DeRobertis Opens DeRoLicious

Some good news for a change. The DeRobertis family, moved from their historic space in the East Village one year ago, has just announced the opening of a new shop in Clifton, New Jersey.



Via email, they write:

"This is the DeRobertis Family. Well, the reason I am contacting you is because on Nov. 23 we opened up a place called DeRoLicious Delights. My Father John, Brother John, Tony the Baker and I (Dana) have decided to continue the business in Clifton, NJ. We are very excited to be back sharing our family tradition with new and old friends. We have a retail space available to visit AND an Online Shop available for people to order Biscotti, Butter Cookies & more."



You can find them online here -- follow them on Instagram -- and visit them in person at 64 1/2 Market St., Clifton, NJ.

Some of the old furnishings have gone with them, including the tables and chairs, and their excellent Wall of Fame:

La Taza de Oro

VANISHED

After nine months of sitting shuttered by the City, after hopeful rumors that they’d soon be reopening, Chelsea’s wonderful La Taza de Oro has called it a day.

Sadly, it's been confirmed, the beloved 68-year-old Puerto Rican luncheonette has closed for good. I will miss it.



A tipster wrote in, "They were looking forward to opening in January, and as of not that long ago were still going to open, but the city recently put additional financial burdens in the way that make it impossible for the small business to open back up."

I went by the restaurant to find proprietor Eric Montalvo, husband of Maria and son-in-law of the man whose uncle originally opened the restaurant in 1947.

Mr. Montalvo was mopping the floor, cleaning up the place and taking it apart. He let me inside and we talked awhile. The bright yellow hand-painted menu signs had already been removed, but he put them back up, proudly, so I could photograph and admire them.



He told me he’s retiring. His children don’t want the restaurant; they all have careers of their own.

The breaking point, however, came when the city made it impossible to stay open after the Second Avenue gas explosion this past spring caused city agencies to panic and tighten the rules, so that when a few bricks fell from the neighboring facade, Con Ed turned off the gas in the Montalvos' building and the Department of Buildings slapped them with an order to vacate. They lost nine months of income. (We nearly lost the B&H Dairy for the same reason.)

Even when you own the building, as the Montalvo family does, it’s getting harder for small restaurants to stay afloat in this town, thanks to increasing bills and a punishing Health Department.

"Small businesses are being pushed out," said Montalvo.

On top of all that, the neighborhood has changed dramatically in recent years. Google took over the building across the street, and its employees, by and large, don’t want the Puerto Rican home cooking at La Taza.

“The new generation,” Montalvo said, “they walk around with the Starbucks cups and the cell phones and…like this,” he turned up his nose and clutched his collar to mimic someone who acts superior, Starbucks cup in hand.



Through the years, La Taza soldiered on, a thriving remnant of the days when Chelsea was filled with Latin restaurants and people. It has served mofongo and tostones to many a celebrity -- Carlos Santana, Puff Daddy, Benicio del Toro, Madonna, Sandra Bernhard -- among the crowd of everyday neighborhood regulars who were devoted to this warm and comforting place.

Montalvo understands that people will be heartbroken to see La Taza go. “I’m sorry to them,” he said. “This is a landmark of New York. It’s the embassy of Puerto Rican cuisine in the city.” But, at some point, you realize you're fighting a losing battle.

“I’m going back to the Caribbean,” he said. “I’m going to swim in the rivers. And try to relax.”



Montalvo plans to rent the space out and hopes for a Latin restaurant to move in.

As for those vintage hand-painted menu signs, he’ll be putting them on ebay if you’re looking for a souvenir.


Previously:
La Taza shuttered by Con Edison
La Taza shuttered by DOH



Better than Starbucks. And only $1.50.

Sidewalk Cobblers

A little while ago, New York magazine published a piece on how Chinatown has stayed Chinatown, instead of becoming yet another bland, suburban, luxury Nowhere like most of Manhattan. It really is one of the last holdout neighborhoods of the old New York.

I love the relative lawlessness of Chinatown's sidewalks, where all manner of business is conducted. The place has not been regulated and tamed. One phenomenon I particularly enjoy is that of the sidewalk cobbler. While storefront cobblers across town are dying out, thanks to skyrocketing rents, these renegade merchants survive.

There are many of them, but my favorite has a wide space on Elizabeth Street by Grand. Not the ruined Elizabeth Street of "Nolita," but the other Elizabeth Street, further south.



The cobbler's stall, if you can call it that, consists of a long piece of plywood erected alongside a corner herb market. It is beautifully decorated with hand-drawn illustrations, glued to the brick wall. Most of the drawings are of animals--birds, horses, cats, pandas--but also waterfalls and warships and airplanes.



The cobbler and his assistant sit and smoke cigarettes while they work--and their customers wait, stocking-footed, on nearby stools, reading Chinese newspapers.



Most of the sidewalk cobblers will also sharpen your knives and scissors.

Here's another:



And another:



Writing for the Times about the shopless cobblers of Chinatown in 2003, here's Joseph Berger:

"No one knows whether this breed of entrepreneur is growing, but scholars say the phenomenon may reflect the city's rising costs of doing business.

'As rents increased, it became more prohibitive to open up a store, so if you can have a store without paying the rent you do it,' said Dr. William B. Helmreich, a professor of sociology at the City University of New York who specializes in urban ethnography.

These sidewalk tradespeople may be a throwback to the European immigrants of a century ago who would stake out a business wherever it was possible."

Pearl Paint: On Tour

When the Pearl Paint mothership suddenly shuttered last year, artists all over the city--and the country--wept.

Soon after, artist Barry Fellman recreated the interior of the store, traveling to Texas to buy Pearl's original cabinets, fixtures, and various products, and turn them into an installation. "Art Show" is on view once again at the Center for Visual Communication in Miami, and will soon be touring the country.



From the press release:

"The installation provokes questions about the availability of art supplies, how they are purchased, and how their use is changing as artists adopt digital technology and new forms of presentation. Art Store extends Duchamp's seminal Readymades, sourced from consumer culture, to a collection of mass produced objects actually used to create art."

"Art Store will be launched in 2016 as a traveling installation to activate communities nationwide by serving as a point of engagement to support local museums, schools and organization involved in arts and education. Institutions may contact CVC for more information on exhibiting Art Store in their community."

Meanwhile, back on Canal Street, the Pearl Paint space remains vacant, another casualty of high-rent blight.

Cinemaniacs

If you've ever been to a movie at the Museum of Modern Art (or Cinema Village or Film Forum) you may have encountered a cinemaniac. Obsessed and cantankerous, they are masters of the shush.

I once witnessed them nearly lynch an elderly woman for the crime of loudly unwrapping a hard candy. If you go to a movie here, you have to submit to the madness. Enjoy it. This is where all the eccentrics who've been driven from the streets of Manhattan have washed up.



I don't go to the MoMA movies as often as I used to, but I hear those characters are still there. What makes them so dyspeptic?

I suspect they shush so violently because, like many anxious obsessive-compulsives, they likely suffer from misophonia, an extreme sensitivity to annoying sounds. Researchers have also found a relationship between misophonia and the schizotypal personality. Schizotypals are your garden variety eccentrics. And they're a vanishing breed in New York City.

These are people who don't function well in a hyper-regulated city custom-made for the wealthy and the mainstream. They require rent control and stabilization. They require the freedom to be unusual, even difficult. They need a city that tolerates odd behavior. Really, they are some of the last of the New York characters. So next time one of them scolds you at the movies, be grateful. You've been touched by an endangered species.

But be careful. They might get a little out of control. "If you don't get up and beat the person up or threaten them or something, then you're going to actually have the film be ruined," says one in the 2002 film Cinemania. Watch it here in its entirety (bonus--it's New York before Bloomberg's erasure, filled with some vanished places and sensibilities):



Roger Ebert wrote about these New Yorkers:

"These are not crazy people. Maladjusted and obsessed, yes, but who's to say what normal is? I think it makes more sense to see movies all day than to golf, play video games or gamble. Not everyone agrees. I know people like these, and I understand their desire to be absorbed in the darkness and fantasy... They really, really like movies. They cry during them. One stumbled out of 'The Umbrellas of Cherbourg' and walked for blocks in the rain, weeping. 'A commitment to cinema means one must have a technically deviant lifestyle.'"

Brooklyn Flux

Gentrification is slow. Hyper-gentrification is fast. We're really not dealing with old-fashioned gentrification anymore, as much as people keep talking about it.

For a look at what happened--and keeps happening--to large swaths of Brooklyn in less than 10 years, check out Brooklyn Flux, a series of before-and-after photos by Kristy Chatelain.


all photos by Kristy Chatelain

Taken along the waterfront of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, from 2007 to present, the photos mostly show the kind of change that is sweeping the city--from industrial and scruffy to sleek and trendy.

Or vacant.



Signs of the former population, like a Puerto Rican flag in graffiti, are replaced by the symbols of the new population, i.e., old-timey typefaces, gold-leaf signage, wine bars.

And on it goes.

Rudy's Under Attack

The Clinton Chronicle reports that beloved Hell's Kitchen dive bar Rudy's Bar & Grill is under attack by Community Board 4 for serving alcohol in its backyard late into the night.



Saundra Halbertstam and Eliot Camerara report that members of Community Board 4 have "actively worked to shut down and destroy Rudy’s Bar and Grille, a Hell’s Kitchen landmark, in business since 1933."

The writers says these members have "prompted complaints against Rudy’s Bar" and "smeared Rudy’s by sending word through the community that they were operating without proper licenses." So far, Rudy's owners have spent $24,000 defending the bar.

It's a lengthy story--to read the whole piece, pick up a copy of the Clinton Chronicle or read the PDF here. Saundra gave me the upshot in an email: "By closing the backyard, they will force Rudy's to close, since the back represents over 30% of their revenue."


photo: retro roadmap

News of noise complaints against Rudy's goes back to this summer. As DNAInfo reported, Rudy’s management said "those complaining were suburban transplants who don't understand Hell's Kitchen."

“To have somebody come in from suburbia and say that we want to change this neighborhood because they paid an exorbitant amount for a co-op is not fair to the people in the community,” the bar's lawyer, Thomas Purcell, told DNA.

The blog stated, "under Rudy's liquor license, which dates back to 1992 when the current owner Jack Ertl, 88, bought the bar, the venue is allowed to use the backyard space until the wee hours with no restrictions, according to documents and bar management."