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Wow; there is a stunning interactive feature by the New York Times on the Subway. I loved this photo by William Sauro, shot in 1981, capturing the true essence of the grainy graffiti and the three windows with a million different stories. Deep down under the subterranean world.
If you haven’t had time to check in with From Your Desks lately, I recently talked to James and Karla Murray about their vanishing store fronts, graffiti and their pit bull, Tabasco. We also see their workspace and what is up and coming.
Hey, I know blogs stack up like magazines; so many, so little time. But the creative minds involved is too good to miss.
Therefore, I implore you…
The Wall Street Journal reports Chelsea’s legendary and magnificent specimen on West 23rd Street, Hotel Chelsea (where does one even begin?) is “now the latest New York icon up for sale.”
LOVELY. I forecast an upscale, boutique hotel. Why not? New York simply doesn’t have enough of them.
“The Chelsea’s 15 shareholders, led by three Hungarian families who bought the 12-story red-brick building in 1946, are selling the property after concluding that the task of modernizing the hotel and apartment building was too challenging, one owner said. A buyer also would likely end the Chelsea’s tradition of giving artists breaks on payment schedules to assist their careers.
Hotel Chelsea opened in 1884 as one of the city’s first co-ops. Much of the early Queen Anne architecture remains, including a grand staircase and the black cast-iron balconies. But hotel analysts say its aging lobby, retail and corridors are in need of renovation.
The cost of those improvements, which could run to millions of dollars—and the infighting among the controlling families—helped motivate the decision to sell, say people familiar with the matter.”
Over the summer, I read JUST KIDS, Patty Smith’s love letter to her New York days and time spent at the Chelsea, this is particularly bittersweet.
From the HC Site: “Owing to its long list of famous guests and residents, the hotel has an ornate history, both as a birth place of creative modern art and home of bad behavior. Bob Dylan composed songs while staying at the Chelsea, and poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso chose it as a place for philosophical and intellectual exchange. It is also known as the place where the writer Dylan Thomas died of alcohol poisoning on in 1953, and where Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols may have stabbed his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, to death on October 12, 1978.
Famous visitors and residents of the Chelsea Hotel include Eugene O’Neil, Thomas Wolfe, and Arthur C. Clarke (who wrote 2001: A Space Oddyssey while in residence). Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and the Grateful Dead passed through the hotels doors in the 1960s. Virgil Thompson, Larry Rivers, William Burroughs, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Patti Smith, Arthur Miller, Dylan Thomas, Quentin Crisp and many more.
Wow; History is starting to hurt my feelings.
(image one: Unknown Hipster, image two: Chelsea Hotel 1982 Claudio Edinger. image three: Mapplethorpe + Smith in their room, 1970 Judy Lin)
We talk about it so much. Nothing new here. But I like the contrast of the Then + Now.
The old (+ heavy water-damaged) Maggio Beef Company at 820 Washington (on the corner of Washington and Gansevoort Streets) will give way to the new Whitney Museum.
Maybe I’m too old-fashioned. Come on; grow up little girl. Still, I like the blend of the old school, keep some of the butchers and the industrial mixed with the new world a la the High Line.
The Standard. Scoop Street. The DVP flagship.
Still, you won’t see this remains of the animals (save the rats) turn up anymore.
The West Side is the cultural place to be.
The Whitney space was once slated to be the DIA space.
Now it’s the Whitney Space.
Carcass’ be gone.
(Maggioimage via: Forgotten NY).
If their was ever a more apporpoiate piece of art to describe the scene in New York right now…
The dark, stormy clouds. I get it but I don’t have to like it. Vintage words hurt.
Ed Ruscha. That Was Then This Is Now #1, 1989
acrylic on canvas
32 H x 46 W (inches)
This weekend (besides catching William Gibson speak about Zero History) I’m going to pick up Low Life : Lures and Snares by Luc Sante. It’s a cultural history told in four different directions about Manhattan’s underclass circa 1840-1919. This is the gritty, old historic lure of the Bowery and Lower East Side. I stumbled across a Believer Magazine Interview (2004) which lends some interesting insights into Sante’s feeling about contemporary-day New York and notably given pre-911.
BLVR: How can New York regain its personality? Or are we getting the city we deserve right now?
LS: The city we have now is the one we deserve, the coagulation of money. I’m very pissed off because I love cities and yearn for them, and I can’t live in them now—and not just because I can’t afford to. My ideal city is more like the city (New York and Paris come to mind, but it sort of applies to all) that existed up to and including the 1930s, when different classes lived all together in the same neighborhoods, and most businesses of any sort were mom-and-pop, and people and things had a local identity. The sort of city where—I’ve just been reading Richard Cobb on 1930s Paris—a burglar, a banker, a taxi-driver, an academician, a modiste, and a pushcart vendor might all fetch up together in a corner banquette at the end of the night. That won’t happen again unless we have some major, catastrophic shakeup, like war (at home) or depression, and do we want either of those?
BLVR: What’s the best street con you’ve ever fallen for?
LS: I’ve never actually been taken, except voluntarily. Besides giving money to people with really wild stories, I also once coughed up at least $15 or $20 to a couple of old-timers who were running a bona fide banco set-up. It was around 1988 or ‘89, when I was working on Low Life. I was breezing through SoHo, which at the time was filled with vast empty storefronts that had lately lost their art galleries and while awaiting the arrival of the corporate vermin had been fitted out as multivendor bazaars in which people sold T-shirts, junk jewelry, and personalized coffee mugs. To my astonishment, there in one of those souks were these two rascals—seventy-five if they were a day—running an operation of a sort that had last been seen in the neighborhood in the 1920s. It was like going fishing and catching a coelacanth, if you had just that day read the Britannica entry on it…
Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York posted a great piece entitled Fran on NYC (a solid interview from Mr Bellers Neighborhood circa 2002). What she says is true and even more true to this day as the wealthy daddy money kids flock in.
FL: As soon as you had a magazine called New York you had all these journalists who had to constantly write about New York. So eventually they would seek out things that they never could have come across on their own–like restaurants and places to go and ways of life–and start to write about them. And they turned these things upside down, so these things became open to the public, hence, boring and unauthentic. And eventually, the entire city became like that. There would be a club that no journalist in a million years would know about. Then one would find out about it, write about it, and ruin it. And then you’d go to another one and keep escaping these journalists. Then people starting opening clubs with an eye to being written about, so it was never a club you wanted to go to.
TB: New York has become one huge press release.
FL: That’s why New York is boring.
TB: Which is why you live here.
FL: I live here because when I got here it wasn’t boring.
TB: Do you long for the old days?
FL: Absolutely. I wouldn’t move here now. I used to work a little bit to pay my little rent. I used to drive a cab until the exact moment my rent was paid and then stop. I never wanted to have any extra money, if it meant having to have any extra work. Now there’s now way you can live in Manhattan and drive a cab. To move to Manhattan, you have to have a rich father. The kids who come here are either rich or are moving here to make money in business, which is a dull kind of kid anyway.
(image: Christopher Felver/CORBIS)
Off the streets snap via Condor.
I mean, really, who doesn’t?
The Old Terry of Vice daze goodbye and now bff’ing with Ollie and upper crust.
Seriously, bru.
Bring it back.
Even Terry’s a bit vain on the whole thing via his D Boy posting.
Come on’ Brutastic…let’s do this thing,
r e i n v e n t !
“Fredo, you’re nothing to me now. You’re not a brother, you’re not a friend. I don’t want to know you or what you do. I don’t want to see you at the hotels, I don’t want you near my house. When you see our mother, I want to know a day in advance, so I won’t be there. You understand?” - Michael Corleone to Fredo Corleone in Godfather II.
For a while now, say two plus years, I’ve watched the metamorphosis of a fairly charming block to what it has certainly become: a constant San Gennaro festival where a heavy, drunken crowd of bar hoppers and tourists line the streets. Loud people who come in search of booze and frozen yogurt.
Let’s summarize, shall we? The charming little boutiques are mere relics: Tracey Feith, Hollywould, Nancy Koltes, Find Outlet and most recently, Label . (Refresh your memory; here.)
I walk around like a zombie attempting to hold on to some part of my past. But it’s gone. Long gone. Sure, Habana still makes a mean brunch, Cafe Gitane is nice for a strong cup of espresso. However, Rice relocated, Kitchen Club bounced (making way for cupackes). You recall M+R Bar was the first causality and the remaining fell like dominos–Rialto, Connecticut Muffin and most recently Cafe Colonial. Sure, I can still grab a pint at Sweet or Spring Lounge, maybe a salad at Bread or takeout Lombardis, takeout Parisi or burritos at Iggy’s… but the truth is clear, NoLita is a shell of its former self.
Now it’s more upscale “established” brands a la Rag and Bone, the Double RL’s, the high-rent, celeb favorite cupcakaries (flour, sugar, water) commanding $200 a square foot, Cafeteria’s sleek sister Delicatessen and their pricey brunches with the $15 mojitos. There’s Pulinos pizza with long waits for seats outside along the Bowery (on this note, I won’t even attempt to discuss the Bowery’s evolution). The real estate is fancy, new and pricey; along Elizabeth Street and of course the old stable building at 11 Spring Street where the real art and graffiti was plastered is now poof, gone.
Cleaned up.
Bloomberg clean.
I roll with change but not when change becomes middling or worse, common.
Now the party is officially over with the erection of Duane Reade.
Yes, this latest travesty is ready to go. Up and addem’. A massive drugstore coupled with the harsh, unflattering lighting that I’ve always detested in all their stores. Spring Street; the charming little block I used to call home will now churn out cheap bottled waters, toilet paper and Maybelline mascara to the masses.
I get it but don’t have to like it.
I bury my memories but keep them close to the vest. The truth comes ever more clear; You really can’t go home again, you just can’t. Especially, the way things are shaping up on my beloved old Spring Street, the street I loved to walk alone.
Perhaps I don’t want to go home. Or I just can’t go home.
Duane Reade; New York’s “Friendly” Pharmacy is coming to Spring Street. Not only is it landing in a historical building–originally a bank designed in 1924 by Cass Gilbert–it’s taken over a neighborhood front which has managed to fend off much of the Broadway flagships. Until now. The deal is for roughly 12,000 square feet after a failed jean company, Parasuco Jeans left the space.
A DR executive spoke (to Rew Online) “They’re absolutely committed to shedding their old frumpy image and showing that they’re the sexiest, hippest, greatest drug store around,” the source said. “Yet they’ve always called themselves New York’s drug store and this space is so ironically New York and classic downtown.”
Oh well, at least John Mayer has a place to score his condoms. Or wash down your pain killers with a cold frosty Spring Lounge bar.
A friend on the streets mentions: they’re putting on the finishing touches and the shopping carts are unloaded, ready to roll. There goes the neighborhood again and again and again.
(Image: Christina Dalle Pezze on the scene last week + today where the “Coming Soon” signage was already stripped down).
Spring Lounge: An Homage and Stepping Out On Spring Street Alone.
Ready for his documentary to open this week, Florent Morellet is telling people like me to get over the new, New York. In a fun Daily News read, he says, it’s time for nightlifers to get over the “terrible disease known as nostalgia” and embrace the new New York.
Morellet, who’s currently in Prato, Italy, attending an exhibition of his artwork, calls complaints about the city’s 21st century vibe, ‘the whine of middle-class, white people” who romanticize 1970s and early ’80s New York, when the city’s financial crisis made it cheap for creative people to live and thrive here. “Maybe you could get a 10,000-square-foot loft for $500 a month, but the outer boroughs were burning,” Morellet tells Gatecrasher. And to those who groan about tourists and the disappearance of the “down and dirty Times Square,” the former restaurateur says, “Stop! I didn’t move here from bum-f— France to live in a city that has to be frozen at the bottom of its depression.”
His clear-eyed view of once-and-future New York is the result of years of “therapy over my struggles to accept change,” the former restaurateur explains, referring to his realization shortly after 9/11 that his restaurant had been priced out of the very neighborhood it had made fashionable. When his breakthrough finally came, he says, “I realized that the rest of the world did not accept the change of the restaurant closing.“
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I still say: It’s not that easy to brunch in the West Village/Meatpacking these days, and that mac and cheese was really good. In fact, hard to forget.
An old snap of the Bowery Boys aka Bowery Futbal Club from 2004; Fanatic at Chelsea Piers-Westside Highway.
