Master Cutting Table

I must have walked on 27th Street between Broadway and 6th Avenue a million times. But somehow never noticed Master Cutting Table. Maybe the shutters were always down when I went by. Maybe I was too distracted by the neon of the weird old Senton Hotel. In any case, recently, deep in the depths of a rather bad mood, I came upon the miracle that is Master Cutting Table.



It was the decapitated Charlie McCarthy doll heads that caught my eye. And the mannequin in the vest and Spartan helmet. I got closer and looked in through the plate-glass window.

It was like looking into one of those panoramic Easter eggs as a kid. A whole world opened up. And, seeing what I saw, my mood instantly lifted.



American flags. Antique clocks. JFK and RFK posters. A bigger than life-size bathing beauty cardboard cut-out. Pressed-tin ceiling above and wooden floorboards below. A long path leading to the back of the shop through dozens and dozens of old garment industry machines:

Gold Stampers, Wire Stitchers, Rossley Button Machines, Defiance Foot Presses, Schaefer Cementers, Clicker Blocks, Rubber Pads.

Had I tumbled back through time? How could something so pure, so untouched still be permitted in the homogenized, stultified Manhattan of today? What delightful madness was this?



The lights were on, but the door was locked.

"This is our flag, be proud of it!" reads a sign on the door, below a "Back In" notice that doesn't indicate how many minutes will pass before they'll be back in. I waited around a bit, not wanting to stop looking. Eventually, I had to go, but vowed to return.



When I went back a few weeks later, it was the same scene: lights on and no one in sight.

I pushed the door. It opened with the tinkling of a bell.

I walked inside, unsure that I should be there, and tried to commit as much as I could to memory. The place smelled of age, of sweetly rotting paper, like a library. I breathed it in.



A silver-haired man emerged from a back door and came directly towards me, dressed all in black, his spine stiffly upright, his shoes shuffling.

"The door was open?" he said, indicating that it was not meant to be. "What can I do for you?"

"I'm admiring your shop," I said.

"Why? It's a dirty stinkin' hole!"

"It's beautiful."

"You shoulda seen it 60 years ago. It was a machine shop."

He ushered me to the door, adding, "Now we don't do nothin'."

"Nothin'?"

"Nothin'! When you're old, you'll understand. When you're married, you'll understand. In the morning, you kiss the wife goodbye and say, 'Seeya later, Sweetie, I'm off to work!'"

"So you don't do anything here? You don't sell anything, fix anything? You just do nothing?"

"Come back when you're 60 and I'll tell you all about it!"

He closed to the door behind me, locked it, and shuffled back down the long path to the back room where he does nothing all day. A man who just wants to be left alone in his dirty, stinkin', beautiful museum of a machine shop.




The site 14to42 says Master Cutting Table has been here since the early 1960s. It is run by a man named Arnold. A writer at Manhattan Sideways ventured in to the place one time. She reported:

"Asked what he does here, Arnold replied: 'nothing.' Asked why he comes in, then: 'I don’t want to stay at home. I love my wife of over sixty years, but sometimes you just have to get away.' Having invested in property in New York when it was not as astronomically expensive, Arnold now owns this building and has the luxury of using it as a 'day home.' He is holding out against selling to developers bent on transforming the space. 'I’ll let my kids make that mistake,' he says. 'You can walk with a straight backbone knowing you own property in New York. It’s a marvelous feeling.'"

A. Blank Sign

Downtown, at Broad and Stone, Giuliano's pizza place has lost the skin of its signage.


Google Maps

Reader Greg Wyles, sends in a photo of the sign hidden beneath the sign, recently revealed. He says "the Pizza Place that had been there was knocked out by Hurricane Sandy and there has been construction going on and off" ever since.



Last year, spotting the shape of Giuliano's sign, Thomas Rinaldi at New York Neon suspected it was an antique. He did a little digging into the history of the sign and found photos of Blank with its neon intact.

As for A. Blank -- no history remains. Only this. Since 1899.


Anthony Cortese, flickr

Astor Place Design Pavilion

Five years ago, I posted here about the Battle for Astor Place, writing, "The City's Department of Transportation and Cooper Union are unfolding their plan to turn Astor Place into what they call a public park, but what is clearly an amenity for more condo and office towers, setting the stage for further upscaling of the East Village and Bowery."

Today, that vision is coming true. Across from Gwathmey's "Green Monster" condo tower, the Death Star has since risen, a dark, hulking slab full of tech companies. Astor Place's center has been flattened and reshaped--part of the street has been erased, and the Alamo cube was hauled off for polishing, yet to return.

And now we have our first "public" private advertainment event.



Yesterday, NYCxDesign's "Design Pavilion" opened between the Green Monster and the Death Star.

It features interactive advertisements from IBM, a resident of the Death Star, and is sponsored by 125 Greenwich Street, another supertall luxury tower that will be full of oligarch money.

125 Greenwich commandeers the center space with a large architectural display, described thus: "the installation abstracts the surrounding city fabric as an undulating landscape of white fiberglass rods, while 125 Greenwich Street and the World Trade Center buildings are prominently represented as solid forms, finished in white satin lacquer."



So the city fabric is erased, abstracted, neutralized, while the sky-high luxury residence and the corporate office tower are "prominently represented."

Whose city is this?




Uniformed security guards circle the perimeter of the pavilion. When I approached, I hesitated, unsure if I would be permitted inside.

The space is "open to the public," but doesn't quite feel open. And which public? All of the public?



NYCxDesign calls the pavilion a "public activation" and "an immersive urban experience" consisting of "a curated assemblage of creative structures and displays."

But the true urban experience is not a curated one. It is, by nature, haphazard, chaotic, idiosyncratic.

The pavilion reminds me of the controversial BMW Guggenheim Lab that came to the East Village a few years ago. James Wolcott said at the time: "An interdisciplinary lab is what you get when there's no more Mercer Arts Center, Max's Kansas City, CBGB's, or Mudd Club--a buzzword mausoleum."



This is the new Astor Place. It looks like a public space, but like many sites in Bloomberg's "high-performance" neoliberal vision of the city, it feels more and more like privatization, covered in high-end branding disguised as "fun for everyone."

Standing in the center, you find that what you're immersed in is not the urban utopia, but a dystopia of corporate advertising--the pavilion and its branded contents, surrounded by the lighted signs of Chase, Walgreens, Starbucks, CVS, on and on. This is truly the "geography of nowhere."



I'll end this post as I did the one in 2011, with some words by William H. Whyte, Jr., from his 1958 book The Exploding Metropolis:

"Everybody, it would seem, is for the rebuilding of our cities... But this is not the same as liking cities...most of the rebuilding under way and in prospect is being designed by people who don’t like cities."

"what is the image of the city of the future? In the plans for the huge redevelopment projects to come, we are being shown a new image of the city—and it is sterile and lifeless. Gone are the dirt and the noise—and the variety and the excitement and the spirit. That it is an ideal makes it all the worse; these bleak new utopias are not bleak because they have to be; they are the concrete manifestation—and how literally—of a deep, and at times arrogant, misunderstanding of the function of the city."

Chelsea Car Wash

I often worry about the car wash on 10th Avenue and 24th Street. It is the last remnant of "Gasoline Alley," the world that existed before the High Line dramatically changed this part of Chelsea, when it was all blue-collar businesses, largely related to the care and maintenance of automobiles.



They've been there for over 35 or 40 years and are now utterly surrounded by high-rise jillion-dollar glitz.



I take the car wash's picture pretty much every time I walk by. Just in case.

I took a ride through the thing, even though I have no car. I saw a cabbie going in for a wash and hopped in, paying him for the opportunity just to ride through.

Here's the scintillating film footage of that adventure. Enjoy those soapy mitters.



Anyway, a good sign recently appeared on the car wash: "Under New Management."



I'd like to think this bodes well for the future of the place.

"Under new management" presumably means they're not selling out to a luxury developer, and they're going to keep washing cars (and bikes). Hopefully, for many years to come.

Missing Silk Clock

Recently, I received this note in an email:

"I am a granddaughter of Alfred Schwarzenbach and my father worked in the building for years. We are all appalled about the disappearance of the clock! How can we find it? Who has the authority to simply take it away? If they don't want it, why not give it back to the family? All questions with no answers! Maybe you can give us some!"

It came from Ines Franck in Switzerland. She is referring to a post I did in 2014 about the lovely Silk Clock on the former Schwarzenbach building on Park Avenue and 32nd Street.


Before, via 14to42

The clock was removed when the building was sold, stripped, streamlined, and turned into TIAA-CREF's 470 Park Avenue South.

At the time, we wondered what would happen to the clock. Would it return to the public sidewalk once the renovations were done?


After

My original tipster on the story went over and took a look.

The Silk Clock has not been returned to the exterior where it can be enjoyed by all. He also searched the lobby and found no trace of the Silk Clock. Only cold marble and security guards.



The clock was originally installed here in 1926. Every hour Zoroaster would wave a wand, causing the Queen of Silk to emerge from her cocoon, holding a tulip. (Click to watch.)

Since it's no longer part of the building, Ines Franck's family would like her grandfather's clock back. She vows to keep searching for it. If you have any clues to the clock's whereabouts, please let us know.

UPDATE: Reader Sheila contacted TIAA-CREF. She reports that they responded on Facebook: "we like the clock too, so we’re restoring it! It will be rehung on the building’s north entrance as soon as it's complete for all New Yorkers to enjoy."


via David Cobb Craig, Street Clocks in NY

Jane

When Jane Jacobs published The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961, the word "gentrification" had yet to be coined. The process that would eventually destroy the global cities of the 21st century had not yet been observed. British sociologist Ruth Glass would come up with it in 1964, and it would arrive in New York City in the 1970s.

Jacobs did, however, detect a process that is clearly the same one we are contending with today--what I call hyper-gentrification. Jacobs would call it over-success. She wrote:

"so many people want to live in the locality that it becomes profitable to build, in excessive and devastating quantity, for those who can pay the most. These are usually childless people, and today they are not simply people who can pay the most in general, but people who can or will pay the most for the smallest space. Accommodations for this narrow, profitable segment of population multiply, at the expense of all other tissue and all other population. Families are crowded out, variety of scene is crowded out, enterprises unable to support their share of the new construction costs are crowded out."

She calls this "a problem of malfunction in cities themselves," and concludes, "we must understand that self-destruction of diversity is caused by success, not by failure."

Happy 100th birthday Jane.

Pearl River Remains

As you know, the beloved Pearl River Mart closed when its rent was hiked from $100,000 to a reported $500,000 per month.

Here's what remains.



#SaveNYC.