Life goes to Times Square

Thanks to frequent EV Grieve commenter Mykola (Mick) Dementiuk, author of "Times Queer," for passing along a link to a treasure trove of photos from Life magazine showing Times Square from 1950...



...to 1986...

No more "Life on Mars"

Variety (via NY Mag's Vulture) has the news:

ABC has decided to end the show after a single year -- but in an unusual move, the net will keep the show on the air through the end of its full run.

That will give the series a rare opportunity to sign off with a proper finale, wrapping up the series' core mystery.

Network insiders said they were fans of the show and pleased with its creative chops -- but that the ratings ultimately didn't warrant a second season. The most recent seg of "Life on Mars" averaged just a 2.0 rating/5 share among adults 18-49, as well as 5.5 million viewers.

The show had been filmed, in part, around the neighborhood going back to last summer. We liked the premise -- time-traveling cop returns to 1970s NYC. And we championed the show until we actually watched it. Oh, it was fine. But I stopped watching after the second or third episode.

Here's our complete "LIfe on Mars" coverage.

"The high cost of living has hit the Bowery"

From the caption that accompanied this archival AP photo:

A prospective customer grumbles under his breath at the prices scribbled on the window of this Bowery restaurant on New York's Lower East Side, Sept. 26, 1947. The high cost of living has hit the Bowery like every other place and it's tough on the residents. One of the biggest selling items is soup and coffee, for 10 cents. It used to be a Nickel. A room with a partition and an electric light is up from 30 cents to 40 cents. The dormitories are 35 cents up from 20.

[AP Photo/Ed Ford]

"Sophie's...remains a good place to stop time"

I finally watched the "Disappearing Manhattan" episode of "No Reservations" (this after blabbering away about it the last three months!). It debuted Monday night, and will air several more times. Grub Street yesterday provided a nice synopsis of what the episode covered.

In particular, I was interested in the last segment, in which Anthony Bourdain shoots the shit with Nick Tosches at Sophie's. It was all of about three minutes (and the shoot at Sophie's took nearly three hours, I was told).

Here's most of what transpired at Sophie's....

The Bourdainster blogs about "Disappearing Manhattan"

The Bourdainster blogs about tonight's episode of "No Reservations"...

We're calling Monday night's show "DISAPPEARING MANHATTAN," but this is not to suggest that Katz's Deli, or Keen's, or Russ & Daughters are going to fade away anytime soon (if ever). What I am saying with this "Special" episode is that these are exactly the kind of old school, hometown places I love; uniquely New York institutions who have survived the brutal caprices of style and changing tastes -- and are still worth going out of your way to patronize. Let me make this clear: "Old" does not necessarily mean "good." Just cause it's a "New York institution" doesn't mean you want to eat there. If it did, New Yorkers might actually eat at Tavern On The Green -- and Luchows would still be open.

Previously on EV Grieve:
"No Reservations" at Sophie's

"Disappearing Manhattan" and opium chitchat with the Bourdainster (and is the Brooklyn Bridge going to disappear?)

The Anthony Bourdain/"No Reservations"/Travel Channel site posted more information on their "Disappearing Manhattan" episode that debuts Monday at 10 p.m. Based on the publicity still above, should we assume that the Brooklyn Bridge is going to disappear? What does he know!

Also, after poking around the Travel Channel site, I discovered that the Bourdainsters had already posted a snippet of the interview that Bourdain did with Nick Tosches at Sophie's. According to the description of the two-minute clip that was shot last November, "Anthony Bourdain sits down and grabs a beer with author Nick Tosches, to chat about Southeast Asia and Tosches' new book, 'The Last Opium Den.'"

Presumably there's more of this interview (maybe not so publicist friendly?) with Tosches during the "Disappearing Manhattan" segment. Meanwhile, Daniel Maurer at Grub Street had more information on the episode...

Previously on EV Grieve:
"No Reservations" at Sophie's

Graffiti watch

Earlier this week, CityRag had an appreciation of some NYC graffiti...with links to their older posts on graffiti around the city, such as in the East Village and on the Bowery...and LES.

"No Reservations" at Sophie's: Feb. 23

Back on Nov. 25, I reported that globetrotting chef Anthony Bourdain filmed a segment of his show "No Reservations" at Sophie's. The Bourdainster was joined by Nick Tosches to discuss great old haunts of NYC.

Well! It appears as if that segment is ready to air this Feb. 23 on The Travel Channel...The segment, titled "Disappearing Manhattan," starts at 10 p.m. Don't worry -- it will be repeated many times, according to the schedule...

Bowery blues

From Bowery Street to the Bowery District, there's no shortage of attempts to call the Bowery everything but the Bowery of late. In a blog post today, Michelle and James Nevius, authors of "Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City," discuss previous attempts to change or repurpose the Bowery name through the years:

By the late 19th century, the Bowery had become synonymous with skid row.

A lot of the Bowery’s reputation was deserved, but at least part of the blame for its near-universal name recognition was the musical A Trip to Chinatown, which featured the song “The Bowery.” Its chorus boasts:

The Bow'ry, the Bow'ry
They say such things and they do strange things,
On the Bow'ry! The Bow'ry!
I'll never go there any more.

By 1916, the street’s reputation had gotten so bad that civic groups battled to come up with a new name for the thoroughfare. One suggestion was “Cooper Avenue” in honor of Cooper Union founder (and Jell-O pioneer)* Peter Cooper.

A rival proposition recommended “Central Broadway.” It’s hard to imagine the chaos this name change might have brought about in a city that already featured Broadway, West Broadway, and East Broadway.

A New York state of mind in Wyoming, Alabama, Siciliy and maybe Pakistan

The Times today rounds up the iconic pieces of vintage New York that have recently been exported.

Cheyenne Diner to Alabama (and now they want the shuttered Ridgewood Theater in Queens)

Moondance Diner to Wyoming

Kim's video collection to a Sicilian town

"And from Pakistan came interest in another New York icon: the Astroland Rocket at Coney Island."

Hmm.

No, it’s not the faltering economy that’s putting venerable New York up for sale and shipment. It may be just coincidental that there is a flurry of outliers who are in a New York state of mind and want a part of it.

“We’re not taking anything from New York — the diner needed saving,” said Cheryl Pierce, who with her husband, Vince, bought the Moondance in 2007 for $7,500. They spent $40,000 to move it 2,125 miles to La Barge in western Wyoming, where it opened on Jan. 12 after a delay to replace a roof collapsed by snow.

It is hardly a new phenomenon, of course. New York has been exporting its bounties, willingly and unwillingly, since the days of Peter Stuyvesant and marauding redcoats.

More recently, according to the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, cast-iron eagles from the old Pennsylvania Station and Grand Central Terminal have turned up at suburban estates, a kiosk from the 1939 World’s Fair is now a restaurant in New Jersey, parts of an 18th-century ship found at 175 Water Street were sent to the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Va., and old subway cars are swimming with the fishes as artificial reefs off the Delaware coast.

[Moondance photo: Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times]

An article about "Life on Marzzzzzz" and people who tend to romanticize the city of the gritty ’70s and wonder if those days lie ahead

Sounds boring to me! I want to go shopping! Still, if you must. "Life on Marzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz" returns to the telly on Wednesday night after a hiatus...and the Times today takes a really loooooong look at the show set, in part, in the gritty 1973 NYC, and wonders..."[W]ill people continue to do so when the city feels as if it could be slipping back into those dangerous, crime-ridden days? In other words, will these people still want to look back at this era — fondly or otherwise — as the New York of 2009 increasingly comes to resemble its ’70s-era ancestor in all the wrong ways?

How about more Gretchen Moll? Then we'll looking back fondly. Or something. To the article!

“The image of New York is important to New Yorkers, and it’s part of their self-image,” said Jonathan Mahler, the author of the 2006 book “Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City.”

Many people who stuck with the city through tougher times now feel that they have a stake in its continued prosperity, and, he said, “are now sticking out their chests a little bit. ‘Yeah, I may be living in this little studio apartment, but I’m making it and I’m surviving here.’ ”

Not that New York was utterly beyond redemption in these bygone years: As a kind of modern-day frontier town, Mr. Mahler said, it was teeming with peril, but also with frantic energy and with havens where experimental subcultures could flourish.

“As parts of the city became abandoned and forgotten, they would be taken up by these urban pioneers who would use them for their own purposes and create interesting things there,” he said, pointing to the gay culture of the West Village, the punk rockers of the East Village and the nascent art scene in SoHo, all of which emerged during those years.

Mr. Mahler added, however, that that the 1970s were not in any way a better decade to be living in the city. “I’m much happier to be living here and raising my family in New York now,” he said. “Or at least I could have said that six months ago.”

AND:

AS the New York of today continues to look more like its unsavory 1973 self — a declining economy, upticks in violent crimes like murder and bank robbery and an ever more crumbling infrastructure starved for resources — it remains to be seen whether the romantic feelings of the “Life on Mars” creators (and its viewers) will endure. After all, who wants to turn on a television and be reminded of the bad old days when evidence of bad new days can be seen right outside your window?

"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.]

"Flapper skirts on a bride of Christ! I don't like undercover nuns"

Continuing with our celebration of Elvis's birthday, which was, uh, yesterday. With! Change of Habit. Set in NYC. 1969. Elvis is a doctor. Mary Tyler Moore is a nun. Bring some butter for this corn. Here's the first 8 minutes (with Spanish subtitles...) showing some vintage Midtown NYC.

Nickel beer at Sam's

Jeremiah's awful news yesterday on the possible demise of the Holiday on St. Mark's inspired to me look into some other old haunts on the street from year's past...I came across this article in the Time magazine archives on Sam's Bar & Grill.

The Nickel In St. Mark's Place
Monday, Apr. 4, 1949

Pale and shaken, 51-year-old Sam Atkins backed away from himself with a feeling somewhere between disbelief and awe. By a single, splendid cerebration he had been lifted out of the ruck into the status of a television curiosity. In his humble Manhattan saloon, Sam had decided to cut the price of beer (the 7-oz. glass) from a dime to a nickel.

Up to that moment Sam was just a pensioned pumper driver from the Bayonne (N.J.) fire department, and Sam's bar & grill was like any neighborhood joint around St. Mark's Place on the Lower East Side. Its only distinctive touch was Sam's cousin, "Bottle Sam" Hock, who amused the trade by whacking tunes out of whisky bottles with a suds-scraper. But the customers got a joyful jolt when Sam opened up one morning last week.

All around the walls, even over the bar mirror, tasteful, powder-blue signs proclaimed in red letters: "Spring is here and so is the 5¢ beer." The early birds drank and took their change in mild disbelief. The nickel wasn't obsolescent after all. The word spread. Sam's bar & grill started to bulge like Madison Square Garden on fight night. People drank, shook hands with strangers and sang.

Then something went sour. The two breweries that supplied Sam cut him off, and an electrician came around and took the neon beer sign out of the flyspecked windows. Somehow, it seemed, Sam had betrayed free enterprise. An organization of restaurant owners muttered that Sam might not be cutting his beer, but he was cutting his throat. The Bartenders Union threw a picket line in front of the place because it was nonunion.

But Sam hung on. He signed up with the union, managed to get his beer through a couple of distributors and a Brooklyn brewery, announced that he was going to have the windows washed, and keep at it. Said he solemnly: "The people want it." By this week Sam's idea had spread to other saloons in Washington, D.C. and New Jersey, and Sam was getting more trade in a day than he had drawn before in a week. The nickel beer was here to stay, Sam announced.

Photos via the Time archive.

A few things about Woolworths

The City Room had a fun piece the other day on the old Olympic-size swimming pool in the F.H. Woolworth Building on lower Broadway.

An early promotional brochure for the building promised tenants an “immense Swimming Pool and Turkish Bath establishment, open day and night,” equipped with “every modern device making for comfort, safety and sanitation.” This was in addition to the Postkeller restaurant, the barber shop and the Hospital Room “for female stenographers, clerks and others, where they may receive first-aid treatment and simple remedies at the hands of a competent nurse.”

Speaking of Woolworth stores, which closed for good in the city in 2001, here's some footage of the old Woolworth's location in downtown Flushing from 1997:



Which reminds me of eating at the Woolworth's lunch counter on 14th Street...and wasn't there one on Park Avenue South around 23rd Street? The food was pretty awful at times, but it was cheap, of course.

Here's a Woolworth's menu from 1960 (via Mr. Monopoly):

When a beloved neighborhood bar relocates...

Do the regulars follow? On the eve of the P & G closing and moving, the Times looks into the issue...

[I]f drinking and dining have always been a moveable feast in New York, is charisma cartable? Can the character of everything from venerable pubs to palatial eateries migrate with their names and owners? This portability issue has gained new urgency in a season of economic disarray, when property owners are less willing to extend the leases of even the most beloved old-timers.

Loyalists can be fickle, and geography perilous. “New York is so provincial, three blocks is a huge distance,” said Patrick Daley, the owner of Kettle of Fish, the classic step-down barroom at 59 Christopher Street in Sheridan Square, in the space formerly inhabited by the Lion’s Head, a lionized writers’ pub, which closed in 1996.

Not in the article but worth noting: Sophie's moved from Avenue A to its current location on East Fifth Street in the mid-1980s.

Previously on EV Grieve:
An appreciation: the P & G Cafe

I should really give old Jane Gallagher a buzz

"The Catcher in the Rye" Christmas tour. This is an AP story from last December. Just remebered it for some reason. Good thing for entertaining visitors. Visitors who like the book. Have fun, folks. I'll be at a bar.

"The Catcher in the Rye," by J.D. Salinger, was published in 1951. But nearly all the landmarks Holden mentions as he wanders around Manhattan at Christmastime — the Rockefeller Center skating rink, Radio City and the Rockettes, the zoo and carousel in Central Park, Grand Central, the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art — are still drawing holiday visitors more than a half-century later.

"The things that he chose tend be crowd-pleasers," said Matthew Postal, a researcher with the Landmarks Preservation Commission. "In a city where so much changes, there is a tendency, especially with institutions, to protect the crowd-pleasers."

Short film of the East Village circa 1971

Toots

All this talk today in the next few posts about fancy cocktails and secret "underbelly" bars makes me...

Well, it makes me want to watch Toots, the documentary on Toots Shoor, the legendary Manhattan saloonkeeper. The film, directed by his granddaughter, will have a limited theatrical run before being released on DVD Jan. 13.

Here's a look:

Checking out the Vigilant Hotel: "Perfect for the bored with responsibilities of maintaining a traceable address"

I've long been fascinated by the Vigilant Hotel at 370 Eighth Ave. between 28th Street and 29th Street. An old-fashioned flophouse continues to survive in this era of pricey real estate and swanky hotel developments? Miracle of miracles! 14to42 had this information from a 2003 post:

In 1895 the lodgings empire of Angelino Sartirano consisted of hotels at 116 Gansevoort St., 208 and 352 8th Ave., 1553 Broadway, 2291 3d Ave., and here at 370 8th Ave.

The Sartirano (sometimes spelled Sartirana) hotel business is even older, going back to 1888 with his first hotel at 116 Gansevoort St. in the West Village.

The name Vigilant Hotel, however, is not quite so old, and seems to date no earlier than 1916. The hotel is still here (as of August 2003) but to all appearances no longer operates as a hotel in the usual sense...

14to42 also also has links to two photos by Percy Loomis Sperr in the New York Public Library's Digital Collections. The first dated 1932 shows a side wall with "Rooms 25¢." The second dated 1938 shows a small sign over the sidewalk reading "Vigilant Hotel."

14th42 also published this shot from 2003 of the hotel's faded sign:



So, can I get a room here? Sure! It's for men only. And it will cost you $140. A week.

The reviews are mixed on Yahoo! Travel. Someone who has never stayed there gave it five stars while someone who did gave it one star. What was so wrong with it that it deserved that?

Don't ever step foot in this place
By A Yahoo! Contributor, 10/08/08
The place is so downtrodden, neglected and downright decreped. The hotel guests are homeless people who arementally ill. Even the police wouldn't stay in this hotel! If I were homeless I wouldn't stay in this disgusting hotel. Im shocked they are still open!

OK, Felix Ungar...we'll getcha a suite at The Carlyle!

Anyway, here's what the place looks like on the inside:







(These three photos via here.)

Finally, here's review of the hotel at Not for Tourists by Dave Crish:

A scar, even upon the pissed on pave of Chelsea's north edge. I relate, here, of history's Vigilant. Built some hundred years ago of resilient brick, at present resembling ash. Not the sort of amenitied lodge one peruses on vacation. Piped of, but, three befouled showers, a pair of sinks, and toilettes of excreta. Succinctly, an inn of cells petit rented to gents of varied feather—all poor for whatever reason, breathing the airs of next step below homelessness. $125 per seven days. No credit, no checks, no euros, cartons maybe—of Marlboros. Never gleeful, rarely tended proud asylum sans musique. Fine abode for a bit of drifting or a brief disappearance. In sum, perfect for the bored with responsibilities of maintaining a traceable address. Foam pad, gray, oft cavorted 'pon by bloodsucking mites. Not a lash of social space but narrow hallways. Sphere of little social grace a tincture schizo of few heads cracked—a few murderers, few blooming, and even fewer handsome. Maybe a master once and then. Never a fellow un-weathered. Indeed, the Vigilant Hotel. For the times when desires discordant means and the bench not an option.

Related on EV Grieve:
Elk in the City