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"The modern version of the Rat Pack burned rubber through the city streets Friday as Leonardo DiCaprio and buddies Lukas Haas, Tobey Maguire and Kevin Dillon toured the East Village on bicycles." (New York Post)
Charles Goldstein, a cigarmaker, built Webster Hall in 1886 for $75,000, with a design by Charles Rentz Jr., an architect and beer vendor, for “balls, receptions, Hebrew weddings and sociables,” according to a December 1886 article in The New York Times.
But it soon came to be known for rowdy parties, many of which featured live music, like the fund-raiser for General Grant’s memorial in September 1887, or the fete for the French Revolution centennial in May 1889.
In the early 1900s, Webster Hall’s guest lists featured artists of all sorts, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. Around the same time, Greenwich Village became a center of gay and lesbian life, and the club was frequently a gathering place.
It was back in 1953, when RCA Victor set up a studio in the Grand Ballroom of Webster Hall in Manhattan to achieve a level of reverberation that would help the label compete with Columbia Records. Perry Como recorded his “Como Swings” there in 1959, which displayed Como in slacks and a blue shirt on a golf course.
As the world changed, and music with it, so did the acts the venue attracted: in 1967, Jefferson Airplane staged its first concert in New York inside. On Dec. 6, 1980, U2ushered in the post-punk era here — it was called the Ritz at the time — when it pounded out “I Will Follow” in its first gig in the United States. And on Feb. 2, 1988, Axl Rose of Guns N’ Roses, standing on the same stage, before screeching “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” inflated a condom like a balloon.
When the New York Yankees throw open the doors to their new home on April 3, fans will walk into a $1.5 billion stadium filled with all the hallmarks of 21st-century sports extravagance: a steak house, a glass-enclosed sports bar and high-definition video screens in every direction.
Luxury suite-holders can access a separate deal-room for conducting business. In the sleek, exclusive "Legends Club," the high-definition screens are so ubiquitous they're even set into the lavatory mirrors. For spectators in the premium section's teak-armed seats, waiters will bring brick-oven pizza to anyone able to shell out $2,500 a ticket to watch a ballgame in the midst of the worst recession in a generation.
Citi Field will have a reservation-only restaurant and a wine bar, plus gourmet snack food -- barbecue, burgers and Belgian-style french fries -- by top New York restaurateur Danny Meyer. The Yankees and Cowboys decided no existing concessions company was good enough for their new stadiums, so they teamed up with Goldman Sachs to create their own company, Legends Hospitality Management, which will focus on high-end, locally themed food. Yankee Stadium promises food cooked up by celebrity chefs from the Food Network, while a sample menu for a Cowboys luxury suite features New Zealand baby lamb chops, Kobe beef with a cognac demi-glace and truffled macaroni and cheese.
Fans can still get bleacher seats in Yankee Stadium for $5, though their view of the field is partially blocked by a glass-enclosed sports bar. Bleacher seats with unobstructed views will go for $12.
The luxury building, around the corner from Avenue D, is attracting big dollars to a street that most New Yorkers a decade ago would not have considered even for a stroll.
"This is Perry Street, this is 77th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus," the lead broker for Flowerbox, Larry Carty of Warburg Marketing, said. Eight loft units in his building, which started at $1.495 million, sold out in three months. The gigantic Lillian Wald and Jacob Riis housing projects down the block are hardly a liability, according to the broker. "So what? You pay 800 bucks a night at the Maritime Hotel, and you're looking out your window at projects," he said.
"Buyers weren't worried about Avenue D," Mr. Carty said. "If anything, they were saying, ‘Where exactly is that?'"
The neighborhood, one of the city's largest — spanning from the Bowery east, from Houston to Canal streets — offers Manhattan's least expensive two- and three-bedroom rentals, averaging $3,023 and $4,095 a month, respectively, according to Citi Habitats' January data. (Compare that to $4,311 and $5,450 in Chelsea, and $5,086 and $7,169 in SoHo/TriBeCa.)
[T]he glass 16-story, 32-unit Blue condo, out of place among its five- and six-story neighbors, is a different story. It averaged $1,140 per square foot when it sold out, says Corcoran Group broker Barrie Mandel.
"The people who bought [at Blue] were people who 10 years ago would have bought in the Village and five years ago would have bought in SoHo and two years ago would have bought in NoLIta," Mandel says. "The majority of people have traditional work that they do all day long, they dress in a suit and tie, a dress and proper heels and come home at night and lead a different life, go to the clubs or the lounges."
Since Anne Hugard moved to the Lower East Side in 2001, she has seen a dramatic transformation.
"There were no stores, and it was Chinatown to the south and very Puerto Rican to the east; that's what we liked about it," she says. "It got gentrified, which is good and bad. We enjoy the convenience of stores, but the drawback is that the population gets to be all the same."
"I've watched this area go from street fights to kids puking in the streets," says Chris Scott, co-owner of Fat Hippo, a newish restaurant on Clinton Street. "Those bridge-and-tunnel places are what made this area better."
Manhattan's retail rent rollback is causing Wal-Mart to give the city another look.
The giant discount chain has shopped for space in Union Square and among the big-box stores along Sixth Avenue in Chelsea, The Post has learned.
Wal-Mart recently passed on a proposal by Related Companies for a two-level store of about 57,000 feet in Union Square where Virgin Megastores and Circuit City are closing, sources said.
The company's real-estate scouts have also been roaming the area around 620 Sixth Ave., said the sources.
Wal-Mart spokesman Steven Restivo said the Union Square sites "were never under consideration." But he said the company is "still interested" in opening stores in New York, despite strong political and union opposition.
Talk about your leggy blondes: Kiehl's has thought of a creative way to hype their relaunch of Close-Shaverettes Simply Mahvelous Legs Shave Cream, ($15.50). They've enlisted the help of vertically-gifted Svetlana Pankratova, the woman who holds the record for having the longest legs in the world. (They're a whopping 4'4" — that's her legs alone. Keep in mind that the average woman is only about 5'3" from head to toe!) If you're in the New York area tomorrow, you can see those gams for yourself at Kiehl's East Village flagship store, where Pankratova will be on hand from 12 PM to 5PM to demonstrate the product and donate $44 per razor stroke to the Lower Eastside Girls Club.