Hamilton's Luncheonette

For my piece in this week's Metro NY, something new that's not so bad. Yet:

A new eatery called Hamilton’s Soda Fountain and Luncheonette recently opened in Greenwich Village, on the corner of Marc Jacobs and Marc Jacobs, also known as Bank St. and W. 4th. It’s one of those new retro places that both attracts and repels me, first for its nostalgic verisimilitude, second for its twee self-awareness.

The real problem with most of these places is that they serve overpriced items for foodies who lust for fetishized fancywork. They also tend to fill up with the most irritating people on earth. So I approached Hamilton’s with suspicious curiosity. But after checking out their menu and finding it shockingly affordable and filled with plain basics, I tried the place out...



...At Hamilton’s, I was joined by an older lady, whose name I didn’t get, though she told me the story of her 50 years in the Village, and the flower shop she once ran, where gay men were her most appreciative customers and muggers strolled in with guns in their hands.

The lady was delighted to find Hamilton’s. “There’s no place left to eat around here,” she said. “The Village is gone. Only the buildings are left standing.” She read the menu like a good book, savoring each item. “Oh, chopped liver,” she said. “Pastrami! Egg creams and lime rickeys! I feel like I’ve been deprived of these things, and now here they are.”

She ordered the pastrami sandwich and a cream soda. Billie Holiday sang softly through the speakers. We talked about Brooklyn, tourists, and death. She told me about her rent-controlled apartment, how she outlived the landlord who never expected her to stay so long. “I’ll probably die there,” she said, “in another five years. That’s enough for me.”

If Hamilton’s keeps appealing to people like her, it’s a good thing for the Village. I just hope they don’t ruin it.

Please click here to read the whole article.

Marble Cemeteries

From my piece in today's Metro NY:



...Mostly marked by plaques, some of the vaults here have monuments above them. One of the largest belongs to Mangle Minthorne Quakenbos, real estate magnate with a spectacular name. But the most famous here is Preserved Fish—famous for his curious name, not for his life, which was spent in shipping and banking and outliving one wife after another.

A cemetery volunteer shared the apocryphal story behind Mr. Fish’s naming: “As a baby, while traveling by ship, he fell overboard. He washed ashore and was found by a whaling captain, who gave him the name.” Because he was like a fish preserved.



It’s a pleasure to stroll through a cemetery, a peaceful activity not often possible in Manhattan. As people wandered over the graves, long-time East Villager Helen Stratford played her accordion. She wore a black dress and black-feathered wings, the angel of death playing Andy Williams hits, like “Moon River” and the “Theme from Love Story.”

Please read the whole essay here.

La Lunchonette

VANISHING

When Melva Max and her husband Jean-François Fraysse moved their restaurant La Lunchonette from the Lower East Side to the remote corner of 10th Avenue and 18th Street in far west Chelsea in 1988, it was a different world. The Meatpacking District was the domain of transgender sex workers, queer sex clubs, and meatpacking plants. The High Line was a derelict rail bed covered in weeds. Gun shots cracked through the night air. Now, 26 years later, this is one of the most expensive neighborhoods in New York City, filled with luxury chain stores and luxury high rises. The sweeping change happened recently, in the blink of an eye—and it is forcing La Lunchonette to shutter.

“The neighborhood is so gross now,” Melva says. “It’s all tourists coming for the High Line. People always say, ‘But wasn’t it great for you?’ The High Line has been the cause of my demise.”

Since the pricey park opened, Melva’s landlord’s phone hasn’t stopped ringing, and it’s always a real-estate developer on the other end. “My landlord’s not a bad guy, but how you can you say no to offers of $30 million?” He’s giving her until June 2015 and then she’s out of business.

[A shorter version of this essay appears in today's Metro NY]



When the High Line opened its first phase in 2009, critics raved as neighboring small business people looked on uncertainly, hoping the park would be a rising tide to lift all boats. That didn’t happen. By the time the High Line’s second phase opened in 2011, small businesses in its shadow were dropping like flies (mostly blue-collar businesses), making room for massive, high-rise development exclusively for the global super-rich.

What most New Yorkers do not know is that the luxury mega-development scheme was baked right in to the High Line preservation plan.

In the book High Line, the park’s co-founders Joshua David and Robert Hammond explain how, in order to preserve the train trestle, the air rights above it would be sold off to developers to build a new neighborhood filled with soaring towers. David recalls saying to Hammond at the time, “If the result of doing the High Line is that you end up with all these tall buildings that you wouldn’t have had otherwise, I don’t want to be a part of it.” Gradually, however, David came around--“my perspective changed,” he wrote. As Joseph Rose, chairman of the New York City Planning Commission, told them, “The High Line had been an impediment for so many years. You and your group changed it into a catalyst.”

Still, what the High Line had catalyzed was unfathomable at the time. Glistening towers rising 20, 30, 40 stories into the air, pressed tightly together, casting cold shadows and blotting out the sky, all along the length of the park? Condos with their own personal swimming pools? Russian oligarchs stashing investment money in glittering vertical ghost towns? Who could believe this claustrophobic dystopian vision would ever be permitted?

In 2011, in a love letter to the High Line, Philip Lopate wrote, “Much of the High Line's present magic stems from its passing though an historic industrial cityscape roughly the same age as the viaduct, supplemented by private tenement backyards and the poetic grunge of taxi garages. It would make a huge difference if High Line walkers were to feel trapped in a canyon of spanking new high-rise condos, providing antlike visual entertainment for one’s financial betters lolling on balconies.”

That vision has come true—and more so every day, now that the High Line’s final phase has opened, a ribbon wrapping a bow around what will be the Hudson Yards billionaire city within a city. The poetic grunge has gone with the exiled taxi garages. And the tenements, like the one containing La Lunchonette, have been pulverized to dust as new towers rise in every remaining open space.



“People aren’t going to like me for saying this,” Melva says, “but it feels like Disneyland around here now. Everyone’s fighting the crowd to get to the next ride. People on the High Line look like lemmings, like they’re walking on a treadmill. They’re not even looking at the plants. They should sell t-shirts up there that say, ‘I Did the High Line.’”

But shouldn’t tourists be good for the local economy? Melva explains that, even though there’s a High Line staircase right outside her building, most tourists don’t come down.

“They get off their big tour bus down at Gansevoort, walk to the end of the High Line, and then the bus picks them up again. Most of them never get off the High Line.”

Those who do venture down the stairs aren’t interested in eating a meal. They’re interested in Melva’s bathroom. “People come down to use my toilet. I get 20 – 30 people a day who just want to use my toilet.” She lets pregnant women, elderly people, and children use her bathroom; the rest she turns away. “They yell at me! Like it’s my job to provide them with a toilet.”



Melva is a warm and generous person. She calls all her customers “Honey” and touches them gently on the shoulder as she quietly glides up to ask if they need anything else, more water, another glass of wine. She makes you feel welcome and well cared for. A reviewer at New York magazine once said that walking into La Lunchonette is “like having someone put two warm hands on your cheeks.” Those are Melva’s hands.

But she’s also angry. Her anger at the High Line, the tourists, and the hyper-gentrification that has decimated Chelsea is shared by many New Yorkers, people who are tired of their neighborhoods changing into pleasure-domes for the rich, amusement parks for tourists, Anywhere USA’s filled with suburban chain stores.

Still, Melva says, "I love the High Line," specifically the views, the sunsets, and the air, all things that are being destroyed by overdevelopment. Even the rich are starting to complain, she says, upset about tourist buses idling in front of their condos, belching black exhaust fumes into the air. Even the rich are talking of leaving.

“What people don’t understand,” Melva explains, “is that it could have been a nice park. The zoning could’ve stayed so it didn’t attract all this grotesque development. It could have been done in a more creative way. And I’d still have my business.”

She adds, “The High Line was a Trojan horse for the real-estate people. All that glitters is not gold.”



Back in 2005, with Dan Doctoroff and Amanda Burden leading the charge, and with support from the Friends of the High Line, the Bloomberg Administration rezoned several blocks of West Chelsea--all “with the High Line at its center,” recalled Hammond in High Line.

In the city’s zoning resolution, they wrote out the explicit purposes of creating this special district. Aside from encouraging development and promoting the “most desirable” use of land (already in use), one purpose was “to facilitate the restoration and reuse of the High Line” as a public space, through, in part, “High Line improvement bonuses and the transfer of development rights from the High Line Transfer Corridor.” Bonuses along the corridor meant that if a luxury developer provided improvements to the High Line itself, that developer would be given permission to build their condo towers even bigger. And they did.

Another purpose of the West Chelsea rezoning, according to the city’s resolution, was to “create and provide a transition to the Hudson Yards area to the north.” In essence, Special West Chelsea was zoned to provide a link between the glamorous Meatpacking District below and the glittering new neighborhood above, all with the High Line running through, like a conveyor belt ferrying tourists and money up and down. To the developers of Hudson Yards, Bloomberg gave millions of dollars in tax breaks, including approximately $510 million to the Related Companies.

On their marketing materials, Related calls Hudson Yards “The New Heart of New York.”



I ask Melva how she might respond to charges that her restaurant helped usher in gentrification back in 1988. She says, “I have to concede that the galleries came, in part, because we were here. But our prices have always been fair, and our clientele is not all rich people. It’s a middle-class place, but there’s no room left for the middle class here. It’s a matter of degrees.” We talk about gentrification versus hyper-gentrification, how today’s changes are being created by the city government in collusion with corporations.

The catastrophically rising cost of Chelsea has pushed many of La Lunchonette’s regulars out of the neighborhood. And for the newcomers who fetishize the flashy and new, La Lunchonette’s “low-key” and “divey charm,” as Zagat puts it, is not their cup of tea.

It’s really too bad because dining at La Lunchonette is an absolute pleasure—and a rare experience. The music is soft--Miles Davis, Edith Piaf--and the rooms are cozy. The food is good—I had the lamb sausages and carrot-pumpkin soup. And then there are Melva’s warm hands and her kind voice asking, “How’re you doin’ Honey?” as she refills your glass. In a city increasingly populated with iZombies, at La Lunchonette you feel like you’ve rejoined humanity, and it feels good.

Melva hopes that by letting her customers know about the closure well ahead of time, they’ll have the chance to come say goodbye and enjoy a last meal. She hopes more people will try La Lunchonette, so she can close next spring without too much debt. She doesn’t know what she’ll do next. With crippling taxes and a draconian Health Department levying Kafkaesque citations and fines, the city makes it very hard to run a small restaurant.

“This place has been my whole life,” Melva says. “I didn’t think it would end like this. This is not the New York that I love. All my customers say the same thing. And no one’s doing anything about it.”



Previously:
Disney World on the Hudson
Brownfeld Auto
Meatpacking Before & After 
J. Crew for the High Line
Special West Chelsea

Lemon Ice King

For this week's piece in Metro NY, a long walk to the Lemon Ice King of Corona.



To get to the Lemon Ice King of Corona, especially on a day when the 7 train is running express, you walk from Junction Boulevard in Queens. The walk is half the pleasure.

Under the elevated tracks, you go past the botanicas and tarot card readers, the driving schools and tortillerias, the women at sidewalk stands blending fruit into juice. You walk past the giant, flashing signs for Corona Oral Surgery–the ones that inexplicably advertise OB-GYN! OB-GYN!–and turn right onto 104th Street, through the land of barber shops...

...It’s Indian summer, or more Global Warming. The locust trees along the sidewalk are turning gold. The Mets have just one game left to play. At the Lemon Ice King, the candy apples have appeared, another sign of the changing season. A new crowd arrives, taking vivid colors into their hands—pistachio green, cherry red, blueberry blue. No one buys a candy apple. They’re not quite ready to give up the ice.

Read the whole essay at Metro NY

Floating Library

For today's Metro NY, a visit to the Floating Library:



Across the ship, readers lounge on mattresses and chairs, books in hand. All mobile devices must be powered off. The Floating Library is an analog experience. Swaying in the water, bumping against big rubber fenders that keen against the dock, the Lilac smells sweetly of rust and rot, of the saline Hudson and time gone by. Like a library, it is peacefully quiet. The only racket comes from the loud, intrusive music of the mini-golf course across the pier, another dubious amenity of the city’s suburbanization.

Onboard, though roped to the city, you are yet away from it. The 1933 lighthouse tender is a floating artifact, a lovely ruin through which you are free to roam, peering through portholes and poking into musty rooms washed in river light.

Read the whole piece at Metro NY

Bird Garden

From my piece in today's Metro NY:

On a Saturday morning at the Hua Mei Bird Garden in Sara D. Roosevelt Park, where the Lower East Side rubs up against Chinatown, the trees are full of birdcages. Half shrouded in white cloths, they look like Halloween ghosts, bouncing a little in the branches. Up close, you find that each one is carved from bamboo and contains a single songbird...



...It’s the end of summer. The air has shifted. Already, the leaves of the London Plane trees are brown and falling. One drops into my lap, like a living thing, and I think of a line from a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti:

“Outside the leaves were falling
and they cried
Too soon! too soon!”

Please read the whole essay here.

Battle of Brooklyn

For my piece in this week's Metro, a visit to the Battle of Brooklyn celebration.



On a beautifully temperate Sunday afternoon, I went to Green-Wood Cemetery to watch a group of Revolutionary War reenactors celebrate the Battle of Brooklyn. Dressed in their eighteenth-century best, they stuffed a cannon with balls of tinfoil and shot them towards the distant harbor. “Cover your ears,” warned a man in a tricorn hat before the boom and the ring of floating smoke. The monk parrots nesting in the nearby trees were not pleased.

Benjamin Franklin walked around with his kite, ostensibly waiting for lightning to strike, but the sky was stormless, a clear summer blue. Another man held up a leafy twig, explaining, “This is from a tree planted during the American Revolution. It grows in Woodside, Queens. I think it’s called a beech tree, but I’m really not sure.”

I walked to the top of Battle Hill to look at the statue of Minerva. In her helmet and armored breastplate, she waves down to the Statue of Liberty, who seems not to notice or care. They’re like a couple of estranged sisters, these two, one ignoring the other’s overture...

Please read the rest of the essay at Metro

At Donohue's

For my piece in this week's Metro NY, a visit to Dononue's Steak House on Lexington near 64th.



...it’s the people who really take you back to an older New York, before restaurant chatter was about nothing but money, work, and the latest technological toy—before people became so boring.

At lunchtime, around the bar at Donohue’s, you’ll find the real New Yorkers. The scientist sipping a Manhattan knows everything about everything. The older lady quaffing white wine sounds exactly like Maureen O’Sullivan, with a slight slur that makes her only more elegant. The bartender, with his German accent, referees the conversation with jokes.

In a discussion that bounces from George Orwell to life in India, a newspaper headline shifts the talk to Robin Williams. Comedians really are unhappy people, the group decides.

“It’s the old Pagliacci thing,” says the scientist. “The weeping clown. It’s the misery behind the laughter.”

Jerry Lewis? Miserable. Lenny Bruce? Wretched. Milton Berle? He might have been okay, but Lucille Ball was decidedly unpleasant. They move on to other celebrities with difficult personalities. “Hey,” says the bartender, readying a joke, “you know what Sinatra said when he introduced Mia Farrow to his mother? He said, ‘Mama, Mia.’ You see? Mama Mia!” ...


Please read the rest of the essay in the paper here.

Leo's Latticini

For my column in today's Metro NY, a visit to Leo's Latticini in Corona, Queens.



“Is this your first time here?” she asks from the kitchen, her hands over a basin of milky water where she’s pulling mozzarella like it’s taffy.

I nod. I must look lost.

“You like mozzarella? Come. Taste.”

She rips off a hunk of the soft cheese, squeezes it in her dripping fist, and thrusts it towards me. Like a good Catholic faced with the Eucharist, I take and I eat. The fresh cheese is warm, silky, and delicious.

“Chew it good,” she says.



This is my introduction to Irene DeBenedittis of Leo’s Laticcini, also known as Mama’s of Corona. Irene makes the mozzarella and her sister Marie does the cooking—turkey with gravy, roast pork, manicotti, you name it.

“I don’t use recipes,” says Marie. “I just go on instinct" ...

Please read the rest of the essay here.

Park Slope Barber

For my latest essay in Metro NY, a haircut at the Fiumefreddo brothers' barber shop in Park Slope.



On a weekday morning, the Fiumefreddo brothers’ Park Slope Barber shop is quiet and easy. Ella Fitzgerald sings from the speakers, followed by Sarah Vaughan. “Hey,” says the barber, “this one could give Ella a run for her money. Her voice has a lot of, what do you call ‘em? Octabels. Is that the word?” Octaves, decibels, the word doesn’t matter. What matters is the sound—and the feeling. The place provides a honeyed sense of calm and connectedness, of being rooted through time, past to present.

At this time of day, in high summer, with the door open to Seventh Avenue and a sweet breeze lilting in, the shop is a gentle country of old men. Their silver heads, with fringes of hair, are lovingly palmed and petted by the barber before his scissors start.

“How short do you want it today?”
“Same as always.”
“Sarah Vaughan. What a voice.”
“I remember when she died,” says the customer, holding still...

Read the rest at Metro NY

Tap Jam

In my latest essay for Metro NY, I venture down into Smalls jazz club for the Wednesday night Tap Jam:



On a recent summer night I wandered past Smalls jazz club on West 10th Street in the Village. The Maine Coon cat reclining on the doorstep caught my attention, and the chalkboard announcement of “Tap Jam” held it. The cat is called Minnow and the Tap Jam is not to be missed.

On Wednesday nights, from 6:00 until 9:00 p.m., the basement club fills up with dancers. Dressed casually in shorts and t-shirts, baseball caps, and summer dresses, they are an unassuming group. No sequins, no bugle beads. No ramrod dancer’s posture or louche way of walking. On the street, you wouldn’t notice them. Then they put on their tap shoes.

Michela Marino Lerman, the host of the jam and tap dancer extraordinaire, calls out a name and asks, “You got your shoes on?” ...

Read the rest of the essay here

Lunch at El Quijote

Starting this week, I'm trying my hand at a weekly column over at Metro NY on any and all things New York City. For my first essay, it's lunchtime at El Quijote.

Read the piece at Metro here



Lunchtime at El Quijote is a quiet affair. Classical music plays overhead, a series of waltzes, giving you space to hear yourself think. Patrons are gray-haired, hushed, some of them in singles, sitting with white napkins on their laps, not reading, just sitting. No one, not even once, takes out a cell phone. They sit without anxiety, self-contained.

The waiter, dressed in his admiral's jacket, glides silently among the tables, bearing platters of meat and fish, cocktails, and salads. Bread arrives in a wire basket adorned with a paper doily.

At the far end of the dining room, mounted on a wall painted with sky, a group of windmills slowly turn. The dreary ceiling, scalloped in stucco, brazenly shows its age, untroubled by the dark spots and cracks. Dim chandeliers hang by threads. The oxblood booths wear their frayed shoulders with a shrug of acceptance.

"Laugh and the world laughs with you," a man says to his lunch companions, "Cry and you cry alone. Understand? Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry and you cry all by yourself," as if the word "alone" is too difficult to grasp.

No one is talking about real estate or technology. No one is screeching with performative delight.

"The Nazis were very, very strict," says a wild-haired woman as she explains her trip to the Degenerate Art show at the Neue Galerie.

"I had a library of 5,000 books," says another man at another table. "But I had to give them up when I moved. I didn't have the space."

The salad is simple and unpretentious--lettuce, tomato, slices of radish. The pork chops are simple, accompanied by a stark smattering of plain peas. Your mother might have served this to you, back in the dark ages of the 20th century. The simplicity and plainness of the food acts as the opposite of a stimulant. Like the quiet, it calms the nervous system. It is just: pork chop, peas, lettuce, bread. It isn't trying to impress anyone. It has been this way for a hundred years and sees no point in changing. Take me or leave me, it says. I am what I am.

"In some countries, people will eat leftovers for breakfast."

"They're all in Bushwick now, the artists. No more in Manhattan."

Lunchtime at El Quijote is a protective bubble. The urban cymbal crash is kept far away, outside. Time slows down here. You are among the New Yorkers, the old guard, the ones who are awake, not locked to a screen's hypnotizing gaze. They know who they are, like the pork chops on the plate, and have no interest in putting on a show.