Supposedly, all of New York City is suffering from a mass collective malaise, a dark cloud of shared pessimism. But the truth is very different. In reality, many of us are feeling giddily optimistic about this city for the first time in a decade.
Who are these crazy optimists? Head-in-the-sand deniers of the economic calamity? No, just people who welcome the possibility that the unique character of New York, sanitized in the Giuliani and Bloomberg years, may finally return.
As the writer of the blog Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, where I catalogue the city that's being lost to hypergentrification, I have heard hope rising from many vocal readers -- hope that we'll at last have our beloved, wild, creative, eclectic city back.
Since the boom began approximately 10 years ago, many New Yorkers have watched with grief and anger while the city we love was crushed by overzealous development, the all-encompassing renovation plan of Mayor Bloomberg. This plan has gutted countless mom-and-pop businesses and landmarks like Coney Island and Yankee Stadium. It has extended to the use of eminent domain to seize private property from its owners. What we have received in return has been a city of glass, cold and calculated, built for only the superrich seekers of safety to enjoy.
Penley made a name for himself documenting the turmoil of life on the Lower East Side and protesting big business, including NYU expansion, through the last decades of the 20th century.
“This one is my favorite,” Penley laughed, holding a Daily News front cover photograph he took after he discovered locals were growing marijuana plants in Tompkins Square Park.
“It was obvious. I mean, I know what pot plants look like,” Penley said. After Penley called the Daily News, a reporter from the paper went to the scene and brought a leaf of the plant to a professor at NYU who confirmed it was, in fact, marijuana.
Penley started taking photographs as a journalist in Nicaragua in 1983 when he covered the Contra War and continued to document life in the Village until about six years ago.
“I quit. I got completely burnt out. You know, it’s a very hard way to make a living. I was arrested multiple times,” he said. “I got tired of looking at stuff like fires and car wrecks.”
The activist will move away from the Village to live in Pennsylvania next month where he plans to deejay at his friend’s bar and ice fish in his spare time.
“To be honest with you, I’m really sick of the [Village]. The people who would generate creative things there have been forced to leave the neighborhood,” he said.
Hordes of NYU students only add to Penley’s annoyances with the comparatively bland flavor of the area has taken on in recent years.
“I think it was irresponsible to dump that many students on the Lower East Side without educating them about how to behave in our neighborhood,” he said.
One of only a handful of existing Greek revival buildings that survived the great fire of 1835, 211 Pearl St. was constructed in the early 1830s by William Colgate, the founder of Colgate-Palmolive. Colgate used the building as a warehouse at a time when Pearl St. bustled as a hub for trading in dry goods.
The building's current owner, Rockrose Development Corporation, received demolition permits for 211 Pearl from the city's Buildings Department on Dec. 13, 2002, a Buildings spokesperson said. Rockrose is considering plans to demolish the building to make way for a rear entrance for a new, 650-unit residential development the company is constructing west of Pearl St., near Maiden Lane, Platt and Gold Sts.
"It's kind of ironic that, after having endured the tragedy of 9/11, we're talking about destroying a building that symbolizes the strength and endurance of New York," said Councilmember Alan Gerson.
At 211 Pearl St., only a silver remains of the historic Greek revival building that had stood there since the early 1830s. But elsewhere in the city, parts of the demolished interior have found new life, in a restaurant on the Upper West Side, in a tree guard on E. Fourth St., and possibly even on a music video set for Madonna and Britney Spears.
Since opening on New York’s Lower East Side in late 2005, it has enjoyed great success among vegans and non-vegans alike. BabyCakes reportedly grossed $1.2 million in sales last year, and, thanks to a significant number of customers whom McKenna describes as “celebrities who aren’t even vegan but [are] health conscious,” will open a second Los Angeles location in the spring, right around the time the BabyCakes cookbook is scheduled to hit shelves.
bryan said...
I don't think it's the same dog, but there's one like it on Mulberry Street over the door to an Italian place. Careful to whoever's calling Mulberry above Canal "Chinatown": those kind of words could still get you hurt!
February 3, 2009 4:42 PM
Jill said...
I am sure it's the same one. My camera battery died on me during Chinese New Years, but Mulberry Street sounds exactly right. How many big brown dogs perched over a canopy can there possibly be in one small town?
Sintir . . . met some opposition from nine members of the Block Association. They collected a petition with 109 signatures trying to block the restaurant and cited ads the owners had apparently posted on their MySpace pages advertising upcoming live music performances. After a half an hour struggle, the ap was denied, the owner was in tears.
I underwent a "recession makeover" for the March issue of Harper's Bazaar (on stands February 17), and it was fun, to a point. There are three things I dislike: rice pudding, social climbers and photo shoots — though not necessarily in that order. I knew they were going to put my hair down. My hairdo has become my trademark and my curse because if I show up at a gala with my hair down, people shriek, "We want Ivana!" And I say, "You have Ivana." And they say, "No, we want the Ivana hairdo." So I told Bazaar, "I will not cut my hair, because if I do, I cannot put it in a chignon." But the crew was fabulous. And I had a great laugh about the story. If people were not interested, magazines would not write about me. I am what I am.
"You think I'm going to send a $10,000 Dolce & Gabbana suit to Honduras? UPS takes like three weeks. It's never going to arrive because somebody will steal it." Countries like that are beautiful but they are very poor, OK? So I am passing on that. Rossano is just looking for adventure. But I am really slightly worried. In the jungle there are no mobile phones, no computers and no cigarettes, but there are plenty of tarantulas, cockroaches and snakes. I hate those slimy things. I can deal with the sharks on Wall Street and the barracudas on Madison Avenue, but this is really too much."
By the late 19th century, the Bowery had become synonymous with skid row.
A lot of the Bowery’s reputation was deserved, but at least part of the blame for its near-universal name recognition was the musical A Trip to Chinatown, which featured the song “The Bowery.” Its chorus boasts:
The Bow'ry, the Bow'ry
They say such things and they do strange things,
On the Bow'ry! The Bow'ry!
I'll never go there any more.
By 1916, the street’s reputation had gotten so bad that civic groups battled to come up with a new name for the thoroughfare. One suggestion was “Cooper Avenue” in honor of Cooper Union founder (and Jell-O pioneer)* Peter Cooper.
A rival proposition recommended “Central Broadway.” It’s hard to imagine the chaos this name change might have brought about in a city that already featured Broadway, West Broadway, and East Broadway.
Neighbors, elected officials and friends from near and far gathered on Feb. 1, the Feast of St. Brigid, to celebrate the victory of the Committee to Save St. Brigid’s in the group’s long struggle to prevent the demolition of the 1849 church on Tompkins Square Park.
The committee saw its dream come true last May when the Catholic Archdiocese of New York announced it had accepted a $20 million donation from an anonymous donor, including $10 million to restore and maintain the building and the parish and another $10 million to endow parish schools in the area.
The donor is still anonymous and the archdiocese has declined to identify the “angel” who made the gift.
Edwin Torres, leader of the committee, told the gathering on Sunday that the archdiocese had received the last $5 million installment of the $10 million for the building restoration on Dec. 16 and that architects and engineers have been working in the building at 119 Avenue B since the beginning of the year.
“We’ve been at the site at least once a week and we’ve spoken to the engineers — they’re testing the bricks and mortar in the church to see the extent of the problems,” Torres said, adding, “This will probably be the last meeting of the committee — we’ve achieved what we set out to 10 years ago. But we’ll continue to monitor the site,” he said.
