3 Dreams

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.

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Eisenberg's

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 VANISHED One of the greatest, and one of my favorites, has gone. After temporarily shuttering during the pandemic, Eisenberg's sandwich shop , near the Flatiron since 1929, has closed for good. A For Lease sign is in the window. I went by yesterday and talked with building manager Jackie Valiente who told me that she and the building owner would love to save Eisenberg's, but they need someone to take it over and keep it as it is. "Someone who wants the old Eisenberg's," she said, "the old concept of New York." That concept, said customer Arnold Engelman, is simple. "Eisenberg's is what New York's all about," he told me. "People gathering in places they know, knowing the owners and the owners knowing them. This doesn't exist anymore." Arnold has been coming to Eisenberg's since he was a kid, growing up on 11th Street. Jackie has been eating at Eisenberg's since 1976. It's the kind of place you keep going...
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September 11: From "Vanishing New York"

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Until September 11, 2001, New York was not quite America. From its Dutch beginnings, the city existed as a space apart. Exceptionally able to tolerate, and celebrate, a multiplicity of cultures and ways of living, it had been both the gateway to America for foreign immigrants and the escape from America for those who never fell in line with the American way of normal. New York was a liminal space between inside and outside, a threshold neither here nor there but ultimately itself. It was a city that permitted transgression, the crossing of old boundaries, whether that meant a Jewish immigrant from Russia casting off her wig, or a young man from Nebraska putting his on (with false eyelashes to match). In The Island at the Center of the World, Russell Shorto writes, “It was no coincidence that on September 11, 2001, those who wished to make a symbolic attack on the center of American power chose the World Trade Center as their target. If what made America great was its ingenious openn...
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Zombie Urbanism

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Jonny Aspen , Associate Professor at the Institute of Urbanism and Landscape in Oslo, Norway, coined the term " Zombie Urbanism " in 2013 to describe the way many urban environments are being designed today. I like the term, so I got in touch with Aspen and asked him about it--and how it applies to the redesigning of New York City, including the High Line, Hudson Yards, Times Square, and the new Astor Place. Astor Place Q: Can you give a definition of what you call "zombie urbanism"? A: I’ve coined the concept in order to encircle what seems to be an increasingly more prevalent, and increasingly more worrying, phenomenon in contemporary urban development, namely the cliché-like way that many developers and designers talk about and deal with urban environments in general and public areas and places more specifically. On the one hand I use it as a reference to what seems to have developed into an increasingly more homogeneous discourse, globally speaking, on...
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