...and Avenue B.
Or is it the other way around?
Grand Opening, a glass-fronted gallery space between tenement buildings on the Lower East Side, has old Chinese men playing hipsters on its table despite the language barrier. “People can communicate through their game,” the owner, Ben Smyth, 27, said.
Eric Bogosian misses the dangerous and dirty old Times Square. In the monologist's upcoming novel, "Perforated Heart," his hero describes walking along the new "Deuce" between Seventh and Eighth avenues and being "jostled by tourists munching kosher hot dogs, their souvenir Playbills clenched in pale Midwestern fists . . . [taking] pictures of each other." He continues: "Thirty years ago, these same darkened doorways framed girls who chanted, 'Wanna go out?' 'Wanna party?' Prostitutes, drug dealers, pickpockets. Where are those wonderful folks now? Grown old. At home with their grandkids, or in drug rehab or in prison or pushing up daisies." The book hits stores next spring.