Armando's

My last (and first) meal at Armando's 72-year-old restaurant in Brooklyn Heights was enjoyed this weekend beneath a water-damaged portrait of Marilyn Monroe, one-time habitue of the place, back when Arthur Miller lived in the neighborhood and the two were falling in love. The Brooklyn Dodgers drank here. So did Norman Mailer. But beginning in the mid-1990s, with an influx of chain stores to Montague Street, Armando's began to feel the pinch.


more photos @ my flickr

It was quiet at lunchtime, only a few tables occupied. At the bar, the regulars gathered for last drinks. "Where ya going?" they asked each other, wondering what the new hangout would be after Armando's is gone. Shrugs all around. Mancuso's? Harry's? "That's long gone, didn't you know." Callahan's? Joe's? "You can all come up to my apartment!" Laughter.



The place was closing at 9:00, the free drinks would start at 6:00, they said, but keep it quiet. Someone wisecracked, "I swear to God, if a stranger comes in here for free drinks, I'll break his arms." More laughter. Hugs and kisses as familiar faces came and went. They exchanged phone numbers. "Call me," they said, "Let's stay in touch. We'll have lunch." But where? Armando's is gone and only the chain stores and the fast-food joints will remain.

2 West Side Diners

The New York Times reports that the Market Diner will reopen--not as a high-rise condo and not as a French bistro, but as a diner. This is wonderful news for our ever-depleting stock of once-copious West Side diners. It's been bought by the Greek owners of the Cosmic Diner on Eighth Avenue and 52nd Street, who say they will make it more upscale, but how upscale can it be? Hopefully it won't go the way of the Empire.

According to Agilitynut and Diner City, the Market was built in the 1960s by DeRaffele, one of the last remaining manufacturers of prefab diners. A hangout for Frank Sinatra and Hell's Kitchen gang the Westies, it's been closed since 2006.


1972 photo by Thorney Lieberman

At its spot on 11th and 43rd, the Market is scheduled to open in a couple of months. In the meantime, you can continue to enjoy the Cheyenne Diner at 9th Ave and 33rd St, a Paramount dating to about 1940.


more photos @ my flickr

The Cheyenne features Greek food and bison burgers--and booths upholstered in sparkly metallic red and silver vinyl.



It also has a whole Native American motif to enjoy.

• New York Diners at ForgottenNY
• The Market Diner in the Times

*Everyday Chatter

The scaffolding is off Bigelow and it's back to looking ever so lovely:


The Minetta Tavern is selling--and going from authentic Italian-American to faux-French in the hands of Mr. Pastis. [Eater]

The unofficial shopping mall that is Soho may become the official Soho Mall. [Villager]

Don't even try loitering, i.e. sitting on a bench, in the new cleaned-up Washington Square Park. It's just for looking at, so keep it moving. [Curbed]

Goodbye lobster, hello pickle: Armando's will be replaced by a fast-food chain. Go Sunday to say goodbye. [Bklyn Paper]

Fulton Fish Market goes upscale green market--I guess all those non-wealthy residents who are losing their Pathmark to a luxury tower will get to enjoy some primo Dumpster diving. [Racked]

Save St. Brigid's--here's another chance to wear your Irish anti-gentrification attitude, tomorrow at Webster Hall.

Stuyvesant Curiosity Shop

The facade teardown of the former Galaxy bodega on the northwest corner of 10th St. and 3rd Ave. has revealed a lovely cast-iron column and other architectural details.



It's also revealed bits of signage from the Stuyvesant Curiosity Shop which long ago occupied the space. That word at the bottom is definitely GUNS:






Here's a detail from an old Con Edison photo that probably dates to the 1940s or 50s. Here you can see, as in the above photo, the address number 48 and the word TOOLS painted down the side:



Here is Berenice Abbott's 1937 photo of the place. You can see that the corner column was buried even back then:


Photo: Berenice Abbott via NYPL

I don't know much about the Stuyvesant Curiosity Shop other than that it was a pawnshop and one of those oddball places that lived quite well in the shadow of the Third Avenue El. Next to it was another pawn shop and Sig. Klein's Fat Men's Shop. And next to that was Sipmeier's Restaurant for ladies and gents.

The city planners had high hopes for Third Avenue when they tore down the El, imagining a pleasure promenade. What they got were a lot of nail salons--and here, at #48, is coming one more.

Florent

After weeks of speculation, it's official: Florent will close on June 29. Confirmed by The New York Post, the closure comes on Gay Pride Day, though Florent's lease ends on March 31, at which time rent on the spot will jump from $6,000 to $50,000 per month.


all pics: my flickr

Many credit, or blame, Florent Morellet for launching the current super-luxurification of the Meatpacking District. It's a distinction he gives to himself, saying in The Times that his diner brought "the first bit of gentrification to the area.'' And Gawker, in their satirical history of Meatpacking, calls it "the root of the poisonous tree from whence springs all evil."

But it wasn't until Keith McNally's faux-Parisian Pastis moved in, almost 15 years after Florent, that the current slaughter of Meatpacking ensued.

During those 15 years, blood and other bodily fluids continued to flow freely on the cobblestoned streets. Meatpacking in the 1990s still had Jackie 60, the Clit Club, the Vault, the Lure...but it was vulnerable. Metromix put it aptly (if a bit transphobically) when they wrote, "If it weren't for Pastis, the Meatpacking District would still be an abandoned line of butcher shops littered with friendly trannies instead of today's trendy meet-market littered with, well, tranny lookalikes."



It is appropriate that Florent will close on Gay Pride since it was born from gay defiance, springing from the SM leather bars that once graced (and greased) the formerly gritty neighborhood. “Maybe it was 1978 or ’79 or ’81," Morellet told The Villager, "and I was coming from the Anvil, or the Mineshaft, or someplace...It was morning, and I went into the R&L diner for breakfast. I immediately loved the place.” In 1984, when the R&L went up for sale, Morellet bought it, leaving the old diner intact because he liked its Hopperesque feeling.


a recent note from Florent: is he hopeful when he writes, "real estate goes down, nyc survives"?

Saying goodbye to Florent most likely means saying goodbye to the R&L as well. Who but someone Furstenberg-sized can afford $50,000 per month? It was the site of a speakeasy in the 1920s and became the R&L in the 1930s. A place where longshoremen and meatpackers would dine at night, in the 1950s they called it "Eatem and Beatem," according to the Chicago Sun, "because they would zip in and out around 3 in the morning." The chrome sign still stands as much of the original R&L remains.



Whatever your feelings about Florent and its place in history, it's worth taking a visit if only because it is a part of New York history--a part that will soon be wiped off the map.


"no hard feelings"

Christopher's End

I was walking down Christopher Street recently when a for rent sign on the Badlands Adult Video emporium stopped me. When I asked the guy inside when they were closing, he only said, "When someone takes it, we will close." Any takers? At $40,000 a month, it's been up for grabs for a while now. Last summer, Eater talked with the broker, who urged prospects to "Do your part in the continuing gentrification of the West-Side Hwy and open a damn restaurant/ nightclub here already.”



Before someone grants his wish, take a walk to the very end of Christopher. It still feels like New York City out there. You'll pass Meier & Oelhaf Marine Repair, with its windows made from ship's portals (also for rent), and The Dugout, where you can enjoy beer in plastic cups and the company of friendly bears.



Badlands is in the Weehawken Street Historic District (click that link for lots of details). The building was built in 1937 and housed Harry's Men's Shop for seamen's supplies until the 1960s-70s, when it was claimed by gay men (insert seamen/semen joke here).

The end of Christopher was once a leatherman's paradise. The wooden shack at 392 West Street dates to 1834 and is the last remaining structure from the Weehawken Market. It also later became the home of gay bars and next door to it was the Ramrod, mecca of hardcore leather and much featured in the Pacino film Cruising. (Soon after the film's release, a man fired an automatic weapon on the Ramrod, killing two and wounding six.)



Like San Francisco, gay enclaves seem to spring up wherever sailors come to port. The Keller Hotel, once a home for sailors, where "ghosts of the past breathe deeply," stands like a fading oceanliner above the Hudson. It hosted a leather bar where disco was born. It went up for landmarking last year and there's rumor it's getting a surreptitious luxury remodeling.

Like the other vanished gay leather land, the Meatpacking District, there's not so much cruising at the end of Christopher anymore--unless you count rollerblading as cruising--but you can still get a taste of the real city, a gritty, desolate, riverside taste of it. Like everything else in town, it's a rare feeling that is fading fast.

• View more pics on my flickr

• ForgottenNY walks on West Street
• Bridge and Tunnel walks on Christopher

*Everyday Chatter

Extell giddily gears up for World War III as they market brand-new, 21st-century "prewar" condos. [Times]

Defunct Chelsea cabaret Helen's, nee Judy's, loses its cool purple entranceway to become a bar/restaurant called Ate Ave. Now hiring:


A burlesque roller-rink in the old Childs at Coney Island? It really is a dream come true! (It's also just a temporary stop on the way to something no doubt nightmarish.) [Curbed]

The rezoning of Harlem has pro-gentrifiers celebrating and defensive. [Curbed] But one brave man calls Amanda Burden (Bloomberg's city planner) "a rich, rich, rich horrible person." [Gothamist]

More Manhattan Apocalypse excitement--Columbia's aggressive redevelopment will end up underwater someday. Something to look forward to. [Gotham Gazette]

The East Village/LES is one of the loudest, most obnoxious neighborhoods in the city, and we lament the peace and quiet of pre-gentrification drug deals. [Gothamist]

"[W]here's the real St. Mark's?" asks one graffitist on this Pinkberry plywood. "Dead," comes the reply:


Sad to see banks changing hands? Here's a sort-of ode to dead regional banks. [AMNY]

From the ghost town of Orchard Street, Sammy Gluck, owner and son of G&G International Menswear keeps things alive. [Intothebox]

"Make Manhattan your own." Whose New York is this? Has anybody else noticed that many ads these days sell the city as a personal, individual possession?