POV NYC

Janko Puls is a journalist and photographer--and also a reader of this blog. He recently published Point of View New York City, a guessing game of locations. Filled with photos of well-known city places, seen from unusual angles, the book challenges readers to test their knowledge of New York.

On Thursday, August 7, at 6:30pm, Janko will present the book, along with a slide-show, talk, and guessing game, at the Mid-Manhattan branch of the New York Public Library.



Q: What inspired you to do this book?

A: I moved here from Germany in 2006 as a journalist and, driven by curiosity, I wanted to get to know my new home, workplace, and playground. During many city walks with my wife, a born Manhattanite, she commented all the time, "This was here, and that was there." To my surprise, I started singing along with her lamentations within a few months.

Following blogs like yours and E.V. Grieve's raised my attention further to the rapid changes in the city. Seeing these losses happen firsthand sometimes really hurt, and following the blogs was at times too frustrating. I grew up in a city which was founded by the ancient Romans, and on my daily walk to school I passed buildings and city walls from the last 1200 years. So I am appalled and baffled to see how New York is neglecting and destroying so much of its own heritage without even blinking. Yes, great new things are created as well, and this relentless change is one of the huge driving forces of this city, but at times it feels that everything is about the money and not much else.

If the guessing game in the book helps raise attention to what we still have here and what we're losing, the better it is.



Q: What attracts you to little-known parts of the city?

Basically, my curiosity. Wherever I've lived so far, I've always wanted to get the full picture of a city. As a student in Berlin, I spent the first months after my moving there as a messenger to make sure I would see every corner of the city. That was a year before the wall came down, and after that there was so much more to discover.

Here in New York, I ride the MTA or my bicycle and then walk, walk, walk. It is probably impossible to get an all-encompassing knowledge of New York, but you can stretch far beyond your comfort zone.



Q: How has the book been received so far by readers?

A: All reactions have been positive so far. Some have asked already for a follow-up edition. Before I started putting the photos for the actual book together, I played the guessing game with friends and family to feel out what they would recognize. So it turned out to be a bit Manhattan-centric, but that's a beginning.

Many readers start rapidly flipping through the book, only to get stuck on some page, look up the location in the index and start reading the back stories. After three or four minutes, they usually look up smiling, and saying something like "Oh, that will take me a bit if time to see the whole book, but I am looking forward to it."

Q: What can people expect from the Aug 7 event at the NYPL?

A: I'll play the guessing game with you, for sure! I'd also like to introduce the underlying concept of "Point of View New York City" and its different functions--as a photo book, as an interactive game, as a very selective, very personal city guide. Last but not least, I'd like to try to inspire people to wander around with open eyes and to map their own city.



You can follow Janko and POV NYC on Facebook. Until August 7, you can find his photos of the city for sale at Bar & Lounge Verlaine, 110 Rivington St.

The Dog

On Sunday, I had a piece published in The Daily News on a new documentary called The Dog, about the real guy behind Dog Day Afternoon. You can read it here in the paper.



The unedited, original version of my essay--including a few more details--is here:

On a sultry day in August, 1972, John Wojtowicz tried to rob a bank in Brooklyn. He needed the money for his transgender wife’s sex reassignment surgery. He failed. He did succeed, however, in entertaining and titillating the entire city, becoming an “only in New York” cult figure, and getting immortalized by Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon. Wojtowicz gave the movie money to his wife, she got her surgery, and he went to prison—where he styled himself as a Gay Liberation icon.

“I’m like Babe Ruth, but the gay Babe Ruth,” says Wojtowicz in The Dog, a riveting 100-minute documentary about one man’s unconventional life.

After earning high praise on the festival circuit, The Dog, co-directed by Allison Berg and Frank Keraudren, opens in New York on August 8 at IFC Center and Lincoln Center. Packed with old-school outer-borough characters and rare archival footage from the lost gritty city, the film’s arrival in today’s squeaky-clean New York is a rollicking reminder of when life was less orderly.

“Things were looser then,” says Berg. “It was a messier time. Today it feels like we’re in one big sanitized city. We loved getting back to the fast-talking, street-hustling dirty New York. It was full of characters you just don’t have today.”

Characters like John’s first wife, Carmen Bifulco, and his prison wife, George Heath. Liz Eden, the reason for the robbery, is here in grainy archival interviews, a lithe, beautiful boy who transitions into a striking woman. There’s the captivating Terry, John’s elderly mother, an Italian-American spitfire. And, of course, there’s The Dog himself—charismatic, controlling, and unabashedly foul-mouthed.

Says Keraudren, “John’s like if you took all of Scorsese’s characters and rolled them into one. But he’s also gay.”

Wojtowicz was a Stonewall-era fighter for LGBT rights. With the Gay Activists Alliance, he participated in the first gay marriage protest at City Hall. Then he held people hostage at gunpoint, because his wife was suicidal and only surgery would save her. Through all his seemingly conflicting words and actions, what emerges is a fascinating story of a complex character who fell somewhere between hero and loser, sane and crazy, good and bad.

Bob Kappstatter, reporting for The Daily News, was on the scene at the robbery. He recalls meeting a twitchy Wojtowicz face to face, with NYPD sniper rifles pointing at them. The robber was impatient—and sweaty. The police had turned off the air conditioning in the bank and the hostages suffered.

“The hostages liked him,” recalls George Heath. “They realized he wasn’t a criminal criminal. He gave them all money.”

Was Wojtowicz the heroic figure he longed to be? Kappstatter calls him “a person with a strong ego, passion, and a flair for screwing up his and others’ lives.” Heath says, “John was a hero in his own way. He saved someone’s life. He did what he felt needed to be done.”

As filmmakers, Berg and Keraudren try not to choose sides. “You’re not there to judge,” Keraudren explains. “On a good day, John was great. On a bad day, he was sociopathic.”

“We had complicated feelings about him,” says Berg. “He was a once-in-a-lifetime character. He also drove us up the wall.” The filmmakers followed Wojtowicz for a decade, until his death from cancer in 2006. He also followed them, calling at all hours of the night and showing up on doorsteps. “Once you were in John’s world,” says Berg, “he wanted you there all the time.”

Maybe that’s what ultimately drove Wojtowicz’s actions—an obsessive need, call it a doggedness, to keep people in his world, all the time.



In addition, a photography show accompanies the film. It opens tomorrow. 

From the press release: "On Wednesday, August 6th at 7:00pm the Film Society of Lincoln Center's The Furman Gallery at the Walter Reade Theater will premiere photos taken by Marcia Resnick of The Dog himself, John Wojtowicz, the inspiration for Al Pacino's character in Dog Day Afternoon, at his most candid in the 1970's. The exhibit will stay up until August 15th."

Tap Jam

In my latest essay for Metro NY, I venture down into Smalls jazz club for the Wednesday night Tap Jam:



On a recent summer night I wandered past Smalls jazz club on West 10th Street in the Village. The Maine Coon cat reclining on the doorstep caught my attention, and the chalkboard announcement of “Tap Jam” held it. The cat is called Minnow and the Tap Jam is not to be missed.

On Wednesday nights, from 6:00 until 9:00 p.m., the basement club fills up with dancers. Dressed casually in shorts and t-shirts, baseball caps, and summer dresses, they are an unassuming group. No sequins, no bugle beads. No ramrod dancer’s posture or louche way of walking. On the street, you wouldn’t notice them. Then they put on their tap shoes.

Michela Marino Lerman, the host of the jam and tap dancer extraordinaire, calls out a name and asks, “You got your shoes on?” ...

Read the rest of the essay here

More at 12th and University

The last business to remain open in the former Bowlmor building on 12th and University has closed, leaving no more. University Pita has shuttered.



In their goodbye note, they say they are not relocating.



Around the corner, similarly displaced Japonica is relocating. Their plywood is up with a "coming soon" banner.



Meanwhile, back at Bowlmor, flowers have appeared in the shuttered gate, along with a note, "In loving memory of Marky B."

Mark Braunreuther was Bowlmor's greeter for 16 years. In the Times recently, Jo Certo wrote a memorial goodbye to him, calling him a "benevolent minder, gentleman greeter, peacekeeper on the rowdy corner" and "the mayor of University Place."



Now that every single one of the many small businesses in this building have been pushed out--from Bowlmor to Stromboli Pizza--the luxury condo construction can begin. Already, the hardhats are revving their engines.



Previously:
Bowlmor
University Stationery

Chat 'N Chew

As neighborhood-changing high-end restaurants are shuttering due to high rents that they themselves helped to elevate, the trendy little places that followed in their wake will inevitably follow in their demise.

In 1994, the trailer-park, white-trash, small-town theme restaurant Chat 'N Chew opened right across E. 16th street from Union Square Cafe, which opened in 1985. Union Square Cafe is shuttering--and it looks like Chat 'N Chew is already down for the count.



Reader Ben writes in, "They closed down for 'renovations' a year or two ago and re-opened with an updated menu and look. Some of the old comfort food was still on the menu but much had been replaced with more upscale, trendy items. They were trying for a new and different crowd. It didn't work. I guess Sunday was the last day because Monday the paper went up on the windows. There is no sign or any indication that the space will re-open or if it's becoming something else."

The restaurant's website is still up.

From Vinyl to Dunkin'

Recently we saw the former Bleecker St. Records turn into a Starbucks. This week, the former Norman's Sound and Vision record shop has become a Dunkin' Donuts. Monday was their grand opening.



Located on Third Avenue between 7th and St. Mark's, Norman's closed in 2012. The rent was too damn high. "The landlords pushed us out here," said the owner in a video interview, referring to Williamsburg, where Norman's has since moved.

According to the Center for an Urban Future's 2013 "State of the Chains" report, Dunkin Donuts is New York's most plentiful:

"For the sixth consecutive year, Dunkin Donuts tops our list as the largest national retailer in New York City, with a total of 515 stores. Over the past year, Dunkin Donuts had a net increase of 39 stores in the city (an 8 percent gain)."

Add one more to the growing pile.

Lunch at El Quijote

Starting this week, I'm trying my hand at a weekly column over at Metro NY on any and all things New York City. For my first essay, it's lunchtime at El Quijote.

Read the piece at Metro here



Lunchtime at El Quijote is a quiet affair. Classical music plays overhead, a series of waltzes, giving you space to hear yourself think. Patrons are gray-haired, hushed, some of them in singles, sitting with white napkins on their laps, not reading, just sitting. No one, not even once, takes out a cell phone. They sit without anxiety, self-contained.

The waiter, dressed in his admiral's jacket, glides silently among the tables, bearing platters of meat and fish, cocktails, and salads. Bread arrives in a wire basket adorned with a paper doily.

At the far end of the dining room, mounted on a wall painted with sky, a group of windmills slowly turn. The dreary ceiling, scalloped in stucco, brazenly shows its age, untroubled by the dark spots and cracks. Dim chandeliers hang by threads. The oxblood booths wear their frayed shoulders with a shrug of acceptance.

"Laugh and the world laughs with you," a man says to his lunch companions, "Cry and you cry alone. Understand? Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry and you cry all by yourself," as if the word "alone" is too difficult to grasp.

No one is talking about real estate or technology. No one is screeching with performative delight.

"The Nazis were very, very strict," says a wild-haired woman as she explains her trip to the Degenerate Art show at the Neue Galerie.

"I had a library of 5,000 books," says another man at another table. "But I had to give them up when I moved. I didn't have the space."

The salad is simple and unpretentious--lettuce, tomato, slices of radish. The pork chops are simple, accompanied by a stark smattering of plain peas. Your mother might have served this to you, back in the dark ages of the 20th century. The simplicity and plainness of the food acts as the opposite of a stimulant. Like the quiet, it calms the nervous system. It is just: pork chop, peas, lettuce, bread. It isn't trying to impress anyone. It has been this way for a hundred years and sees no point in changing. Take me or leave me, it says. I am what I am.

"In some countries, people will eat leftovers for breakfast."

"They're all in Bushwick now, the artists. No more in Manhattan."

Lunchtime at El Quijote is a protective bubble. The urban cymbal crash is kept far away, outside. Time slows down here. You are among the New Yorkers, the old guard, the ones who are awake, not locked to a screen's hypnotizing gaze. They know who they are, like the pork chops on the plate, and have no interest in putting on a show.