia common to colonists,” people who speak of usually black and brown, working-class neighborhoods as if nothing and no one was there before the upper-class white people came. We hear it all the time when gentrification happens. It appeared in a 2010 story about the birth of NoMad from New York magazine.

"Close your eyes and picture Broadway between 23rd and 30th Streets," it begins. "There’s a good chance you’re either drawing a blank or you’re envisioning a long strip of wholesale perfume retailers, luggage liquidators, and stores that specialize in human-hair wigs. This is not the most picturesque area in the city, nor the most easily romanticized." The area is called nameless, "a nondescript no-man’s-land" dubbed "the Brown Zone" by one critic because it showed up as a brown rectangle on maps. But it also was, and is, brown in its people.



Why is it not picturesque or easily romanticized? Why is it thought of as nondescript, blank, a no-man's land? There was so much here. African women walking down the street in brightly colored dresses and head wraps. Shoppers striding through with armfuls of flowers from the (also vanishing) Flower District. The sidewalks lively with tables full of wares. Windows bright with bottles of body oils with names like Lick Me All Over. In summer, women selling ices in mango and coconut. Men calling out the bargains, barking their deals to passersby.

You could feel the aliveness, the giddy chaos of a street that was not engineered and designed by hyper-capitalists in remote offices. We need places like the Wholesale District. They are good for the soul--and for the city.

Now so much is gone. The shutters are down, the police are on guard. More dead towers are rising. There is more to save--but who with the power is willing?

Smashed Links

Not happy with those intrusive and distracting LinkNYC kiosks? You're not alone. Along 8th Avenue in Chelsea, someone has been smashing LinkNYC screens with a cobble stone.



The apparent rage is understandable. With their video advertisements, dumb cartoons, and repetitive quotations, the digital pylons continually rob our attention. Walking down the street, on every block, your thoughts are interrupted by the flashing screens, violating your right to keep your attention where you want it.

Do we have a right to our attention? Jasper L. Tran has written, "We own and are entitled to our attention because attention is a property right and part of our individual dignity. Yet advertisement companies and scam artists freely bombard us with their 'products' daily, resulting in our own time and monetary loss." Jon Danaher at Philsophical Disquisitions calls it a "right to attentional protection."

LinkNYC violates that right. As we all know, it's hard to keep your eyes from flicking to a screen. (Clay Shirky once compared the contagious mental distraction of screens to second-hand smoke.)

The intrusion potentially goes deeper. With their microphones, bluetooth beacons, and cameras, the kiosks may "represent a troubling expansion of the city’s surveillance network," collecting information as New Yorkers pass by.



And who owns LinkNYC? As RethinkLink points out, it's basically Google -- via consortiums and companies like Titan and Control (real names), and something called Sidewalk Labs, which is owned by Google and headed by Dan Doctoroff, former deputy mayor of New York City for economic development under Bloomberg. This guy. The one who helped bring us Hudson Yards.

It is perhaps no coincidence that the smashed Links are in Google's neighborhood, clustered around its Chelsea location.



So who is our LinkNYC smasher? Is the smashing politically motivated? Is it a cry for our attentional rights? Or just a random act of vandalism?

Visiting Hudson Yards

For its opening weekend, Hudson Yards, aka Dubai on the Hudson, is crammed with people. They walk the glistening floors of the luxury shopping mall and climb The Vessel, aka The Giant Shawarma (h/t Eater). They stand in line for free ice cream and ransack a refrigerator full of foul-tasting beverages that may or may not be free. They pose for Instagrammable photos with the mega-development's corporate logo and pay $28 to visit Snark Park, an "art theme park" where the creators have seized an opportunity to "literally control and curate everything," which pretty much sums up everything about Hudson Yards.



In my 2017 book Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul, I predicted that Hudson Yards would be: "A dreamworld of exclusion...one of those places Mike Davis describes in Evil Paradises: 'where the rich can walk like gods in the nightmare gardens of their deepest and most secret desires.' It will be what Norwegian urbanist Jonny Aspen calls zombie urbanism, a neat and tedious stage set, regurgitating global clichés about modern urban life, 'in which there is no room for irregularity and the unexpected.'"

Now the taxpayer-backed mega-development has met its major critics and the verdict is in.

New York magazine called it "a billionaire's fantasy city" as Justin Davidson reported that it feels like a faux New York: "Everything is too clean, too flat, too art-directed." At the Times, Michael Kimmelman said the place "glorifies a kind of surface spectacle -- as if the peak ambitions of city life were consuming luxury goods and enjoying a smooth, seductive, mindless materialism."



Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the gilded room that hawks the Residences at Hudson Yards. Just outside, in the hall of the mall, a massive video screen shows scenes from the lifestyles of the super-rich to a captive audience of tired parents and tourists beached on benches.

Inside, behind 3-D renderings of the towers, visitors watch a film about the love story between Marcus, "the titan of industry," and Viv, "the fashion mogul." They are affluent, glaringly white, and well seasoned, sweeping around their tower while sucking down lattes and green smoothies. In the background plays I'm back in the "New York Groove," which Hudson Yards is decidedly not.

Among the viewers in the real world, a woman asks her friend, "Is this a parody?" The question could be asked again and again while walking through the mall.



For example, when a worker hands out Hudson Yards temporary tattoos so you can brand your body with the corporate logo. Or when a piece of video art, curated by a luxury boutique, praises itself for including "gender nonconforming artists."

Or at the Avant Gallery, showing "art for the new New York" in a show called, no kidding, "There Goes the Neighborhood," filled with riffs on luxury brands like Louis Vuitton and Chanel, mixed with images of homeless people and downtown artists.



Is it parody when a crowd crashes the unguarded refrigerators of the Hudson Yards Drug Store and grabs every bottle in sight, swigging down concoctions containing charcoal, rose petal, and turmeric? People gag on the drinks, re-cap the bottles, and leave them on the floor.

Someone says, "It tastes awful."

Someone says, "I don't think these are really free."



Then there's the schedule for The Shed, Hudson Yards' hotly awaited performance space, bringing a lefty radicalism incongruent with the one-percenter playground. The opening season includes "a women-centered celebration of radical art," a work about "the relationship between art and the politics of space," and a lecture on Art and Civil Disobedience by Boots Riley, the African-American Communist behind the film Sorry to Bother You. (It's part of their DIS OBEY program.)

Will young communists soon fill this billionaire fantasy anti-city--and will they be disobedient?

Finally, there's The Vessel, that walkable "stairway to nowhere" that the billionaire developer of Hudson Yards called "the social climber." To walk it, you'll have to agree to an acknowledgment of risks that "may include, for example, slipping, being knocked off balance, falling, exposure to heights (which may cause vertigo, nausea, or discomfort), exposure to flashing or intermittent special effects or lighting, personal injury, or death." One other risk: If you appear in any photos, including your own, you sign away "the unrestricted, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual right and license (with the right to transfer or sublicense) to use my name, likeness, voice, and all other aspects of my persona."



The Vessel's hornet's nest logo is on everything, but nowhere does its silhouette most excite me than when it accidentally appears on the side of a nearby food truck--The Giant Shawarma mirrored by an actual shawarma.

As I escape Hudson Yards, I point out the similarity to the vendor inside the truck. "Yes," he calls out, seeing the joke, "the same! It is the same!" And he has a good laugh. In the end, it all seems like one big joke.


Read all my Hudson Yards coverage here

Legacy Records and Black Branding

In his Times review of a new Hudson Yards restaurant, Pete Wells writes that Legacy Records has "ginned up a history for itself that brings together sloppy research with a superficial tribute to black culture."

I haven't been inside the place, so I'll leave it to Wells, who describes images of black musicians on the walls, stars like Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, and Marvin Gaye, who supposedly recorded in a studio on the site. Except they didn't. There was a studio there for a few years in the 2000s, he says, "mostly used by orchestras, Broadway cast recordings and commercials."

There's also a photo by Mickalene Thomas of a black woman with an Afro in a sexy pose.


photo by Gary He

Wells concludes:

"Legacy Records has taken this shred of history and turned it into a fantasy of black American music.

Exhibited in a museum or gallery, Ms. Thomas’s photo might be taken as a comment on the different postures and personas available to black women. Hanging it next to the counter where pastries and coffee are sold by day strips out some of its meaning; it looks like an attempt to buy a personality for a restaurant that doesn’t have one of its own.

If anyone gets to decide who can use black culture for what purposes, it surely isn’t me. But Legacy Records uses it in a gratuitous and offhanded way that made me uncomfortable. Stevie Wonder will always be cool, but a restaurant dreamed up by real estate developers doesn’t automatically become cool by putting him on the wall."


photo: Mo Gelber

What Wells describes is not just cultural appropriation, it is "black branding" for the purposes of commodifying an urban space for the wealthy and mostly white. It is a trend that comes with hyper-gentrifying cities across America.

In his book "Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City,” Derek S. Hyra writes: “Not long ago, an urban community’s association with blackness was mostly perceived as detrimental. But nowadays...neighborhood-based organizations, real estate developers, restaurant owners and urban planners commodify and appropriate aspects of blackness to promote tourism, homeownership, and community redevelopment.”

We saw it most famously at the Summerhill restaurant in Crown Heights, where locals protested the use of supposed bullet holes and Forty Ounce Rosé.

Black branding is happening in hyper-gentrified cities where actual black people are being removed. With hyper-gentrification, New York City is getting whiter. And, as we've seen in many recent news reports, as middle and upper-class whites move into black and brown neighborhoods, they call the police on black people--for barbecuing, playing music, and just hanging out. These attacks happen simultaneously with the commodification of blackness.

Lower-income black people are pushed out. Their images and symbols are kept by the race/class victors as trophies and marketing opportunities. It can be seen as a form of revenge.


Barbecue Becky, Oakland, CA

“The rallying cry of the revanchist city,” wrote urbanist and gentrification expert Neil Smith, “might well be: ‘Who lost the city? And on whom is revenge to be exacted?’”

The notion of the lost city, the stolen city, goes back to white flight, a phenomenon engineered by the federal government beginning in the 1930s. Without Jim Crow in the northern United States, the government had to use stealthier methods of segregation. They developed the racist housing practice of redlining to confine black and brown people in disinvested cities, while luring whites away with good deals on houses in whites-only suburbs. This drain of the city’s tax base played a major role in the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, which provided the economic excuse for New York’s reorientation away from social democracy and towards neoliberalism, the radical free market, aka "trickle-down economics." And it is from there that hyper-gentrification, as a top-down tactic of state and city government, began.

We cannot talk about hyper-gentrification without also talking about racism. The story of American capital cannot be disentangled from the story of slavery in America. Neoliberalism, while it is an economic approach, was a white supremacist solution. It was, and continues to be, a powerful method to “take back” the city -- and, ultimately, the country—from black and brown people and to re-establish the power of the wealthy white elite. 


Inside Legacy Records, photo: Gary He, via Eater

So it seems appropriate that this restaurant is part of Hudson Yards, the fake city within a city, a curated space for the ultra-elite, and the perfect product of neoliberalized New York -- with all its corporate welfare, Hudson Yards has cost the city hundreds of millions of dollars.

As I noted in my book Vanishing New York, Hudson Yards is a "dreamworld of exclusion," one of those places Mike Davis describes in Evil Paradises: “where the rich can walk like gods in the nightmare gardens of their deepest and most secret desires.”

El Quijote's Raw Deal

Last week we learned that El Quijote, the 87-year-old restaurant in the Chelsea Hotel, is closing at the end of March, thanks to its new owners. Now Page Six reports that the employees are getting a raw deal.



“The staff is being disrespected,” said a tipster to the Post. “They are being given two weeks’ severance pay...from a person who just started working last month to the executive chef who’s been working there over 30 years. They’re all being treated the same.”



I first reported on the coming closure of El Quijote here in 2014. Since then, the restaurant and the hotel changed hands (again and again).

The hotel is currently owned by "BD Hotels’ Richard Born and Ira Drukier, and Jane Hotel honcho Sean MacPherson." Born told the Post, "The real severance obligation is from the original owner...We have only been here a little over a year.”

El Quijote has been a thorn in the owners' side for awhile now. Back in 2010, The Real Deal reported:

When BD NY Hotels took over operations of the legendary West 23rd Street lodge in 2007, the Richard Born and Ira Drukier-led management team tried to rent the empty retail spaces to a number of other restaurateurs, including the prolific Jean-Georges Vongerichten.

“The problem,” according to court papers filed in 2008 concerning a dispute between BD NY and the building’s owners, “has been that the existing lease with El Quixote [sic] negotiated by the prior management contains a covenant prohibiting any other restaurant in the building.”

In 2014, the hotel's then owner, Ed Scheetz, bought El Quijote and the troublesome lease ended, making it possible to close the restaurant, upgrade it, and/or put more restaurants in the hotel.



Some claim that the restaurant will reopen, likely gutted and glossed for an upscale clientele, aka "Vongerichtified." But an employee that I recently spoke to told me, "They'll probably just sell it."

El Quijote still does a brisk business and is loved by many New Yorkers just as it is. Historically, it was frequented by Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, William Burroughs, and many other cultural luminaries.

El Quijote

VANISHING

After nearly 90 years in the Chelsea Hotel, the great and wonderful and gorgeous El Quijote is closing on March 30.



Eater reports: "Staffers at the historic restaurant, located at 226 West 23rd St. between Seventh and Eighth avenues, were given two weeks notice. Ownership allegedly told employees that the restaurant is being renovated and will re-open eventually. Eater NY has reached out to the restaurant for comment."

Back in 2014, I reported on this coming closure. At the time, I was told that El Quijote would be upscaled and sanitized in a fashion similar to what happened to Minetta Tavern.

The plan was denied -- and then confirmed. A rep for Ed Scheetz, the man who took over the hotel, said at the time that they would "retain the signature look and feel of El Quijote" while "maintaining its authenticity."

But then life went on. El Q remained untouched. We held our breath.

When -- and if -- the place reopens, it won't be the old El Quijote anymore.

Moscot's Move

Last month I wrote about the demise of 69 West 14th St and its tenement neighbors. At that time, nine storefronts had been shuttered, and developer Extell will likely demolish the buildings. Now there are ten.



Sol Moscot was (from what I can tell) the last tenant in the buildings, making them now clear for destruction.

And Moscot has moved up 6th Avenue, into the mini-mall structure built a few years ago by the Stonehenge Group.



Stonehenge is the same group that cleared all the small businesses out of a building they purchased on 9th Avenue and 18th Street. It was a move that broke the hearts of many local people. That was years ago. Since then, they put in a Wells Fargo bank, but all of the remaining spaces still sit empty and wasted.

Stonehenge also quintupled the rent on Colony Records, putting them out of Times Square after 60 years. Has anything permanent moved into that spot, or is it still revolving holiday pop-ups?

Anyway, I hope Moscot got a good, long lease at 555 6th Ave. It's getting so you can't stay anywhere for long in this town.

Desco Vacuum

Desco Vacuum Sales and Service, at 131 West 14th Street, has been around since about 1950. It was (at least) a third generation business. Now it's gone.



A reader wrote in: "Owner of business (and also the building) said that it was becoming increasingly difficult to do business in the city, even with owning the property. He also said that millennials don't buy vacuums and the ancillary products, and it was hard to compete with that."

I bought my vacuum cleaner bags at Desco and always liked seeing its vertical neon sign, but especially the neon vacuum cleaner.



Now the shop is empty and the neon signs are dark.


2008