For the soul

Here are the Fleshtones, the Queens natives who debuted at CBGB May 19, 1976.

It's "Soul City."

Nightmare: A culturally dead city that's still unaffordable

As always, thanks for reading...and leaving comments here.

Wanted to share a comment from this post:

ed said...
My nightmare is that the job losses on Wall Street turn out to have no effect on New York, since the city has basically turned into a place for the super rich to go and live, not as a place to have careers. That is what Venice turned into during the 18th century. Then the city will be culturally dead, with no recovery, and it will still be unaffordable.

October 9, 2008 1:24 PM

Daily News crime video almost bad enough to make local TV news

The Daily News has this exciting crime story! (Via Gothamist)

A shoplifter with a taste for designer threads was nabbed by police after he and his buddies tried swiping a pricey jacket at a Lower East Side clothing boutique.
Police arrested Christopher Foster, 22, after he and a group of friends tried stealing jackets from Unis, a trendy clothier on Elizabeth Street.
Although his buddies successfully fled the store, police nabbed Foster around 5 p.m. on the Bowery near Rivington Street, where a Daily News videographer taped the arrest.

Nominee for the worst video ever...? How harrowing! (Love how the store owner/manager/victim taunts the perps!)

Today's sign of the apocalypse

In these trying financial times, the Post has launched a ridiculous daily feature dubbed "Dire Straits," a collection of anecdotes about New Yorkers braving the economy. Here's an item from today's paper:

Folks can't afford a meal? Let 'em eat cake!

In the midst of the meltdown, the Magnolia Bakery opened up a new location at Sixth Avenue and 49th Street this week.

"When the market dropped 700 points last week, business was great," said owner Bobbie Lloyd. "Maybe people needed a pick-me-up. It's an affordable luxury, a small investment for a lot of happiness."

Many of the customers who were scarfing down cupcakes at $2.50 or more a pop said they were seeking a respite from the bleak fiscal news.

Life on Marzzzzzzz (a 20-second review)

As mentioned previously, "Life on Mars" made its debut last night. I'm not much of a prime-time TV person. But! I tuned in anyway. Was a little more curious about the show than I needed to be. So you know the premise: Present-day NYC detective finds himself back in time in "gritty" 1973 Manhattan.

And?

Eh. Or maybe Meh.

For starters, the lead fellow Sam Tyler (Jason O'Mara) is an annoying mix of Mel Gibson and, oh, Michael Sarrazin. Without getting into all the plot points, I understand the confusion...the anger...the feeling of helplessness that he felt, trapped in 1973 NYC while the eldest Cosby kid (Lisa Bonet!) is in peril in 2008.

Still! Think of the fun you could have! Porn in Times Square! Betting on sporting events that you already know the outcomes to! I don't know. Maybe check out some shows. Are the New York Dolls playing somewhere?

Savor the opportunity...revisit a now-vanished bar...go to the top of the World Trade Center (which they showed twice...)....Buy up a ton of buildings in Soho and become a real-estate baron!

Plus, I had so many questions...Did he travel back with money? They showed his East Village apartment...Where did he eat breakfast? Lunch? Dinner? Why wasn't anyone smoking during the scene inside 7B? Why did all the extras look like players from a summer stock production of Hair?

OK, this was only the first episode...maybe all this is explored in the coming weeks. I'll give it a another shot next week.

P.S.
I'll leave the critique of co-star Gretchen Mol to someone more qualified ...

Getting nostalgic 10 years in advance

I've been enjoying Alex's "things that aren't here now" series of photos. Made me think that I shouldn't delete any photos on my computer, no matter how insignificant they seem now. What if we're looking at the photos below 10 years from now? What might we be saying? (Oh, I did something similar to this during my guest stint at Curbed this past August...)

"Wow, this area was still called the Bowery."

"The last ATM that the government shut down!"

"$5 for a Subway sub? So cheap! And this was before Subway merged with Starbucks to create StarSubs (SubBanks?)."

"Who?"

"Freedom Towers should be completed in just another 7 years."

"Only $4.75 for a Coke at old Yankee Stadium? Bargain!"

"Ha! Look! No ads on the bridge!"

"How quaint! When there were shoe repair shops run by people who have been in business 40-plus years!"

"Pay phones....Wha....?"

"Wow, the Christodora was the tallest building on the block; and before Ford Models bought it for their girls!"

"No shopping mall on Grand and Clinton?!"

"The Staten Island Ferry was free!"

"Ha ha ha -- remember when there were newspapers?"

"Wonder when that $20 million will kick in for the repairs at St. Brigid's..."

"Ah, Coney Island..."

"Iggy hasn't aged a bit!"

"Wow, a corner on the Bowery without a high rise...and that was the best Bond since Thunderball!"

And now the obligatory crash-crime story

Now that we're all broke, we have something else to look forward to: More crime! Or maybe not. This is all debated in the Times today:

Expert opinions differ . . . The last time stocks on Wall Street fell hard, in 1987, crime was exploding, and the city saw historic highs in murders in the following years.

Before that, the fiscal crisis of the 1970s helped lead to the abandonment of neighborhoods, failing schools and startling crime rates: robberies built through those years to a high in 1981, when there were 107,495 of them, for an average of 294 a day. (Last year’s total reported robberies, 21,787, was the lowest figure in modern history.)

“Every recession since the late ’50s has been associated with an increase in crime and, in particular, property crime and robbery, which would be most responsive to changes in economic conditions,” said Richard Rosenfeld, a sociologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Typically, he said, “there is a year lag between the economic change and crime rates.”

Uh. How about New York?

New York, of course, has over the last 15 years seen an extraordinary drop in crime, from the most serious to the mildly irritating. But across all those years, economists and sociologists have debated how much of the success was attributable to new trends in policing and how much to other factors, including a robust economy.

Now, if the dire predictions of economic hardship prove accurate, the city may be poised to find out in a real-time experiment. And it will have to conduct that experiment with thousands fewer police officers than it had in 2001.

For his part, the New York police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, said he did not subscribe to the idea that there was a strong connection between a city’s financial fortunes and its safety. He said he and his top commanders had had informal talks about the current economic conditions and what they might mean for crime, but had set no specific policy changes in motion that are related to economic circumstances.

Noted

The end of bling. Via The Wall Street Journal:

Francesco Trapani, chief executive of Bulgari Group, is cutting back on the fixed costs of his jet-setting lifestyle. The jewelry, luxury-goods and hotel magnate recently sold his 137-foot yacht, the "Christianne B," and he's holding off on buying any more homes. Even his bespoke Micocci shirt was slightly frayed at the collar last week -- a fact he acknowledged with an apologetic smile.

"I'm being more prudent," Mr. Trapani said. "I spent a lot of money this summer renting houses and things. But when the summer's over, it's over."

Not even the richest people are feeling untouched by our current financial crisis. In their personal lives, as in business, the purveyors of luxury are sizing up what it all means. Some of the questions: Is it unseemly to spend money publicly? Will people still shop for the all-important holiday season? Is this the end of bling?

Francois Henri Pinault, chief executive of French luxury giant PPR, said a few weeks ago that there will always be rich people, but the question is how they will behave as consumers.

The answer may have a lot to do with how these consumers want to be seen. It's not necessarily a good thing to show up at the tennis club with a new $30,000 crocodile handbag when your friends' net worth has been halved and the Federal Reserve is spending billions to keep the banking system afloat

.

Dunzo Journalism

Via Guest of a Guest...:

The Bowery may be the hottest street in the city, but is it too hot for its own good? We have already gotten more than one email from very “in the know” New Yorkers that insist that the LES (Lower East Side), including the Bowery and her hip hotel and bars are OVER. As in DUNZO. At least for the “cool kids” of the city that refuse to follow trends.

Down by the Hipster's take:

What happens when someone asks a question that has already been answered years ago? ...
So yes - the LES is Dunzo, and has been for quite a long time. It certainly doesn't take an "in the know" New Yorker to tell you that. Or maybe it does, and that makes us weep.

Loving "Kojak"

"Life on Mars," the new time-a-traveling crime drama, debuts tonight on ABC at 10. The show, based on the BBC series, follows a NYC detective who's transported from 2008 to 1973. Confusion ensues! They've been filming the show around the East Village and LES, as Bowery Boogie and Jeremiah have chronicled for us. The show's main character, Sam Tyler (Jason O'Mara), lives in the East Village. In any event, it looks interesting...and I may actually tune in.

Still! The show goes to great lengths to recreate 1973 NYC. The time in which "Kojak" was on the job. The Telly Savalas crime drama debuted in 1973 and played for five seasons.

Here's an entire episode from season four that aired Sept. 26, 1976. Guest stars Richard Gere. Oh, the thing is 45 minutes or so. I'd recommend tuning in for some tough Telly love at the 24-minute mark...and again at the 38-minute mark.



[Via the YouTube page set up by Nicholas Savalas. There are other full episodes there.]

Bonus trivia:
"Life of Mars" co-stars Esquared favorite Gretchen Mol.

A touch of Hollywood on C

A neon sign that I like. On Avenue C.

Caution: objects in mirror are dumber than they appear

Driving on 7th Street near Avenue B.

VIPs leaving City Hall

Bet I know who the Mayor was with!



Wonder what Elmo thinks of the third term...

EV Green

Check out the cool video by East Village Podcasts on the Wild Project, the eco-conscious gallery/theater on East Third Street between Avenue A and Avenue B.

Noted

At St. Jerome's on Rivington between Clinton and Suffolk. Via BC at NYC.com.

Are we in a recession because that one seller on craigslist says we are?

Are we in a recession? (New York Times)

Hogs and hoboes, gloom and doom

Catching up on this week's New York.

There's James Cramer's column:

What will New York look like a year from now? The answer: bad and probably worse, and perhaps downright catastrophic. Three degrees of awful.

And an interview with financial historian Niall Ferguson:

I’m in Venice now, which used to be a financial center and is now a tourist center. And the nightmare is that a crisis of this magnitude will turn New York from a financial center into a tourist center. The good news is that London seems to be handling this crisis slightly worse than New York. My sense is that the great financial crisis we’re living through will fundamentally tilt the balance of the world from West to East. Sovereign-wealth funds will matter much, much more because they’ve got the money and we haven’t. New York isn’t quite Venice yet, but I certainly am quite relieved that I don’t own a large block of real estate in Manhattan right now.

And there's a piece on that newish place on 7th Street between Avenue A and First Avenue that sells fancy sliced hog:

It fills the shop with a lovely aroma that wafts its way down the block, causing startled passersby to lift their noses and sniff the air like cartoon hoboes on the trail of a windowsill pie. Resistance is futile.

Unless you're a vegetarian.

NYC's boutique baseball teams

Pablo S. Torre on SI.com:

If you're a typical sports fan -- you know, the kind who worries about gas prices, tuition and the trade deadline -- New York's new stadiums might look as if they belong behind a boutique window.

In the Bronx looms the skeleton of Yankee Stadium 2.0, a coliseum with half as many bleacher seats as its predecessor but more than three times the luxury boxes. In Queens, the Mets traded Shea's 20,420-seat hull of an upper deck for Citi Field and its 54 suites, burnished by leases priced firmly in the six figures.

The fro-yo wars will be getting ugly (and pricy!)

AdAge.com delves into the competitive world of marketing frozen yogurt.

Red Mango is throwing down the gauntlet in the "authentic frozen yogurt" wars. The chain has hired the Richards Group, Dallas, in a seven-figure deal to create online, in-store, public relations and event marketing. Print and outdoor work will likely be added in 2009.

The chain's announcement comes just weeks after news that archrival Pinkberry hired branding firm Bulldog Drummond, San Diego.

EV Grieve's complete Fro-Yo library.

An end to the bank branch glut?

Some passages from a Times article today:

[I]t seems highly likely there will be some branch closings and that the dynamics of the market for retail space in Manhattan could be altered, although not immediately.

Brokers say that eventually Chase will almost certainly want to shut some branches once Washington Mutual has been absorbed.

Chase has 121 full-service branches in Manhattan, and WaMu has opened about 45.

But shedding excess branches may prove problematic. For one thing, WaMu signed most of its New York leases in the last four years. Banks tend to favor 15-year leases, so a lot of these leases may have 11 to 14 years left before they expire.