In Shakespeare's day, audience members heckled actors by hurling rotten fruit. But a few weeks ago, when Law's yoga session was interrupted, the fruit flew in the opposite direction.
"He noticed we were there and we started waving at him. Then he went inside and came back with two oranges," freshman Neha Najeeb told The Post. "He threw them at our window, but he missed." Law then went back inside and returned with two additional oranges, she said.
"This time, he hit the windows -- there was orange pulp on the glass for a week -- and then he went back to working out," she said. "Now we don't like Jude Law anymore."
And here, the ground rules of Mexico City are in effect—no guacamole, no sides of rice and beans, and a staunch anti-burrito position. Drop by at the start of a long night and you'll get a grilled tortilla doused with six different imported chilis, created by a guy who's eaten his way around the Mexican capital. Or specials like the Mil Máscaras: a trio of tortillas piled with cecina steak, Oaxaca cheese and enough bacon to make sure you're ready for the various tequila menus of the East Village.
Miller used dimensional type to engage and activate multiple planes and architectural surfaces. The building identity, for example, is optically extruded letterforms that appear "correct" when seen in strict elevation, but distort as the profile of the letter is dragged backwards in space. The top half of the letters, appearing on one plane of the canopy, are dimensional, while the bottom half are cut out of another plane, echoing the transparency of the building's skin of perforated stainless steel.
What’s happened on the Bowery is surely gentrification, although the distance from five-buck flops to $500-a-night luxury suites cries out for a stronger term. I see something else: a lesson in urban ecology. The places where it’s possible for new architecture to thrive in Manhattan are generally those districts where the political clout of civic groups is the weakest. In Greenwich Village or on the Upper East Side, the community boards and neighborhood activists rush in like SWAT teams to counter development threats. But on the former skid row, the power to say no to development isn’t as strong. A preservation-oriented downzoning of the East Village, approved late last year, left out the Bowery. Development on the west side of the street is moderated by the low-density zoning of the Noho Historic District and the Little Italy Special District. The east side of the Bowery, where most new development has taken place, was left undefended. While an organization called the Bowery Alliance of Neighbors has tried to have rules put in place to limit buildings on the east side of the Bowery to eight stories, that strip is still approved for what the city’s Zoning Handbook calls “high bulk.”
One time, shortly after the completion of the massive apartment complexes that now face the Bowery on the north and south sides of Houston Street, I emerged from a nearby subway station — something I’d done literally hundreds of times — and had no idea where I was. The new buildings, the hopelessly bland Avalon Bowery Place and Avalon Chrystie Place, developed by a large real estate investment trust, had wiped out my sense of place.
By contrast, the architect Carlos Zapata’s Cooper Square Hotel has emerged as a landmark. But not all landmarks are created equal. The glassy 21-story tower, which borrows its milk-colored glass and swoopy style from Frank Gehry’s much nicer IAC headquarters on the West Side, is wedged so tightly between the neighboring tenements that it appears to be a cartoon illustrating the evils of overdevelopment. I attended a party in the hotel’s penthouse that was a total mob scene, but on the afternoon of a recent walking tour, I found the public spaces ghostly and depopulated. I’ve heard that its East Village neighbors have coined a nickname for the Cooper Square: “Dubai.” And as I sat by myself in the back patio, the building prompted the exact question I found myself asking all the time in Dubai: Who is this place for?
On a recent night, a group of freshmen girls (and several boys) on the ninth floor of Hayden residence hall fought each other for a spot at the window in a dorm room. They all pressed their faces against the glass, straining to catch a glimpse of someone a few floors below in the building behind Hayden.
The word was spreading — Jude Law had officially moved in next door.
"We didn't even know he lived here," Tisch freshman Erica Rose said. (Her room is where the students gather to spy.) "I just came home one day and the entire floor was in my room staring out the window," Rose said.
LSP freshman Bryan Hall said he feels bad for Law.
He said: "He moved in next to a freshmen dorm, so he'll always be ogled by freshmen girls."
