Joe's Dairy

VANISHED

As we shared here last week, Joe's Dairy closed this weekend to retail customers. They served their last sandwiches on Friday evening. On Saturday, with lines out the door and the tip jar overflowing, it was all about the mozzarella. News photographers and reporters went in and out, aiming to capture something vanishing before their eyes.



As it often happens on these last days, the staff was surprised by the sudden outpouring of love. Vincent Campanelli told WPIX 11, "You think you’re selling cheese, and you start going up layers, it’s a whole of a lot more than you thought."

Customers gave their condolences, along with last-minute advice, "You should've put up a website, got on Facebook," and some dire predictions, "Marc Jacobs will probably move into this space next." Even with mom and pops vanishing all over town, it's hard to understand how, in a time and place where faux "artisanal" food is all the rage, actual artisanal food can't succeed.



But this wasn't the usual case of hiked rent. Some at Joe's said it was due to a shrinking customer base. One reader reported that owner Anthony Campanelli drove in to work on Wednesday and "it just struck him--'I can't do this anymore.' He was going to just close up and not tell anyone. He wanted to leave quietly. But then word got out and all the hoopla ensued... He, his wife and his daughter all told me that today is a happy day."

Mr. Campanelli told James and Karla Murray in 2008, "When I’m ready to retire, it will probably be a lost art in my family because I have a daughter but I won’t allow her to do this. It’s a lot of hard work. It’s not that a woman couldn’t do it, but you have to get up really early and work long hours. I feel like I do this because I chose to. Nobody asked me to do it. This is what I wanted to do but I wouldn’t suggest it to anyone."



Why don't we have more people like the Campanellis to keep our longstanding mom and pops going when Mom and Pop can't do it anymore? In 1977, they took Joe's over from Joe Aiello and they didn't glamorize it, they just kept doing what had been done. Why don't we have more people who want to keep traditions alive without twisting them into something exclusive?

If someone new took it over today, chances are it wouldn't be Joe's Dairy anymore. It would be Faux Joe's, some upscale reproduction with luxury prices and the clientele to match. They'd reproduce the sign to look like the old sign, only spiffed up. They'd serve "The Campanelli," a mozzarella and prosciutto panini drizzled with truffle oil and slapped with a $35 price tag. They'd have lines out the door every day. In their interview for New York magazine, they'd defend themselves to their critics, "We saved this place. A lot of banks and Starbucks were looking to move in here. No, it's not the same as before. What we're doing is an homage."

Here's a true homage, a documentary about Joe's directed by Piero Iberti and produced with Jeremy Zalben, due out this summer--online and (hopefully) in theaters:


Joe's Dairy (Teaser) from 10Block Productions on Vimeo.

I asked the filmmakers some questions about Joe's Dairy and their film. Here are their answers:

Piero Iberti: My parents first discovered Joe’s when they were going to Soho gallery openings in the early 1980s. As I grew up nearby, I began to frequent Joe’s on a regular basis. I'm a native New Yorker and, at the heart of it, I wanted to capture a New York story that was important and resonant to me. On a basic level, I wanted to know how they made the cheese. I was interested in finding out the story of the people, the shop, and who this Joe was.

Jeremy Zalben: We both grew up in the East Village, 10 blocks away from each other. I never personally experienced Joe’s growing up, but when Piero told me about it, I knew it was an important story that needed to be shared with people.

Piero: I found out about the closing the night before and couldn't believe it when I heard. I frantically called Jeremy to tell him, and scrambled to phone those close to me who knew the store as well. I knew I had to be there the next day.

Jeremy: When Piero called me and told me, I didn’t believe him. I told him to call Vincent at the shop to see if this was actually true. I was truly surprised. When we first started out making the film two years ago, no part of me thought that the end of Joe’s would come before we could put our film out.

Piero: The city has lost a tremendous cultural force with the closing of Joe’s. It has also lost a piece of its identity and what makes New York, New York. One of the main motivations we had in making this movie was to capture that old New York feel that still existed because of shops like Joe’s. Now that feeling is on the verge of extinction. With less and less "mom and pop" stores around to provide that character, I’m not sure it's possible to retain it anymore.

Jeremy: For me, the city has lost another piece of what made New York such a special place. Stores like Joe’s are what made people want to live in New York. Joe’s provided a place where you could go, not just for a piece of smoked mozzarella, but to see your neighbors while waiting in line, to have a conversation with Ro behind the counter, or say hi to Vincent and Anthony while they worked on the cheese in the back. Unfortunately, people don’t want that anymore. They would rather go into a store, buy what they want, and go. I don’t think it’s possible for New York to ever be what it used to be.

Dojo's

VANISHING

For the second time today, Ken of Greenwich Village Daily Photo shares some shocking bad news on his Facebook page. Now he tells us that the sole surviving Dojo, by NYU, is closing.



He writes, "Rent increase will force one of the best healthy, inexpensive restaurants in the Village to close this summer. Bartender said it 'will reopen as something entirely different.'"

Dojo has been around since 1974. It began as the Ice Cream Connection on St. Mark's Place, complete with druggie flavors. When the Dojo on St. Mark's shuttered, the one on West 4th remained. Says the Dojo website, "Dojo went through hippie years, drug years, New York’s first blackout in 1970s, Avenue B Houston and 14th Street riot, pop art culture movement with Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol...you get the picture."

Now it's goodbye delicious and cheap soy burger dinner. Goodbye carrot-ginger dressing invented in 1973. Hello 7-Eleven, Starbucks, Subway, cupcake bakery...whatever the zombie machine churns out next.

Joe's Dairy

VANISHING

Ken of Greenwich Village Daily Photo says, by way of his Facebook page, that "After 60 years in business Joe's Dairy will close Saturday, citing poor walk-in sales. Their wholesale business will remain."

A call to the store confirms they're open today and tomorrow until 6:00pm--and then it's over.



I wrote a little about Joe's and its across-the-street neighbor, Pino's, in 2009. We're talking about the loss of one of the last pieces of an almost completely vanished Italian neighborhood.

In this film by Brian Dube, he talks to the Joe's Dairy guys. They discuss the day when Joe's will eventually close and how the city has been "yuppified." Dube says, "We want to be way, way back. You want to be at the Gap, Starbucks, or you want to be way, way back?"

"Oh no, please," says the owner. "Who wants to pay $7 for a cup of coffee?" God forbid that's what comes to this space next.



Go to Joe's today or tomorrow for a last, fresh, handmade mozzarella sandwich. And fuck Soho while you're at it.

Here's how they make the mozzarella.

*Everyday Chatter

"Big Nick’s Burger & Pizza Joint has been in limbo for months, as its landlord has said he will hike the restaurant’s rent by about $20,000 a month. 'It’s some kind of torture,'" says Nick. "I can't sleep at night." Send your Big Nick memories to West Side Rag and help brighten Nick's day. [WSR]

Help restore Jim Power's Mosaic Trail. [EVG]

Lower East Side bohemian Taylor Mead has died of a stroke after a long battle with his landlord. [TLD]

Take a walk with a Walker in the City. [WIC]

Fantastic shots of 42nd Street in the 1990s before it was bulldozed and sanitized. [NYC90s]

Inside those $10 apartments that used to be the Mars Bar building. [Gothamist]

Top editors abruptly leave the Village Voice. [NYT]

Some good old-school signs. [ENY]

And now...7-Elevens are coming in two-story sizes. [DNA]

Saturday May 11: Check out super-8 films on the "iconography of the city, queerness, and grrl culture"--including scenes of the East Village in the 90s. [MF]

Estes' New York

We're looking all the time at photos of the old New York, searching for traces of the vanished city, but what about in paintings? Richard Estes' photorealist paintings capture blocks of that lost world.

The Woolworths, cafeterias, candy store windows, Times Square cinemas, burger stands, subway cars, telephone booths, billiard halls, luncheonettes, liquor stores...



There's the Jones Diner. And there's the Grand Luncheonette.



What can you find here?

301 West 46th

Readers have been sending in the news that 301 West 46th Street, after years of lingering in limbo, is about to fall.


today the scaffolding has gone up all the way, photo: Allen S.

The building on 8th Avenue between 46th and 47th was shuttered around 2008 and wrapped in scaffolding, ready for demolition. At the time, a 38-story glass tower was planned to rise here, including a "375-room hotel, 35 units of condominiums, and amenities that include bar, lounge, meeting rooms, swimming pool and an automated parking garage system." It was to be completed in 2010, but then the market crashed.


Berg Flynn, architectural rendering

The lender foreclosed on the developer. In 2011, the property was acquired by Glenwood Management for $76.3 million. And still nothing happened.

The building sat empty--all its residents and businesses long evicted--a ghost of Hell's Kitchen past, and a reminder of the future to come.


2007

The 19th-century building boasts a compelling history, as many old New York buildings do. Author David Freeland recently unearthed that history at his blog Gotham Lost & Found.

He describes The Cave of the Fallen Angels, the speakeasy that once inhabited the basement, replaced in the 1960s by Steve Paul's The Scene, a celebrated rock venue where you could find Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Andy Warhol, and many other scenesters of the day.

For a look inside The Scene, check out the 1970 documentary Groupies (12-minute mark). Steve Paul passed away last fall, and whatever moved into that basement after The Scene, we don't know.


today

Upstairs, there were a couple of adult video stores and the Collins Bar, which had a nice piece of neon signage out front. New York wrote of the bar, "The pimps, dealers and pool sharks who haunted this worn, woody bar back when it was Lady Anne's Full Moon Saloon have found different stomping grounds (Riker's Island, most likely). Now, aside from a few leftover old men who've been continually three sheets to the wind since the early '80s, the clientele is mostly young professionals."

Of Lady Anne's, Anthony Bourdain wrote: "where the smell of Lysol and vomit distracted one from the recently released convict population playing pool on the warped table in the rear."


2007

Over its century of life, the building had its moments--a place for pimps, groupies, prostitutes, rock stars, and furtive peep-booth masturbators.

Soon, another glass tower will rise here, a clone to match the one that rose right across the avenue on the grave of McHale's, and the giants that will come to the empty lot on the opposite corner, and the Shake Shack one that felled the Playpen just to the south. On and on it goes. So many glass towers with nothing much to say for themselves.

Now I worry about the tenements on the next block north, the New York Inn with its gorgeous ghost signage advertising steam-heated rooms and savory cigars. The residents of the new hotel/condo tower will look out on those scuzzy bricks from their floor-to-ceiling windows and they won't be pleased. Another demolition will be set in motion.

Those Bags

I was thinking about these bags a little while ago and wondering what to call them. I was thinking about them because I don't see them as much as I used to. They used to be everywhere and now they're not so much.



I asked people on my Facebook page what the bags are called, and got a lot of interesting answers. Many had a certain similarity, referencing ethnicity and class:

Chinese bags
Little Chinese lady bags
Old lady bags
Homeless bags
Third-World bags
Refugee bags
Bombay bags
Ghana Gucci bags
Gypsy bags
Polish luggage
Jewish luggage
and
Carpetbagger's Delight

In summary, these bags are mostly associated with old people, poor people, and immigrants. The Telegraph did a story on this bag, calling it "the bag of the uprooted" and "the modern equivalent of the battered leather suitcases piled high at the Ellis Island museum."



And then the high-end fashion designers got a hold of it. Jack Spade knocked it off--selling an $85 version called the Canal Street Coal Bag, along with matching accessories like iPhone cases, luggage tags, card holders, and New Era ball caps.

Louis Vuitton knocked it off, too, calling it the Street GM bag--selling for around $600.

And then that knock off was knocked off. As the people most closely associated with this bag--immigrants, elderly, poor--are being replaced by the young and affluent in Manhattan, the bag is literally changing hands, morphing into a status symbol for the rich and their aspirants.

But did the replica of Louis Vuitton's replica of the Chinatown bag ever sell on the streets of Chinatown? A middle-class simulacrum of a luxury simulacrum of the low-end real thing returned to its roots?



Thinking of this the day after the Punk: From Chaos to Couture Met Ball, where "Miley Cyrus, Anne Hathaway and Cameron Diaz were among the celebrities to embrace the punk theme" and "Sarah Jessica Parker donned an oversized feather mohawk by Philip Treacy that complemented her graffiti-splashed and slashed gown by Giles Deacon, which she also paired with custom-made, thigh-high, tartan-plaid Christian Louboutin boots."

The show at the Met includes a reproduction of the piss-filled bathroom at CBGB's.