Tomorrow night: 'Greenwich Village: Past, Present, and Future'

From the EV Grieve inbox...

Wednesday at 6:30 pm
Greenwich Village: Past, Present, and Future

The Village has been transformed over the centuries from farmland to row houses to tenements to luxury condominiums. How does a district that has long celebrated newcomers and defiant outsiders balance the old and the new? Join historians, planners, and community leaders for an evening of discussion about this important section of New York City and what its future might hold, moderated by Andrew Berman, Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, featuring Kurt Cavanaugh, Director, East Village Community Coalition and David Mulkins, Chair, Bowery Alliance of Neighbors.

Co-sponsored by the Historic Districts Council. This program is presented as part of the ongoing Urban Forum series New York Neighborhoods: Preservation and Development.

Reservations required: 917-492-3395 or e-mail programs@mcny.org

$6 museum members; $8 seniors and students; $12 non-members

$6 when you mention EV Grieve

Museum of the City of New York
1220 Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street

More info here.

New York's disappearing storefronts

A friend recently turned me on to the work of James and Karla Murray, photographers who split time between NYC and Miami. Last month, they released their latest book, "Store Front -- The Disappearing Face of New York." According to their site: "'Store Front' provides an irreplaceable window to the rich cultural experience of New York City as seen through its neighborhood shops. These stores have the city’s history etched in their facades. They tirelessly serve their community, sustaining a neighborhood’s diverse nature and ethnic background, in a city with an unmercifully fast pace and seemingly insatiable need for change.

Through March 29, you can see their work at the Brooklyn Historical Society's exhibition, "The Disappearing Face of Brooklyn’s Storefronts." (Via Gowanus Lounge)

Meanwhile, here's a video they did on Emily's Pork Store in Williamsburg.



Since seeing their "Store Front" work, I've started paying even more attention to the great old shops that remain in the neighborhood...and elsewhere in the city...

Instant Bowery

From the Times. Check out Concrete Jumble: Instant Bowery, which is the third episode in Gary Leib's series of animations about the history of New York City.

"It was a gray city, a weary one, an older one"

Novelist Kevin Baker has an op-ed in the Times today. It's about his arrival in NYC in the late 1970s. Here are a few excerpts from the piece titled "New York was so much older then."

It was a dirtier city then, more violent, more interesting — more accessible to poor, eager young people. We lived four and five to a railroad apartment, the bathtub in the kitchen in some places, the floors lined with clumpy chalk lines of boric acid that were our useless defense against the cockroaches.

We feasted on $4 platters of Indian food in restaurants on Sixth Street where you could bring your own wine. We went everywhere by subway, riding in gray, graffiti-covered cars where half the doors didn’t open and a single, sluggish fan shoved the air about on summer nights. We took a cab sometimes, when there were five of us and we could get a Checker, one person riding on the jump seat, staring out at the long avenues of the city.

And:

It was a gray city, a weary one, an older one. There were, in those days, pornographic theaters in good neighborhoods; Bowery-style wino bars with sawdust on the floor on Upper Broadway; prostitutes along West End Avenue slipping into cars with New Jersey license plates. It was a city, too, that seemed to open up into an infinite series of magic boxes, of novelty shops and diners, delicatessens and corner bakeries, used record stores and bookstores.

Like Barack Obama we read everything we could get our hands on. It was a movie-mad town then, and we lined up for hours in the cold on the East Side to see the latest Fassbinder or Fellini, the new Woody Allen. We nailed long, flapping schedules of all the revival houses to our walls, from the Thalia and the New Yorker, Theater 80 St. Marks and the Bleecker Street Cinemas. I saw my first Broadway show, “Equus,” for $3, and sat on stage.

[Photo of the 1970s East Village by Litter Bugged via Filthy Messes.]