Vanishing New York Backup

VANISHING Bowery Kitchen Supplies has been doing business in Chelsea Market since 1996. Now they're closing. "We have no choice but to close our doors," they write in their posted notice, listing the reasons: "The soaring rents and extra charges by corporate landlords, the rapid and dramatic changes in the retail landscape especially for 'brick and mortar' businesses and finally an aggressive NY state and city tax bureau." Last week, they wrote on their Facebook page , "As a small business in NYC we struggle thru many crises, we ourselves thru 9/11, hurricanes, outages and on. Never any help from the government, just higher taxes. And now high rents and next day delivery are taking their toll on the few that survived." Bowery Kitchen Supplies originally opened on the Bowery in 1975, founded by the Nourieli family. Google purchased their home, Chelsea Market, for $2.4 billion in 2018, in what's been called "the second-lar...

VANISHING The Chelsea Flea Market on 25th Street between 6th and Broadway has been in business since 1976. Now we hear it is coming to an end. I went by one evening a few weeks ago and heard the rumor that the lease is up and the owners aren't renewing. Now a couple of tipsters confirm: Next weekend, December 28 and 29, will be the last for this popular and long-running flea. Paul Jeromack writes, "There is a possibility it will get a reprieve," hoping someone might take it over from the current managers, Alan and Helene Boss -- a couple that the Post has said "rules city flea markets with an iron fist." However, he adds, "the church next door," which owns the parking lot "does not want to renew the lease." That church is St. Sava Serbian Orthodox, burned down in a massive blaze in 2016 . Around that time, there was also news of an 850-foot commercial tower going up on the flea's parking lot. It doesn't look good. Jer...

VANISHING Bill's Flower Market opened in 1936. They are closing this month. The sign in the window says the owners are retiring. It is another loss for the rapidly vanishing Flower District , which has been taken over and demolished by tourist hotels. Reader Marjorie Ingall let me know about the closing. She writes, "Jim, Bill’s brother and co-owner, said he’s ready to retire and spend time with his grandkids in Nassau and Suffolk county, but high rent is a factor too . I bought a turkey made with real feathers that I will turn into a holiday centerpiece, two rolls of beautiful floral ribbon, and a tiny nest with two eggs and a sparrow. We both reminisced about when the Flower District went from 26th to 29th, Broadway to 7th Avenue. He said, ' It’s all fancy hotels now .'" When I went by, Bill's was closed for the day, shutting down now at 3:00 in the afternoon, so I could not go in to see the artificial birds they are famous for. They used to have...

VANISHING Guest Post written by William Hennelly, an editor/writer and Seido Karate black belt Down the block from the Flatiron Building in Manhattan sits another local landmark — the headquarters of the World Seido Karate Organization. Since 1976, the school founded by Kaicho (“Grandmaster”) Tadashi Nakamura has trained thousands of martial arts practitioners at 61 West 23rd Street, where it also has operated the Seido Juku Benefit Foundation, a charitable nonprofit. Nakamura, 77, is a revered karateka worldwide, particularly in his native Japan, a status he earned in 1962 by knocking out a muay thai fighter in Bangkok in a much publicized international clash of fighting styles. But now Kaicho and his son, Nidaime (“Successor”) Akira Nakamura, 44, who is Seido’s chief instructor, are faced with a daunting opponent outside the arena — the New York City real estate market. The owners of the 1886 Italian Renaissance-style building that houses the headquarters — or “Honbu” in Ja...

VANISHING For the past decade, ever since the Ace Hotel took over the Breslin SRO hotel on Broadway and 29th Street, I've been watching the Wholesale District vanish. It is not dying. It is being murdered, shop by shop, building by building, all to create the fake "neighborhood" known as NoMad. Hanging by a thread, it recently took a turn for the worse. A major center of wholesalers on Broadway has just been wiped out in one fell swoop. Along the west side of Broadway in the upper 20s, the sudden mass erasure of so many small businesses is staggering. 1165 Broadway Before (taken in 2016) 1165 Broadway Today, 2019 Between 27th and 28th Streets, 1165 Broadway housed several small wholesale businesses, selling perfume, jewelry, handbags, African-American hair products, clothing, and more. For years, I have walked by it every week, lingering to admire what I cannot fully participate in, but appreciate nonetheless. The small businesses attracted a diversity of...

Not happy with those intrusive and distracting LinkNYC kiosks? You're not alone. Along 8th Avenue in Chelsea, someone has been smashing LinkNYC screens with a cobble stone. The apparent rage is understandable. With their video advertisements, dumb cartoons, and repetitive quotations, the digital pylons continually rob our attention . Walking down the street, on every block, your thoughts are interrupted by the flashing screens, violating your right to keep your attention where you want it. Do we have a right to our attention? Jasper L. Tran has written, " We own and are entitled to our attention because attention is a property right and part of our individual dignity. Yet advertisement companies and scam artists freely bombard us with their 'products' daily, resulting in our own time and monetary loss." Jon Danaher at Philsophical Disquisitions calls it a " right to attentional protection ." LinkNYC violates that right. As we all know, it's ...

For its opening weekend, Hudson Yards, aka Dubai on the Hudson, is crammed with people. They walk the glistening floors of the luxury shopping mall and climb The Vessel, aka The Giant Shawarma (h/t Eater ). They stand in line for free ice cream and ransack a refrigerator full of foul-tasting beverages that may or may not be free. They pose for Instagrammable photos with the mega-development's corporate logo and pay $28 to visit Snark Park, an "art theme park" where the creators have seized an opportunity to " literally control and curate everything ," which pretty much sums up everything about Hudson Yards. In my 2017 book Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul , I predicted that Hudson Yards would be: "A dreamworld of exclusion...one of those places Mike Davis describes in Evil Paradises : 'where the rich can walk like gods in the nightmare gardens of their deepest and most secret desires.' It will be what Norwegian urbanist Jonny A...

In his Times review of a new Hudson Yards restaurant , Pete Wells writes that Legacy Records has "ginned up a history for itself that brings together sloppy research with a superficial tribute to black culture." I haven't been inside the place, so I'll leave it to Wells, who describes images of black musicians on the walls, stars like Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, and Marvin Gaye, who supposedly recorded in a studio on the site. Except they didn't. There was a studio there for a few years in the 2000s, he says, "mostly used by orchestras, Broadway cast recordings and commercials." There's also a photo by Mickalene Thomas of a black woman with an Afro in a sexy pose. photo by Gary He Wells concludes: "Legacy Records has taken this shred of history and turned it into a fantasy of black American music. Exhibited in a museum or gallery, Ms. Thomas’s photo might be taken as a comment on the different postures and personas available to black...

Last week we learned that El Quijote, the 87-year-old restaurant in the Chelsea Hotel, is closing at the end of March , thanks to its new owners. Now Page Six reports that the employees are getting a raw deal. “The staff is being disrespected,” said a tipster to the Post . “They are being given two weeks’ severance pay...from a person who just started working last month to the executive chef who’s been working there over 30 years. They’re all being treated the same.” I first reported on the coming closure of El Quijote here in 2014 . Since then, the restaurant and the hotel changed hands (again and again). The hotel is currently owned by "BD Hotels’ Richard Born and Ira Drukier, and Jane Hotel honcho Sean MacPherson." Born told the Post , "The real severance obligation is from the original owner...We have only been here a little over a year.” El Quijote has been a thorn in the owners' side for awhile now. Back in 2010, The Real Deal reported : When BD ...

VANISHING After nearly 90 years in the Chelsea Hotel, the great and wonderful and gorgeous El Quijote is closing on March 30. Eater reports: "Staffers at the historic restaurant, located at 226 West 23rd St. between Seventh and Eighth avenues, were given two weeks notice. Ownership allegedly told employees that the restaurant is being renovated and will re-open eventually. Eater NY has reached out to the restaurant for comment." Back in 2014, I reported on this coming closure . At the time, I was told that El Quijote would be upscaled and sanitized in a fashion similar to what happened to Minetta Tavern. The plan was denied -- and then confirmed. A rep for Ed Scheetz, the man who took over the hotel, said at the time that they would "retain the signature look and feel of El Quijote" while "maintaining its authenticity." But then life went on. El Q remained untouched. We held our breath. When -- and if -- the place reopens, it won't be th...

Last month I wrote about the demise of 69 West 14th St and its tenement neighbors . At that time, nine storefronts had been shuttered, and developer Extell will likely demolish the buildings. Now there are ten. Sol Moscot was (from what I can tell) the last tenant in the buildings, making them now clear for destruction. And Moscot has moved up 6th Avenue, into the mini-mall structure built a few years ago by the Stonehenge Group. Stonehenge is the same group that cleared all the small businesses out of a building they purchased on 9th Avenue and 18th Street. It was a move that broke the hearts of many local people . That was years ago. Since then, they put in a Wells Fargo bank , but all of the remaining spaces still sit empty and wasted. Stonehenge also quintupled the rent on Colony Records , putting them out of Times Square after 60 years. Has anything permanent moved into that spot, or is it still revolving holiday pop-ups? Anyway, I hope Moscot got a good, long lease...

Desco Vacuum Sales and Service, at 131 West 14th Street, has been around since about 1950 . It was (at least) a third generation business. Now it's gone. A reader wrote in: "Owner of business (and also the building) said that it was becoming increasingly difficult to do business in the city, even with owning the property . He also said that millennials don't buy vacuums and the ancillary products, and it was hard to compete with that." I bought my vacuum cleaner bags at Desco and always liked seeing its vertical neon sign, but especially the neon vacuum cleaner. Now the shop is empty and the neon signs are dark. 2008