*Everyday Chatter

More Signs of the Yunnipocalypse:
-Village shop successfully stands strong against Chocolate Tsunami
-Viva Chuck!
-West Broadway is over.
-Thor covers Gordon's Novelty shop with a faux facade, "so we can at least pretend that we are not in deep recession." Reminds me of what they did in the Bronx during the last economic crisis. Remember the urban blight decals?

photo source

More on the sad closure of the Oscar Wilde LGBT bookshop. [NYT]

Poor old 1551 Broadway, where once was HoJo's and the Gaiety, American Eagle has landed on you. [Curbed]

City Room digs up a NYC character, a lady who sells Civil Service books--and may be going under. [CR]

Remembering 172 Stanton, one of the uglier days in LES history. [EVG]

Before and after at Paul's Boutique. [BBoogie]

Nearly ever other window in this block of University between 9th and 10th looks like this:

Chelsea Still Rising

The new view of West Chelsea, as glass boxes grip the High Line, accompanied by Armani billboards in matching shades of icy glacial blue. This scene, with crane slicing the sky, epitomizes our present day.



The High Line, like a suddenly wet watering hole in a dry desert, has attracted condo and hotel towers like thirsty rhinos to its shores. They push and shoulder each other out of the way, crushing whatever gets underfoot.

And the developers demolishing the most ancient of meatpacking plants insist the High Line is a hardship, a detriment to construction. Tell that to the rest of the builders who just keep on building.

Nearby, 456 West 19th has been topped with a rollercoaster rail. No, that's just more undulation.



Also on the rise, HL 23 with its misshapen foldy bits beginning to recline over the High Line. Here its crane casts a shadow onto "Highline 519." And what is that below, a brick tenement with tin cornice? Shouldn't that have been demolished by now?



HL 23's "Sales Tin" features a quote from the building's architect from the following statement:

"In the early 1980s, I lived in New York City and spent a great deal of time in far West Chelsea, imagining and even drawing designs for buildings that would celebrate its gritty, industrial romance and the beautifully decaying form of the High Line. I cannot overstate how satisfying it is for our firm to create a formally challenging, artistic project here more than 25 years later, addressing a practical demand for the people who will live inside the building and a local demand for the public who will experience it from the sidewalks, the High Line, and from other buildings throughout the West Chelsea arts district."



There's almost nothing left of that romantic grit and industry, that beautiful decay. Not even a yunnipocalypse can save it now. There's too much glass. Too much stainless steel. We'll be shielding our eyes from their glare for eons to come.

But with everybody broke, will anybody actually be living here? Or will West Chelsea become nothing more than a decaying ghost town made of glass and blindingly bright ideas?

See more photos here

Further reading:
Glassing West Chelsea
Chelsea Towers West (Soylent Green)
The Condo Shall Inherit the Earth (Sylvia Plath)

*Everyday Chatter

More Signs of the Yunnipocalypse:
-Condo buyers abandon ship
-Restaurants kiss ass
-Landlords cry cataclysm!
-Bloomberg creates welfare program for Wall St's unfortunates
-"Madison Avenue...pockmarked with vacancies as retailers flee."

Chelsea Hotel residents prove there's still some crazy spirit left in this town. [NYO]

Memorial for Peeler Man this Saturday. [Gothamist]

The Holland Bar is open, after shuttering some months ago. [Grub]

In more sad diner news, the Miss Williamsburg after the fire. [Brownstoner]

Updike on New York: Uninhabitable. [NYT]

Is the city being attacked by UFOs, groundhogs, and Mrs. Butterworth? [Gothamist]

Vanishing Store Fronts

At long last, I finally got over to see Jim and Karla Murray's show "Counter/Culture: The Disappearing Face of Brooklyn's Storefronts" at the Brooklyn Historical Society. The exhibit is up until March, but if you can't make it there in time, you can bring the Murrays' important work home with you.



Their book Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York is now available. A $65 hardcover, it's an investment and well worth it--the book is a big, fat collection of gorgeous color photographs from the vanishing face of New York City.

I email-interviewed Jim and Karla about their work and asked them what they look for in a choice storefront. "We try to photograph storefronts that have a certain character due to their age," they said, "Old neon signs always attract us as well as hand-painted signs and interesting fonts that we haven't seen before."



Which vanished storefronts do they miss the most? "We definitely miss Katy's Candy that was in Bedford-Stuyvesant. The Everything Store and D. D'Auria & Sons Pork Store in the Bronx and Kurowycky & Sons in our own neighborhood of the East Village."

Many more of the shops and scenes in the Murrays' book have vanished--the Astroland rocket is gone from its Coney Island snackbar perch, Love Saves the Day has shuttered, and look at their 2001 shot below of 1st Avenue between 7th and 8th Streets in the East Village. These businesses had been there for decades. But today none of it is the same--and most of it vanished in just the past few years.


from Jim and Karla's flickr

For comparison, I took the snapshot below: Kurowycky Meats is now Kim's, Cosmo's Packages is for rent after being gutted for a cafe, the beauty parlor is a Ruben's Empanadas, and the International Bar was shuttered then reopened under new management.

Not bad. It could have been worse, considering. And that just happens to be a $110,675 Mercedes G55 SUV parked at the curb.


from my flickr

• See more of Jim and Karla's work on their flickr page
• Check out their blog

*Everyday Chatter

In more Signs of the Yunnipocalypse:
-Starbucks offers value meals
-New York's rent regulation laws now fortified!
-Puppies are losing their cachet
-Shea Stadium may not be named after a bank
-Doubledown, zines for Wall St's elite, runs out of money

But the condos keep coming. Shield your eyes, drivers! 245 10th Avenue has been skinned and it's ready to burn out your retinas:


In sad news, my favorite street eccentric, Joe Ades the Peeler Man, has passed away. [NYT] Enjoy an ode to Ades, plus a video and a Villager salute.

In more sad news: Oscar Wilde, the oldest LGBT bookshop, is shuttering after 41 years. [CR]

LCD Soundsystem says "New York, I love you, but you're bringing me down." Watch the video.

Andy Schwartz visits the vanished Soundscape. [Furious]

That whole crazy Haley Joel Penistrator thing has made it into print. [EVG]

Cheyenne Forlorn

A trip to the recently stripped Cheyenne found a forlorn sight.



Getting ready to leave our city for Alabama, the diner's signage has been carted away. Some of the windows and glass brick are covered with plywood. Many of the exterior details have been inexplicably peeled off. (By those renegade wall pluckers?)

The swivel stools are decapitated and the sparkly vinyl booths have vanished.



As I walked away, most likely for the last time, another Cheyenne mourner pressed his face to the glass, by the wrecker sign, perhaps remembering big bison burgers and platefuls of souvlaki, how the place used to glitter with grease and life.



See all my Cheyenne pics

*Everyday Chatter

P&G signage carnage? A tipster writes in: "I work across the street from P&G, and I am sorry to announce that there are people removing the signage as we speak..." As reported here in December, they planned to stick around until February. Well, it's February. And as the bartender told me, the sign may be too brittle to take to the new place. Somebody get up there with a camera asap!


Should we worry about the death of shopping malls? [NYT]

Cool map of Starbucks' rise and its relationship to gentrification in New York City. [NYT]

Chelsea Hotel says "ta-ta!" to another manager. [LWL]

The Holiday Cocktail Lounge is expanding its hours--and serving hot wings to football fans. [DBTH]

A RE broker's dreams never die--check out what one imagines for the corner of Lafayette and Great Jones. [EVG]