"Everything has a price. Everything except outsider eccentricity, which evidently is bad for business"

Excellent essay in New York magazine by Jerry Saltz on the Tower of Toys (RIP).

On the tower's creator, Eddie Boros:

He was a fixture in a neighborhood of human fixtures, a reminder that the East Village was still marginal, where odd things were normal and normalcy was odd.

On art and gentrification:

It wasn’t beautiful, but it was beautifully eccentric, part of a folk-art tradition put together from the detritus and wreckage of once-raggedy neighborhoods by individuals working on the edge of society. Adam Purple’s glorious “Garden of Eden” on Eldridge Street was torn down in 1986; the metal-sculpture garden on Avenue B and East 2nd was evicted in 1995. And last week, the Tower of Toys came down. All of these projects, and others elsewhere in the city, served as demarcation lines, stopgaps against encroaching gentrification. Now there aren’t any peripheries in Manhattan, and there are few anywhere in the city. Everything has a price. Everything except outsider eccentricity, which evidently is bad for business.

At the Loisaida Festival, May 25

Several of us were watching the couple passionately kissing by the port-o-potties.





Bonus: Part of the live entertainment

OMG! Isn't that Oliver Platt?!

New York magazine has a listing of some of the movies that will be filming around town this summer. In the LES, two projects are listed, including the new film by Nicole Holofcener starring Catherine Keener and Oliver Pratt (an EV Grieve favorite, by the way). Among the locations: Economy Candy. And the premise: It "concerns a family that wants to expand its two-bedroom but must wait for the cranky old lady in the apartment next door to die." Hmm, based on a true story?

Meanwhile, the listing didn't mention the new Woody Allen film with Larry David that was shooting in the neighborhood in recent weeks. (I was walking on St. Mark's when they were filming at Cafe Mogador. I sure appreciated the young twentysomething PA who yelled at me to keep walking when I was, in fact, walking.)

Anyway, just a few short months before the filming starts on Night at the Museum 2!

Breaking: Living in Manhattan can be expensive for young professionals

The Times has a piece today -- titled Starting Salaries but New York Tastes -- on how difficult it is being a young professional trying to live in Manhattan. What some people have to go through!

As the article notes:

Some tactics have long been chronicled: sharing tiny apartments with strangers. Sharing those apartments with eight strangers. Eating cheap lunches and skipping dinners — not just to save money, but so that drinks pack more of a punch and fewer need be consumed.

But there are smaller measures, no less ingenious, that round out the lifestyle. These young people sneak flasks of vodka into bars, flirt their way into clubs, sublet their walk-in closets, finagle their way into open-bar parties and put off haircuts until they visit their hometowns, even if those hometowns are thousands of miles away.

Ms. Werkheiser’s salary as a publicist, while well south of six figures, might be considered enviable elsewhere in the country, but in New York she has had to reprioritize. So the remote wardrobe was not her only money-saving tactic. She also gave up being a blonde.

Before moving from San Francisco last fall, Ms. Werkheiser realized that paying salon prices for platinum tresses in New York would require cutting back on needs like food and shelter. “So I went natural,” said Ms. Werkheiser. “I dyed it dark, a New York brunette.”

She and her friends have also located just about every B.Y.O.B. brunch spot in the city, plotting them out on Google maps. The cost-consciousness, Ms. Werkheiser says, is worth it: She adores New York and lives, with two roommates, in a $3,450-a-month three-bedroom apartment on the Lower East Side, verily the center of the universe for Manhattan’s young and hip.

A model co-op

Catching up on this week's New York Observer today. According to a real estate piece by Max Abelson, 21-year-old model Lily Donaldson bought a co-op on Avenue B along Tompkins Square Park for $2.2 million.

As the article notes:

Very blond, well-boned, expensively jeaned buyers have been pouring into East Village apartments for so long that it’s hard to find new excuses to complain about the area’s über-gentrification. But then again, it’s hard to remember when someone as upsettingly young as Lily Donaldson, the 21-year-old Vogue cover girl, spent anything like $2.2 million on a neighborhood apartment, especially one that happens to be as far east as Avenue B.

Her new two-bedroom place on Tompkins Square Park around East Eighth Street could be the most expensive co-op ever sold on the block, according to listing broker Danny Davis.

She has Brazilian cherry wood floors (“that glow with the setting sun,” according to his listing), two bathrooms with original pedestal sinks and cast iron tubs, a 40-foot-long living room with six windows facing three directions, and, of course, a dressing room off one of the two bedrooms.

On the downside, the building is massively nondescript and un-frilled, plus the apartment needs work. “I’d put money into it,” Mr. Davis said, “I’d bet she will, too.”

If you know the neighborhood, then you know the building. I won't be all creepy/stalky (creepier and stalkier?) about it and name it. Anyway. If she's paying $2.2 million for something that needs work and doesn't have a lot of amenities...uh, what will someone be paying for something new and pristine...? Plus, this just blows the co-op curve off the chart.

Back to the article:

The last sale in the building, according to city records, was a $650,000 deal just one floor down. That was in October 2004.

Meanwhile, sort of not really related:

Have you seen the window display in that newish women's boutique on 9th Street between First and Second Avenue?

10th Street between First and Second Avenue, 8:07 a.m., May 25

Revisiting: "How many rich jerks that want to be in Sex and the City can there possibly be in America?"

I originally ran this post on April 9. But it seemed like a good thing to repeat, given what's facing us next Friday...



In a Q-and-A published at Gothamist today, singer-songwriter (and Brooklyn resident) Mike Doughty was asked: If you could change one thing about New York what would it be?

His answer (bravo!):

The forward march of the gentrification cold-front. But I keep in mind that gentrification hasn't been around forever, and is a trend, not a universal unstoppable force. How many rich jerks that want to be in Sex and the City can there possibly be in America? OK, a lot, but there's not a limitless supply. If the upcoming Sex and the City movie tanks, it will be for the societal good.

Meanwhile, back to the present...

Minetta Tavern is one of Esquire magazine's "Best Bars in America"

I noticed the coverlines on the June issue of Esquire touting its next installment of the "Best bars in America" feature. Was a little curious to see if they picked any bars in the neighborhood, some place the editorial assistants told the bosses to include. (Which may explain why/how my beloved Grassroots was picked in 2006.) Anyway, I went to their Web site today to check out the list. I saw where Minetta Tavern made the list at No. 6! Deserving! But who wants to tell them that the place closed last week? (Perhaps this is last year's list...though the home page does have the June cover subject, Barack Obama, featured....)

Meanwhile, someone should also tell the good people at Citysearch the same news.

Third Avenue, 7:47 a.m., May 24

[And warning: Street festival on Third Avenue today!]

Friday night, May 23