Non-Digital Marquees

On Thursday nights, you can walk across town and, if you're lucky, get to see cinema employees climbing ladders to change the movie titles on the non-digital marquees, announcing the Friday openings.





Dark silhouettes against bright marquee lights. Letters piled on the sidewalk or in bins. The sound of plastic and metal sliding across the rails.

Personally, I prefer three-dimensional black letters, like the ones at Cinema Village, to the plastic sheets at Loews Village 7, but I like them all better than fast-moving digitized text.

Village East, too, still has 3-D physical letters. Jackson Triplex isn't digital. Neither is Park Slope's Pavilion or Cobble Hill Cinemas. Tell us, where else can we still catch this vanishing piece of New York?

Albanese Meats & Poultry

Yesterday I wrote about the transformation of Elizabeth Street and mentioned that I am worried about sole survivor, Albanese Meats & Poultry shop. The last time I visited Elizabeth, one year ago, the shop's windows were full of signs and memorabilia, and the shop was cluttered with photographs, papers, and other signs of busy life.

Today the place is spare and uncluttered. It was closed when I went by and the only indication that Mr. Albanese was still at work was the calendar on the wall, turned to the current month.


October 2007


October 2008

Maybe he's just neatening up the place. Maybe it's a sign of vanishing. Either way, it got me in a sentimental mood (not hard to do).

For those who remember, or want to remember, the way Elizabeth once was, the following is excerpted from a journal I kept in 1996. Bear in mind, I was younger then and more exuberant, and the city was a more enlivening place.



1996:
Walking home, I stopped at LaRosa's on Elizabeth Street. I can’t resist that smell of hot baking bread that fills the neighborhood. I stepped inside. The bakers were pulling hot loaves from the oven. I bought one for 50 cents, broke it open on the street, and ate it with my bare hands. The soft, white bread was like warm milk.

I passed Bella’s Luncheonette where you can eat cheeseburgers at the window and maybe see Jim Jarmusch walk by.

Inside Albanese Meats, the butcher was working on a slab of beef, carefully trimming the fat. He stepped out to the street for a moment, the blood on his apron, knife shining in his hand. He looked around as if expecting someone, then nodded to me, and went back inside.

I went in and asked, "Is that veal you're working on?"
"You got a taste for veal?" he asked me.
"Yes," I said, "How much for one good cutlet?"
"About four dollars. You want one? I'll get you a good cut.”

He went to the back and took out a bag labeled HIPS and a long sharp knife. He tried out the knife on the HIPS before going back to the veal. His white-haired mother sat watching the television. She smiled at me. There was a poster-size photo of her hanging on the wall with a banner that said: Happy 90th Birthday.


Albanese mother and son

I watched the butcher work on the veal. It was still practically a calf. He slapped it with his palm, as if to wake it, then trimmed off a nice pink slice.

"Good?" he asked, holding it up to the watery light.
"Very good," I said, watching him wrap the cutlet in butcher paper and put it in a bag.

I was so happy, carrying home what seemed to be the most beautiful piece of veal in the world. I put on Mario Lanza, baked a potato, and fried up the cutlet dipped in egg and bread crumbs. It was possibly the most amazing piece of food I have ever put into my mouth.

Back to 2008:

• Watch Moe cut meat in this film by Val Albanese
• See pictures of Moe on cakehole's flickr
• When the authentic is gone, there will be only the simulacra
  

*Everyday Chatter

Houston Street is getting benches. Who wants to sit in the middle of Houston Street? Same people who sit in the middle of 9th Ave I suppose. If you build it (and add WiFi), they will come:


Tonight the public is invited to a Chelsea Community Meeting at St. Paul's Church, 7 pm, to welcome the Gem Hotel (no comment). The enticing part is there will be a presentation on the history of Chelsea, complete with some great vintage photos, including images like this one of the old Allerton:


Our cuddliest Slacktivist, John Penley, is leaving NYC for "parts unknown." Now what will we do? [EVG]

Remembering the magical Martinka. [BBoys]

How marketing concepts become sickening realities: Please let's not nickname West Harlem "ViVa." [NYB]

As an addendum to today's Elizabeth Street post, another shot of the 290 Mulberry scaffolding signage, because the sky is not falling, right?

Elizabeth Street

Some years ago, when Elizabeth Street began to change, I began to avoid it. But before then, it was possibly my favorite street in the city. I used to go out of my way just to walk on it. Now I make sure not to go near it. Recently, I made the terrible mistake of visiting.

Today Elizabeth is another street altogether. She's the plain, approachable girl who went on Extreme Makeover and came out wrapped in a shiny, plastic, Barbie-doll skin. You don't recognize her, searching in vain for some familiar feature that will bring her back to you.

On her polished, high-maintenance storefronts, she proclaims herself "Trust Fund Baby" and "La Petite Princesse."



This transformation began about 10 years ago. In 1998 Bella's Luncheonette became Cafe Habana. And then a shop opened. It blared ear-splitting music and expelled obnoxious people who stepped over the Italian ladies peeling potatoes on the sidewalk.

I was nervous then, but had no idea just how complete the change would be--and how little time it would take. It's the totality that troubles me, though it pleases the people on today's Elizabeth. They smile and shop, stop and chat, loving this made-over, plasticine swan.

This is Nolita now. An illustration on the scaffolding around the new 290 Mulberry informs us that "Elizabeth Street Is Da Bomb."



The only protest (if this can be called protest) against the endlessly encroaching, luxurious sameness comes from a man selling junk on the street. He sets up rows of little milk cartons and, with a golf club, drives them into the netted scaffolding of "beautiful, bespoke" 211 Elizabeth.



But the old girl is gone.

LaRosa & Son bakery is now a high-end home decor store. Habana attracts a crowd of hipsters and Europeans. The mysterious candle house is a mansion. The Italian ladies who used to peel potatoes have vanished. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Albanese Meats & Poultry is the sole remaining old-timer on this stretch.



I'm worried about Moe Albanese and his store. It looks emptier than it used to, and it wasn't open when I went by in mid-afternoon.

Elizabeth Street will break your heart. Don't go there. Unless you need a nice piece of veal. But when Albanese is gone, there will be not a single scrap left of what was. And I don't expect the octogenarian butcher will last much longer here.

to be continued tomorrow...

Tribal Soundz

Tribal Soundz, the music shop on East 6th Street that sold instruments from around the world, has vanished.



A benefit concert was held for them last year when they were about to lose their space "to the real estate bastards who seem to own NYC," according to voodoojive. So I'm not sure when it closed. I just walked by and noticed it was empty and shuttered.

A shop girl recalls her days selling dumbeks and djembes at the shop, saying, "I used to fill in for the digeridoo teacher and the jaw harp teacher... East Village was my spot, I made friends with every sitar player on Indian Row."

Indian Row itself is vanishing, too. Little by little, this block is being nibbled away by demolition and new, non-Indian restaurants. How long before the sound of sitars is gone?

*Everyday Chatter

Remember the recent plan to stick a condo on top of the Cathedral of the Holy Virgin Protection in the EV? It's not happening. Someone at the church told someone at CB3: "the whole plan is CANCELLED...CB opposed the new plan and were looking to landmark it. Church does not want landmarking and were trying to get this in place before new zoning...hallelujah!"

The new Maysles Cinema in Harlem is offering a selection of documentaries about rent control. View their calendar here.

Is the Hunter College School of Social Work good for East Harlem as it demolishes small businesses for its new building? [Times]

Watch movies and more about the decline of manufacturing in New York City--a decline that makes the city more vulnerable to economic instability. [13]

From the VNY Flickr Pool, thanks to Roaring Twenties, a pretty amazing ghost sign from some subway: Hats Cleaned!


As a 100-year-old Villager passes away, so does the memory of cows wandering Washington Square. [Villager]

Check out Runnin' Scared's new feature "The Crap Archives," offering "the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets." Nice. [Voice]

Enjoy some "lobstah" with BaHa. [SE]

Yuppie scum graffiti appears on Thompson LES. [BBoogie]

Christine's

What's going on with Christine's Polish restaurant in the East Village?

A reader wrote in to say: "Christine's, at 208 First Avenue, closed recently. My friends and I ate there the very first day it opened back in the long-ago summer of 1982, and I can still clearly remember how the addition of just a new Polish coffee shop to what was then a really hardcore neighborhood could bring about such a sense of euphoria and excitement. (Little did we know what lurked ahead.) And now it's gone, leaving only Neptune (formerly KK's) on that stretch of upper First to carry the pierogi and blintzes torch."



But is Christine's shuttered for good? I went for breakfast at Neptune's and the waitress told me it's been "closed, like, forever." How long? "About two weeks," she clarified.

A photo on flickr shows it gated in mid-September with signs reading, "Closed for Renovations." But those signs are gone now, the place is empty and kind of trashed, with no sign of renovations in progress. So what's the story? Have we lost, along with Teresa's, one of the last of our Polish coffee shops?



From Allen Ginsberg's "Charnel Ground":

...Meanwhile the upstairs meth head shot cocaine & yowled up
and down
East 12th Street, kicked out of Christine’s Eatery till police cornered
him, ‘top a hot iron steamhole
near Stuyvesant Town Avenue A telephone booth calling his deaf
mother – sirens speed the way to Bellevue –
past whispering grass crack salesman jittering in circles on East 10th
Street’s
southwest corner where art yuppies come out of the overpriced Japanese
Sushi Bar -- & they poured salt into potato soup heart failure
vats at KK’s Polish restaurant...