Vanishing New York Backup

On Sunday March 15, the great Yonah Shimmel knishery will celebrate 110 years in business on the Lower East Side. The first 110 knishes will sell for $1.10 each. Go get 'em! And grab a delicious egg cream while you're at it.

Your own private driveway. Your own private bowling alley. Your own private movie theater. Your own private spa. Your own private lookout. These promises of privacy are repeated on banners that circle Extell's One Manhattan Square on the Lower East Side, the latest luxury monstrosity to vandalize our skyline and bully its way into our low-rise neighborhoods. (There will also be a private golf simulator, a private pet spa, a private fitness complex, a private squash and basketball court, and an entire acre of private gardens.) With so much private space, why venture out of the complex at all? Why engage with city life? The insistence on privacy and the turning away from the street exemplify the suburban mentality come to the city in the 2000s. One resident of a luxury building loaded with suburban amenities told The Observer in 2008, “Everything's always convenient, always safe, always clean. You don't have to worry about gross things. Like mice! And creepy things ...

(From an old post I never posted.) C&L Sunrise Grocery was a little newsstand on Hester Street at Bowery. Its facade is remarkable thanks to the old, hand-painted sign that hangs above its awning, announcing: "Chung's Candy & Soda Stand," with 7-Up and Coca-Cola logos, also painted by hand. The place sold candy and newspapers, lottery tickets and umbrellas. The usual stuff. Awhile ago, I went by to find a "Space for Lease" sign on its rolled-down shutter. (Maybe by now it's reopened as a new newsstand?) Meanwhile, at another corner of Chinatown, where Lower East Side-style gentrification is seeping in, another newsstand vanished. before At Rutgers and East Broadway, against community objections last year , Jajaja Plantas Mexicana moved in to what had been the Golden Carriage Bakery and a little newsstand with a metal awning. The popular restaurant serves vegan Mexican food. They left the newsstand signage, but it looks kind of sad, han...

On a warm spring afternoon I meet John Freeman Gill on the Lower East Side for a little gargoyle hunting. Gill is the author of The Gargoyle Hunters , a novel set in 1970s New York City about a boy and his father who rescue ornamental stonework from tenements and other old buildings under demolition. For the father, it's a way to preserve a vanishing city. "The book is completely about the evolving streetscape of New York," says Gill. "The city is constantly destroying itself. Regenerating. It's always been a city in a hurry." Gill's inspiration for the book was a man named Ivan Karp, a self-taught gargoyle hunter who put together a team in the 1950s and led "clandestine raids on demolition sites." It was the time of Urban Renewal when countless tenements were destroyed, taking their decorations with them. Karp saved some 1,500 sculptures and eventually got the Brooklyn Museum to take them in. Since the days of Urban Renewal, housin...

VANISHING New Beer Distributors on Chrystie Street just announced via their Facebook page : "Sorry guys to announce we have a few days left till we shut down for good. We have a fire sale going on!!! 50% off on everything on our shelves. Thank you guys for all the business and memories you gave us for the last 50 years." I recently walked by to find them flanked by luxury construction and demolition. They say it was the rent. 50 years--wiped out by hyper-gentrification. 

The Sunshine Cinema closed last month --bought by developers who plan to demolish the historic building and put up a glassy office tower that will surely help to further hyper-gentrify the neighborhood. All photos by Herb Jue On Thursday of this week, those developers, East End Capital & K Property Group, are hosting a party to celebrate--what exactly? Their triumph over history? The invitation says it's to "CELEBRATE THE LOWER EAST SIDE & PREVIEW OUR NEW OFFICE DEVELOPMENT." I'm not sure how one can do both simultaneously. Anyway, it's free and we're all invited . The party will feature some artwashing --or poetry washing, I suppose you'd call it. Yes, poets are performing at a party thrown by luxury real estate developers to hype a project that is literally demolishing Lower East Side culture. Some protesters might show up, but probably not. This is the new Lower East Side.

VANISHED The Sunshine Cinema closed this weekend . It wasn't landmarked--though it should have been. Soon it will be a pile of bricks. 1930, via NYPL It was built as a Dutch Reformed Church in the 1800s. In the early 1900s, it became the Houston Athletic Club, for boxing matches. In 1909 it transformed into the Houston Hippodrome, an affordable vaudeville and Yiddish movie house frequented by Jewish, Italian, and other immigrants of the Lower East Side. In 1913, the Hippodrome was the site of a deadly stampede . During the movie "Daredevils Species," while robbers held up a western train, a flash came from the camera, causing someone to yell "Fire!" Panic ensued. People trampled each other as they clamored for the exit. Crushed to death were two women--Mrs. Margaret Corsa of Chrystie Street and an unidentified woman whose dark hair was "tinged with gray," and who wore on her finger a wedding ring with the initials P.M. In 1917, the Hippodr...

So that big penis mural (or is it a dildo?) on Broome Street doesn't have much longer. Workers are preparing to paint it over today. The ropes and ladders are already in place. It was painted earlier this week by Swedish artist Carolina Falkholt, as part of the New Allen project (which seems to have something to do with artwashing the Lower East Side for more gentrification). Today, onlookers gathered in the freezing cold to gaze upon the mural. Many took selfies with it. News crews interviewed the onlookers, asking their thoughts. When asked about the negative local response to the mural, one guy answered, "If people can't appreciate the penis, they can't appreciate life." Another reporter said he could see a face in the network of veins. "See it? Right there? You can see a guy's face. It looks kind of like a clown." Down the block, guys on the corner were talking. One said, "It's just the same old neighborhood shit....

The cart stands on Houston near Lafayette. Between the many signs for hot dogs, hot pretzels, and honey roasted peanuts, hand-written messages tell passersby to call their mothers. "A smiling face is a...beautiful mankind," reads another. "Let's back to our childhood. There we used to mistake again and again. Some people used to forgive us over and over." "Wake up! Re-start. U'll overcome this time." The vendor says the signs bring people to him, inspire them to stop and talk. It's a good thing. "We're all turning into machines," he says, "in this system." It's a good thing to stop and connect. And go call your mother. Which I did.

Jesse Malin just released a video for the title track of his EP Meet Me at the End of the World, an album that Rolling Stone calls "a mix of Lower East Side grit and Simon & Garfunkel Americana pop." The video features the great Ray's Candy and B&H Dairy, two luminaries of the East Village small business scene -- plus a cameo from Ray himself. Check it out:

VANISHING I wrote a piece for the Times this week about the closing of Moe's Meat Market, a butcher shop on Elizabeth Street turned into an artist's studio and gallery in 1977. Back then, Bohemians and working-class Italians mixed on a street once affordable, now taken over by luxury. Moe’s Meat Market, in Little Italy, hasn’t been a meat market for 40 years. But the floor is still tiled in black and white, the walls covered in porcelain-enameled tin sheets. When the artist Robert Kobayashi, known as Kobi, bought Moe’s and the rest of its building in 1977, he moved in with his wife, the photographer Kate Keller, and installed his studio in the storefront, leaving the walls intact. As a sculptor who worked with tin, maybe he felt an affinity for the sheet metal. Maybe he just appreciated the history. Read the rest at The Times the basement wine press

This summer we saw the tragic end of the Cup & Saucer , thanks to a non-negotiable rent hike. It didn't take long for the beautiful old signage to get stripped. And replaced by a bunch of shitty For Rent banners.

This summer, Columbia University Press published Do You Have a Band? Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City by Daniel Kane. I asked Daniel a few questions about his book. Q: You make the point throughout the book that poetry in the 1950s and 60s, specifically New York School and Beat poetry, was far more transgressive than rock and roll of that time. How so? A: Well, poets could write things like "fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy" as Allen Ginsberg did in his poem "Howl," or publish a magazine entitled "Fuck You: a magazine of the arts," as Ed Sanders did, and kind of get away with it. Sure, these poets faced hassles with the law--Ginsberg's publishers were charged with obscenity, as was Sanders later on, but these charges were later dismissed. These poets set the stage for the literary freedoms we've enjoyed since. Pop music at the time simply didn't have that kind of radical ambition or sense of possib...

Back in 2009, we said goodbye to the great Amato Opera House , on the Bowery for 60 years. 2009 The building was sold and sold again. Recently, the plywood was removed to reveal this--a stark white box awaiting a luxury chain store or an art gallery or a restaurant. Certainly not a rag-tag, affordable opera house. As Bowery Boogie noted last year, infamous local landlord Steve Croman was "converting 319 Bowery into a mixed-use dwelling befitting Bowery 2.0. Three glitzy, full-floor apartments, including the aforementioned penthouse will sit atop the ground level store. The retail space was last on the market in 2014, asking a whopping $35,000 per month in rent."

UN-VANISHING After seemingly shuttering and inspiring teary goodbyes , the Great Jones Cafe is rising from the almost-dead. Word is shooting around social media, and the cafe's website confirms it: "The Reports of Our Demise Were Greatly Exaggerated (to paraphrase Twain). After a week off, we reopen Wednesday, August 2nd at 5 PM. See you then !!!" Said one commenter on the cafe's Facebook page, "This has been an emotional roller coaster ride." UPDATE: Here's the inside scoop .