Greenwich Gallery Frame Shop

VANISHED

When Charlie Mom was forced to close last year, the building at the corner of 6th Avenue and 11th Street had just one street-level business left: The Greenwich Gallery Frame Shop.

Now it has none.

After 35 years in business, the Greenwich Gallery has shuttered.


photo: Richard Morgan

On one side of its empty storefront is the empty storefront of Charlie Mom. On the other side is the empty storefront that had once been the amazing Nikos Magazine Shop and has yet to become a Birdbath bakery.

More high-rent blight, all were shuttered--after decades in business--due to hiked rent. (I'm willing to bet that's the case here.) With no penalties and no regulations to stop them, the building owner has now emptied all the businesses from the first floor and is leaving them empty. Could they be hoping for a big-box chain store to take it all? 

Meanwhile, no one in city government is doing anything to stop the total destruction of New York's distinctive, local streetscape. We will become, in the end, one big suburban shopping mall.


2015

Preview Sandwich Shop

On West 53rd Street, under the green awning for the Hello Deli, located in the CBS building, is an old sign for a lost sandwich shop.



Rupert Jee's Hello Deli was famous for its proprietor's appearances on the David Letterman show. But what of the Preview Sandwich Shop?



Just look at that gorgeous typeface. What more is there to say?

Greek Corner

There have been some rumors going around that the Greek Corner Coffee Shop -- which I first wrote about here -- is on its way out.

So I went in and asked around.



The place is located on 7th Avenue and 28th Street. It's been there since 1980. It's one of those New York places--cheap, simple, local--that's vanishing without relent.

When I went in for lunch, a bunch of tourists standing around outside harangued me. They were trying to decide whether to eat there or at one of the many national chains nearby.

"Do you like it?" they asked. Yes. "Is it clean? Is it clean?" They kept repeating this stupid question. "Is it clean?" I did not respond. They went away.



I ordered a BLT and talked to the people in the coffee shop. Here's what I learned: The building has been sold. The building might be sold. There are holdouts who won't budge. The building won't be sold. Everything will be okay. Who knows?



This whole neighborhood, just south of Penn Station, is going through a major upheaval. Old buildings are coming down and new ones are going up at a frenetic pace. Most of the new buildings are tourist hotels.

Specialty coffee bars are moving in between the odd little wholesale shops and the silk flower shops and the places that embroider ball caps and roll cigars and unpack ginseng from cardboard barrels.

We don't need more hotels. The city has become glutted with them. In 2011, Mayor Bloomberg announced that New York would soon reach a record number of hotel rooms--90,000--a 24 percent increase since he began his tourist-driving initiative in 2006. Leisure and Hospitality became the fastest growing industry, increasing at a rate of 27.4 percent, far outpacing health, information, and the financial services. We have rapidly become a city of servants, towel replenishers, and toilet paper folders.

But, above the Greek Corner Coffee Shop, we still have some industry.



I love the second-story windows of this building. I love walking by at night and seeing the inside lit up. The silhouettes of radiators and dressmaker's dummies. A woman bends over a table, cutting or ironing fabric. This is the home of Timberlake Studios, since 1986. They make costumes for theatre, dance, and opera.

In the 1970s, the studio's founder, Betty Williams, set out to save commercial garment patterns. From the website: "Encouraged by the Smithsonian, she started a drive to save patterns. It developed into a nationwide network of women (once called 'Betty's Brigade') that searched for patterns in attics, church bazaars, and estate sales. This led to a collection of patterns called The Commercial Pattern Archive, together with tailoring magazines and sewing instruction material dating to the 19th Century. It is a major resource for theatre and fashion designers and a permanent record of one phase of women's lives for sociologists and historians."



I don't know what's going to happen to this building. It holds pieces of the real New York, the city that is being wiped out and homogenized. So let's all keep an eye on it.

Hogs & Heifers Today

Hogs & Heifers closed last year, after 23 years in the Meatpacking District.

As the Daily News reported at the time, "Thor Equities purchased the building on the corner of Washington and W. 13th Sts. in 2013 for about $100 million, and when Hogs’ lease expired last year, the proposed rent jumped to $60,000 a month, from $14,000."


photo: Orchard View

Here's what the once brassiere-cluttered and colorful honky-tonk bar looks like today.



And the inside...



Talking about Thor Equities and its boss, Joe Sitt, Hogs co-founder and owner Michelle Dell told the Daily News in 2015: “They don’t give a shit. At the end of the day Thor is a company that deals with chain brands. They make a big display of how honored they are to be in a historic neighborhood, but then they decimate everything that made it historic. What are you going to put in, another Le Pain Quotidien?”

Looks like it.

5 Pointz Pit

What a thrill it was to round the bend on the 7 train into Long Island City and see the crazy, vivid vista of 5 Pointz, covered in graffiti art. Through the scrim of the dirty train window, all that color.

You felt it in your chest. In your heart. That flutter. That sudden flooding of feeling. Remember that?


from Untapped Cities

Then they whitewashed it and demolished it.

And here's what it looks like now when you round that bend.



Just a muddy pit. The footprint of what will be more glass, for glitz, more generic towers for more generic life.

New York, we are fucking everything up.

West Street Demolished

In case you're wondering how winter treated that little vintage block on West Street doomed to the wrecking ball, well, it wasn't good.

Everything is gone.



Gone is the car wash, the auto body shop, and the Westway club. Gone, too, is the little Kullman diner that glittered abandoned among the ailanthus trees, stirring our imaginations.

Gone another piece of the real city, New York of usefulness and grit, of diversity and history. New York where you could get a grilled cheese sandwich while waiting for your flat to be fixed. New York of nude dancing and queer back rooms. New York of mortar and brick, of earth tones burnished in the sun.


2013

Gone.

And what's to come? The usual thing. Another generic box of luxury glass.


Ian Schrager

What did Rem Koolhaas say about the Generic City?

“The Generic City is what is left after large sections of urban life crossed over to cyberspace. It is a place of weak and distended sensations, few and far between emotions….

The Generic City is fractal, an endless repetition of the same simple structural module….

Instead of specific memories, the associations the Generic City mobilizes are general memories, memories of memories: if not all memories at the same time, then at least an abstract, token memory, a déjà vu that never ends, generic memory.”


Before:
West Street Vintage

Keller Hotel Get Scaffolded

At Barrow and West Streets, the Keller Hotel has been standing since 1898. Abandoned and boarded up, it is one of the last relics of the old age to remain along a stretch of Manhattan utterly glazed in luxury glitz.

The building was landmarked in 2007 and a residential conversion was supposed to happen, but it never did.

Now, a green scaffolding wraps around the Keller.



The scaffolding joins white X's in boxes, spray painted by the door to indicate that the building is unsafe, possibly with floors collapsed.



Does that new scaffolding mean work will finally be done on the old sailor's hotel?

If the day of luxury conversion is upon the Keller, it is highly likely that we will lose that beautiful, beat-up old neon sign, a beacon from an Edward Hopper painting to tell us that the city hasn't all gone glam.



Here's the sign when it was new, on the Keller in 1940:


via NYPL

And here's a rare shot from 1975 when the hotel housed Keller's bar, possibly the oldest gay leather bar in the city at that time, opened around 1959.

In the upper right corner, you can see the bottom "EL" of the hotel's sign.


photo by Hank O'Neal