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.
A six-month examination of the commission’s operations by The New York Times reveals an overtaxed agency that has taken years to act on some proposed designations, even as soaring development pressures put historic buildings at risk. Its decision-making is often opaque, and its record-keeping on landmark-designation requests is so spotty that staff members are uncertain how many it rejects in a given year.
