Down on Fulton Street

As I've written before, my place of employment is near Fulton Street, that lovely stretch of misery between Broadway and Water. The street has been torn up for years. Meanwhile, businesses are seemingly struggling to survive. Still, there are some nice little spots tucked away on the side streets, like Ryan's, an Irish pub on Gold Street that's never too busy (except when the NYU and Pace kids get in with their fake IDs). Given the glitzy high rises going up nearby, you have to appreciate such a place. Haven't been there in a few months, so I thought I'd ... Oh. Shit.


Here's what remains of Ryan's and whatever was next to it. Torn down to make way for condos.


Well, at least Ryan's was able to move nearby. Meanwhile, I worry about some of the mom-and-pop shops on Fulton Street. Seems like someone is closing up all too often. And there's no place for them to go.


There's a nice cobbler on the street. An odd little jewelry store/barber stop combo. And the Blarney Stone.


Still making rubber stamps. But for how long?




So why are the little shops disappearing? Just look up.


Of course.

Earlier on EV Grieve:

Been on Fulton Street lately? What a treat!

"...it's not some perfunctory cinematic appendix to a popular series, but the beginning of a whole new string of films"

That's part of Mick LaSalle's glowing review of Sex and the City in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Hoo-boy, did he like this movie. A lot!

Yet even viewers coming in cold will appreciate "Sex and the City" as the best American movie about women so far this year, and probably the best that will be made this year. Indeed, at the rate Hollywood has been going, it may stand as the best women's movie until "Sex and the City II," if that ever comes along.

Meanwhile, Mick wraps it up:

There's something alive here. There's a feeling about this movie, that it's not some perfunctory cinematic appendix to a popular series, but the beginning of a whole new string of films. There's certainly no artistic reason "Sex and the City" can't be the women's equivalent of "Star Trek," with human emotion being the final frontier. Like outer space, that frontier is infinite.

Is it true that in space, no one can hear you scream?

So, what's going on in the world today?

The Post gives the film 1.5 stars out of four. As Lou Lumenick writes:

New Yorkers put up with noise, lack of privacy, tiny expensive apartments and countless other daily insults. But will they shell out 12 bucks for what amounts to a 21/2-hour "very special" TV episode of "Sex and the City" that feels like it was written and directed by an audience focus group in Omaha?

If the ecstatic reaction at the screening I attended is any indication, they might - at least if they're not heterosexual males bored by the movie's endless fashion montages, shameless product placements, lethally slow pacing and utterly predictable plot.

And how was the glitzy premiere of the movie last night at Radio City?

Everything must go?

The OTB drama continues today. As the Post reports:

The city's Off-Track-Betting Corp. is advertising today for an auctioneer to liquidate its assets as talks drag on in Albany on a new revenue-sharing formula to rescue the cash-strapped bookie operation before June 15.
Among the items that would be up for grabs are leases to 62 OTB parlors, a warehouse, a repair facility, a print shop and a storage depot.
Gov. Paterson, state Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver issued a joint statement on April 15 saying they're committed to saving OTB and its 1,500 jobs.
But one source said, "They're not close to consensus."
Mayor Bloomberg has threatened to shut OTB on June 15 if Albany doesn't change the formula that now forces OTB to pay out more than 100 percent of its profits.
"Everybody thinks this is going to go to the 11th hour, 59th minute," said one insider.

If you have the Post, the public notice -- "request for expression of interest" -- is on Page 55.

Previously on EV Grieve:

Scenes from a Derby day

So long, OTB (and happy Derby day)

"So I came to New York for the reason everyone comes to New York, because it is the city of changes"

So let's continue on with linking to about every article in this week's New York magazine...(Hey, lots of stuff that's of interest to me...)

Such as:

The 25th Hour of Florent Morellet...Florent will be closing soon after 23 years.

Says Morellet:

“I am from Bumfuck, France, okay? And when I grew up I wanted to kill myself every Sunday because nothing happened. So I moved to Paris, but you know what? Paris is awful! Americans, they love Paris, but I absolutely hate Paris. It is always gray, it is always the same. So I came to New York for the reason everyone comes to New York, because it is the city of changes. People forget this is what they love about New York. They get old, they get grumpy. They get … nostalgic.”

Speaking of restaurants, there's a small write up on Kafana, the new Serbian restaurant on Avenue C owned by former Sophie's bartender Vladimir Ocokoljic. (Despite the blog's origins -- see By the Way below -- I didn't know Vlade personally.)

In the movie reviews, David Edelstein likes Sex and the City! He calls it a "joyful wallow." (I always prefered "flounder.")

And finally, in the Approval Matrix, this falls under the "highbrow despicable" category:

"A preservation group calls the Lower East Side an 'Endangered' neighborhood. Should we also landmark the neighborhood from City of God?"

"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

Highs and lows this week

Such good news this week about St. Brigid's.




Meanwhile, this is what's left of the Tower of Toys as of Friday afternoon around 4.

"A handful of its buildings may seem grimly picturesque, but for the most part this is unappealing New York"

That's Simon Jenkins writing in today's Guardian UK.

It's a reaction to the National Trust for Historic Preservation naming the LES in its 2008 list of America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places.

Here's an excerpt from his column:

A new facet of globalisation is well-meaning organisations roaming the planet listing things as threatened or on the brink of extinction. They may be a beetle, a rainforest, a Buddhist temple or, it so appears, the spirits of a city's past. Two years ago the Indiana Joneses of Unesco fought their way up the Thames to be appalled by the Tower of London. They found its setting blighted - as if overnight - by ugly office blocks, qualifying it for the "world heritage in danger" schedule. Liverpool waterfront received a similar finger-wagging.

The Tower of London is one thing, the Lower East Side another. I have been a "poverty tourist" in many awful places and felt the mix of guilt, shame and astonishment at such human resilience. But it never occurred to me to want to "save" the street camps of Calcutta, the shanties of Bogota or the inhabited concrete ruins of modern Baghdad.

The Lower East Side is not in this league, but the principle is similar. A handful of its buildings may seem grimly picturesque, but for the most part this is unappealing New York, an environment of drab tenements, public housing and vacant lots, where only the lifestyle of the fleeing minorities infuses the streets with some visual interest. The concept of "endangered" here applies to an idea, that of a cultural and social fabric, and one that is inevitably transient.

Yet the appeal of that fabric to local residents and to New Yorkers in general is undeniable. This may be a New York churning with "comers and goers", but both residents and those new to the area seem to agree on one thing: they want something of its character preserved. Conservation has matured from saving buildings to seeing them as a proxy for communities, cultures and a sense of physical identity. It is reflected in the British yearning to "save rural communities" by subsiding houses and preventing sales to newcomers, the so-called "yokel in a smock" syndrome.

Dumpster of the Day

10th Steet between Avenue A and First Avenue.

I had this dream in which I woke up and every corner in the city was now a condo, bank and Duane Reade

Then I woke up for real and.....AHHHHHHHHHH!

The Brooklyn Bridge really overdid it last night during its 125th birthday

Can't even call this a hangover. Still, what a blowout!

I'm really tired of suggestive advertising

What exactly does "come to your happy place" mean?



Now this is just too much!

Hmm, feel like seeing a movie at my neighborhood theater -- what shall I see?