Memory Keeper

VANISHED

Romy Ashby posted the following photo to her Walkers in the City Facebook page this weekend, sharing the sad news that the Memory Keeper has closed.

It may not seem like a major loss, a little photo lab on 14th Street between 6th and 7th, but I liked the place, and it had that old New York feeling. 



In the front window, a man who might have been Russian repaired wristwatches. You could bring in your watch and he'd fix it in minutes, sitting at a desk cluttered with interesting little tools. I often got my battery changed by him and he always gave my watch a quick tune-up. He was meticulous about it and utterly silent, never chatty. I got passport photos taken there, too.

Memory Keeper was one of those places I'd been waiting for to close. You knew it was coming. First of all, there was the name: "Memory Keeper." The city doesn't care much about that business. And then its two functions: developing film and fixing wristwatches, a couple of disappearing artifacts of our old world. How could it last?

(It was also next to La Nueva Rampa, the Chino-Latino joint that shuttered, then reopened.)

99-cent Fresh Pizza

There's a 99-cent pizza place on 9th Avenue behind the Port Authority bus terminal. It's next to Stiles Farmers Market, next to the now-shuttered Big Apple Meat Market. Actually, it's less of a pizza "place" and more of a pizza stand.

I wonder what will happen to it once Big Apple's building is demolished and the block goes luxury.



It's an orderly but somewhat makeshift little pizza stand, covered with red-lettered signs that seem to shout. It scored an A from the Health Department. And it always draws customers. It opened during the 99-cent recession pizza boom a few years back, and its manager claims to be first on the scene.

I especially like it at night, when it takes on a foggy, dirty-fishtank glow. It feels like something from the older New York.



In 2010, the Times described its scene:

"13 men and women stood on the sidewalk outside 99¢ Fresh, impatiently ordering and impatiently eating slices amid the ambiance of ungentrified Hell’s Kitchen: idling delivery trucks near the rear of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, a barking dog named Leo someone tied up down the block, a prostitute who hurried by saying something about $150 for a half-hour and a bearded homeless man with a cane who spoke loudly to himself about the size of the average bear. He ate two slices."



99-cent Fresh Pizza also sells a few lonely doughnuts, warmed by a fluorescent bulb, bathed in mercury vapor.

Old Chelsea Station

VANISHING

DNA reports: "The Old Chelsea Station at 217 W. 18th St., which was built in 1937 and landed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1986, is on the chopping block, the USPS announced in a letter posted in the station." The building is for sale and will pass out of federal ownership--meaning it's going from public to private. Meaning, let's face it, luxury condos and upscale retail.



I remember, as a kid living way out in the sticks, mailing some of my depressing little poems to a poetry journal with a P.O. box at Old Chelsea Station. I didn't realize that name was a post office, and I thought that "Old Chelsea Station" was a train station, like Grand Central Station, and I imagined that the poetry editor somehow lived in this train station in the middle of New York City, which seemed very weird and wonderful. Later, when I encountered the post office for the first time, I realized that this is where all those poems of mine had ended up and not at a train station at all.

So I have this odd fondness for it. Also, the post office boasts some lovely bas-relief murals of animals in the forest.



Romy at Walkers in the City wrote about their artist, Paul Fiene:

"He had his studio upstate in Woodstock, New York, and the two panels, called 'Deer' and 'Bear,' are bas-relief cast stone covered in silver leaf, made in 1938 for Old Chelsea Station, which was built in 1935. I read that Paul Fiene had studied at the Beaux Arts Institute to Design here in New York, and that he won first prize in a life class in 1917. Then he won the Prix de Rome, which he had to decline because he didn’t have enough money to get to Rome to accept the prize, and I imagine that he must have been very disappointed. But he must have been very happy to get the commission to create two works of art to decorate this Manhattan post office. Imagining a post office built during the depression and decorated with money set aside for just that purpose having to close for lack of funds made me feel very sad."



If this P.O. goes, you and I might never see those bears and those deer again. They will become private property for those who can afford to enjoy them. And the community will lose a valuable public space.

People are fighting this sale. If you'd like to speak your mind about it, please do so at tonight's CB4 Full Board Meeting, 6:30 p.m., at Hotel Trades Council Auditorium, 305 W. 44th Street.

That Fancy Coffee

This report from a reader:

I tried a fancy "artisanal" cup of coffee the other day from one of those places with the lines going out the door. It's in the East Village, but I don't want to say where, because the guys who run it seem like cool people.

The coffee was terrible. Bitter and muddy. No amount of milk and sugar could make it drinkable. I said to my wife, "How can people drink this? They line up for this? Do they really like it or do they just think they like it because it's popular?"

We passed an old homeless man begging for change so he could get a cup of coffee. We offered him the fancy coffee and warned him, "It's fancy but not very good." He took it, tasted it, and spat it out on the sidewalk. "Awful!" he says.

Then he says, "People drink this kind of coffee because someone tells them to drink it. No one could like this shit. And Starbucks? Awful. I never drink Starbucks coffee. I like the Mud Truck at Astor Place. I'd pay $5 for a Mud Truck coffee, but not this crap."

Smart guy.

Ginsberg Photos

You have until April to go see "Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg" at NYU's Grey Art Gallery.



A vast array of Ginsberg's black-and-white, hand-inscribed photographs, many were taken in the East Village where the poet lived first on 7th Street and later on 12th. (In the above photo, he's on the 7th Street rooftop, the steeples of St. Brigid's in the background.)

On one wall, a quartet of views from his 12th Street apartment show a ragged backside in winter, spring, and summer, scenes of ailanthus trees and chimney pots. Allen died there in 1997. Now someone new occupies that renovated kitchen, looks out that window, and does what with it?

Among the many photos, there are also artifacts in vitrines--letters, books, and other ephemera. In one hand-written letter to Carl Solomon, Ginsberg tells of visiting Ezra Pound, to whom he gave a Beatles record as an 82nd birthday gift. I keep trying to imagine crotchety old Ezra Pound listening to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Allen mostly took pictures of his friends, so detailed city scenery is rare. But there is one shot in the show that does the trick, a rarely seen photo of Avenue A between 7th and 8th along Tompkins Square Park. Taken in 1953 of a "Shopping Cart Prophet," it shows the long-lost businesses of that time--the Volga Inn, a Bar & Grill, a Soda Ice Cream Candy Luncheonette, and the Park Center Restaurant (now the "new" Odessa, a photo lab, a bodega, and Sushi Lounge). Writing on the photo, Ginsberg recalls: "Leshko's Restaurant was cheap and popular as at present." That's gone, too.

A little more Allen Ginsberg:
Howl
Kiev

*Everyday Chatter

Ed Koch, who got the ball rolling on NYC's hyper-gentrification, has passed away. [NYT]

"People have bought homes" on Bedford Street and they don't want Chumley's ruining it for them. [DNA]

Gentrification as an end-game and the rise of "sub-urbanity." [NG]

Check out this film about Marsha P. Johnson--"Stonewall instigator, Andy Warhol model, drag queen, sex worker, starving actress, Saint." [youtube]

Tomorrow, take the No 7-11 Bodega Tour of the East Village. [DNA]

The Pearl Diner may be making a comeback. [EVG]

Grand Central grandeur in the Village. [GVSHP]

"This small shop on a treeless, cheerless stretch of Fifth Avenue in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, not far from the Greenwood Cemetery, is more than a pizzeria: it is a social parlor where co-owner Giovanni Lanzo holds court." [PC]

Library closings in Brooklyn. [OMFS]

Burlesque birthday for good old Ray. [NEV]

What have we come to? Cupcake tours. [AMZ]

Little Bodega

In the midst of great efforts to save our bodegas from 7-Eleven assimilation and destruction, miniature model artist Randy Hage sends in another of his masterful miniatures. This time it's the endangered species known as the New York bodega.


all photos: Randy Hage

Inspired by the R&R Deli Grocery, vanished from the corner of Albany and Pacific in Brooklyn, the mini bodega has it all. The crummy payphone and bubblegum machines (secured with a cinderblock) out front. The busted hand-painted sign loaded with a list of wares (BEER, MEAT, COFFEE). The window cluttered with junk ads for Mega Millions and menthol cigarettes. The sidewalk littered with dead leaves and trash.



Of course, it's what's inside that really makes the city's bodegas special.

As Randy says, "A chain store will never be able to foster the sense of community and meaningful friendships that a mom-and-pop type store can. In a busy city, it is the contact with people we know and care about that brings feelings of belonging. Community, diversity, and character are lost when the chain stores move in."

But if 7-Eleven gets its way, all we'll have left of the New York bodega are models and memories.



See more of Randy's work:
Model New York
Unreal Ideal Hosiery
Mini Mars Bar

Join the fight against 7-11:
No 7-11 on Facebook
No 7-11 on Twitter

And here's one more--with a quarter rolled in to show just how miniature this miniature is.