Thrift & New

VANISHED

The little, one-story antiques shop known mostly as Thrift and New, located on 9th Avenue and 43rd Street in Hell's Kitchen, has vanished.


thanks to Shade Rupe for the photo and the tip

It was one of those wonderful holdouts, a throwback, a leftover from the old New York, and every time I found it still open, it seemed like a miracle. Places like this just aren't allowed to exist here anymore.



I must have photographed it a hundred times, knowing each time might be my last.



It was a warm and lively place. There were always customers inside, sifting through the stuff, browsing, reading.



They sold jewelry, guitars, books, old photographs.



They had a room full of ceramics, mostly pink.



The sign says they'd been open since 1952. I don't know why they closed.

McHale's Sign

When the beloved Hell's Kitchen bar McHale's was forced to close in 2006 and replaced by a luxury condo tower, New Yorkers wept. In 2012, its neon sign was salvaged and then resurfaced in a nearby bar. It wasn't McHale's, but one could dream.

Now a commenter alerts us that the sign has resurfaced once again--on ebay.


ebay

It can be yours for $2,500 -- or else it gets destroyed.

The seller writes:

"I bought this to repurpose the sign for something else, but was told this was a popular bar in the theater district at one time. Now demolished for more condos. I would prefer this go to someone interested in NYC history or Mchales and so I am giving this one shot, and then it heads off to the shop. This is located in NYC."


2006

Nick's Barber Shop

Last week I wrote about the sudden vanishing of John's Barber Shop under Port Authority. I mentioned that his brother, Nick, is still going strong in his own little shop on West 44th St. If you want a good, old-school barber shop experience, go see Nick.

Now that John's is gone, along with the great Mayfair, he may be the last of his kind in that area. And you never know how long a place like this will be around.



It's a little spot down a set of stairs at 351 West 44th. The signs just say "Barber Shop," but the official name of the place is the Times One Barber Shop.



If you bend down from the sidewalk, you can see Nick at work. There's always someone sitting in his chair.



You take a seat and hang up your coat. The walls are covered with Broadway posters, many of them autographed by Nick's customers. Along a ceiling pipe hang New Year's Eve sunglasses. There are mementos from Greece, Nick's home country.



If you ask him about the old shop, the one he worked with his brother under 42nd Street in the subway arcade, he might take out some photographs--one of the corner where the shop used to be, and one of himself, a young barber with thick black hair, in the Times Square of the past.



He'll do a decent and quick job on your hair. The price will be cheap--12 bucks. And, like the sheet metal barber poles in the window say, you'll LOOK BETTER and FEEL BETTER.

Vynl

VANISHING

I never went to Vynl, but it's been around for 23 years, it's a gay place, and people will miss it.



Vynl was part of a restaurant mini empire by John Dempsey.

No reason for the closure is given on the goodbye note. They only say the place is "retiring."

It will close this Saturday.


Thanks to Ben for the tip

Ray Today

Ray Beauty Supply had been on 8th Avenue off Times Square for over 50 years. They claimed to be the oldest beauty supply shop in the city. They had personality. And a great sign.



They vanished in 2013 and the storefront sat empty for awhile.

Recently, I noticed it's been turned into this chain that sells "artisanal" gelato. They have dozens of "boutiques" all over the world.

Condo on Cheyenne

Remember the Cheyenne Diner, that gorgeous antique over on 9th Avenue and 33rd? It was evicted in 2008, picked up, and moved to Alabama, where, last we heard, it was sitting in pieces.

So now, after the lot sat empty for years, this condo is rising:



Once again, the city has lost a unique piece of its history and its soul for another pile of dime-a-dozen, generic schlock. They call it the Skylight House, after the Skylight Diner around the corner (same owners).

Is anyone getting tired of this yet?

Maria's Mont Blanc

VANISHED

Last night was the last night for Maria's Mont Blanc restaurant on West 48th.


photo via New York

Stephen wrote in:

"Those of us who've been denizens of Hell's Kitchen are losing a wonderful neighborhood bar/restaurant. Fought for at least a year with the landlord. Hangout for the musicians' union across the street as well as theater designers, box office staff, stage hands, and, of course, tourists. Lots of Broadway casts and off-Broadway casts hang after their shows. A truly great spot. And beloved by the surrounding industry."

Maria's Mont Blanc has been around since 1982 -- in one location, then another, both on West 48th Street. Eater visited in 2011 and reported: "the feeling that you're in the capable hands of a close-knit family remains. I've rarely seen such conscientious kindness as that exhibited by Mont Blanc's staff toward its faithful clientele."

And another one gone while City Hall sits on its hands. #SaveNYC.

Papaya Dog Down

Reader Richard writes in to let us know "the Papaya Dog on the corner of 42nd and 9th Ave shut down overnight. I spoke to some of the doormen at a nearby building and they said the employees were ripping the place up overnight."


today

This Papaya Dog was one of four in the city (I visited all the hot dog and papaya joints last year).

It was located in the Elk Hotel, a former flop, nearly a century old. The Elk was sold in 2012 and emptied of tenants. (I took a tour of the place with one tenant back then--seriously don't miss that one.)

We heard awhile back that, along with most of the low-rise block, the hotel was sold again and all the businesses on the block would soon be kicked out. Is that why Papaya Dog closed?

Or maybe it was doomed by the luxury hotel rising across the avenue--the one that pushed out Big Apple Meat Market and Stile's Market and 99-cent Fresh Pizza.

Then again, maybe it was just that magically powerful tyranny of nostalgia that did it.


2015

Market Diner Demolished

When we last checked in with the doomed Market Diner it was locked behind green plywood. Now reader Shade Rupe sends in photos of the gruesome remains.


photo: Shade Rupe

A bit of stone foundation still stands. A stairway to nowhere. The rest is dust.


photo: Shade Rupe

The Market Diner was here since 1962. It was beautiful and unusual. Developer Joseph Moinian's Moinian Group bought it, evicted it, and is replacing it with a 13-story building. If it matches their existing two towers across the street, it will be yet another dull, dead luxury box.

You can like those towers or hate those towers. But here's the thing: All the glass boxes around the city are making us sick--mentally and physically. They are literally killing us as they hasten our deaths.

Cognitive neuroscientist Colin Ellard studied what happens to people on the sidewalk when they stand in front of a bland glass façade. In one study, he placed human subjects in front of the Whole Foods grocery store on the Lower East Side, strapped skin-conducting bracelets to their wrists, and asked them to take notes on their emotional states.

He reported, “When planted in front of Whole Foods, my participants stood awkwardly, casting around for something of interest to latch on to and talk about. They assessed their emotional state as being on the wrong side of ‘happy’ and their state of arousal was close to bottoming out. The physiological instruments strapped to their arms showed a similar pattern. These people were bored and unhappy. When asked to describe the site, words such as bland, monotonous and passionless rose to the top of the charts.”


Moinian's two towers across the street

In his book Happy City, Charles Montgomery calls this “an emerging disaster in street psychology.” The loss of old buildings and small businesses, the homogenization from suburban chains and condo boxes, is more than an aesthetic loss. It is damaging us both psychologically and physically.

Writes Montgomery, “The big-boxing of a city block harms the physical health of people living nearby, especially the elderly. Seniors who live among long stretches of dead frontage have actually been found to age more quickly than those who live on blocks with plenty of doors, windows, porch stoops, and destinations.”

You have to wonder if the developers and corporations putting up these buildings and facades actually want anyone around. Montgomery points out that many corporate towers are built to be “deeply misanthropic,” intended to actively repel people with repellant street-level design. In a city where people are reconceived as consumers, not citizens, it is best to keep everyone moving and disconnected.


Market Diner in happier days

The opposite is true when people walk along a diverse block of small businesses and buildings. As Ellard found on the Lower East Side, they feel “lively and engaged.”

Visually interesting architecture and human-scaled, idiosyncratic storefronts enliven us. I would bet that they stimulate our brains to produce happy chemicals, warding off stress and the damage it causes. It's not far-fetched to say that buildings like the Market Diner, with unusual shapes and inviting facades, don't just make us feel alive, they keep us alive. And yet City Hall continues to encourage developers to kill them off.

More and more, we are living in a zombie city, its aliveness murdered by politicians and developers. It's only a matter of time before all of New York becomes the undead.

Club Escuelita

VANISHED

Escuelita, the legendary Latin LGBTQ nightclub, has closed. A notice on their website says thank you for 49 years and "it's time to say goodbye for now..."



That's all the information I can find on the closure. The club's phone has been disconnected.

Two days ago, DaGrapevine called it "Truly The End Of An Era For The New York City Underground Gay Night Club Scene... However Tbh We At #DGV Aren't Surprised About This At All," due to the club's struggles with the State Liquor Authority.

In 2012, the Post reported on Escuelita's fight. "In papers filed in Manhattan Supreme Court, Escuelita charges the SLA is cutting corners in a bid to take away their license, a move the club charges is clearly aimed at clearing gay, lesbian, transgenders and minorities out of the gentrifying area."

Said owner Sayvon Zabar in an affidavit, "I also believe that we are no longer welcome on West 39th Street as minorities scare the mostly white tourists who patronize the newly built and expensive boutique hotels on the block."

Zabar also told the Daily News that "Minorities...do not fit into the gentrification plans of the city."

Escuelita won that fight--and the fight went on.



Located on West 39th Street near Port Authority, Escuelita is, in fact, surrounded by a crop of new hotels. But the harassment isn't new.

Writing about queer club culture of 1990s New York in her book, Impossible Dance, Fiona Buckland reports on the surveillance, undercover actions, and raids that Escuelita had to deal with. She recalls a police cruiser parked outside the club. "I bet they ain't hanging around outside straight, white clubs," remarks someone in line.

When the old Escuelita closed in 1995, the final night was a scene of tears. "All of the drag queens, the transformistas, and impersonators," reports one regular in the book Puerto Rican Jam, "gathered on stage for the grand finale. They sang 'America the Beautiful.' They cried. Their makeup ran. An American flag unfurled...upside down."


Lady Bunny with Jerry O'Connell and Andy Cohen backstage, via Daily News

For decades, Escuelita was an important part of the queer scene in the city, providing a space for drag performers like Lady Bunny, and--in the words of 60by80--for "fierce trannies, homo thugs, papichulos and voqueing pier queens from all 5 boroughs."

A list to which New York adds, "Dieseled-out hip-hop gays, sweet cocoa go-go boys, and a handful of blanquitos, all of whom stick around for the truly fierce after-midnight drag competition."

In Queering the Popular Pitch, the authors recount how Escuelita got its name. It was originally located in the basement of a language school. And from "the use of diminutives by Puerto Ricans when giving directions--the club was, thus, the place under the 'little language school.'"

Escuelita has closed and moved before, and it may do so once again. "Goodbye for now," they say. But where in the white-washed tourist city will they be welcomed? My guess--Jackson Heights.

Panda in Hell

Reader Cat McGuire sends in pics of something new moving to Hell's Kitchen at 46th Street and 9th Avenue.



It's a Panda Express -- a suburban shopping-mall, food-court restaurant with over 1,500 locations around the globe. It's run by this billionaire CEO.

And the chaining of the city continues. Anyway.

An angry New Yorker with a Sharpie has a message for the mega-chain: "Panda Express?!? A mall restaurant?!? Get the fuck out of Hell's Kitchen!!"

Market Diner Demolition

The lovely, doomed Market Diner is being prepped for demolition. It has now been surrounded by a wall of green plywood.


Thank you to Andrea Kleiman for taking these photos

The Market Diner, opened in 1962, was forced to close a few months ago by its owner, the Moinian Group, who bought the site with plans to demolish the beloved vintage restaurant and erect on its grave a high-rise luxury condo tower -- making a total of three towers they will have on that very same intersection.

The diner is a true one-of-a-kind. What's replacing it is a dime-a-dozen. Once again, we're losing authentic local character for more soulless architecture from the "geography of nowhere." And no one in City Hall is doing a damn thing to stop it. As the proprietor of Chelsea's shuttered La Lunchonette restaurant just told the Daily Beast, "There’s not much integrity left in New York when chains get breaks and small businesses struggle."

The same goes for mega-developers, who have received billions of dollars in tax breaks and other incentives, corporate welfare from New Yorkers' pockets, to reconstruct West Chelsea and Hell's Kitchen into a glittering city within the city for the super-rich.



It all makes me think of the 1995 essay “The Generic City" by architect Rem Koolhaas.

He riffs on the blankness of homogenization, the “superficial” city that, like a Hollywood studio lot, has no identity and no age. The Generic City is an “endless repetition” of blank facades, offering a kind of sedative to urban dwellers.

“The street is dead,” says Koolhaas. “Close your eyes and imagine an explosion of beige.”

I’d rather not.

In 2011, he commented on his prescient essay: “These days, we're building assembly-line cities and assembly-line buildings, standardized buildings and cities.”


Across the street from Market Diner

That cannot be said about the Market Diner. It is not one in an endless repetition of the same. It is not generic.

But it is dead. And, like much of the city we've loved and lost, it's the victim of murder.

Rudy's Under Attack

The Clinton Chronicle reports that beloved Hell's Kitchen dive bar Rudy's Bar & Grill is under attack by Community Board 4 for serving alcohol in its backyard late into the night.



Saundra Halbertstam and Eliot Camerara report that members of Community Board 4 have "actively worked to shut down and destroy Rudy’s Bar and Grille, a Hell’s Kitchen landmark, in business since 1933."

The writers says these members have "prompted complaints against Rudy’s Bar" and "smeared Rudy’s by sending word through the community that they were operating without proper licenses." So far, Rudy's owners have spent $24,000 defending the bar.

It's a lengthy story--to read the whole piece, pick up a copy of the Clinton Chronicle or read the PDF here. Saundra gave me the upshot in an email: "By closing the backyard, they will force Rudy's to close, since the back represents over 30% of their revenue."


photo: retro roadmap

News of noise complaints against Rudy's goes back to this summer. As DNAInfo reported, Rudy’s management said "those complaining were suburban transplants who don't understand Hell's Kitchen."

“To have somebody come in from suburbia and say that we want to change this neighborhood because they paid an exorbitant amount for a co-op is not fair to the people in the community,” the bar's lawyer, Thomas Purcell, told DNA.

The blog stated, "under Rudy's liquor license, which dates back to 1992 when the current owner Jack Ertl, 88, bought the bar, the venue is allowed to use the backyard space until the wee hours with no restrictions, according to documents and bar management."

Last Meal at Market Diner

VANISHED

This weekend I had a last meal at the Market Diner, shuttered now and waiting for the Moinian Group's wrecking machines to flatten it, so yet another soul-murdering, high-rise luxury condo can rise.



Aren't there enough of those already? The place is surrounded by luxury towers. In fact, Moinian has another pair right across the avenue.

From the windows of the Market Diner you can watch "The Sky" rise, wrapped in the slogan: "Live the Sky Life." With 1,175 rental units, The Sky is currently the city's biggest residential tower, literally blotting out the actual sky. And right next to that is Moinian's massive Atelier condo tower. The 13-story tower to rise on Market Diner's grave will make it a trio.

These buildings are here because the city rezoned the far west side as part of the Special Hudson Yards District and the Special Clinton District. They're here because the city government wants them here.



Meanwhile, inside the diner, crowds of people jammed themselves into the vestibule, waiting 20 and 30 minutes for a table. Some had come to say goodbye on this last weekend, but most just loved eating here.



After this irreplaceable piece of the authentic New York is destroyed forever, we'll hear politicians and other development apologists trot out the hideous bullshit lines that "tastes change" and "some small businesses just aren't viable." But we'll know the truth. 

The Market Diner was always packed with customers. They closed because the Moinian Group bought them and shuttered them. They closed because City Hall allowed it. Because our government offers no protections for small businesses. They closed because New York is in the midst of a small business apocalypse--and a cultural genocide.



As Robert Sietsema wrote for Eater this weekend: "even with a liberal mayor, nothing is done to stop this sort of cultural and culinary depredation. Isn’t the mix of businesses in a neighborhood important? Do real estate developers have an absolute right to do anything with their properties, no matter how foul?"

Yes, apparently, they do.

The Market Diner was in business since 1962. Frank Sinatra ate there. It was gorgeous. It was unique. I've said it a million times already. For fuck's sake, #SaveNYC. Whatever's left of it.


Previously: 
Last Days of Market Diner
Market Diner Vanishing
Market Diner Renovation

Last Days of Market Diner

This summer I reported that the Market Diner would be closing. Later reports gave the place six months to a year to live. Turns out, it was only four months. We now hear the diner's final day will be this Sunday, November 1.


photo: Karen Gehres

Reader Karen Gehres sends in a photo of a notice put up in her building at Manhattan Plaza. "Enjoy it while you can and say goodbye," reads the sign. "Yet another excellent and reasonably priced neighborhood restaurant bites the dust."

I called the diner and was told they will go through the weekend. Their last day will be Sunday, November 1.

Yet again, it's not biting the dust because business is bad, or because it's not a viable business, as the folks in City Hall might want us to believe. Anytime I've gone by the Market Diner, the place was packed. People love it.

It's dying because of development. It's dying because of the Hudson Yards Effect. It's dying because Joseph Moinian’s Moinian Group bought the property and evicted the diner so they can put up a luxury tower. It's dying because small businesses in this city are completely unprotected and utterly vulnerable to the whims of landlords.



Karen adds that the Garden Center next door will also be destroyed. She says they're already "moving everything off the premises today."

The Market Diner has been on this site since 1962. It's a beautiful, unique piece of mid-century Googie architecture in a city filling up with banal, carbon-copy glass buildings. Another great loss--when we're losing too many diners as it is.

If you're sick and tired of the vanishing, write to the mayor and council speaker. It's easy, just visit #SaveNYC and click a few buttons. You'll feel better about yourself if you do.

Market Diner

VANISHING?

Yesterday, the Real Deal reported that a 13-story building is coming to 572 11th Avenue. That address is the current home of the grand old Market Diner.


photo: Sideways NYC

One of Manhattan's very last vintage, chrome, stand-alone diners still in business, the Market has been on this site since 1962. It was a favorite of Frank Sinatra and west-side gangsters.

The place closed in 2006 and reopened in late 2008 with a redesign that stayed true to its glorious mid-century roots.


photo: Greenwich Village Daily Photo

A call to the Market Diner yielded no information about any upcoming closure. The Real Deal reports that the new development will include 163 residential units, ground-floor retail, a second-floor gym, lounge, and a rooftop with private terraces.

The Moondance and Cheyenne were picked up and moved to keep them from being destroyed, but something tells me we're not going to be able to put this one on a flatbed truck and send it off to the farm.


1972 photo by Thorney Lieberman

Dykes Lumber

Since 1912, Dykes Lumber has been on West 44th Street, occupying a pair of brick buildings painted forest green. They won't be there much longer.


Alex Albanese

Reader Alex Albanese let us know the business is moving. Signs on the exterior say they're relocating to East 124th Street.

The barber on the block believes they sold the building and "a new hotel is coming."


Alex Albanese