"Picture Cary Grant in Hitchcock’s 1959 thriller 'North by Northwest' being hustled out of the hotel and into the back seat of a parked car by two goons, having been mistaken for another man. 'Don’t tell me where we’re going,' Grant quips. 'Surprise me.' The car peels away and we are swiftly sealed in another world, our familiar surroundings receding in the rear-view mirror.(The New York Times)
"Standing at the same corner half a century later, it’s not hard to feel a curious dissonance between the two places. There’s the tangible New York of concrete and smog, and there’s what the film historian James Sanders has called the 'mythic New York,' the dreamy celluloid landscape of a thousand crisscrossing fictions."
Balducci's, the storied high-end grocery chain that first opened in Greenwich Village 63 years ago, is closing its two Manhattan locations at the end of the month.
Balducci's is probably best remembered by New Yorkers for its store on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village, which operated from 1972 to 2003.
After the Greenwich Village store shuttered, Balducci's only Manhattan location for a while was on West 66th Street near Lincoln Center.
That store will close, as will what is now Balducci's Manhattan flagship, a 17,000-square-foot store that opened in 2005 in a former bank at Eighth Avenue and 14th Street in Chelsea.
Last September, when the Astroland amusement park, a three-acre sliver of the area, was shut down in a battle with its landlord, erroneous reports went out around the world that all of Coney Island was a corpse. Overnight, it seemed, obituaries were composed. Carnie barkers were invited to their own wakes.
But the rumors of demise had been exaggerated greatly. All of Coney Island, from Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs to the world-renowned Cyclone, had not dropped off the Boardwalk into the sea.
“They’re all surprised when I tell them we’re still open,” said a frustrated Dennis Vourderis, whose family has run the Wonder Wheel for more than 40 years. “Unfortunately, the press did a great job announcing Astroland had closed, so now people think that Coney Island is closed.
“But they haven’t rolled the beach up yet,” he said. “It’s totally ridiculous.”
The premature announcement of their burial has been so widespread that several local merchants have pooled money in an existential media campaign. Beginning next month, there will be billboards on the highways, bus stop ads, commercials at the movies. The slogan: “Coney Island: Really Fun. Really Open.”
Tropicana's rebranding debacle did more than create a customer-relations fiasco. It hit the brand in the wallet. After its package redesign, sales of the Tropicana Pure Premium line plummeted 20% between Jan. 1 and Feb. 22, costing the brand tens of millions of dollars. On Feb. 23, the company announced it would bow to consumer demand and scrap the new packaging, designed by Peter Arnell. It had been on the market less than two months.
