Vanishing New York Backup

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...

The great Eisenberg's has been sold. We've been hearing whispers about this for the past two years . Today the sale was announced on Eisenberg's Facebook page. They say they've "passed the torch" and hope "things will continue as they were." When I called for information and asked for long-time owner Josh Konecky, I was told by Jodie the manager that he is "no longer connected with Eisenberg's." The employees just got the news on Monday night. "It's so fresh for us," Jodie said, "I know nothing except they told me that Eisenberg's will be running just as is." The new owner is named Warren, but that's all the information available right now. Let's keep our fingers crossed and pray that Warren is a true fan of Eisenberg's and will in fact keep the tradition going, just as it is, like Josh did when he first bought the place, saving it from certain destruction and running it for the past ...

In February, I reported that NY Cake was closing , hoping to move to a new location. They have announced that they are staying in the neighborhood, moving to 118 West 22nd Street in the fall of 2018. In their press release, they write: "The larger space is located just a block away from the current storefront which will remain open throughout the summer to ensure customers’ baking needs continue to be met. The new location will enable NYCAKE to enhance the store’s offerings including the introduction of new lines of baking products, expanding the school’s schedule to include additional baking classes with co-owner Lisa Mansour, and launching their first-ever café offering freshly-baked confections from NYCAKE."

VANISHING/MOVING NY Cake , the much-loved cake supply shop on 22nd Street near 6th Avenue is closing its doors. "We're Moving," reads a sign in the window. They're not sure where they're going yet, but you can put your name on the mailing list to be notified. A multi-generation family business , NY Cake was started by Joan Mansour in 1991-- it was previously known as the Chocolate Gallery in 1989. The shop is a wonderland of cake supplies--shelves of sprinkles and sugars, racks of molds for making chocolate lollipops. And lots of those plastic novelties for decorating cakes for every occasion. They also have this amazing door, for reasons that remain a mystery: I haven't been able to get through to NY Cake to find out why they're closing and hoping to relocate nearby. Back in 2011, they inked a 10-year lease extension, according to the Commercial Observer . “They’d been wonderful tenants,” said the landlord at the time. “The neighborh...

A reader wrote in to let us know that the Campanile restaurant on E. 29th Street has closed. It's been awhile. Eater shared the news a year ago--and I missed it. They wrote: "Northern Italian eatery Campanile has closed after 18 years of business. According to the restaurant's Facebook, the building was sold and the landlord wants to turn it into a high rise ." The building that housed Campanile at 30 E. 29th was originally the very old New York Telephone Building . I can't locate any plans for a high rise here, but something's happening along this block. One building away, neighbor Stampworx is also gone. They'd been around since 1946 . Probably as long as Campanile's pink neon sign's been hanging there, the remnant of another restaurant. Stampworx was located in a wooden house owned in the 1800s by the Pringle family. It has a lovely second-floor facade and an interesting history .   Life used to take me to this block somewhat regu...

Last evening, after their Easter celebration, St. Sava Serbian Orthodox Church burned in a massive, four-alarm blaze battled by nearly 200 firefighters. Photos shared immediately on social media showed the church engulfed in flames, exploding through the stained glass rose window, destroying the roof, leaving nothing but the brownstone shell. Thick, dark smoke billowed high into the air over the area around Madison Square Park. Tim Teeman, Twitter photo: Zokster Something The congregation of St. Sava had just celebrated their Easter services earlier in the day. Photos posted to their Facebook page only two hours before the fire showed a full house inside the landmarked historic church. Early reports stated that no one was inside during the fire. Parishioners stood on the street, watching and weeping. “We're all alive, but the building is gone,” the parish priest, Fr. Djokan Majstorovic, told RT . And what a beautiful building it was. Easter celebration, photo via ...

In a city rapidly losing its record shops, Academy Records is alive and well on West 18th Street . It's actually crowded on Saturday afternoons with giddy music collectors. (I've been holding this post, unpublished, for quite some time because I'm afraid to jinx the place. But I don't have that kind of power, right? So here goes.) Inside, it feels like New York. Like the real New York we used to know, not so long ago. And it should. Academy's been around since 1977. Here you will find actual New Yorkers. It's as if some giant sifter has panned across the shopping mall of Fifth Avenue, weeded out the tourists and the dullest newbies, and deposited the gold right here. You can tell these people are New Yorkers because they feel like New Yorkers, even if they don't live in New York. They've got an edge to them. An energy. How to describe this? If you don't know what I mean, well, you either know or you don't. I'm telling you, it...

Barnes & Noble is removing its stores from Queens , including a location in Forest Hills that preservationists tried to save . It's ironic to fight for a chain, but the neighborhood is otherwise a bookstore desert. And what's coming to replace it? A Target . Meanwhile, on Fifth Avenue and 18th Street, the flagship Barnes & Noble bookstore ( since 1932 and closed in 2014 ) has been completely transformed into a Banana Republic. The plaque on the outside wall ("Founded 1873") has been pried off, leaving a shadowy scar on the masonry. Inside, a message for all who might still think books have value: THINK LESS. (I took this picture awhile ago, so it may not be there anymore. It was there when they opened.)

The original Barnes & Noble flagship store on 5th Avenue closed this past January . It had been there since 1932. The Banana Republic that is taking its place has a message for us: "Good things are worth the wait."

For many years, by the northeast corner of 23rd and Park Avenue South, there stood a lovely little newsstand. It was bright blue. It remained, until very recently, an unlikely survivor of Bloomberg's Cemusa onslaught. I wish I could find my other photos of it Here it is (was) on Google maps, surviving defiantly in front of Pret A Manger, Bank of America, 7-Eleven, New York Sports Club, and Baked By Melissa cupcakes, across from Walgreens, Bath & Body Works, and the Vitamin Shoppe. It was crooked and quirky, just like all our newsstands used to be. It had character. Really, it was the only bit of original New York character left on that chain-strangled corner. I always admired it when I walked by, grateful to it for still standing against the dull tide of glass and chrome. But on a recent walk past, I found it was gone. Some construction is being done to the subway entrance. "Where's the newsstand?" I asked a nearby construction worker. "Disappear...

Yesterday, the Whitney Museum installed a temporary recreation of Edward Hopper’s painting Nighthawks in the Flatiron Building's Prow Artspace. The Whitney's Curator of Drawings, Carter E. Foster, believes that the Flatiron's curved glass prow was part of the inspiration for the painting. You can read more about that theory in my interview with Foster here , as well as my own three-part search for the Nighthawks diner here . With life-size cut-outs of the nighthawks in their places around the diner counter, and with the lights turned on at night, you can almost imagine yourself as a voyeur inside Hopper's scene--except he didn't have any iPhone texters in his painting. You can see the installation at the Flatiron through October 6 .

A few readers have written in to let us know about the return of Chock Full o'Nuts to New York City, and this weekend both the New York Times and the Daily News did stories about it, about how "some things do come back," meaning things that have vanished and were missed. Both stories are full of nostalgia. 1960s Now and then, I get a comment on this blog about how someday, in the distant future, New Yorkers will be nostalgic for the vanished Starbucks chain . Whenever I hear that, I think of Chock Full o'Nuts and its onetime domination of the city, topping out with 100 locations. And then I try to imagine a future in which people actually wax nostalgic for Starbucks (17,133 around the globe). It makes me wonder: How do we decide to bestow our nostalgia? Thinking over the commentary trends of my readers, I put together this totally unscientific Nostalgia Point system: +3 points for a longtime (20+ years) mom-and-pop shop +2 points for a native, locally owned busine...

This weekend is the last chance you'll have to buy books at Skyline . But there is some good news. According to People magazine's website " People Pets ," Skyline's beloved bookstore cat, Linda, has found a new home . You may recall the bookshop's plea to Gothamist readers : "The shop told us the owner may not be able to take her home due to other pets, saying: 'Linda is a territorial cat. She's had complete run of that bookstore her entire life.'" photo via Gothamist Well, that part has worked out for Linda and Skyline owner, Rob Warren. He told People Pets, "After much contemplation, I decided to find a home for the two older [cats] with a woman who loves cats, so Linda can come home with me. I am so happy that this has worked out so Linda and I can continue to hang out! " And there's more potentially good news in this article: "Warren intends to pursue his book-selling business via other commercial means and spaces....

I went back to Eisenberg’s recently for yet another perfect tuna sandwich on toasted rye. This time, owner Josh Konecky was there, presiding over the cash register in Hawaiian-style shirt, writing out to-go orders on brown paper bags. I had one question I really wanted to ask him: “Most people nowadays when they buy a place, they change it,” I said, “Why did you keep this place the same?” He looked at me like I had just asked the most ridiculous question in the world, then he shrugged and said, “Why change it? When I bought the place, people kept saying, you’re not gonna change it, are you? I told them, I’m just gonna clean it up a bit. And they’d say, Don’t clean it up too much!” Josh did have to make a few changes. The exhaust system used to blow out the front and legally it has to blow out the back, which is too bad, because blowing out the front was good for business. “Fifteen years ago it was the smell of bacon on the street that brought me in,” Josh said. He’s also got a broken ...

NOT VANISHING Every now and then, I like to have lunch at Eisenberg’s Sandwich Shop, where the world’s most delicious tuna-salad sandwich can be found. Eisenberg’s has been around since 1929 and is no longer owned by the Eisenberg family. Remarkably, though the luncheonette has changed hands 4 or 5 times, it has never been tampered with—a miracle in this city of constant renovation. The current owner, Josh Konecky, is a self-proclaimed preservationist. This city needs more of those. One little detail I love about the place is that they use Pechter’s bread , itself an anachronism of sorts, packaged not in plastic bags, but waxy paper sleeves. The bakery opened in 1929, the same year that Eisenberg’s debuted, and I’m willing to bet the two of them have been making beautiful sandwiches together since the beginning. On my most recent trip to Eisenberg’s, I took a seat at the vintage counter and ordered the tuna on rye with a bag of chips and a chocolate egg cream. A guy named Pete D. asked...

VANISHED Opened in 1934, it has been closed for years, and while we could not step inside to shop for X-ray Spex and whoopie cushions, we could still walk down Broadway and enjoy the wonderful old facade of the Gordon Novelty shop . I took these photos in 2003. Now this nostalgic signage from another age has vanished. Today a tipster let me know that the building has been covered with a big Thor Equities sign. I went by to take some new pictures . The front has been totally stripped . No more golden-lettered Bazaar Items, Chinese Lanterns, Noise Makers, and Joke Items. The building is for lease. If you'd like to buy a letter from the sign , Thor will sell it to you for $200. this photo by jschumacher