A collector of New York ephemera

The Times has an obituary today on Herbert Mitchell, 83. "At the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia, where he worked from 1960 to 1991, and in his own sequestered apartment, he assembled something extraordinary, if slightly beyond description," the Times notes. “His was the most eclectic collection of the valuable, the semi-valuable and the somewhat-not-valuable,” his attorney said. Much of it is to be given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he added. Among the treasures he had already donated: 3,866 stereographic views of New York City from the 19th and early 20th centuries that show Central Park not long after its construction. “One of his real interests was ephemera — that part of history that disappears,” said Kitty Chibnik, the associate director of Avery. The above image from his collection was described by the Times as "The Everard Baths on 28th Street, where gay New Yorkers met."

All along the water towers

For the past two years, Gary Conger has been painting portraits of the rooftop water towers (like the one above) that he sees from his apartment. According to his Web site:

The water towers in my neighborhood (Flatiron/Madison Park) represent an older New York, a city of smaller brick buildings and rooftops that offer living and playing space as well as the hardware needed to run the building. Views of these rooftops and water towers though are being blocked by the new glass towers rising up all around us.

An exhibition of his work, titled "Vanishing New York" (Hey Jeremiah!), is now on display at BooMA, the art gallery at the public relations firm M Booth & Associates, 300 Park Ave. South at 23rd Street, 12th floor. According to the Booth site, "BooMA (with affectionate apologies to MoMA) is one of very few art collections mounted in the halls of New York City public relations firms."

Related:

Bowery Boogie has a nice post from last month on water towers. Jeremiah also has some thoughts on water towers. As he wrote, "I think of the iconic wooden water tanks as lovely anachronisms, symbols of the old New York that is rapidly vanishing."

The Ex files

Remember these stupid fliers plastered all over the neighborhood...which turned out to be a viral campaign for the new CBS series "The Ex List"....?

Anyway, the show just got canceled.

Transportation in New York circa 1951

Five photos taken in the back of a cab that was probably going a little too fast during a rainstorm Tuesday evening

Wow, that headline is really concise! On West Broadway then Houston.

The layers of Fulton Street (aka, that big hole in the ground)

I've been keeping my eye on the looooong-delayed and increasingly expensive Fulton Street Transit Center at the corner of Broadway in the Financial District. It doesn't seem as if much progress is being made. The top two photos here show the construction site last week.



Here's what it looked like in July. I can't really see much difference.

Meanwhile, the Fulton subway entrance pictured below has been shuttered during the recent construction. The businesses shown here in July have been relocated to other parts of Fulton Street. These mom-and-pop shops that line entrances and exits of the subway give this city a little character, a little of which continues to die.

Red Square has Lenin; Cooper Union now has Stalin

City Room explains.

EV Grieve Random: A touch of evil

Roger Ebert recently trashed an independent movie that he only watched for eight minutes....Which prompted Miami Herald critics to share their worst review experiences. As pop music critic Michael Hamersly notes:

I was tempted to destroy my stereo with a sledgehammer probably two minutes into Deborah Harry's ironically titled October 2007 release Necessary Evil. It's an excruciating CD, full of random, cheesy musical styles (smooth jazz? hair metal?) and embarrassingly inappropriate lewdness (the 60-year-old woman sings about the devil's d--- and her curlies, for God's sake).
But whether it was professionalism or, more likely, morbid fascination, I stuck it out. Sure, I gave the album no stars (and got plenty of hate mail for trashing the icon), but I felt the ex-Blondie singer's star power warranted a review, good or horrid. If the artist had been a nobody, I would have simply ignored it.

MORE NYC album art

Well, Alex has been running laps around me in our NYC album art back and forth. So, in desperate times like these, I'm breaking out my secret weapon: boobs. OK, OK, I mean, it sort of has something to do with NYC...The original cover of the third record by Jimi Hendrix, "Electric Ladyland," showed a harem of nude women. The cover was banned in the United States...but was OK to use for the U.K. release.




Meanwhile, a few other NYC-related covers that I like...

An examination of hipsters

Meanwhile, in Australia, Lisa Pryor at The Sydney Morning Herald weighs in with a screed titled "How to be a bona fide hipster -- try to be different by being the same." Here are a few excerpts from the article:

Hipsters are hard to describe because they are so full of contradictions. But like a toupee or AIDS-related wasting, you know it when you see it. Hipsters hate fashion but take meticulous care achieving exactly the right degree of rumpledness. They value originality while looking the same as one another.

Thanks to these contradictions, hipsters find themselves always hurtling, psychically, towards a black hole of self-hatred, denial and irony, both intended and unintended. Ever seen someone walk into a cool bar and say "Oh my God. Look at all these try-hard wankers" not realising they look exactly the same? Classic hipster.

This week I am writing to you from the world headquarters of hipsterdom, the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Williamsburg. This slice of New York is the Haight-Ashbury of ironic self-loathing. In Verb Cafe on Bedford Avenue, a sign reads "Missing: brown felt fedora". Only four guys in the cafe are not wearing fedoras. Young men with messy hair, forearm tattoos and full beards abound. Around the corner at egg, an uncapitalised cafe, the beardage rate tops 50 per cent.

Whether they live in New York or Sydney, hipsters share many of the same qualities, particularly in the love-hate relationships they have to the hot topics of gentrification, fashion and queueing.

First, gentrification, a topic on which hipsters have passionate, confused views. They hate watching property prices rise in cool neighbourhoods partly because they do not want to see the earthy, quaint, ethnic working class displaced by white professionals with modular sofas who love painting their front doors red, but mostly because they realise they can no longer make a killing by buying cheap terraces and later flogging them off. And despite hating gentrification, they refuse to move anywhere that has not been gentrified.

A Pioneer no more?

Ugh. This one hurts. New York magazine has the story:

Another East Village institution is shuttering: Two Boots Pioneer Theater, which specializes in indie, underground, and cult fare, will most likely close at the end of the month. “I’m still hoping for a reprieve,” says Two Boots owner Phil Hartman, who’s seeking a partner or new owner. “But it was always a labor of love and never commercially viable.” Hartman and his wife founded the cozy 99-seat cinema in 2000, but the venue seemed older: It attempted to resurrect the lost atmosphere of old, offbeat downtown movie houses. Now it’ll share their fate, done in by a looming rent increase and tough times in the exhibition business.

Looking at the neighborhood circa the late 1970s

A friend gave me a used copy of "The Lower East Side: A Guide to its Jewish Past" by Ronald Sanders. The book, published in 1979, provides a straightforward history of the neighborhood from the 1870s to the 1920s. Text aside, I appreciate the many photos (99 in total) taken by Edmund V. Gillon, Jr. Here's a sampling of them, circa late 1970s:


Eighth Street and Avenue B.


10th Street.

Second Avenue near Sixth Street.

On Second Avenue (a cross street wasn't given).

At the Christodora on Avenue B before it was refurbished.