Vanishing New York Backup

Yesterday, workers removed the gorgeous neon sign of the shuttered Carnegie Deli. photo by Jonathan Walland The 79-year-old deli closed at the end of December-- for reasons no one fully understands . Its famous Walls of Fame were recently stripped and its contents auctioned: photo: Ken Jacowitz photo: Ken Jacowitz photo: Ken Jacowitz

Tomorrow evening, January 31, the NYPL's Martin Duberman Visiting Scholar, Hugh Ryan, will be presenting on " The Queer Histories of Brooklyn’s Working Waterfront ." I asked Hugh a few questions on the topic of his research. * UPDATE: Watch the streaming video of the talk here . Q: What are some ways that queer populations and the working class came together in New York of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century? A: For much of the period I’m researching (from the mid-1800s to World War II), there wasn’t really a “queer population” to speak of. Our modern idea of sexuality as a unique identity, separate from gender, was only just coming into existence (the word “homosexuality” wasn’t even coined until 1868). Of course, there were people who did and felt queer things. But they didn’t “come together” with the working class in the ways that we would imagine. Rather, they were part of the working class (as well as other classes), and in some spaces and at some...

For years, the block of West 28th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues was a quiet one, wide open and low rising. It was auto-body shops, a scrap yard, a place to get a slice of pizza, and the Eagle gay bar. Then the new High Line came. Immediately, a big chunk of the block was flattened. Small construction businesses moved out. The +ART condo went up across the street in 2010. The second section of the High Line opened in 2011. Construction began for Avalon Bay's AVA High Line. In 2012, the one-story nightclub in the bottom right of this photo was demolished. The scrap yard (left side, with yellow machine) kept scrapping. Life went on. Then residents of the +ART condo started complaining about the Folsom East fetish fair. Christian right-wingers stood on the High Line with signs telling the fairgoers they were sinners. Tourists gawked . The fair was cancelled and eventually moved. AVA got bigger and bigger and bigger. Then the scrap yard went in 2013 , sol...

In despair, I recently reported on the closure of the great and underrated Greek Corner Coffee Shop . Now there's a new sign in the window: "Under new management: Store will be re-opening after renovations." This looks like good news. Let's hope it stays a regular coffee shop. (I would say let's hope they keep the pistachio green lunch counter, but you know that will never happen.)

This past fall, the journalist, author, and Village Voice editor Neil deMause published The Brooklyn Wars , the story of 21st-century hyper-gentrification in the borough of kings. I asked him a few questions about what the wars are all about. What are the Brooklyn Wars? Who are the competing armies and what are they fighting for? The last 20 to 30 years of this borough — the rise of the “New Brooklyn” and all that — has been portrayed as either a good or a bad thing, depending on your perspective, but either way usually as a sort of unavoidable evolution. When you look more closely, though, it’s actually been the result of a series of pitched battles over what the borough would look like, who it would serve, and who would get to live here. The sides in these battles have been complex and shifting: You have developers, and politicians seeking “redevelopment” in various forms, and residents of all types who either promote or resist change, sometimes both at the same time. (One ...

Unsurprisingly, the real-estate developers are excited about a Trump presidency. This press release came in over the transom for an event tomorrow at the Sunshine Cinema of all places. It's full of awfulness: "L.E.S. is MORE" is a vibrant discussion between real estate and financial titans on the changing landscape of the Lower East Side post-election . Additional info can be found below: Who – Moderator: Leonard Steinberg, President of Compass / Panelists: Benjamin Shaoul, Charles Bendit, Arthur Stern, Andres Hoff, José Antonio Grabowsky and Nikolai Fedak Where – Landmark Sunshine Cinema, located at 143 E Houston St When – Wednesday, January 18 from 9:30 am - 1:00 pm (Breakfast and lunch will be served). Topics of discussion will include: - Trump threw out the playbook in politics, fittingly NYC's real estate players are doing the same -How the LES is ripe for living and ripe for investment -Green smoothies and Katz's pastrami sandwiches: the collisi...

VANISHING Back in 2010, after 15 years on Bleecker Street, Leo Design gifts closed shop. Their goodbye sign at the time said, " We're being turned out ." This was in the middle of the luxury blitz that decimated the western end of Bleecker , turning the quiet and eclectic local street into a homogenized suburban shopping mall for the very rich. Leo Design moved to Hudson Street. And now it's closing again. Their goodbye sign this time around is longer--and more heartbreaking. The core of the letter gets right to the core of the problem in the new New York. Owner Kimo Jung writes: "Long-time neighbors in The Village will remember when we opened 22 years ago. What a different place this was! Mom & Pop shops were the rule, not the exception . One-of-a-kind shops lined the streets—and shoppers could find odd and wonderful delights unavailable in any suburban shopping mall. The Internet was something new and Simon & Garfunkel sang that 'thirty d...

VANISHING Fong Inn Too is the oldest family-run tofu shop in New York City and, quite possibly, in the United States. Founded on Mott Street in Chinatown in 1933, it closes forever tomorrow--Sunday, January 15. Paul Eng Third-generation co-owner Paul Eng showed me around the place. Upstairs, a massive noodle-making machine churns out white sheets of rice noodle, sometimes speckled with shrimp and scallion. Downstairs, a kitchen runs several hours a day with steaming woks and vats of tofu and rice cake batter, including a fragrantly fermenting heirloom blend of living legacy stock that dates back decades. Eng's family came to New York from Guangzhou in the Guangdong province of China (by way of Cuba), like many of Chinatown's earliest immigrants. His grandfather, Geu Yee Eng, started the business, catering mainly to the neighborhood's restaurants. His father, Wun Hong, and later his mother, Kim Young, took over after World War II and kept it going, branching out fro...

A reader from Queens recently wrote in, "There have been reports of the Neptune Diner’s imminent demise over the last few years. However, community gossip is much stronger and multiple people have said the lot on which the Neptune sits was sold and the diner will be closed." So I went to Astoria for breakfast at the Neptune. It's right at the bottom of the stairs at Astoria Boulevard Station. You can't miss it with its white stone walls and red adobe-style roof, its arched windows and lighted carriage lamps. The food was good. As the paper placemat informs you, the Daily News has named Neptune the Best Diner in Queens. The place was busy, too, bustling with a Queensian mix of New Yorkers--working class and middle class, many races and ethnicities. The city. I don't know how long the Neptune has been in existence. Long enough for David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve to dine there during the filming of The Hunger , and no doubt longer. Photo by Jean-C...

VANISHED I'd never been to Le Train Bleu, the quasi-hidden restaurant atop Bloomingdale's, so when the Times reported it was closing at the end of 2016, after 37 years, I went. Le Train Bleu, as James Barron explained, was "the nickname for a famous French train that carried passengers coming from London and Paris to the Riviera. The engines were blue. The restaurant, in Bloomingdale’s flagship store, mimicked the train’s dark-green interiors, with velvet on the walls, along with mahogany paneling and a Victorian-style ceiling." Bloomingdale’s will be renovating the sixth floor, and that means no more Le Train Bleu. You got there by elevator or escalator, winding your way through the housewares department, and climbing a set of carpeted stairs to an odd little corridor. The dining room looked like a dining car, long and narrow, framed with tables. I sat by the window, with a view of some plastic shrubbery and a bunch of brutal luxury apartment buildings...

VANISHED Late last week, I headed to the Greek Corner Coffee Shop Diner , as I often do, looking forward to a cup of coffee at the pistachio green counter. Instead, I found it gone. I was heartbroken. A goodbye sign in the window said they'd closed on December 31--"After exactly 36 years, 5 months, and 15 days." They'd been on the corner of 7th Avenue and 28th Street since 1980. Back in March, I shared the rumor that the place was going to close , but I could not confirm it. I was told: The building has been sold. The building might be sold. There are holdouts who won't budge. The building won't be sold. Everything will be okay. Who knows? There's no notice of a recent sale in the online building records, but it could be imminent. Was the coffee shop pushed out or did they just decide it's time to go? In their goodbye sign they say they're opening a new place in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, called Blue Door Souvlakia . It looks nice, but nothi...

VANISHED Last week we lost another authentic New York coffee shop, that rapidly vanishing part of the city's local fabric. The Evergreen on West 47th, a block east of Times Square, had been in business for 25 years. They'd just celebrated their anniversary. A sign in the window read: "we will go dark" on New Year's Eve. The building owner would not renew their lease. “We’re being forced out,” Evergreen's owner Ilias Argenas told DNAInfo . “They want the property vacant. Why? I have no clue.” To the Post , he said, “We were pleading, we were arguing." But no lease. Not even for one more year. The building that holds the Evergreen was sold. When I went in for a farewell meal, a waiter told me it will be demolished for a new hotel. A little deli in the building will also close. Two small local businesses destroyed for yet another tourist hotel? We need that like we need a hole in the head. According to news outlets and public records, the b...

If you've recently walked by Cake Shop , which played its last song on New Year's Eve , you may have noticed a flickering neon sign in the window. It says one word: VANISHING. The sign is the brainchild of artists Troy Kreiner and Brian Broker of Shameless Enterprise , in collaboration with "Vanishing New York" and built by neon artist Patrick Nash . The 20-something offspring of native New Yorkers, raised nearby in Nassau County, Troy and Brian created the sign to bring attention to the plight of vanishing small businesses in the city they love. "Neon is poetic," says Troy. "The singular word, VANISHING, echoes the OPEN signs you see in store windows." Only this sign communicates the opposite, announcing closure and finality with its irregular rhythm, like a heartbeat fading out. "The light was engineered to flicker," Troy explains, "like it's on its last legs. And neon is a fragile material, hand-crafted, ingrained in the...