You know that grand art-deco Metro Theater at 99th and Broadway that has been closed for a few years?

Yeah, its recent long tortured history (condo! restuarant!) is over. It will now be home to an Urban Outfitters. (New York Post, second item). Finally, local residents won't have to travel so far for their Toddland diver down hoodies!

City Room had an item on the Metro (originally called the Midtown, for some reason) in 2007:

From the outside, the landmark Metro Theater on Broadway, an Art Deco jewel box between 99th and 100th Streets, looks almost as exquisite as it must have in the 1930s, when movies were still known as “photoplays,” though no photo has played there for two years.

But the inside, visible to passers-by on a recent afternoon, has been gutted. Gone are seats and plaster and curtains and screen. Gone is a golden ceiling molding with a chain of floral bouquets. Gone are the sylph-filled niches. Gone is grillework that sprouted like corn stalks.

Here's a little more on the theater's past on Tom Fletcher's New York Architecture

The Midtown, designed by the architecture firm of Boak & Paris, opened in 1933. From 1948 through April 1972, it was part of the Brandt circuit, featuring sub-run foreign and independent fare starting in the 1950s. It exhibited films such as Belle de Jour, Shame (and just about every other Bergman movie), Breathless, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Repulsion, L’Avventura, Straw Dogs, and Gimme Shelter, though never in exclusive engagements. After Brandt's management, it operated as an adult film venue.

It was renamed the Metro in 1982.

And this little piggy wants to turn three landmark homes into one

Oops. Outside my neighborhood again. But. Jeez.

As the Times reports:

When Andrew Carnegie decided to build himself a mansion in 1898, he headed to the northernmost reaches of the city at the time, situating his 64-room Georgian-style country home on a relatively undeveloped tract of land at 91st Street and Fifth Avenue. There was even enough space for what was then one of the city’s largest private gardens.
Combining and Expanding A century later, when Dr. Mitchell Blutt, a modern-day tycoon made rich on Wall Street, wanted a mansion of his own, he found Mr. Carnegie’s neighborhood, now known as Carnegie Hill, not surprisingly plumb out of space.
To solve the problem, Dr. Blutt bought the two town houses directly east of his current home on East 90th Street, between Park and Madison Avenues, in order to combine the three Romanesque Revival, four-story town houses into one 17,000-square-foot dwelling. His plans have prompted protest from neighbors, who see an intrusion of a suburban-style “McMansion,” and from preservationists, who fear that they would destroy the character of the landmark-protected buildings.

[Image -- Andrea Mohin/The New York Times]

"All of Manhattan has lost its soul to money lords"

That's Cheetah Chrome in today's New York Post discussing the new i-banker playground off the Bowery. "Extra Place," as it's being called, is in the former piss-filled alley behind CBGB. (See the Ramones photo above.) As the Post notes, that spot is "getting dragged into the 21st century with a makeover that would make Martha Stewart proud." Yes, because she could afford the kinds of things that are going into "Extra Place." (How not just call it "Extra Expensive"?)