While I'm in the neighborhood... Dunno how long 37 Great Jones has been on the market...
As the Timesnoted in March 2008: "An unusual addition to the street was the stocky, brooding building at 37 Great Jones, designed in 1917 by Lewis Patton and used as a warehouse in the 1930s by the Philco Radio and Television Corporation."
The building is on the block for $8.8 million. As the listing (PDF) notes, "This property represents a unique opportunity for an investor or end user (such as a single family or restaurant), in an area teaming with new development. This building abuts Ian Schrager's 40 Bond, and numerous other new projects."
We've been waiting, waiting and waiting (since May 2008!) to see what will appear at the former tumor at Seventh Street just west of First Avenue...
...a construction worker at the scene in the spring said it will be "a restaurant or another bar." Hmmm.
Well, maybe some day. It appears that all that work gone into carving out the space and creating the tumor was just to prep it for lease.
According to the listing, the joint has 2,000 square feet, plus another 1,000 square feet in the basement. And: "Many busy cafes in the vicinity."
Feel free to leave your guess in the comments...smart money would have to be on some sort of ramen/noodle/yogurt place. (Or, if BaHa can do it, FroRam!)
Whole Earth Bakery and Kitchen, which has operated at 130 St. Mark's Place since 1991, closed last Friday for renovations. The shop was expected to reopen yesterday. However, a walk by yesterday afternoon revealed that the renovations continue...
Please reopen soon...
Whole Earth Bakery and Kitchen got its start in 1978 on Spring Street.
TGIF to Union Square fallout. Per an Eater commenter: "I am going to run a $1 shuttle bus between TGI Friday's and Superdive starting at 8pm on Thursdays and Fridays" (Eater)
There will be none of that "discharge of fecal matter" business in this pool! (Curbed)
Jack Shafer debunks the summer's big "trends" stories. Like beer guts on hipsters! "Usually when something is called hip, a top hipster can be found embracing it. But Trebay names no leader of potbelly hipness and uncovers no evidence of hip potbellies in the cinema, the stage, the concert hall, the night club, or elsewhere. It's just these random guts strolling around New York. You might as well say argyle socks are hip." (Slate)
Phil Mushnick: "Every time I hear/read a team or MLB exec rationalize ticket prices as in-line with Broadway show tickets I want to retch. How many Broadway shows have two-hour rain delays? How many matinees are switched to Sunday nights? On Broadway a losing streak closes the show. How many shows would survive if the cast were shut out, 12-0, the script re-written every day and the stars intentionally walked?" (New York Post)
On this block in East Harlem, one house remains on the east side of Lexington Avenue between 117th and 118th Streets. I noticed it earlier this summer on a day that I was tooling around town in a rental car.
A search on Google Maps shows that two houses were still standing as of one year ago.
Now, only 1889 Lexington Ave. remains. And there's construction going on behind it and next to it.
Michael Bloomberg has never been the sort of public speaker who makes people faint in his presence. He talks too quickly, mispronounces words, and has a weakness for self-referential jokes, at which he smirks readily, like a boy who knows that his mother approves.
McGrath's piece is roughly 10,000 words, so.... here are just a few interesting passages.
Bloomberg took office during a recession, and quickly established himself as a bold and decisive fiscal manager, ultimately demonstrating, as his friend Mitchell Moss, an urban-planning professor at N.Y.U., says, that New York was “open for business after 9/11.” As the economy recovered, Bloomberg set about trying to transform the city, on a scale not seen since the days of Robert Moses. “I think if you look, we’ve done more in the last seven years than — I don’t know if it’s fair to say more than Moses did, but I hope history will show the things we did made a lot more sense,” Bloomberg told me. “You know, Moses did some things that turned out not to be great: cutting us off from the waterfront, putting roads all along the water.” The Bloomberg model, under the direction of Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff and Amanda Burden, the City Planning Commissioner, was based to a large extent on undoing the Moses legacy: rezoning for commercial and residential use large tracts of waterfront property that had once been the province of industry.
Later on, a City Hall reporter offers:
“If he weren’t sometimes such a dick, it would be an unbearable beat.”
At the start of every summer, I always say that I'll go see one of the HBO Bryant Park Summer Film Festival films. But I never do it. Afraid I'll start throwing picnic baskets. And tonight is the last one for the summer of 2009. Just as well. It's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." I'd be lost: I haven't seen the first two. (Boo! Hiss!)
And now I see New York has its annual Fall Fashion issue. Fall? I'd like a do-over on June, please. And I'd like to go see "Dog Day Afternoon" on July 6.
In 1986, when the Lower East Side had just one bank in a 100-square block area...
Today, despite a bank branch on seemingly every corner throughout the city, the article notes:
In Manhattan, long the world’s banking capital, 12 percent of households still do not have a bank account... 91,100 Manhattan households feel more comfortable hiding their savings in closets, in pillows — even in brown paper lunch bags. They rely on check-cashers and corner bodegas for cash and post offices for money orders, even as banks are more accessible than ever: the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation reports 682 banks in the borough in 2008, compared with 521 in 2004 — a more than 30 percent increase.
