...and Avenue B.
Or is it the other way around?
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.
This just after Anthony Bourdain, mourning the loss of Siberia, praised the Holland, which he called: "A classic old-man bar." He also hailed the Distinguished Wakamba Lounge, a former after-work haunt of mine, and now I'm worried. What if Bourdain has reaper powers?
Despite what Neil Young says (“Hey, hey, my, my”), rock ’n’ roll not only dies — sometimes it is crated into boxes and shipped off to a mini-storage unit in the industrial wastes of Brooklyn.
That, alas, is the precise and inglorious fate of CBGB, the legendary nightclub that for 33 years brought hardcore bands like Shrapnel and the Meat Puppets — not to mention chaos and cocaine — to the uplifted gormandizers of New York. Like all good things, the famous club (which closed its doors for good in October 2006) came to an end with a savage finality: the bar stashed in a trailer in Connecticut, the awning pawned off on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and much of the rest of it left to molder here, in a dingy 3,000-square-foot Moishe’s moving company storage space in Williamsburg, a stage dive from the Navy Yard.
“It’s sad,” said Louise Parnassa-Staley, who was the nightclub’s manager for 22 years, “but it’s not really dismal. It’s quiet here, you know. And there’s no rats.”
There is grim commentary to be found in the fact that Ms. Parnassa-Staley — who once booked acts like Hatebreed and Cattle Decapitation — now makes business calls for CBGB Fashions, a clothing operation run from the storage unit that sells T-shirts, belt buckles, onesies for kids, even a CBGB dog vest for your poodle. That ghastliness is matched only by the news that the club’s former barman, Ger Burgman, son-in-law of the deceased owner, Hilly Kristal himself, is now the customer service representative for online accounts.
NY public toilets feature TVs, tuxedoed attendants
NEW YORK (AP) -- What a relief! The free public restrooms operated by the Charmin toilet paper company in Times Square during the holidays are being rolled out for another year.
It's the third straight year for the 20 deluxe stalls.
The plush potties feature flat-screen televisions, attendants dressed in tuxedos and plenty of Charmin.
The loos are so luxurious that Charmin promises Times Square tourists will feel like kings sitting on their thrones before making their royal flushes.
The toilets are being inaugurated Monday with a ceremonial first flush by pop singer and Broadway star Joey Fatone.
They'll be open every day through the end of the year except Christmas Day. For the first time they'll be open on New Year's Eve for the crowd watching the 2009 ball drop.
Everyone knows that working for the press has it’s advantages. This week I was lucky enough to check out the new El Dorado bar before it even opened. Located in the East Village where the Hong Kong Club used to be this is going to be a bar to look forward to.
El Dorado is not what I would characterize as a typical dive bar. The new owners have created an entirely new atmosphere by renovating and improving the previously neglected bar. The bar mixes old school dive bar decor with a slightly modern twist that exudes sophistication. The deep red booths and long 70’s era bartop inlayed with classic comics of decades past add a certain charm that together create the comfort of a timeless lounge. The East Village bar perches on the edge, hovering between a barfly dive and a hip hangout.
The four young owners, three of which are brothers, have a certain cadence to the way they pour their drinks, they put as much care and thought into each drink they make as they did into the details of the bar. From the gold flaked floor, vintage jukebox, wood finishings above the bar and hanging chandeliers this is the type of old-fashioned bar you can tell their minds envisioned going to when they got older; a type of bar their grandpa would have gone to is his heyday.
The result is an attractive, comfortable, friendly Dive-Lounge that provides independent entertainment, honest prices and consistent, cordial service. El Dorado’s purpose was to provide East Village residents and visitors with the highest quality neighborhood lounge, and I for one fully believe they have achieved this.
While arguing over whether to reauthorize Off Track Betting, the Mayor clashed with the normally mild-mannered Governor Paterson, whose support is essential for the city; Paterson came away describing the mayor to the Post's Fred Dicker as "a nasty, untrustworthy, tantrum-prone liar who has little use for average New Yorkers."
Bloomberg is so committed to his ideal of the "luxury city" run by and for the wealthy and organized interest groups that the Wall Street collapse took him completely by surprise. Like Lindsay's successor, the hapless Abe Beame, Bloomberg seems not to understand what's happening around him. His budget projections are based on the notion that the future economic path will be shaped like a U, but it's more likely to look like an L.
New York, which became ever more dependent on Wall Street's high rollers to create each new job a thousand-dollar meal at a time, is going to have to rethink its economic future. Wall Street as we knew it is never coming back. The high taxes and over-regulation Bloomberg prefers pushes out the small- to medium-size businesses that will have to drive much of our economic growth in the future.
THE duplex five-bedroom apartment on Attorney Street that Daniel Vosovic calls home seems ready-made for a television sitcom. There’s the location, on the of-the-moment Lower East Side, with its mix of detox juice bars and Old World knishes, runway models and streetwise misfits. There are Mr. Vosovic’s four roommates, who work in disparate industries — cupcakes, high fashion, education and sofas.