Day-O Dead-O

The Art-Moderne storefront on Greenwich Avenue's former Day-O restaurant, the one that preservationists tried in vain to preserve, has officially been confirmed vanished.



It's been hidden behind padlocked, super-secure plywood for some time now, but on a recent walkby, we caught a glimpse inside. There is nothing left of the facade--no more curve and no more chrome. The "historic corner column," however, is now unexposed, as promised. You can see it in the center of this shot of the interior.



Here is what we've lost. 2010:



1987:


from westvillagebob's flickr

1940:

*Everyday Chatter

Incredibly sympathetic letter from the Park Slope Pavilion about the theater's neglected state. [FIPS]

A trademark battle over the Lower East Side--J. Crew gets sued. Now who's going to sue everybody for "The Bowery"? [BB]

Don't miss the 1980s East Village films of Nelson Sullivan. [EVG]

Meet Eddie the Hustler of 1972. [RS]


Lost Galaxy Diner, by SReed

City bans smoking in public parks: "We’re moving towards a totalitarian society," says one councilmember. [NYT]

"Bloomberg's New York is a high-performance town: fit, lean, open-minded, eco-aware, and fond of dawdling at café tables, attending free theater and music performances (paid for by friendly corporations) and eating fancy food at ballparks." Now Bloom York takes "a benevolent but strict approach" to public parks. [CNY]

From Coney Island to Times Square in seconds. [ATZ]

The Munson Diner, long of Hell's Kitchen and moved to the Catskills, is in danger once more. [NYT]

#35's Personal Jane Jacobs

When we last checked in with artist and community activist Sally Young, she was a one-woman force to be reckoned with, struggling to save 35 Cooper Square single-handedly. Recently, over 100 people showed up at a rally for the historic building. I talked to Sally this week to find out more about how the momentum has grown over the years and what's in store for this piece of Lower East Side history.


Sally Young

“I'm really flabbergasted at the amount of interest that has grown over this house," she told me. "I think a lot of people had looked at it for years and, like me, just assumed it must be landmarked.” But the oldest building on Cooper Square, one of the oldest of the Bowery, wasn't protected at all. The 1825 Federal-style house--once the home of Stuyvesants, Beat poets, and artists--became evermore vulnerable when its neighbors were destroyed for the controversial Cooper Square Hotel.


Sally & her students, photo: Louise Millmann

Sally first became interested in #35 in 2006 when she was working on a show called “Art in Odd Places.” She said, “The show was about the block between 5th and 6th Streets being demolished to make way for the Cooper Square Hotel. I put up a display in front of my apartment building that had a big wooden book with photos and journal entries about the destruction of this block. This is when I started researching #35."

The little house became a passion for Sally. She decided to petition the Landmarks Preservation Commission to save it from destruction. She got advice from the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation (GVSHP) and got in touch with the artists who had passed through #35, including poet Diane DiPrima and photographer Billy Name. She spoke to a man who’d spent his childhood in the building. Everything she discovered about #35 went into the petition. “It was a lot of work,” she said, “and then it was rejected.”


Sally's art

But Sally didn’t give up. She joined the burgeoning Bowery Alliance of Neighbors (BAN) and inspired others to help save the little building. Since her first effort at landmarking, she says, “There is this energy out there, a convergence of energy. The rapid changes to the East Village and Bowery area have sped up the process of making people more aware” of the losses faced by the neighborhood. Now, she’s no longer working alone. She is part of a team assisted by the members of BAN, GVSHP, the Historic Districts' Council (HDC), and the Lower East Side Preservation Initiative (LESPI).

“Strength is in numbers with people working together, and helping each other,” says Sally. “This is what's happening now and I think it's great. The support letters we got from so many elected officials is amazing.”


Before the hotel: everystreetinmanhattan's flickr

You can still sign the petition, but as for the house being saved, Sally tells me, “it doesn't look good. The original owners of the Cooper Square Hotel had stated in a public meeting that they wouldn't tear down the little house, and they didn't, but then they foreclosed and the new owners sold the three lots, including the house.” #35 went, with the lot next to it, for $8.5 million.

She wishes that the LPC would do what the community wants done in this case, and not what the new owner wants. “It's sad,” she says, “everything is about money, and in the end, many of these new buildings are not only eyesores, they often fail.”


photo: sally young, 2008

"From the moment when I first laid eyes on 35 Cooper Square, I knew it was the fulfillment of all those fantasies of art and the artist's life, la vie de boheme." --Diane DiPrima

*Everyday Chatter

First they came for Gennaro, now they're going after St. Paddy. The St. Patrick's Day parade will be cut short this year--Bloomie doesn't want to pay for police and sanitation. Maybe this is one issue the Irish and Italians can finally get together on? [IC]

Astor Place before Starbucks. [P&W]

Sheepshead Bay's oldest church is about to have its steeples torn down. [SB]

Will 35 Cooper Square become another NYU dorm? [EVG]

...and what is meant by "mixed use project"? [BB]

A 30-year New Yorker goes back to Iowa, squeezed out by gentrification. [NYT]

Rooting for Little Wisco (and the Packers) in Greenwich Village:

Eater

Gennaro Class War

A class war is about to boil over in Little Italy. Where the old neighborhood meets the new, cultures are clashing over the San Gennaro Feast and it all comes down to a skirmish for the borderlines between the affluent and the working class. For the past few years, the Nolitans have taken aim at the Feast. Today, the Italians of the neighborhood are not taking it lying down. They have begun holding meetings and have formed a Facebook group called "Little Italy and San Gennaro Under ATTACK."


San Gennaro Society, 1940s: John Fratta's flickr

The Facebook group has so far been a place to vent--both grief and rage. Says one group member, "I'd love to go 'window' shopping in all these rats stores, We need a list of the complainants and there local businesses." Says another, "This is a bond that can not be broken and we need to...go forward and never stop against the yuppies. Let's send them packing."

Another asks for calm, saying, "They want us coming in like we are portrayed in movies and T.V. shows. Let them see that people who come from little Italy are a class act we are just as educated as they are if not more."

Others share letters and words of support. The group has 2,000 members so far.


Fratta's Sausage Stand: John Fratta's flickr

San Gennaro Feast boardmember John Fratta has put together a video on youtube. It is a call to arms to Italian-Americans in New York City and all across the country, not only to save the Feast, but to halt anti-Italianism everywhere--he mentions numerous feasts stopped by newcomers in Italian neighborhoods. "We have to come together as a people, once and for all," he says, "and let them know we're gonna fight you from now on. You want to come after us, we're coming right back after you now."

Advises long-time Little Italy activist Carmelo Tramantano at the beginning of the video, "You gotta have the guts to tell those people: 'Get outta here. You don't like? Get outta here.' You gotta be strong that way. Don't be gentle, you gotta be rough. Cause otherwise they're gonna take your bread and water."


click to watch in widescreen

Such fighting words stirred the community Monday night at a meeting of the Northern Little Italy Neighborhood Association, the group formed after the defeat of Shake Shack last year. As reported by Patrick Hedlund at DNAInfo, the sentiments were clear. Said one member of the association, "Nolita does not exist--it's called Little Italy. Nolita is make-believe." Said another, "If they don't like it, they can leave... The people that move in from Montana can go back to the fucking mountains and ride their horses."


"A Nuisance to Pedestrians," anti-Italian newspaper cartoon, 1888

Of course, it's not just Little Italy--the whole city has been in a culture war for the past decade at least. (The people of Little Italy call it "The Yuppie Attack.") In response, there have been blogs and books, protests, graffiti, but we've yet to see righteous anger truly take action, for a group of people to stand up, in unity, and just say "No." Maybe, if anyone can do it, the Italians can.

My hope is that they stay away from right-wing, Tea-Party rhetoric, which will only work against them, and turn back to the fierce Italian Radicalism of the early 1900s--to the spirit of the immigrants who fought for labor rights and formed mutual aid societies. This was the Italian fighting spirit brought to this country by our grandparents and great-grandparents. It was powerful, righteous, and socially responsible. The whole city needs that spirit today.


San Gennaro Feast: John Fratta's flickr

As a post-script, I keep thinking about an interview I did back in 2007 with Annie of DeRobertis Pasticceria in the East Village. She said that the new people in the neighborhood "come in and tell me I don’t know how to make cappuccino. They tell me, 'Starbucks makes it this way.' I tell them, 'I’m here before Starbucks.' ...But they want Starbucks. So I tell them, very nicely I say, So go to Starbucks."

Somehow, that sums it up.


Previous San Gennaro coverage:
Nolita vs. The Feast
First Attack in 2007

*Everyday Chatter

Bad news for Donohue's, the grand old steakhouse has been closed down by the Health Department. Keep your fingers crossed they come back. [JH]

35 Cooper Square with Hettie Jones and Eric Richards. [RS]

Check out the films coming up in this month's Lower East Side Film Festival.

Where used to be Aphrodisia Herb Shop, there is now Bar'rique Varietals and Kitchen. It's a wine bar. They have a number of artisanal items on the menu. Aphrodisia was forced to close after 40 years the Village:



Gorgeous inside shots of Coney's abandoned Playland. [Kensinger]

Saying goodbye to Bowery's Salvation Army before the next high-tech hotel flattens it. [EVG]

Save Astor Place. [Curbed]

Bring back The Whip! One of my favorite rides. [ATZ]

Something to annoy you about book publishing and real estate. [NYT]

...and something to feed your schadenfreude: Neil Genzlinger, my new hero, on the age of oversharing one's bland life. [NYT]

Smart Socialites

Whit Stillman has a new movie called Damsels in Distress coming out this year. As I look forward to that, I took a look back at one of his New York classics. When the Criterion Collection release of 1990's Metropolitan came out in 2006, Luc Sante wrote the accompanying essay.

He said, "Nowadays, you might wonder whether there is anyone left on Park Avenue whose fortune antedates the second Reagan administration. New money is so loud and so insistent that old money has either slipped discreetly away to ancestral hideouts or has, as it were, gone native. Metropolitan, which looked like a perverse bit of daring in 1990, today seems like an artifact from an earlier century."


Metropolitan

An artifact it is. The socialites of 1990, in Stillman's lens, are smart, literary, intellectual snobs.

They dance the cha-cha and the rumba. They use words like "untenable" and discuss Thorsten Veblen and Lionel Trilling. They make statements like, "I'm a committed Socialist, but not a Marxist. I favor the socialist model developed by the 19th-century social critic Fourier." And "Bunuel's a surrealist, despising the bourgeoisie is part of their credo."

They read lots of books.


Metropolitan

Fast forward to two decades later. Gossip Girl is also about young socialites on the Upper East Side.

These kids are not the brightest bulbs, nor do they value the intellect. They say things like: "He texts me every night before he goes to sleep, it's so sweet." And "You know how torturous it is for me to find shiny things that aren't intended for me." And "I think that whore may be my mother."


Gossip Girl

We're left with "high society" reality stars, celebutantes like Jules Kirby, who likes to go downtown and say stuff like: “It’s fun to go hang out with blue collar people at a scummy bar. They do fratty things like play beer pong.”

Now with Kourtney and Kim Take New York, we've also got the Kardashians, who spell everything with a K to match their name--the Kardashian Kard, Kardashian Konfidential, etc. You think Stillman's kids would've tolerated such misspellings?


Kardashians

I might not have liked them, but I miss the smart old socialites. I was on the Upper East Side recently, thinking about how much I used to like to go up there, once in awhile, and look at all the super-rich people in their natural habitat. Ladies in crazy hats and furs. Men in exotic plaids. All the fusty shops with windows full of products you had to be an old-money WASP to know about--Spode plates, cloth cocktail napkins, stuff like that.

Now it's all the same stores they have on Bleecker Street and the Bowery. And it's all the same people, too.