For the bird

Noted

From Page Six Magazine this week:

Courtney Love is searching for an East Village walk-up so she can live like writer Edith Wharton. The only problem? Friends like Gwyneth Paltrow and Scarlett Johansson have tried to talk the messy rock icon out of moving anywhere without a doorman — but Courtney isn't taking them seriously, telling friends, "They're just being goddesses, and I'm a normal woman."

(Also, in the same column...read about BFFs Sarah Palin and Ivana Trump. At your own peril.)

At Mary Help of Christians yesterday morning

Two things.

1) I thought that the Mary Help of Christians Church on East 12th Street closed in May 2007. As the photo below shows, it's very much open. Pay a visit while you can.

2) I expected to find a few more people in the church. You know, given these difficult economic times, people looking for comfort in their faith, etc. ... Anyway, this was the scene yesterday morning for the English-language mass at 10. Not a problem finding a seat.





Related:
East Village playground in contract for $10M (The Real Deal)

For rent and coming soon on Third Avenue

Now that's a new "store for rent" sign up at the former Grace & Hope Mission at 114-116 Third Ave. So does this mean the Mitchell Banchik (Jake's Dilemma, Down The Hatch, etc.) frat bar is off for this space?



Meanwhile, the old Tina Chinese restaurant next door gets a new sign...(And the Robin Raj corner is still on the block.)




And across the street between 13th and 12th...What was this place before? Some Japanese hipster boutique? I can't really remember. Anyway, it's now going to be a Japanese anitiques store.

Dumpster of the day (or night)

East Fifth Street near Avenue B.

El Muchacho in Tompkins Square Park

I love the dragstrip boogie of El Muchacho, one of the many great bands who played today during the Tompkins Square Harvest Rebellion today. (Sorry that I didn't get shots of some of the other bands...However, Rhea Ball has 65 excellent shots from the afternoon on her Flickr page.)

Anyway, thanks to the Shadow for the good times. Check out their site for more upcoming events.






And here's 35 seconds of El Muchacho:



[Photos by Mrs. Grieve]

Reminder: The Harvest Rebellion today

From The Shadow:

THE TOMPKINS SQUARE HARVEST REBELLION IS ON!!

Join us for free shows in New York City's Tompkins Square Park, featuring great music, political speakers, information and lots of surprises!!

These shows celebrate the vitality of the counter cultural scene that has survived on the Lower East Side, despite the rampant gentrification, soaring rents and lost venues that have contributed to the cultural genocide sweeping New York City.

> October 12: THE SHADOW Presents: David Peel, Rubber Room Rats, The Pigs, El Muchacho, Endangered Feces, Fisherman Vibraphonic Orchestra, Iconicide

Come aboard, we're expecting you (well, not really...)

Andy Warhol appeared on the 200th episode of The Love Boat, which aired Oct. 12, 1985.

Week in Review: Bikini and underwear edition (with half-hearted apologies)

In dire times like these...

Wall Street on Monday (via Getty Images)



Jimmy Choo photo shoot on Fifth Avenue. Because no one would buy the shoes if she was wearing a dress or pants or something...? (Via Drunken Stepfather -- NSFW)



Amazin' Jane's Flickr page includes these shots...As AJ explains:
Tourists got an eyeful as they filmed the ridiculous reality show Make Me a Supermodel today at Fulton Ferry Landing. It was quite entertaining as they hoisted scantily clad models into the air by crane - inside a plexiglass cube. [Via Gothamist]

The Post does its best to cheer you up today

An abrupt change of tone from Tuesday's cover.

Nothing is forever in New York...

The Times has a piece today about people who have scattered their family members' ashes at Yankee Stadium and Shea Sadium. Given the fate of those ballparks...

When the two stadiums are being razed in the coming months, demolition crews will be working where Reggie and Mookie once played. But the ashes, apparently, will stay where they were scattered. And that means that relatives who believed they were giving their loved ones a resting place have had to accept that in New York, the quintessential tear-down-and-build-again city, nothing is forever.

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.