Vanishing New York Backup

VANISHING Sadie Stein lets us know that, after selling hand-made, vintage-style clothes in the East Village for 28 years, the D.L. Cerney boutique is leaving 7th Street. D.L. Cerney site I talked with co-owner Linda St. John about the closure. She said it's not about rent, it's just about time. She wants to get out of town for awhile and focus on her art and writing , as well as her farming upstate. She hopes to come back to the city, but not to the East Village. " Back in the 1980s and into the 90s," she said, "this whole neighborhood was just filled with creative people. Now, nobody's left . The way Rudy cleaned up the neighborhood was awesome, but now it's too clean. When did those French bistros end up on Avenue D?" She said that people don't spend money on hand-made clothes anymore, they want to buy "junk" from the chain boutiques. " It's psychological propaganda. People are told to shop there, so they do. I've seen...

It's been a week since my High Line op-ed came out in the Times and it's been interesting to read the response to it. The comments on this blog and its Facebook page were overwhelmingly supportive and positive, as were all the emails I received, including notes from several journalists. Many people commented that the op-ed gave them a sense of relief. "It needed to be said," said one, "but everyone else was afraid to say it." This speaks to the power of the High Line as a sacred cow. It must not be questioned or criticized. People will get upset. [*Update: The Founders of the High Line posted their official response to my Op-Ed .] A number of responses came out on other blogs. While Choire Sicha at The Awl and Kelly Chan at ArtInfo were largely in favor, author Matthew Gallaway and artist Paul Soulellis took offense. Treehugger wasn't crazy about it, either. And, of course, there were several unhappy commenters, here and on other blogs. Rath...

Since the great New York School poet Frank O'Hara's last home was torn down in 2009 and replaced with a luxury condo, the first floor retail space has sat empty, yearning "for a boutique or coffee shop." It's not getting its exact wish, but pretty close. 2009 A Department of Buildings permit has gone up in the window, along with the familiar brown paper that always comes with a move-in. The renovation calls for "ten new yoghurt machines." And the march of the fro-yo chains continues. But which fro-yo chain will it be? Pinkberry? Red Mango? 16 Handles? There are so many to choose from. The architect on the permit is listed as MK Dream Design . They do plastic surgeon offices, beauty spas, and futuristic dance clubs. In the yogurt world, they designed The Yogurt Shop in Englewood, New Jersey, to look like an intergalactic cafe on a spaceship. Is this what's coming to what was once a place for amputees to find new limbs? Where the upstairs was a have...

Author and NYU professor Mark Crispin Miller is a member of the organization NYU Faculty Against the Sexton Plan ( NYUFASP ), a group that's fighting NYU's plan to bulldoze the Village for more development. I asked Mark some questions about the plan, NYUFASP, and the fabulous book While We Were Sleeping: NYU and the Destruction of New York (which you can buy here or pick up at the McNally Jackson bookstore). JVNY: Tell us a little bit about putting together the book While We Were Sleeping . It's got a fantastic roster of writers. How did you know who'd be able to write with anger and clarity about NYU expansion? MCM: We didn't know, but it did work out beautifully. Peter Carey worked especially hard to help us fill that dazzling roster out. He also came up with the title, and got Tom Slaughter to provide us with the cover illustration. NYUFASP owes him a lot—and so will NYU, if it survives the Sexton Plan. We're also indebted to Sarah McNally [of M...

Each morning around 4:00, before opening his business, Dionisios Manesis goes next door to Weichsel Beef's outlet in the Gansevoort Market to buy fresh meat for making burgers at his Hector's Cafe and Diner under the High Line. Weichsel's large, main plant is a few blocks away--it's the last free-standing meatpacking plant in the neighborhood and they've occupied it for the past 45 years. But now they're about to lose it, reports The Real Deal. I wrote about the Weichsel plant back in November , looking at the luxury flood that was encroaching all around it. Weichsel is located on the extreme margin of MePa, out of sight and out of mind. But the High Line brought the Whitney Museum to Weichsel's doorstep, and there's no way Weichsel and its swinging sides of beef would be allowed to stay. Weichsel will be shuffled out of its home and moved completely into the city-run Gansevoort Market Co-Op, where the endangered lease was extended to 2031 in exchange f...

By now you've heard the news, first released yesterday here and since spread like wildfire, that Colony Records must close its long-standing Times Square home in the next month or so. Today, the Post followed up on the story and reported that the reason for the closure is not just because we all have iPods, it's because Colony's landlord is quintupling the rent to $5 million . flickr The Brill Building was sold in 2007 to Stonehenge Properties for $151 million. Here's the rendering they present of the future Brill at 1619 Broadway--and Colony's space--on their website today: "Generation," a fantasy big-box flagship store features the usual glass and glitz, the horror of contemporary life in New York City. And here's how they're marketing it: "Amazing opportunity for a brand to control a high-trafficked corner location" --can accommodate "big box"--in the spot where a family-run business thrived for 6 decades and...

Read three fresh dreams of the vanishing New York: one about 1947 Bowery from me, a tourist nightmare from Chris, and a Lower East Side matrimonial dream from Goggla.

On Broadway near 12th, Union Square is getting a 7-11 and a Pret A Manger. Will the chaining never end? In a city increasingly clogged with 7-11's , neighbors welcome "corporate greed" of Grand St.'s 7-11 . [ BB ] Check out Chris Arnade's lovely photos of the uncelebrated people of Brooklyn and the Bronx . [ CAP ] The "charmingly shabby" interiors of 104 E. 10th , from which last bohemian Edgar Oliver was evicted. [ EVG ] Checking in with zombie restaurants and what happened to Fedora . [ GAF ] Recently shuttered Lafayette French bakery to be replaced by trendy restaurant. [ Eater ] " Stop sucking up to Bloomberg . Why is New York's mayor perpetually portrayed as a hero? Because journalists fear him..." [ Salon ] Gay rights landmark faces demolition. [ GVSHP ] The New Museum on the art of the old Bowery it helped to oust. [ Gothamist ] Developers are lusting to gut your walk-up and send you packing. [ NYT ]

VANISHING After "60 years serving Broadway, New York, and the World," the venerable Colony Music in Times Square is closing down. That's the word from JVNY reader Charles Hutchinson, who works at Academy Records . A call to Colony confirmed the bad news. They'll be around for a little while longer, but not too long. Charles writes in: " Colony Records is closing next month. I'm heartsick when any unique business that promotes music, books, and culture in general gets forced out of this city . As someone who has spent some of his most joyful hours browsing in such shops, I dread the day when rents and the Internet flush them all out. No website that I can conceive of could possibly fill the role played by the late lamented Gotham Book Mart or (should it be forced to close) Downtown Music Gallery in this city's cultural life. Record Stores, despite all the vinyl-is-back hubbub, are proving to be as vulnerable as the next mom-&-pop in the Bloombergia...

The New York Times printed my Op-Ed today on how the High Line "has become a tourist-clogged catwalk and a catalyst for some of the most rapid gentrification in the city’s history." August 21, 2012 Disney World on the Hudson By JEREMIAH MOSS WHEN the first segment of the High Line, the now-famous park built atop an old elevated railway on the West Side of Manhattan, opened in 2009, I experienced a moment of excitement. I had often wondered what it would be like to climb that graffiti-marked trestle with its wild urban meadow. Of course, I’d seen the architectural renderings and knew not to expect a wilderness. Still, the idea was enticing: a public park above the hubbub, a contemplative space where nature softens the city’s abrasiveness. Today it’s difficult to remember that initial feeling. The High Line has become a tourist-clogged catwalk and a catalyst for some of the most rapid gentrification in the city’s history. My skepticism took root during my first v...

With the enormous influx of tourists to the city, along with lots of newer New Yorkers who seem to have trouble getting with the program, we've seen a coinciding uptick in urban etiquette signage. There's Jay Shells' Metropolitan Etiquette Authority street signs, the plethora of "please be quiet" signs outside of bars and restaurants, and a few rogue posters instructing High Line tourists on how to behave. Now graphic artist Desirre Jones has put together a tourist etiquette Tumblr, " NYC Tourist Tips ," subtitled "How to visit New York City and not have the natives want to stab you... and other helpful hints." click to enlarge and read JVNY: What inspired you to make these etiquette posters? DJ: Well, right now I'm working in Times Square and run-ins with tourists are a daily occurrence. Instead of yelling at them on the street like a crazy person I decided to make the blog. JVNY: Has the blog helped you to alleviate your sidewalk rage?...

A reader writes in to report: "The Gramercy Corner shop, news, candy, magazines, etc., has closed soon after a 7-11 opened up next door." Anonymous reader In April, the Daily News visited the little mom-and-pop. They wrote: "Near the 7-Eleven that opened at 247 Third Ave. in Gramercy early last year, local stores have had a hard time. Omar Irfan, the 46-year-old co-owner of Gramercy Corner at 20th St. and Third Ave. estimates that 7-Eleven took away 25-30% of his business . 'We sell a lot of the same things — snacks, cigarettes, lotto,' Irfan said. 'It’s very hard. We try to put prices a little down. Still, people come here for me. They know me.'" Mr. Irfan hasn't shut down completely. He has managed to move across 20th Street and down a couple doors, next to the Dunkin Donuts Baskin Robbins, into a much smaller space than his last one. The rent here is cheaper. And maybe being a hair's breadth away from 7-11's field of gravity will help...

Author Josh Alan Friedman dreams of an alternate Coney Island--at Dreams of the Vanishing New York .

Something's coming to the corner of Mott and Houston. The space used to be La Cocina corner deli, but it's been for rent for awhile now. Its side has long been wrapped in a plasticky advertisement, hot pink and decorated with super-skinny women shoppers (some without eyes). They clutch their bags and strike poses around the words YOUR STORE HERE. It's an insulting sign and appropriately attracted neighborhood rage from the beginning . "We want our bodega," said one writer in black Magic Marker. "No more yuppies in Nolita." A bit more recently, another writer got more colorful, saying, "FUCK YOU BLOODSUCKERS WE WANT A BODEGA BACK" and "FUCK YOU HOPE IT BURNS DOWN BEFORE IT GOES BROKE."

VANISHED Reader Kevin Dougherty writes in with the news that, after over 30 years in business, the Lafayette Bakery on Greenwich Avenue has closed. "Sadly, it does not come as a surprise to me. I do not think he was doing that well in the business. The store is totally empty. Not a thing appears to be left. Sad." He shares this photo of the empty shop window: photo: Kevin Dougherty In June, the owner of the bakery wrote on Lafayette's Facebook page: " we must leave this location due to a letter of eviction. donations are being accepted. i need 40000! " A week later, he said, "good news- got an order to show cause extending our life til july 9, 2012." And that was all he wrote. In July, Robert Sietsema reported that the marshals had seized the place. As to history, he wrote, "Lafayette had been at this Greenwich Avenue location for at least 15 years, and had previously existed for at least 15 years near the corner of Bleecker and Seventh Avenu...

10 reasons why you should help St. Mark's Bookshop move to a new location. [ KSPL ] Only 4 days left to make a donation so St. Mark's gets the funds already pledged. Send them a few bucks today! [ LA ] On Williamsburg, the " Last Bohemia ," gentrification, and all that stuff. [ VV ] "Narratively," a new project to tell New York's stories , looks like it's doing something interesting. Give them a kickstart, if you like how it sounds. [ KS ] Utrecht art supply store is leaving 4th Avenue. [ EVG ] Rare and lovely shots inside abandoned Shore Theater of Coney Island. [ youtube ] Luxury Bleecker comes east with Intermix on Bond St . [ BB ] Joan Jett at Coney Island. [ TWM ] "One hundred and sixty-eight bleak Decembers ago or thereabouts, Edgar Allan Poe sat before a fireplace in a farmhouse on a high bluff on what would someday be called the Upper West Side, composing a poem..." [ CR ] Finding the Hotel Cavalier . [ NYN ] Cool Culinaria...

VANISHED What happened to Mei Dick? 2009 Back in April, a couple of commenters noted that the notorious ( and much photographed ) sign was gone, but we just got down to Chinatown to check it out. It's gone. Yelper A.F.B. tells the tale: "Friday, April 20, 2012 will be a day that I recall with melancholic humor. I walked out of Aji Ichiban on Mott Street, turned left, looked over and exclaimed loudly with appropriate horror, 'OH, NO!!! MY DICK IS GONE!' Then laughed. The sign is scrubbed away, the mailbox is stuffed with un-picked up mail, and one of my Chinatown Cultural References seems to have disappeared. Mei Dick was one of the places in Chinatown where I'd get my haircut... They did a good job at a good price and, with the constant clacking noise of Mah Jongg tiles in the background, somewhat like an adventure. So, one more 'I remember when' to add to my walks through the City of Ghosts." Yelper Isaac C realls, "The same guy (the on...

On a hot summer day in 1987, join Michael Musto and friends for a graffiti-splattered subway ride from (unrecognizable) Union Square to (recently demolished) Coney Island. It's another gem from filmmaker Nelson Sullivan . When artist Albert Crudo gets on in Bensonhurst he tells of "these horrible girls" on the platform who commented on his gender presentation: "It's a guy! It's a guy!" Musto passes the time by defacing images of 1950s Hollywood starlets. Today they'd be hipsters. But it's not today. It's the '80s. And, look, it's the Loew's Oriental movie palace--shuttered in 1995 and turned into a Marshall's . When they finally arrive at their destination, the glimpse of Coney's ghosts might break your heart.

When West 33rd Street's Peep World closed back in March , we thought it would be replaced by a branch of Murray Hill's Overlook Lounge, a large gastro-pub known as "The Home of the Oklahoma Sooners." As I wrote then, "They specialize in hot wings and pommes frites, and feature a TV screen at every booth tuned to a sporting event. Their customers are often seen dressed in mardi gras beads and football jerseys for out-of-town teams." But this fate is not to be--at least, not exactly. Instead, Peep World will become a Hooters . Which is kind of the same thing as an Oklahoma Sooners bar serving hot wings. Except it's worse. It's worse because Hooters is a watered-down, suburbanized version of Peep World and all the other XXX joints that have been erased from the city. It's worse because it's a "family restaurant" that's really all about big tits. Unlike Hooters, Peep World didn't pretend to be family friendly,...