Monday, November 2, 2020
The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black in Tompkins Square Park
A Taste of the Tropics on Avenue C
“It’s called a pawpaw fruit,” Ross Martin, director of La Plaza Cultural Community Garden, said as he bent over to pick it up. “And it’s native!”
A cross between a mango and a banana, the pawpaw fruit isn’t what one pictures when thinking of New York City. With custardy yellow flesh and large black seeds, it has a tropical flavor more reminiscent of a Caribbean island than a vacant city lot, and yet La Plaza’s small patch of trees have happily taken root in their few feet of soil.
“I’d never seen one growing in Manhattan,” Martin said with a chuckle, “so I thought it would be cool to be the only place that had one.”
“People associate the neighborhood with gardens and gardens with the neighborhood,” Martin, who’s been with La Plaza for 25 years, said. According to him the “sort of spirit of creativity and ingenuity” that led to the gardens was “part and parcel of the neighborhood.”
“The benefit this place has is more of a community benefit, for bringing people together, giving us a space,” Martin explained. “We can do all that plus produce food.”
With supple, velveteen skin and a delicate ripeness, pawpaw fruits feel like they might bruise if you hold them just a little too tightly. Plenty have been plucked from the trees since Martin, a landscape architect, planted the patch himself seven years ago in the wake of Hurricane Irene. The storm had knocked down a weeping willow that stood in the same place, a traumatic event for the garden’s members.
“People came to mourn the tree,” he said, describing the iconic 30-year-old giant that had once shaded the eastern portion of the land with its wispy pale branches. Only the stump remained in the storm’s aftermath.
“We used that as the base for our hugel mounds,” Martin said. Hugel mounds are a common strategy in urban gardens to protect their produce from pollutants by layering wood, mulch, and soil on top of the lead- and arsenic-contaminated lots where buildings once stood. The old willow stump serves as a base for the pawpaw patch and surrounding hazelnut trees now occupying that corner of the garden.
“They’re really thriving,” Martin said proudly. “The system really works.”
Hidden by wide, flat leaves, the oblong pawpaw fruits hang in clustered bunches, dropping with ease when the flesh inside turns sweet and spoonable. Picking a ripe one off the branch (which requires nothing more than a gentle twist) feels like saving it a bruising trip to the garden floor a few feet below.
“Basically anyone can come in and take anything they want,” Martin said about La Plaza Cultural. His goal is to maximize the garden’s potential as a food producer, a dream that, along with the pawpaw patch, could only take root recently.
“It wasn’t really until the storm came and knocked over the trees that we had light in the garden,” he said. “It’s a really special fruit.”
Ducks Eatery will close this weekend after 8-plus years on 12th Street
Ducks Eatery will be shutting down after service on Saturday here on 12th Street between First Avenue and Second Avenue.
The owners, siblings Julie and Will Horowitz, made the announcement Friday on Instagram:
After a tough few months, we have made the very heavy decision to close our doors for good on Nov. 7. While this is not how we envisioned our time on 12th Street ending, we're choosing to focus on all of the extraordinary experiences that have come out of being part of your community for nearly nine years.
Thank you for sharing your sense of adventure, your stories and your warmth with us. We are humbled and so grateful.
After opening in August 2012, Ducks Eatery was known for a creative meat-centric menu ... that evolved into more sustainable, non-meat items (including that smoked watermelon a few years back).
Will Horowitz attributed the closure to the economic downturn from the coronavirus pandemic in a phone call with Eater on Monday. Though the restaurant’s longtime landlords ... attempted to negotiate a rent agreement, keeping the business afloat on takeout, delivery, and outdoor dining sales would have been “impossible,” he says....Horowitz says the restaurant’s indoor dining room could accommodate no more than 10 people at the state-mandated 25 percent capacity.
“It would have been a death wish going into winter,” he says
Incoming office building makes first appearance above the plywood at 141 E. Houston
From acclaimed architect Roger Ferris, the only new development of its type on the Lower East Side, 141 East Houston is a new frame for viewing the neighborhood. Column-free and unbounded by walls, it reinterprets the area through a bold geometric perimeter of cladding and glass. State-of- the-art workspaces and private terraces reframe expectations, while a well-connected location recasts perspectives.
With its glass frame and dynamic courtyard running the length of its eastern side, doubling as a second facade, 141 East Houston challenges the distinction between indoors and out.
• Sunshine Cinema-replacing office building moving forward; demolition watch back on
• Discarded theater seats and goodbyes at the Sunshine Cinema
• The 9-story boutique office building coming to the former Sunshine Cinema space
• A celebratory ad on the purchase of 139 E. Houston St., current home of the Sunshine Cinema
• The boutique office building replacing the Sunshine Cinema will be 'unbounded by walls' with an outdoor space called Houston Alley
The vacant corners on the west side of 3rd Avenue and 13th Street
Opening and/or coming soon: The Dolar Shop, Kyuramen
.... the coming soon signage recently arrived for Kyuramen, a Taiwan-based ramen chain with 120 locations worldwide, at 210 E. 14th St. between Second Avenue and Third Avenue. (Previously)