Like a crash virgin...

Doree Shafrir and Irina Alexksander look at "crash virgins" in this week's Observer, young New Yorkers experiencing their very first economic downturn.

An excerpt!

Lizzy Goodman was one of the fortunate ones of the class of 2002; upon graduating from Penn, she had a job lined up as an assistant teacher at Buckley, the all-boys school on the Upper East Side. Six years later, she’s an editor at large at Blender. Like some of her peers, she seems hopeful that, instead of being a harbinger of utter doom, this crash will instead level the playing field just a little bit.
“I don’t think anyone is hoping for American financial collapse just so that the Bowery can be seedy again,” said Ms. Goodman, who lives in the West Village. “But on the other hand, if in the wake of this collective shuttering and fearing comes a return to old school ’80s boho New York, I would certainly be in favor of that.”
The disconnect between the New York of legend and the reality of living here has perhaps never been starker. “I know a lot of people who moved to New York for something that isn’t in New York right now,” said Mr. Fischer, the marketing strategist. “There is a sense that things are in transition. I think there’s a big question of how this will change the social and cultural landscape of New York in the next two or three years. I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s excitement—but it’s apprehension that something is definitely happening.”
Of course, that’s a story that’s been years in the making; the disappearance of Lehman Brothers and the conversion of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley into bank holding companies—as recently as last year thought to be a sacrilege—isn’t going to make $4,000 a month one-bedrooms on the Lower East Side any cheaper. (Or if it does, they’ll go to $3,500 a month, not $1,500.) The days when a photographer could buy an abandoned bank building on the Bowery for $102,000—as the photographer Jay Maisel did in 1966—are over; they are not coming back. (See also: the Playpen, smoking in bars, liquid lunches, Passerby, subway tokens, the Barnes & Noble on Sixth Avenue and 21st St., et cetera, not to mention the Algonquin Round Table, the Automat, Spy magazine, Warhol’s Factory, and the Palladium. Also: typewriters.) Some Wall Street types may flee; a few Wharton grads might move to Boston or San Francisco. But it seems highly unlikely that the crash will herald in some utopian new era of “creativity” or allow artists to colonize Soho, or even the East Village, again. It’s over! You missed it! Even Rent has closed! Besides, the Russians are here now.

What will a return to 1970s NYC be like?: "Well find out when we get there"

Over at the Village Voice, Roy Edroso responds to Nick Paumgarten's New Yorker essay on Wall Street's collapse and a possible return to the 1970s NYC:

Paumgarten avoids going all the way with this, suggesting that we can have the sweet side of the 70s cup without tasting the bitter. The collapse has unloosed something in him; for a long time such as he could not mention New York's bankrupt days without a show of revulsion, as old-world types could not mention the devil without crossing themselves. But the Wall Street debacle tells him that those prayerful gestures have come to naught: the bubble's burst and the wolf is at the door. Now he can admit that there was something cool about those old days, and he can even be glib about them.
But when that 70s show really goes into re-runs, we won't be able to edit out the unfunny bloopers. There was never a chance that we'd get cheaper rents without a crash, and as of now the market fluctuations are only ruffling the high end of the market. We're a long way from the vintage conditions of that last renaissance. Before you can have the Ramones, you have to have rehearsal spaces that even glue-sniffing slackers can afford. Before you can have Taxi Driver, you have to have urban moonscapes that don't need to be built by film crews. And you only get those in the wake of real catastrophe.

Joy-popping the 70s is a fun pastime, but be not deceived: playful speculation is nothing like the real thing. We remember fondly our $125-a-month railroad flat in a forsaken neighborhood called the East Village, and the good times we had there. We also remember nightly gunfire, mugger money, and Etan Patz. Are we willing to accept one to get the other? It's not worth wondering about: we'll find out when we get there.

[Photo of 216 E. 7th St. in 1979 by Marlis Momber.]

Bonus: Are you ready for 1974 again?



And! If you don't have time to watch all of the 39 Death Wish movies, let's just get to it:

The many lives of the Roseland (For Part 2: Man, it's so loud in here)

I love the Roseland Ballroom on West 52nd Street. Not so much as a concert venue. But for its history. Since 1919, the Roseland has been an ice rink, a roller rink and a dance hall. Blogger Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company provides this summary:

The Roseland Ballroom was built in 1919 at 1658 Broadway, near 51st Street. It was the second in a string of three Roselands built by Louis Brecker (the original was in Philadelphia). Brecker envisioned a cheap but respectable dance hall: "home of refined dancing." It became one of America's most famous dance halls, in part due to its booking of upcoming jazz greats such as Fletcher Henderson and Louis Armstrong, in part due to stunts like female prizefighting bouts and law-breaking dance marathons.

After a couple of decades, it jacked up it's refinement factor in order to become "family entertainment": more decor, less taxi dancers, no jitterbugging, bouncers in tuxedos. In 1956, it moved two blocks into a former ice rink at 239 West 52d Street. The older Roseland was demolished.

(Cosmodemonic goes on to discuss how the Roseland played a key role in Henry Miller's "Tropic of Capricorn.")

As the New York Times noted in October 1996: The 1939 ''W.P.A. Guide to New York City'' described Roseland as ''the downtown headquarters for hot music and such urban dance steps as the cake and collegiate, the Lindy and the Shag.'' Tommy Dorsey, Count Basie and other big-band names played Roseland in the 1920's and 1930's.

Roseland was almost lost in the 1990s:

Roseland's dance floor is magnificent, but the rest of the interior is now well beyond shabby, with faded carpets and worn paint. The curved Iceland ceiling is painted black but marked with many holes; otherwise there is no trace of the rink. The gallery level is a warren of empty rooms, littered with debris. Graffiti and a black, spray-painted ''body piercing booth'' are leftovers from rock concerts that take over the house a few times a month -- ''Soul Coughing'' is due on Nov. 29.

Despite its age and condition, Roseland Dance City is a fascinating leftover in New York entertainment culture -- there is no hype, no flash, no marketing, no product tie-ins, just the swirl of dancers from expert to beginner. It's one of those unprocessed experiences that we say we want, but which may vanish very soon.

The Roseland survived, of course. Again and again. Different locations. Different genres. New tastes. A Time magazine feature from 1957 reports:

When a public dance hall named Roseland opened on Broadway in 1919, smart young people had recently deserted the waltz for the foxtrot, were just beginning to master the delicate nuances of the shimmy. Sam Lanin and his Ipana Troubadours were on the bandstand, thumping out such Ziegfeld Follies hits as Mandy and You Cannot Make Your Shimmy Shake on Tea. Since that distant New Year's Eve, generations of stag-line Romeos and their girls have bunny-hugged Lindy-hopped, Charlestoned, big-appled black-bottomed and jitterbugged under Roseland's star-studded ceiling. At 1 o'clock one morning last week the stars winked out for the last time; the following night Roseland reopened in glittering new quarters, billed as "a magnificent metropolis of melody and merriment."

Family Entertainment. Although professional nostalgics lamented the demolition of the old Roseland building as the end of an era, the dance hall had actually been changing its function for a long time. It started as a refuge for the "poor young clerks" Scott Fitzgerald wrote about; it evolved into a place of family entertainment.

Part 2:

Whew. Anyway! Why bring all this up? I was there last night for the My Bloody Valentine show. I won't get into all that here. But I will in the comments if anyone wants to chime in....Take it away Alex.

From last night:

P.S.

Oh, speaking of Roseland, here's a snippet of 1977's Roseland, the Merchant-Ivory film starring Christopher Walken:

About that "giant-robot laboratory" on East Sixth Street

As you may know, New York has a great piece this week on 190 Bowery, a space that I've long been curious about. Wendy Goodman gets right to it in her lead:

The building at 190 Bowery is a mystery: a graffiti-covered Gilded Age relic, with a beat-up wooden door that looks like it hasn’t been opened since La Guardia was mayor. A few years ago, that described a lot of the neighborhood, but with the Bowery Hotel and the New Museum, the Rogan and John Varvatos boutiques, 190 is now an anomaly, not the norm. Why isn’t some developer turning it into luxury condos?

Because Jay Maisel, the photographer who bought it 42 years ago for $102,000, still lives there, with his wife, Linda Adam Maisel, and daughter, Amanda. It isn’t a decrepit ruin; 190 Bowery is a six-story, 72-room, 35,000-square-foot (depending on how you measure) single-family home.

There's another building that I've been curious about: 421 E. Sixth Street between First Avenue and Avenue A.



I was told years back that an artist lives there. Indeed.

According to Forgotten New York: "421 was a Con Edison substation built in 1920-21 that converted direct current to alternating. It is at present (2008) the studio of modern artist/sculptor Walter De Maria. His most famous installation is The Lightning Field (1977) is permanently installed in the desert at Quemado, New Mexico, and was commissioned by the Dia Art Foundation, who run the site and provide accommodation for visitors. The work consists of hundreds of stainless steel rods projecting from the ground to a uniform height of around six metres (20 feet). Rows of 20 rods extend for one mile, while rows of 16 extend for a kilometre, making a square grid of standard and metric proportions. The work is designed to attract spectacular lightning strikes."

NY Songlines has a few more details: "This building, which looks like a giant-robot laboratory, was actually built in 1919-21 as a New York Edison transformer substation — turning DC current into AC. Since 1980 it's been owned by artist Walter De Maria."



Wonder if we'll ever get to see the inside of this space...

Related:
Miss Representation on 421 E. Sixth St.

The money shots of Wall Street (so to speak)

Someone did a nice little edit job on Wall Street, as in the 1987 Oliver Stone film.

An appreciation: A sign that I like

On Cherry Street. Haven't seen much lately about this site becoming a condo...

Looking at a review of Candace Bushnell's new book

Read Doree Shafrir's review of One Fifth Avenue, the latest from Candace Bushnell, in the Observer.

Bonus excerpt:

[T]he new breed of youngsters intent on highlighting the hypocrisy of their elders is meaner and, well, snarkier than their forebears, Ms. Bushnell implies. Their number is led by a smarmy 20-something named Thayer Core, who lives in a tiny East Village walk-up and yet feels qualified to lob his verbal grenades at the rest of Manhattan (including several residents of One Fifth). Thayer is a despicable character, and it’s not a stretch to imagine that she was personally offended by things written about her on Gawker (where, full disclosure, I used to work). And yet, Ms. Bushnell’s caricature of the Web site and its writers falls victim to the very same snarky, self-satisfied kind of writing she accuses the new generation of perpetuating.

Can't wait for the series!

[Via Gawker]

On returning to the 1970s in 2008 and beyond

Nick Paumgarten on the possible implications of the Wall Street meltdown (under the heading in The New Yorker this week of Dept. of Magical Thinking):

For example: let’s postulate that the collapse of the financial-services industry spells catastrophe for New York City, a return to the nineteen-seventies. Lost tax revenues, budgetary shortfalls, unemployment (not only of those in finance but of the hordes who rely on them), plunging property values, vanished retirement accounts. Let’s cut this up, like a pile of bad debt, into various strips, and, as the rating agencies did to various slices of subprime-mortgage debt, take the top layer and, abracadabra, rate it triple A. Throw out the other strips, the grim probabilities—the crime, the decaying infrastructure, the hardship all around, the heroin and the syphilis. What do we have left? The bright side: maybe Manhattan will become affordable again, and cool, and dangerous. Dangerous in theory, but not to you or your family and friends. Dirty, but in a good way. Night clubs where anything goes. Art, music, Billy Martin.

Four sightings in the neighborhood — officially a trend?

Yes, yes...I know that one is a Mini Cooper...it's still small.  Anyway, I included it so that you can see how much LARGER it is than the Smart Cars...

Speculating about the future of 159 E. Second Ave.

We've been keeping our eye on 159 E. Second Ave., the hallowed ground that was home for 27 years to the beloved A. Fontana Shoe Repair. There has been lots of activity there.  A tipster reported last night that the plywood was down, though the windows are still covered with paper. This is what we spotted earlier with our special spy-cam:



Sure, we could just do a little reporting and find out what's going in here...but let's just wildly speculate!...Because no matter how ridiculous our guesses, we probably won't be too far off! Based on the kitcheny-type wares, I'm going with a high-end dessert shop. Because this area desperately needs more dessert places!

At least there's good news at the tailor shop next door, as Jeremiah reported.

What happened when no one was looking

Airoots has an interesting essay on creativity and the creative process:

New York was creative when no one was looking. SoHo, The East Village, the Lower East side in Manhattan and more recently Williamsburg in Brooklyn were cultural hotbeds for as long as the city was bankrupt and they they were ignored. That’s when people like ABC No Rio and CBGB could squat buildings and Futura was spray painting subway tunnels, when artists that are now established, recognized and often no so inspired anymore where still crackheads, gays, punks, bums and squatters. There was nothing there to see. No hype and no romance. These much venerated places were at the periphery of a city on the verge of a breakdown.

Now that New York is universally recognized as a creative city all we see instead of artists are art directors, graphic designers, ad producers and so on. Established and wannabe communication professionals, commercial artists and other marketers come enmasse to such cities, where they know there is an industry that can use their know-how. Rather than breaking new grounds this so-called “creative class” recycles tired clichés and remixed proven formulas. New York is good at attracting people from elsewhere, but doesn’t breed much local talent anymore. Of course just like everywhere pockets of innovation remain. New York is big enough and its periphery is full of creative tension and driven people. But as a rule, creative work seems to happen where no one is looking.

The dog brothel and other fine works by Joey Skaggs

Meine Kleine Fabrik brings us this video and story of media hoaxster Joey Skaggs. Among his alleged early work:

In 1968, Skaggs noticed that middle-class suburbanites were going on tours of the East Village to observe hippies. Skaggs subsequently organized a sightseeing tour for hippies to observe the suburbs of Queens. On Christmas Day, he created the Vietnamese Christmas Nativity Burning to protest against the Vietnam War.

In 1969, Skaggs tied a 50-foot bra to the front of the U.S. Treasury building on Wall Street, organized a Hells Angels' wedding procession through the Lower East Side, and made grotesque Statues of Liberty on the 4th of July, again to protest against the Vietnam War.

Also!

Cathouse for Dogs (1976): Skaggs published an ad for a dog brothel in The Village Voice and hired actors to present their dogs for the benefit of an ABC news crew. The prank annoyed the ASPCA and the Bureau of Animal Affairs until Skaggs revealed the truth after a subpoena. ABC did not retract the story (the WABC TV producer insisted that Skaggs had said it was a hoax to avoid prosecution), possibly because the piece had been nominated for an Emmy Award. It was subsequently disqualified.

This short film, directed by Frederick Marx, shows many more of Skaggs's media pranks through the years...



Funny stuff. Though I'm easy. Heywood Jablome cracks me up every time!