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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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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