Vanishing New York Backup

After more than a year of speculation , Cornelia Street Cafe has announced they will be closing. PRLog reports the cafe "will close its red doors permanently on January 2nd, 2019." Owner Robin Hirsch wrote, "I am sad to say that I am losing my oldest child. Cornelia has brought me both joy and pain, and it is with a broken heart that I must bid her adieu." The reason for the closure has not been revealed. Last year, the Times reported on the cafe's troubles: "Their rent for the restaurant and basement space, at $33,000 a month, is 77 times what it was when the club opened (that’s not adjusting for inflation — but, in the name of consistency, they’re not charging $77 for a croissant)." DNAInfo noted that the cafe was struggling--especially with landlord Mark Scharfman, "a frequent fixture on various 'Worst Landlord' lists." Hirsch told the blog at the time, "If I'm 10 minutes late with my rent, he threatens me wit...

Earlier this year, I shared a real estate listing on Moishe's Kosher Bake Shop in the East Village. At the time, a call to Moishe Perl got a laugh and the statement, "People always put up these things." He said he wasn't closing. Now the reader who sent me that listing has sent in a report far more alarming. The Real Deal states : "Investor Jay Schwimmer just inked a 21-year lease for the entire three-story East Village property that’s anchored by neighborhood institution Moishe’s Bake Shop... The lease begins in March and includes an option for Schwimmer to buy the building." Moishe's owns the building and has been in the East Village since 1974. As the Times once reported, "he hasn’t changed his menu or his recipes one iota in 42 [now 44] years — everything kosher, no dairy except for the cheese Danish and strudel. His bread slicer, which was there when he bought the place, a former bakery that had been closed for a while, is 80 years ol...

VANISHING (for now) Richard Geist has run Uncle Sam's Army/Navy store on West 8th Street since 1998 . The shop feels even older, a place reminiscent of the lost Village, the lost city, when people thrift-shopped and so much more felt scrappy and surprising, before it all became so sanitized and predictable. And boring. This week, Uncle Sam's is closing shop. Geist told me the closure is by choice, mostly, and that 8th Street just isn't 8th Street anymore. It hasn't been for a long time. High rents wiped out the shoe businesses here, leaving a blighted ghost town about 10 years ago. The storefronts sat empty for awhile, and then a few mediocre restaurants moved in, along with a bunch of nail salons. Geist says there's no foot traffic. The street is dead. As he told the Times last year, "Gentrification is killing us. Eighth Street has lost the magic and we want to bring that magic back, and bring traffic back to help business.” With his former...