Vanishing New York Backup

For 40 years, Gino DiGirolamo had a busy, cluttered tailor shop on Avenue A near the corner of 12th Street. In late 2006, his landlord moved him out to a new space on 14th Street between A & B. That’s where you’ll find him now, at the Royal Tailor shop, chatting with customers in English so broken it’s utterly scrambled, peppering his talk with Italian words brought over from his native Palermo. He wears a measuring tape around his neck. He has two televisions sitting one on top of the other. His walls are covered with pictures of the Italian soccer team, boxer Rocky Marciano, and a poster showing popular lengths of sleeves and trouser legs. A gray-haired woman sits with him. While customers are present, she is silent. But after the customer leaves the shop, she gets up and berates Gino, telling him what he’s doing wrong and asking why can’t he do things the way she says. The tailor just smiles. He seems happy with the way business is going on 14th Street, but he liked his old spot...

If you have watched American Psycho lately, as I have, you may have noticed that the film and the main character bear a striking resemblance to today's New York. In 1991, when the book was published, and 2000, when the film came out, Patrick Bateman was a caricature of the 1980s Wall Street yuppie with a sleek condo on the Upper East Side. He was specific to a certain time and place. Watching the movie today, his specificity washes away. In 2008, Bateman's condo could be anywhere in Manhattan (and many places in Brooklyn), he could work in an office in Times Square or Soho, and his malignant narcissism is no longer a pathology of the few. In today's New York, the American Psycho is an everyman. 1. Bateman's kitchen is an orgy of stainless steel and overperforming appliances, features greatly fetishized in today's popular condos. Below is the gleaming metallic kitchen from Blue : 2. Bateman's condo shows off the cold emptiness of luxe condo aesthetic. But his ...

Is aspirational shopping finally dead? [ NY Times ] Sophie's Bar , "the last peg of a dying neighborhood," is up for sale and here's another inside scoop. [ Villager ] Is Florent , the original Meatpacking pioneer , the Queen of the neighborhood since 1985, really to close? Not without a fight. [ Eater ] The Wackness may be the first movie to wax nostalgic for New York in the 1990s : "To transform the city to its less gentrified self, the filmmakers threw more garbage on the street, sprayed some more graffiti, painted a mural to Kurt Cobain and obtained a 'Forrest Gump' bus poster. 'There was this unspoken-of good will toward the time,' said Mr. Levine, who was in production the film earlier this week. 'Is the New York of today, which has a Starbucks on every corner, better than pre-1994?' He was proud of the fact that 'It’s one of the first movies to fetishize the 1990s.'" Oh, and it stars Mary-Kate Olsen, too. [ City Room ...

With all the recent destruction on the Bowery, I figured it was time to revisit the Amato Opera house and I went to see La Boheme. I saw the show years ago and not much has changed. Now they have a screen above the stage with English supertitles, a great improvement. That's about it. A lady who might be Ukrainian still sells home-made brownies at the snack bar. A stack of old records and VHS tapes sits for sale nearby. Otherwise, the place is the same. Founded in 1948 by husband and wife Tony and Sally Amato , they moved to the Bowery in 1964. For years their tenement theater stood between a parking lot and CBGB's, both now gone. If there is one reason to grieve for that parking lot it's because that was where you could see (and hear) the chorus practicing before performances on temperate afternoons. Another loss, greater than that parking lot, in 2000, Sally Amato passed away , leaving Tony to carry on the tradition of big opera in a small space. She no longer makes he...

Last month I reported that the East Village's A. Fontana Shoe Repair will be closing after 45 years in business. Yesterday, it became "official" with Mr. Fontana's "Lost My Lease" signs going up in the windows. You have until February 28 to pick up your shoes. If you don't have any shoes to pick up, visit the place anyway. Buy a can of weatherproofing spray or a pair of shoelaces. Just go. Come March 1, it will all be gone.

A photographic obit for a Tompkins Square Park character , one of a disappearing breed. [ NMNL ] Help save the Bowery from luxury development. [ SLES ] Juicy Couture's eye-catching window display grabbed me last week and also attracted the folks at Racked . They associated to rats and I associated to scat. In Freudian theory, money is feces. In this window display, money is being eaten. The ultimate yunnie dream? Remember, they do want to shit gold : Take a look at Astor Place's famous musical note clock --and be sure to check out the link to some great pics of Astor back when it had a parking lot loaded with street vendors. Who was the last vendor to make that lot home? The porno man of Astor Place . [ Bowery Boys ] Went to see Cloverfield this weekend --what a disappointment. Like the Times , "For a brief, hopeful moment, I thought the filmmakers might be making a point about how the contemporary compulsion to record the world has dulled us to actual lived experience, ...

Adler with great-grandfather Aron & grandfather Irving Streit Alan Adler, a co-owner of Streit's Matzo factory and great-grandson of founders Aron and Nettie Streit, was kind enough to give me an early-morning tour of the factory, which I'd been wanting to do since I heard the news that Streit's will be moving out of the Lower East Side. At 7:00 a.m., the bakery is already churning out sheets of matzo. In the basement, silos pump flour up through the building and big heaters stoke the ovens. Everything is covered with soft white powder and the air smells vaguely like a grandmother's pantry. The ceiling is a circuitboard of pipes. "The whole building is like a Rube Goldberg device," said Mr. Adler. A manual damper system balances the heat in the oven's long hulk, into which a sheet of uncooked matzo streams after being poked by a comb-like device that makes holes in the dough to keep it from rising. Rabbis are on hand to ensure all is kosher th...

Rally with Save the Hotel to rescue the historic Hotel Pennsylvania from corporate destruction. Show up at the hotel tomorrow, Saturday, from 9:00 - 11:00 in the morning and you will not only get the satisfaction of doing a good thing, you will also get free donut holes! And you might also get on TV. I visited the hotel back in November and took a walk around the neighborhood. If we lose this landmark, we will also most certainly lose an interesting block of New York City. Turning the hotel into another corporate tower will change the surrounding businesses, a motley collection of wig shops, bars, odd little churches-- the places that make New York different from Disney World. We could lose Hickey's Bar , an Irish dive that's already changed (or changing) hands, though the owner of 40 years assured me it isn't closing, as the Times reported . When I was there, Neil Diamond was singing "Love on the Rocks" from the juke and the walls were covered with pictures o...

One of the best places in the city for a beer and a burger is Pete McManus. On 7th Ave in Chelsea, the bar was opened in 1936 by brothers Peter and James. It hasn't changed much since. The Times has described it as ''an inviting place in a rough-and-tumble sort of way, with a well-worn tile floor, lead-paned windows and a splendid carved mahogany bar.'' New York Magazine notes it's the oldest family-run bar in the city , still under the guidance of grandson James. The place has all the things that are good about a bar: wood worn smooth by countless elbows, a warm amber glow, crazy but friendly barflies who look as if they've been pickled in the place, which they have. It even has a lovely pair of wooden phone booths that light up when you open their doors as if welcoming you into them. But, like all good old bars in this city, you have to visit early. After 7:00, the kids come out. These kids are not the well-heeled, yunnie spillovers from the Meatpacking...

As 13th Street Rep proprietor Edith O'Hara predicted here , a giant glass hotel is going up on 13th Street between 5th and 6th. Unless, of course, the neighbors rally and boot the plan in the ass before it can happen. Or is that too much to hope for? [ Curbed ] Zoolander comes to Elizabeth Street as the Hollywood-dream, classic-styled luxury condo building rises on the corner at Prince . We should count our blessings it's not another glass box, and yet, I'm not counting them. Because I remember when it was part of LaRosa & Son Bread Co. and, with the smell of baking in the air, you could stop in on a cold night for a hot loaf of Italian bread, fresh from the oven. It melted in your mouth. That was a blessing. ...and the rendering: The Gertel's sign has been mysteriously resurrected in Brooklyn. [ Lost City ] More big-box building for Red Hook? Here comes the 'burbs in all their unwieldy glory--time to install one of those miserable, life-sucking "offic...

Back in November, I posted about the demise of the East Village's International Bar , watering hole of dive lovers everywhere. This week I noticed the windows have been papered over and I wondered what was happening. Tonight, I got the answer via the following very informative tip from commenter "branmasterflash," who apparently has the inside scoop. Branmaster assures us, "The International is in good hands." Finally, some good news! Thanks, branmaster, whoever you are. I reproduce here your comment in full (if slightly copy edited): " The International is being restored as a neighborhood bar. It will not be quite as gritty as it was, but it will be very similar to what it always was. There will also be some differences in the layout. The bar has been moved to the other side of the room and there is more room at the front of the bar. The proximity of the old bar so close to the front door was always a problem. Unfortunately the old bar was torn out when th...

Now what I want to know is, who pays $18,000 for a belt? [ NY Mag ] via [ Racked ] Save Whole Earth Bakery , on St. Mark's since 1978. [ SBT ] The Ukrainian B&M Meat Market and European Products on 1st Ave and 7th St has been shuttered for a while now. A flyer says a restaurant is coming and they're looking for a beer and wine license. The hearing is tonight. I am sure they'll have no problem getting it. My fingers are crossed in futile hope this won't be another wine bar spilling obnoxious yunnies onto the sidewalks. Do we really need 50 million tourists here every year? I sure don't. [ Sun ] A profile of Chelsea's cigar makers , including La Rosa Cubana. The owner, who I interviewed here , says he may have to move his 50-year-old shop to Jersey due to high rents. [ Chelsea Now ] Second Ave Subway helps murder the city's mom-and-pops. [ Metro ] Check out this amazing found art: Still life with rat and Heineken cap? [ NY Shitty ]

What's happening behind the Avalon? A whole lotta garbage dumping. Curbed reported last year on Avalon's plans to turn this alley into "a slice of the Left Bank, a pedestrian mall lined with interesting boutiques and cafes." Maybe the left side is poised to be Left Bank, but the right is strictly a slice of the old Bowery. The alley is called Extra Place and it's behind the defunct CBGB's. Read and see more about its rock-n-roll history from ForgottenNY . Go further back into its history with Brendan Gill, who wrote about Extra Place for The New Yorker's Talk of the Town in 1952. Back then, the alley housed a garage, a metalworking shop, and an old guy who fondly recalled the speakeasy that used to be there in the '20s. Click on these to enlarge and read from Gill's piece: Take a walk back there to soak up its still-seedy atmosphere, before Avalon succeeds in turning it into another trendoid Freeman Alley . It's just up 1st Street from Mars...

Roger and Dave are closing up shop after 27 years in Chelsea. I like these guys. Very sad. [ Racked ] Cafe Gigi on East 9th is closed and gutted --all but a lonely chandelier. I used to go to this place 15 years ago. I remember sitting there with a friend who told me that a friend of hers would flirt with guys across a crowded room by mouthing the words, "olive juice." Try it. Ask an expert about immigrants on the Lower East Side. [ City Room ] Then take a visit to MTV's virtual Lower East Side , aka VLES. Much more on this later, suffice to say for now, I've spent a few hours there recently and it's a fascinating and bizarre experience. [ Gothamist ] Here I am, in my avatar, bemoaning before the virtual Katz's: A sad goodbye from Frank's Steakhouse in the Meatpacking District. [ Eater ] I'm glad people are locking up their bikes in the East Village , but this is annoying. I had to walk past this one several times, with that tire crowding out half th...

Bad news! Like a pioneer who survived the perilous journey west only to succumb to the harsh winters of that new land, our old Moondance Diner has crumpled under Wyoming's snow. [ City Room ] [ AP ] A guy named Matt who takes cool pictures wants to get his hair cut at every subway barbershop in town . He wants to take their pictures, too, before they vanish. Get more info and please give him a tip if you know of any underground tonsorialists. [ Subway Barbers ] Wholesome Foods (?) is coming to Essex and Stanton , just a couple blocks from Whole Foods. Think there'll be a showdown on the LES? The Garment District is dying fast --and the city's hardly helping. [ Chelsea Now ] Take another visit to Streit's --this time with the Times. [ NY Times ] Gotta love the recent rise in anti-gentrification graffiti : See "Greed is killing the West Village." [ Eater ] The Met Food grocery story on 2nd Ave between 6th and 7th used to be a Ratner's deli . I've gon...

Something big is coming to East 4th Street between 2nd and Bowery. Here's the site today: pics from my flickr And here's the near future: Curbed recently revealed the whole Scarano tower as it rises high above the Bowery -- and, more specifically, above the Salvation Army East Village residence. As the very affluent cavort in their rooftop swimming pool and sip champagne on their terraces, maybe they'll send a few splashes down onto the unwashed masses. Wired has a few more details and images from this latest luxury monstrosity. The Real Deal says the tower will rise to 22 stories (Curbed says 15) and tells us what's inside, interiors by designer Andres Escobar that will be " comparable to Ian Schrager's luxurious 40 Bond ." Which reminds me, have you walked down Bond lately? There's basically nothing left of the former street, except for the lone Bowery Home Supplies. Take a look at the website for 52 E. 4 . Against a backdrop of downtown-style gra...