Farewell to 257 Bowery

Curbed has the details:

English architect Lord Norman Foster must be tired of dealing with all the stuffy uptowners (lookin' at you, Tom Wolfe!) who get mixed up in the business of his grand architectural visions, because rumor has it he's heading downtown—to the Bowery, so conveniently left out of the East Village/Lower East Side rezoning. According to a Curbed tipster, Foster & Partners has designed the above nine-story gallery building for an established Chelsea art dealer at 257 Bowery, just north of the New Museum and across the street from FLAnk Architects' planned eco-friendly hotel.

Earlier:
Bowery Boogie has the goods on another gallery opening in the neighborhood.

Appreciating NYC's drinking past (and present)

I enjoyed Off the Presses author Robert Simonson's article in the Sun yesterday titled "Looking at New York's Liquid Past." Here's his look at Times Square:

Walk to Broadway and down two blocks south to the Crossroads of the World. Unsurprisingly, a lot of drinking history occurred at this intersection. On the southeast corner of Seventh Avenue and 42nd Street, you can still see the Mansard-roofed beauty that once was the Knickerbocker Hotel. The bar was so favored a watering hole of uptown swells in the first two decades of the 20th century that it was called the 42nd Street Country Club. (It was also the original home of Parrish's "Old King Cole" oil painting.) Its main importance in cocktail history, though, lies in the once-prevalent claim that its head bartender, Martini di Arma di Taggia, invented the martini in 1912. This is balderdash, since mentions of the drink had been appearing in print for decades prior to that. But give ol' di Taggia a quick salute, anyway.

Directly opposite Broadway was the Hotel Metropole, another popular way station for actors, politicians, and the like. Its house cocktail was the Metropolitan, which is basically a Manhattan, but with brandy standing in for the rye. It hasn't retained the fame the Manhattan has but is still a damned decent drink.

He also provides some nice details about current haunts such as the Algonquin and King Cole Bar.

Reflections on Avenue A

Near Ninth Street.

A sleek new bar at "21"

Change at the "21" Club! As the City Room reports this afternoon:

There are few entries in the annals of New York alcoholism to rival the bar at the “21” Club in Midtown Manhattan. The broad, mahogany bar stood since the 1940s in the center of the first floor. Drinks were had there by the likes of Humphrey Bogart and Ernest Hemingway.

With its celebrity patrons and speakeasy heritage, it was the subject of paintings by artists like Leroy Neiman and immortalized in films, notably “The Sweet Smell of Success.”

But now in the celebrated dining room of “21,” which reopened this month at “21” West 52nd Street after renovation, there is only the sweet smell of shellac, given off by — egads — a sleek new bar, freshly varnished.

It resembles the old bar, down to the brass foot rail, but there are differences. It is much narrower (about half as wide as the four-foot-wide old one), and shorter (by about 12 feet), leaving more space in the dining room for tables. And there are no spittoons.

Salvador Dalí in New York

MoMa is currently showing the exhibit Dalí: Painting and Film (through Monday). In conjuntion with that tonight and tomorrow, there's a discussion-and-films series titled Dalí in New York.

According to MoMa, "Dalí in New York explores the artist's diverse experiences and encounters in New York from the 1930s to the 1960s."

Among the films:

Screen Tests: Salvador Dalí. 1966. USA. Directed by Andy Warhol. By the mid-1960s Dalí had successfully created a marketable persona that was better known to the public than his paintings. This conflation of art and commerce was of distinct interest to Andy Warhol, and he recorded a pair of screen tests — one shot with the camera upside down — that depict a shrewd Surrealist performance by Dalí. Silent. Approx. 7 min.

Dalí in New York. 1966. USA. Directed by Jack Bond. Dalí, amid preparations for an exhibition at the Huntington Gallery of Modern Art, takes to the streets of New York City. He visits the Art Students League studios, comments on the work of Michelangelo, and creates performance art by lying in a coffin atop one million dollars in cash as ants crawl out of a broken egg and across his face. 57 min.

Here's a snippet of the screen test for Warhol:



And here's part of an interview in New York from last October with Robert and Richard Dupont, the underage twins Warhol fancied who became part of The Factory scene:

Richard: Andy brought us to dinner one Sunday with Salvador Dalí at the Versailles Room at the St. Regis. Dalí always had these dinners, and there were always a lot of drag queens. One named Potassa would be wearing a beautiful gown from Oscar de la Renta or Halston, and she would run around with a big bottle of Champagne and say, “Cham-pan-ya!” After we met her, she would always let us know when Dalí was in town and invite us for these dinners. Sometimes Andy wouldn’t be invited, which would make him upset.

New York Post helps New York men try to be better New York men

The Post has a handy-dandy listicle today titled "25 Skills That Make A NYC Man."

Among the 25 skills that New York men "need to have":

2) Not get ripped off by a cabbie: Always have singles. It's amazing how many taxi drivers have only 10-dollar-bills for change when you have only a 20 for your $8 fare. And the answer to "Where ya' from?" is always "Born and raised in New York."

5) Get into a nightclub with your boys: Go in two at a time holding hands. Seriously, this works. The bouncer will assume you're no threat to the girls they just let in to hit on big spending VIPs. And since no homophobe would resort to this trick just to get in, you're probably not a big macho who'll cause trouble, either.

8) Know what not to order in a bar: Don't get cute. A vodka-cranberry takes two minutes to serve. Your Cape Cod-a-colada could be a while. Plus, it's girly.

9) Not get ripped off in a strip club: "A dance" means one song and costs $20. If the stripper keeps going when song two starts, that meter's running. And FYI, they tell every guy he has pretty eyes. Sorry.

10) Know which clubs and restaurants are played out: If your buddy suggested you take your hot new date to Boucarou, he's trying to get her to leave you. Don't trust blog comments - they're often left by publicists and venue owners of a business or its competition.

17) Not get punched by a crackhead: You don't have to respect them, but act like you do. "I don't have a dollar, but I'll catch you on the way back, buddy." He'll forget. He's a crackhead.

22) Make money: Everything here is absurdly expensive and starving artists starve alone. Unless Albert Hammond is in your band, music is your hobby and you need a day job

23) Know your Olsens from your Hiltons: It's mind-numbing, but it's going to come up. Olsens are elfin creatures who dwell downtown, feed on leaves and often look homeless. Hiltons are longer, taller, louder, shinier and much harder to ignore. You'd rather hook-up with an Olsen, you'd actually rather bag a Hilton.

Ready for the day now, men?

Tonight in Tompkins Square Park: The Toy

Meh...I don't get it either. The Toy? As IMDB describes the plot: On one of his bratty son Eric's annual visits, the plutocrat U.S. Bates (Jackie Gleason) takes him to his department store and offers him anything in it as a gift. Eric chooses a black janitor (Richard Pryor) who has made him laugh with his antics. At first the man suffers many indignities as Eric's "toy", but gradually teaches the lonely boy what it is like to have and to be a friend.

Double ugh. (Oh, and the having Bates as a last name sets up a running gag...Master Bates...)



Now allow me to repeat what I said in a post from July 16:

This film series is all well and good. I'm all for free things that can bring the community together. Not to mention I enjoy cheesy Hollywood movies . . . Still, I'd appreciate an outdoor movie series showing more obscure mainstream and independent films and/or a showcase for local filmmakers. How about something on the history of the neighborhood, such as Clayton Patterson's Captured?

Anyway...on Sept. 19 in the Park: The Shining.

Righteous Hams

"They're like Lennon and McCartney." Righteous Kill opens Friday.




Meanwhile, Pacino in Panic in Needle Park tomorrow night at the Anthology Film Archives at 7.

But of course

The Real Deal reports (via Curbed):

Two thirds of a 15,000-square-foot East Village playground that was home to a popular flea market is under contract in a quiet, all-cash sale for $10.4 million to the Archdiocese of New York, court documents said.

The playground, divided into three ownership lots, is adjacent to the shuttered Mary Help of Christians Catholic Church on the east side of Avenue A between 11th and 12th streets. The Archdiocese owns the church located on a 13,000 square foot lot, city records show.

The Archdiocese did not respond to requests for comment, but real estate professionals speculated the church parcel and playground would be sold and developed into residential housing.

For further reading:
The Church Ladies (The New York Times)

[Photo: Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times]

When the Christodora House became a Greek house

[Photos by Charlie Kerman]

In 1983, when the Christodora House on Avenue B was still abandoned, members of the Tau Delta Phi, Delta Eta Chapter at Cooper Union, placed their Greek letters on the west side atop the 17-floor building. Don't have a lot of details, such as how long the letters remained there. Long enough for a photo opp, of course. Photos of the letters crew are below. (Note the condition of the Christodora...)

One iconic NYC concert venue that is getting renovated instead of torn down or turned into a condo or...

The Times on the renovation of the Beacon:

It almost became a grocery store in the 1970s. In the 1980s, it was nearly jackhammered into a cavernous disco with a triple-tiered restaurant. Somehow it escaped becoming a multiplex. And through 78 years, the neglect of the Beacon Theater in Manhattan — aside from occasional spasms of partial renovation — has often been profound.

The Beacon, at 2124 Broadway, at West 74th Street, is familiar to generations of New Yorkers living on the West Side who grew up there when it was a movie house, performance space and, in recent decades, what some have called the Carnegie Hall of rock rooms.

The Beacon went dark last month for a six-month, $15-million restoration by Madison Square Garden Entertainment, a division of Cablevision Systems Corporation, which announced in 2006 that it was leasing the theater for 20 years. The interior face-lift is to be completed by Jan. 31, in time for a February opening.

The Post has high opinions of LES housing

From today's paper:

Low ceilings. Columns in the living room. Drainage grates outside the windows.

What sounds like a Lower East Side tenement is actually a $53.5 million pair of Plaza penthouses bought by Russian hedge-fund manager Andrei Vavilov, who says the developer promised him the epitome of luxury and then handed over an "attic-like space."

Fair warning

More before-and-afters from New York magazine

I had a post yesterday morning on New York's jaw-dropper of a piece this week titled The Glass Stampede. Here are more before-and-after shots from the feature:


11 and 22 East 1st Street


Palladium Residence Hall on East 14th Street.


One Astor Place


Union Square West

Also! I was so delirious looking at all this that I missed the article's reference to "one" Jeremiah Moss on the first pass yesterday.

As Justin Davidson wrote:

In his 1962 poem “An Urban Convalescence,” James Merrill captured the feverish yet methodical sacking of the city and the way it toys with our sense of comfortable familiarity.

As usual in New York, everything is torn down
Before you have had time to care for it.
Head bowed, at the shrine of noise,
let me try to recall
What building stood here.
Was there a building at all?

Among Merrill’s disciples is one Jeremiah Moss, who maintains the engagingly gloomy blog Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, which he terms “an ongoing obituary for my dying city.” His topic is the steady erosion of the city’s texture. He is the defender of all the undistinguished hunks of masonry that lend the streets their rhythm and give people a place to live and earn a living: bodegas, curio stores, a metalworking shop in Soho, diners, and dingy bars.

At Howl! Sunday afternoon

Just a few photos.





R.I.P. Eddie Boros.




Unfortunately, Mrs. Grieve and I missed the burlesque review. Luckily, Jill was there. (Blah Blog Blah)

Table Hopping with the International Bar

The Table Hopping feature in the Sunday New York Post put the spotlight on the International Bar, the old haunt on First Avenue between Seventh Street and St. Mark's that was brought back to life this past June. Good choice by the Post. Jeremiah profiled proprietors Shawn and Molly back in June. Oh, and the Table Hopping feature doesn't appear to be online. So here it is:

A poorly timed marketing campaign(?)

On Seventh Street and Avenue A Sunday. I'm assuming this is some sort of lame-o marketing project. (If he's actually missing, then my apologies to his family.)

This campaign is especially tacky when family and friends are in a desperate search for Hannah Upp, the 23-year-old teacher who hasn't been seen since Aug. 29.

"The city is sprouting a hard, glistening new shell of glass and steel"

There's a piece in the new New York magazine titled "The Glass Stampede." It begins:

Our city is molting.

Bricks flake away. So do brittle fire escapes, terra-cotta encrustations, old paint, cracked stoops, faded awnings, sash windows, and stone laurels fashioned a century ago by Sicilian carvers. New York is shucking off its aging walk-ups, its small and mildewed structures, its drafty warehouses, cramped stores, and idle factories. In their place, the city is sprouting a hard, glistening new shell of glass and steel. Bright, seamless towers with fast elevators and provisional views spring up over a street-level layer of banks and drugstores. In some cities, a building retains the right to exist until it’s proved irredeemable. Here, colossal towers are merely placeholders, temporary arrangements of future debris. New York lives by a philosophy of creative destruction. The only thing permanent about real estate is a measured patch of earth and the column of air above it. The rest is disposable.

And the metamorphosis has sped up. In the past fifteen fat years, more than 76,000 new buildings have gone up, more than 44,000 were razed, another 83,000 were radically renovated—a rate of change that evokes those time-lapse nature films in which flowers spring up and wither in a matter of seconds. For more than a decade, we have awakened to jackhammers and threaded our way around orange plastic netting, calculating that, since our last haircut, workers have added six more stories to that high-rise down the block. Now that metamorphosis is slowing as the economy drags. Buildings are still going up, but the boom is winding down. Before the next one begins is a good time to ask, has this ferment improved New York or eaten away at the city’s soul?

On Avenue A (and an update from Neither More Nor Less on the fallout from the Donut Social)

I spotted the above on the side of the Con Ed substation on Avenue A yesterday afternoon. How long before this gets removed?

Meanwhile, Bob Arihood has an update of what happened Friday night after the Donut Social and the arrest of Leftöver Crack singer Scott Sturgeon. Part of Bob's report:

"Earlier the 9th precinct had decided to arrest Sturgeon for tossing donuts at them at the concert claiming that per the Penal Code such an action constituted harrasment of a police officer . They waited for an hour to arrest Sturgeon apparently because they felt that it would be easier and less risky than doing so at the concert with a crowd that might protest such an arrest .
Arresting Sturgeon-- charges were harrasment of a police officer , disorderly conduct and resisting arrest--in TSP was not so difficult , there was little resistance , but the unexpected consequences of the arrest were for a while somewhat chaotic .
After Sturgeons arrest some present decided to attempt to prevent the police RMP containing Sturgeon from leaving the park . Police cars were damaged ,broken mirrors etc . Bottles were thrown and trash recepticles were upset and emptied . People climbed on top of police cars with some standing or lying down in front of the police vehicles . For a few minutes the situation was quite eye-ball-to-eye-ball and nose-to-nose physical but police eventually gained control with minimal use of force . 3 additional arrests were made before the brief melee ended.

Previously on EV Grieve:
Friday night in Tompkins Square Park: Unity and a sitdown (and several arrests)
At the Donut Social

"You don't have to spend a million to look like a million!"

Gawker had a good thread Saturday night in which weekend editor Ian Spiegelman asked, "What's your favorite movie or TV show where the Big Apple and its culture, sensibility, and aesthetic is intrinsic to the narrative?" (There were nearly 400 responses...) Here's a clip provided by commenter Dickdogfood. It's a series of commercials from WNEW-TV from 1985. The first ad, for the Ritz Thrift Shop, is a classic: