*Everyday Chatter

New Yankee Stadium a "Monument to Greed," says Joel Sherman at the Post. It's beautiful "in the way that a woman who went to the world's best plastic surgeon might be beautiful. It is supposed to remind you of the previous incarnation, and ends up feeling artificial and overdone." [NYP]

Topshop's neighbors say it with anti-consumer-madness signage. [Racked]

Kinky Jews to hold Kinky Seder in Brooklyn. [RS]

EV besieged by annoying church chimes. [EVG]

This video of talking New York street "furniture," like pay phones and newspaper dispensers, is adorable, indeed. [via Gothamist]

Car-vator building now comes with canoes? ...for getting in and out of your condo during global warming:

Lost Redbirds

Retired, extinct, dropped off the coast of the Carolinas to create rusty, unnatural reefs, New York City's Redbirds have vanished from the subway's tracks. Or have they?

On my trip to Flushing, while crossing the pedestrian bridge over to the park, I spotted this small flock. Just four or five cars sitting in the track yard alongside an expanse of silvery new trains.



Were they left here at the end of the last Redbird run? Are they hiding, afraid of the watery plunge?

*Everyday Chatter

I guess people in Chelsea just aren't buying fine custom kitchens like they used to. This place just shut down:


Some good news for Coney (?): More freaks. [Gothamist]

How would you improve New York? [RS]

The affluent and/or aspirational are abandoning their trendy accessory pets in droves. [CR]

Enforced voyeurism tops a former synagogue on 7th Street. [EVG]

A regretful Wall Street programmer recalls the games traders played: "they marched into the men’s room and stood at the wall opposite the urinals. Dropping their pants, they bet $100 on who could train his stream the longest on the urinals across the lavatory. As their hydraulic pressure waned, the three traders waddled, pants at their ankles, across the floor, desperately trying to keep their pee on target. This is what $2 million of bonus can do to grown men." [NYM]

Panorama: Part 3

Panorama Part 3: A Walk Up the East River

After viewing New York Paleotectonic and the Sanborn book of Brooklyn, it was time for the moment I'd been waiting for. David Strauss took me out for a walk on the Panorama itself.

We went through a secret door and down a set of stairs into a tiny bunker where we both removed our shoes and slipped on a pair of blue hospital booties. David opened a hatch onto the Panorama. It was like looking into an alternate universe. The tiny city blushed in the lights as I climbed towards it, emerging like a giant from the depths of the Atlantic Ocean.


Coney Island

"Try to walk lightly," David told me as we crossed the New York Bight and Ambrose Channel, dodging tankers and oceanliners, toys spilled at our feet.

"Do you ever have Godzilla fantasies out here?" I asked.

"More like Godzilla fears," he said, "Like I'm going to trip and flatten the Statue of Liberty."

We crouched down beside Coney Island, a flea circus with its miniature Wonder Wheel and stringy tangle of Cyclone, framing what used to be--the booths and rides of Astroland. All gone now. These pieces will be slated for removal.


Williamsburg Bridge, looking south

We headed up into the harbor, passing hilly Staten Island and making it past Lady Liberty without incident. She was no taller than a can of Coke. David invited me to follow him up the East River. I felt my heart racing with anxiety, as if I would somehow lose control of myself and topple into Brooklyn, taking Downtown Manhattan down with me, inadvertently realizing a New York Apocalypse fantasy in miniature.

But I managed to step gingerly over the bridges (made of brass, painted white) and came to stand with ease between the Williamsburg Bridge and Roosevelt Island, where even a tiny passenger tram hangs on a filament.

Standing so high above the city is a bit dizzying. There is the fizz of altitude. It is hard to take it all in, the vast expanse of it, your own physical immensity in the city's midst. You feel large and small at the same time. Monosyllables like "wow" tumble out of your mouth. It takes a moment to get your bearings.


East Village

I looked down at my neighborhood, frozen in time at 1992. I have not yet walked those streets 5,000 times. There's Teresa's, Leshko's, and Kurowycky Meats. The St. Marks Theater is still playing double-feature films. Stefan is pouring drinks at the Holiday Lounge. Allen Ginsberg is picking out bruised fruits at Prana Foods.

In the above photo, the green corner of Tompkins Square Park is visible at bottom left, while St. Marks Church can be seen in the upper right, near the slant of Stuyvesant. Though much has changed in terms of people and places, structurally, it is largely the same today.

Below, however, is a piece of the Lower East Side as you will never see it again. Here, framed by Houston on the right and Delancey on the far left, you can see Katz's Deli as a small gray rectangle in the uppermost right corner. How many of these buildings will be removed, yanked out like teeth, to make room for the massive mini Thors and Blues?


Lower East Side

Here is Astor Place and Cooper Square (that green triangle is between 6th and 7th) as they were without Gwathmey's green monster or the Cooper Square Hotel. The old Cooper Union building is a flat rectangle, without the metallic hive to come. There is not a single Starbucks here. The Bowery begins, going south into a world where nothing tall, glass, or metallic will be found.


Astor Pl. and Cooper Sq. at top

The museum is counting on money from developers wanting to add their new buildings to the Panorama, so I asked David how the museum will handle requests to make those miniatures in something resembling glass, the material that has radically changed the look of the city.

He told me, "We want to keep the structure in style with the Panorama itself. So glass is a real question mark. How accurate can you make it without it completely losing its character?"


Midtown

There is no glass as of yet in the high-rises of the Panorama. They still look like the buildings of yesterday. Steel and stone. The renovation has officially begun with the replacement of Shea Stadium. More is to come. It will be done piece by piece, in situ, instead of in one fell swoop.

Changing it this way, said David, "leads to incongruencies. Citi-Field never co-existed with the Twin Towers. But this period of flux perfectly exemplifies the city itself, which is always in a state of flux."

If you want to see the city as it was, visit the Panorama soon. It is a rare and brilliant artifact, a memory itself, perfectly rendered. And like the real city, piece by piece, it is already vanishing.

See all my photos of the Panorama here

*Everyday Chatter

Enjoy the visual and cultural frisson of Amish and Hasidic mingling in Crown Heights. [Gothamist]

While in NYC we have the Unemployment Olympics, where the unemployed playfully toss fax machines, in London bankers go to work in casual clothes to avoid being hit by fax machines hurled by 4,000 very angry protesters. [yahoo]

On the LES, local, multi-generation butcher Jeffrey Ruhalter (of Essex Market) is giving away free steak dinners to the unemployed. [CR]

Get the inside scoop on the East Village's hottest new bar: Whiskey Dick's. [EVG]

Tell me this Bennigan's in the EV is another April Fool's joke. [HG]

The Chelsea Enclave ("Fortress of Solitude and Condos") is getting bricked and windowed:


Listen to an interview with New York street photographer Helen Levitt, who passed away this week at 95. [NPR]

Rail fans and tunnel rats, take a trip through the LIRR's mysterious Bay Ridge Branch. [FNY]

Apparently, Union Square is for sale. [WSP]

Don't forget to buy your Easter peeps at Economy Candy. [WL]

Panorama: Part 2

Panorama Part 2: Brooklyn in a Book

In the same room where New York Paleotectonic is kept, David Strauss took out a Sanborn book, a large collection of city maps originally created for fire insurance risk assessment. They were also used by the Raymond Lester Company when building the Panorama of the City of New York back in the 1960s.

The one I got to look at was a piece of Brooklyn. Everything in the book was drawn with care, even the ornate frontispiece. (The whole thing reminded me of something Chris Ware would create.)


Sanborn Book of Brooklyn, Vol. 6

These Sanborn books provided the Panorama builders with an exact template for every structure in the city--and its scale. They were used again in the 1992 renovation. Here you can see where changes were added, the original inked squares covered over with new squares of paper glued down with each demolition and construction.

The same books--from 1926--will be used in the future renovation as the planners compare them to city documents for the closest accuracy.


4th Avenue and 12th Street, Brooklyn

David and I looked over 4th Avenue, the dividing line between Park Slope and Gowanus, an avenue that has changed tremendously in just the past few years. But here, in these venerable books, there are no glass condo towers. Yet.

A cinema is entitled "Moving Pictures." Warehouses and factories state their business: Billiards Table Manufacturing, Syrup Mixing Company, Diesel Locomotives.

What will these books look like when the next renovation is complete? I worry they'll be so full of pasted-in papers, their bindings might break.


Moving Pictures & Van Brunt P.O.

Stay tuned...
Next! The final installment. Panorama Part 3--A Walk Up the East River

Panorama: Part 1

Panorama Part 1: New York Paleotectonic

What excites me most about the Queens Museum of Art's "Panorama of the City of New York" is that it is an exact replica of the city as it was in 1992. As buildings have fallen and risen, the Panorama has stayed the same. It's the city I fell in love with and it's the city I miss. But that's changing now.

As the Times recently reported, the museum is raising much-needed funds by offering real estate on the Panorama. You can adopt buildings and other structures, thereby making a donation toward maintenance of the Panorama--and its next renovation.

Wanna buy the Brooklyn Bridge? Now you can.


David Strauss & "New York Paleotectonic"

Ever since I first visited it, I've dreamed about seeing the Panorama up close and behind the scenes. The Adopt-a-Building program gave me the excuse I needed and I finally got my chance. It was, in a sense, a chance to say goodbye to the lost city.

David Strauss, director of the museum's external affairs, was my generous and gracious guide. First, in the administrative offices, he showed me something I'd long imagined: The final resting place where removed Panorama pieces are interred. I'd pictured a wooden case, the buildings arranged like trophies on the shelves, but the truth is very different.

Pieces removed in the 1992 update--lost warehouses, single-family homes, tenements, piers, and ships--are arranged behind Plexiglas in a piece of art entitled "New York Paleotectonic, 1964-95" by Richard Plunz and members of his design studio.


"New York Paleotectonic"

The pieces are arranged like strata beneath the earth, with houses up top and waterfront elements on the bottom left.

In an essay you can read here, Plunz and his team write about the art project and its rationale. They critique the Panorama's creator, Robert Moses: "His panorama of New York City is more than a historical monument to his megalomania. Now its revision records the final consequences of the Moses vision for our nation's metropolis. The geology of the panorama's deconstruction indicates just how much was lost."


close-up of the lost pieces

It was a thrill to look at the Panorama buildings up close. In the jumble of vanished New York, you can see U-shaped buildings jigsaw-cut from wood and hand-stenciled with tiny windows. There are odd churches. A handful of water towers. Tenements made of wooden slivers glued together like finger sandwiches.


building with water tower & neighboring tenements

People lived here. Worked here. They bathed in water from those towers. They labored on those piers, or typed countless letters behind the office windows. They kissed on the rooftops. Played music on the rooftops. Sometimes, they jumped off.

Here is the lost riverfront. As the creators describe it in their essay, "first the ships stopped coming, having new destinies which are the container ports of urban peripheries. Then the piers disappeared, slowly eroding, collapsing, burning."


ships, warehouses, & piers of the vanished ports

I asked David where will the lost city of today be stored? He's not sure. So far, only one structure has been recently removed: Shea Stadium has been replaced by Citi-Field. So, while the old ballpark is a pile of rubble, in the museum its miniature is currently being prepared for a special place among the World's Fair artifacts.

Adopt-a-Building is the first phase of the Panorama's "once-a-generation renovation," David told me. So far the responses have been strong. People from all over the world want a piece of the city. In exchange for adopting, you get a deed with your name on it and the address of your building. It may be the only way many of us buy real estate here.

As for the Brooklyn Bridge, it'll cost you $10,000. Not a bad deal. And saving the Panorama--even with its inevitable changes--is a good cause. Click here for info on making an adoption.


Stay tuned...
Next! Panorama Part 2--Brooklyn in a Book
Followed by! Panorama Part 3--A Walk Up the East River