25 years of yuppies

Lots to do and see in New York's 40th anniversary issue.

For instance, here's Jay McInerney in an essay he wrote titled "Yuppies in Eden"....He says he first heard the term "yuppie" in 1983 while having breakfast at Veselka. A painter he knew muttered "fucking yuppies" after seeing an Upper East Side-looking couple in chinos.

Not long after my first actual sighting, I would see the earliest DIE YUPPIE SCUM graffiti around the neighborhood, an epithet that was soon vying in popularity with that LES perennial EAT THE RICH. The vituperative tone with which the Y-word was pronounced on East Fifth Street was in part a function of rapidly escalating real-estate prices in the East Village; after decades of relative stability that had made the area a bastion of Eastern European immigrants and young bohemians, though, it’s easy to forget at this distance that it was also a war zone where muggings and rapes weren’t considered news. The Hells Angels ruled East Third Street, and after dark you went east of Second Avenue strictly at your own risk. The cops didn’t go there. East Tenth beyond Avenue A was a narcotics supermarket where preteen runners scampered in and out of bombed-out tenements. In fact, great swatches of the city were dirty and crime-ridden. Even the West Village was pretty gritty by today’s standards, and Times Square was a scene of spectacular squalor. Check out Taxi Driver or The French Connection if you want to get a sense of what this urban wasteland looked like.

And later...

My first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, came out in September 1984, although it was set a few years earlier, in a grubbier, less prosperous New York. No one was more surprised than me when The Wall Street Journal described me as a spokesman for the yuppies. The protagonist of the novel was a downwardly mobile fact-checker and aspiring novelist, and unless I’m mistaken, he didn’t eat any raw fish in the novel. His best friend, Tad Allagash, was a likelier yuppie, an adman with entrée to all the right places, an uptown boy who knew his way around downtown. And they both did a lot of coke, a.k.a. Bolivian Marching Powder, which was to become the emblematic drug of the eighties, what acid had been to the sixties.

On the Bowery Friday night

Bob Arihood, BoweryBoogie and Jeremiah have photos and words on the "Outsiders" protest Friday night on the Bowery.

[Photo via BoweryBoogie]

Noted

From Ivana Trump's Ivana-Logues column in Page Six Magazine:

Once a year, I go directly to the lingerie department at Bloomingdale's and I try on bras and panties. Then I gather each piece in four colors and buy 24 of each set. I send 24 to my home in Palm Beach, 24 to Saint-Tropez, 24 to London and 24 to New York.

No Rhyme & Reason

Rhyme & Reason, the card shop on 14th Street and Irving Place, is now officially closed. As Racked noted, the owner was facing a huge rent hike for this corner spot in the Zeckendorf Towers. What's to come? I have no idea! But it's a prime spot in NYUville. Also! There's a Duane Reade a block away on 14th and Third...and a Walgreens across the street. So this seems like a good spot for a drug store. Rite Aid?




Anyway, I figured something was up last month when the Christmas items went on sale...

"Hi, I’d like to start–"

New York Press has its annual best of Manhattan issue this week. Always a good read. Which reminded me of my all-time favorite "best of" recipient. Nothing against the Times, just this particular ad campaign. This best of is from Sept. 26, 2000. I'm not sure what to excerpt. So here's the whole damn thing. (The individual recipients do not have bylines, so I can't give props to the writer...)

Best Aggravating Media Ad Campaign
The New York Times

If you watched five minutes of tv in the New York metropolitan area over the past year, you saw this commercial twice. The New York Times must have spent the annual budgets of several Third World nations on this media buy. There has to be a term ad agencies use for a campaign like this that achieves such market oversaturation that it begins to have the opposite of the intended effect and only makes people hate the product. Relentless, remorseless, ubiquitous, inescapable–you couldn’t channel-surf fast enough to get away from it; often it is running on multiple channels at once. "Hi, I’d like to start–" Click. "–ting home delivery of–" Click. "–our financial sec–" Aaaiiieee!

Not only ubiquitous, it’s repulsive. The characters, whom we correctly identified some weeks ago a "rainbow coalition of hideous yuppies," are so carefully chosen for a p.c. spread–young, old, Asian, WASP, brown, male, female–and yet all cut an unmistakable figure of complacent upper-middle-class suburban domesticity. Notice they all seem to have big houses and sun-filled rooms, not a dim little Upper West Side rent-stabilized apartment-dweller in the lot. Clearly this is an ad pitched at the suburban LI-NJ-CT-Westchester-Rockland market. So why must the rest of us suffer through it? Don’t they have a way to narrowcast it only to those markets and leave the rest of us alone?

But back to that rainbow coalition. We got to know these people this year as intimately as our most hated neighbors. The Filipino-looking pederast who simpers, "First thing? I think about my family here–and in my homeland." Nice kneejerk liberal save-the-world touch, the way he overarticulates that word home-land, like he’s auditioning for a community theater production of The King and I. ("King is king of all people–here and in my home-land! Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.") The gender-stereotyping throughout the ad is also remarkably blatant: Man Breadwinner, interested in the business section; Woman Breeder, loves the crossword puzzle. Thus the presumably gay actor playing the empty suit droning about "our financial security" while his brainless Stepford wife literally leans on his elbow and gazes insipidly into middle distance, dreaming of Pillsbury cinnamon rolls and making babies. There’s the old WASP lady who cherishes "another day to learn something new..." ("...that I’ll forget in five minutes because I have Alzheimer’s. The paperboy has actually been delivering the same issue of the paper every day since 1996 and I haven’t noticed!") The positively scary woman with OCD who must finish the crossword puzzle. And the mocha hottie who just loves the arts and "nothing satisfies my passion like The New York Times." Nice subliminal messaging there. Very subtle.

Two or three times during the ad, one of these noids will look directly at you through the lens and repeat in their best, slow, hypnotist’s repeat-after-me voice, "I’d like...to start getting...home delivery...of...The...New York Times..." The ad ran so often, in so many places, that the message became Pavlovian through sheer, heartless repetition. Pretty soon you were shambling the streets of the city like a George Romero zombie, hollow-eyed, unkempt, muttering, "must...order...home delivery...of...The...New York Times...must...order..."

Condescending and yet browbeating, like the Times itself, this commercial was like an unwelcomed guest on our tv screen who just wouldn’t go away. People complained about the Taco Bell dog and the Pets.com sock puppet (the latter our favorite tv figure of the year, and when does he get to host his own talk show?), but both those campaigns combined didn’t add up to the sheer volume or aggravation of this single Times commercial.

I could not find the commercial on YouTube. But here's a parody of it...

New bar on Avenue A has pianos, fancy drinks and referral-only reservations

Thrillist has the following item today on Ella, the piano bar at 9 Ave. A that opens Thursday:

From the Gallery Bar guys, Ella's a semi-private, bi-level, black-lacquered and mirror-bedecked lounge that aims to provide classy ivory tickling from both accomplished house acts and the occasional signed artist (read: people no longer offering music lessons). The intimate, b&w-tiled downstairs sports a jet-black upright Yamaha, a small stage for jazz/blues/torch singers, and a DJ booth, all under a multi-colored lit ceiling evocative of Willy Wonka's terrifying psychedelic tunnel. For a break from the crooning, walk up to the chandeliered, Tinseltown-chic bar & lounge: floral-print couches and semi-circular red suede banquettes fresh from the '07 Oscars flanking a 15-seat bar, which slings speciality cocktails inspired by post-WWII cinema, e.g., the vodka & muddled grape Daisy Kenyon, and the ginny Mildred Pierce ("if you loved Working Girl...").

Ella's opening Thursday, reservations are referral only, and the door policy is doorman's discretion -- so there's a decent chance you'll be stranded outside with Paul and Davy, who's still in the Navy, and probably still hasn't finished The Duplex Supremacy.

Oh, and here's their drink menu.

STILL speculating about the future of 159 Second Ave.

Still going with a dessert shop.

The Times looks at Extra Place

The Times looks at the possible development of Extra Place. As you know, Avalon Bay wants to pave it and add boutiques and wine bars and stuff. Others argue that it remain a public space. And kind of like it was.

“The ground was magnificent,” said Danny Fields, the manager of the Ramones, who took the photograph in November 1976. “It was filled with junk, shreds of clothes and pieces of barrels, posters, leaves, ropes.”

(The article also mentions Jeremiah Moss.)

Previously on EV Grieve:
"All of Manhattan has lost its soul to money lords"

[Photo: Michael Falco for The New York Times]

Seventh Street, 1 p.m., Sept. 27

City businesses will reportedly miss out on making $141 million this fall because the Yankees failed to make the playoffs. How much will the city lose if the Mets lose today and miss the playoffs? (Oh, sorry -- I don't have the answer...just curious...)

“This used to be an area where people got their start. Now it’s a place to land once you’ve made it”

The Times has a great story today about two women who saved their home from destruction at 27 Cooper Square to make way for Cooper Square Hotel. We hear from 74-year-old Hettie Jones and her garden:

“I grew the most fantastic tomatoes and peppers up there, veggies that need lots of light,” lamented Ms. Jones. “We used to have views from every angle, but now they only exist from the hotel’s penthouse.”

She has lived here since 1962.

Pointing to the cluster of new luxury towers rising in the square, Ms. Jones added with a sigh: “This used to be an area where people got their start. Now it’s a place to land once you’ve made it.”

Jeremiah had a post on the history of 35 Cooper Square this past summer.

[Photo: Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times]

Some buildings that should be torn down

Nicolai Ouroussoff has an interesting idea in the Times today:

So here’s what I propose. True, the city is close to broke. But even with Wall Street types contemplating the end and construction of new luxury towers grinding to a halt, why give in to despair? Instead of crying over what can’t be built, why not refocus our energies on knocking down the structures that not only fail to bring us joy, but actually bring us down?

Ugliness, of course, should not be the only criterion. There are countless dreadful buildings in New York; only a few (thankfully) have a traumatic effect on the city.

Among the buildings that he suggests tearing down: That ugly curved glass residential building at Astor Place designed by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates:

[T]he crude quality of its execution is an insult . . . Gwathmey’s tower is squat and clumsy. Clad in garish green glass, it rests on a banal glass box that houses — what else? — rows of A.T.M.’s inside a Chase bank.

But lack of taste is not the point here. Neighborhoods are fragile ecosystems. And while enlightened designs can challenge the past, that is not the same as being oblivious to it. Astor Place would seem more comfortable in a suburban office park.

The East Village is saturated with memories of youthful rebellion. In recent years it has emerged as a crossroads between the world of would-be punks, awkward students and rich Wall Street types. The Gwathmey building serves only the last camp: it’s a literal manifestation of money smoothing over the texture of everyday life.

[Photo by everystreetinmanhattan via Flickr]

Paul Newman dies at 83

So many great films to choose from...Aside from the obvious, I always liked Fort Apache the Bronx.