[Picture courtesy of Best View in Brooklyn]
Wrap-up of the various ways the City lied to the Gowanus community at the Jan. 23 public meeting about the Superfund Scandal. [Found in Brooklyn]
The City then returned on Jan. 24 to lie some more. [Pardon Me for Asking]
The owner of an eminently landmarkable 1870 house in Bayside doesn't think the place is "elegant" enough for landmark status. Gosh, think he might have selfish personal reasons for that stance? [Daily News via Gothamist]
The inside of Circus legend James Bailey's unwanted Harlem mansion is crazy beautiful. [New York Mag]
Big crack in building: no good. [EV Grieve]
That was Beauty Bar, and don't it look grand. [JVNY]
Cuckoo control freak Bloomberg said on WNYC, regarding school control bill: "If the Senate passes something that differs by one word or more, it is saying to the city ‘We want to resurrect the Soviet Union. We want to bring back chaos.’” [Queens Crap]
Pretending to be like Obama, so Democrats will like him.
Pretending to be a Republican so conservatives like him. [The Daily News]
Killing Harlem with his rezoning schemes. [NY Post]
Killing Willets Point with his rezoning schemes, not to mention abuse of eminent domain and the police department. [Daily News via Queens Crap]
Killing Coney Island with his city planning schemes and dickering over price. [NY Observer]
Killing trees with his vanity art projects. [Gothamist]
Paying out money to spread trash about his rivals. [NY Times]
DUMP this lying, scheming, autocratic megalomaniac in 2008. He's a toxin. He's a cancer. He's the new one-man political Mafia. He's not your friend. He's nobody's friend.
Nathan Kensinger has taken some lovely and tragic pictures of the Renaissance Ballroom and Casino in Harlem, which was never landmarked and is now all but gone. "Built between 1920 and 1923 and was a black owned and operated center of culture - a movie theater, a ballroom, a space for basketball games, dances and meetings. It was the "setting for all of Harlem’s most important parties," according to author Michael Henry Adams, but by 1979 the complex had closed down and "by the 1990s it had so deteriorated that it was used as a setting for Spike Lee’s crack den from hell in the movie Jungle Fever.""
Go check out the rest of the photos.
The closure of Harlem's M & G Diner, longstanding palace of old-time soul food, slipped by me somehow. I was notified of the passing of this venerable house of fried chicken and waffles by a helpful reader. And though it's been gone for nearly two months now, it still deserves a proper send off.
I have to file this restaurant under Experiences That Will Never Be. Sorry to say, I never had one of their short-rib sandwiches. But I only need to look at the above sign in all of its antiquated, idiosyncratic glory to know that missed something rare and authentic. The jukebox was chock full of good stuff, I hear, and the serving were ample. Breakfast was served until 1 AM. Many things on the menu were ballyhooed, but chicken was king here.
The Department of Health closed the place down and it never reopened.
Picture courtesy of Eating in Translation.
This is probably a thought that has already occurred to a great many out there. But in recent months, as I watched events unfold in Greenwich Village, Noho, Harlem, the East Village and South Brooklyn, I've often thought that the greatest battles over New York City's soul that are to come won't be between the public and commercial developers like Bruce Ratner and the Joe Sitt. They will be with private institutions that, on the face of it, are benevolent forces, dedicated to the public welfare. That is, hospitals and universities.
Last week, St. Vincent's—longstanding preserver of Village life—laid out its whack-attack plans to take a buzzsaw to a largish portion of Greenwich's landmarked district—some to make a better (and bigger) hospital building, some to make a big residential building that will generate money to make a better (and bigger) hospital, and all of it to make St. Vincent's bigger and better and huger. "Me mighty hospital! You tiny bohemians! Me crush you, then later patch you up!"
Meanwhile, several blocks east, New York University, a past master at gobbling up real estate, has been up to its usual tricks. The august institution—which bestrides the blocks between Houston and 14th Street, and from Sixth Avenue to Second—is a behemoth that won't be gainsayed. It has an appetite and lack of scruple any rapacious developer would admire. Many still fault the bastion of higher learning for a host of crimes against nature, including: ruining the view from lower Fifth Avenue by building a boxy student center of the south side of Washington Square Park; and the abomination built on top of St. Ann's on 12th Street. (Thanks to Curbed for the photo.) Their latest shenanigans include plans for some zany "superblocks" just below the park, and a jacking up of rent that will possibly force Second Avenue's community-serving Met Food supermarket onto the street. N.Y.U. anticipates the need for a total of 6 million additional square feet of space by 2031 for academic uses, housing for undergraduate, graduate, professional and faculty personnel and for student services. Say your prayers, Villagers.
For all of NYU's chutzpah, Columbia University is perhaps even more gloriously arrogant and hard-hearted. The university recently ate up is East Harlem but good! The chowdown was part of its $7 billion expansion program. The school spent $1 million in lobbying fees, and had lots of fun abusing eminent domain to kick out plenty of teeny local land- and business-owners, and get a 17-acre swath of Manhattan's green earth renamed Columbialand. (Will they ever teach this case in Columbia Law?)
As for other instituions that are supposed to do the public good, but just as often do them ill, I've complained before about Long Island College Hospital's deleterious effect on the life of South Brooklyn. (Thanks for the new Clarett building, LICH!) Part of the reason these corporations—let's call them what they are—get away with the amazing shit that they do is they pose as beautiful, shining beacons of near-altruistic goodness. They feed the very life of the City, they do. NYU and Columbia educate, improving our young 'uns' minds and creating generation after generation of thinking, productive citizens. St. Vincent's and LICH keep us in fine fettle, deliver our babies, watch over our old folks, and fix our broken bones so we can live to walk another mile. They wouldn't hurt us. Why, they wouldn't hurt a fly! They're all for the greater freakin' good, you insignificant ingrates!
Don't believe it. NYU would build a dorm on your sainted grandmother's grave, and St. Vincent's would sell a penthouse suite to the rat bastard CEO who's responsible for your high prescription-drug bill. They're bullies and connivers and moustache-twirlers. It's time City Hall gave them the same fish-eye they'd give a Wal-Mart or a relocating Virginia gunseller. Our healers and teachers are stuffing dynamite under the feet of New York's renters, landowners, small businesses, history and heritage.
Florent will not go into that goodnight quietly, but in singularly quirky fashion.
Soil is coming to the High Line.
Harlem City Council Member Inez Dickens is my new hero. Anyone who pisses off Bloomberg rates in my book.
Read this article in the Village Voice and then tell me Bloomberg, Doctoroff and Lancaster aren't enemies of the people.
The City Fathers pushed through the rezoning of 125th Street yesterday, and, as Curbed points out, the furor began this morning. Did we expect anything else?
The Daily News charted the unpleasant reaction when the Planning Commission revealed their vote, with one resident saying "They want it to look like 86th St.," which has evolved into a serious epithet in recent months. Nobody wants to look like 86th Street.
The conservative New York Post also gave the negative reaction good coverage, helping to make an anti-development celebrity out of Michael Henry Adams, an architectural historian and author of "Harlem Lost & Found." Adam blew a gasket at the meet, screaming at the commission's chairwoman, Amanda "Park Avenue" Burden, "You're a rich, rich, rich horrible person. You're destroying our communities. You're a rich, rich socialite. You're a rich, rich socialite. How dare you! You're destroying Harlem. You're getting rid of all the black people." Let me buy that man a drink. And a sedative.
The New York Sun didn't mention Mssr. Adams and gave the whole vote a fairly positive twist.
I didn't see anything in the Times.
I haven't said anything to date about the City's stultifyingly stupid and misguided plan to rezone 125th Street. But a recent article in the New York Times, which featured a mind-blowingly narrow-minded comment by the Department of City Planning deeply inappropriate chairwoman, Amanda Burden, has compelled me to weigh in. So here goes: The plan is stultifyingly stupid and misguided.
Surprised I think it's a bad idea? Yeah, I didn't think so. But, call me naive—I am surprised that somebody, anybody could think this was a good idea. The African-American community of Harlem sticks it out through thick and (mostly) thin, remaining in place so as to hold on to its history and heritage in the once-glorious, but long-blighted neighborhood, and how does the City repay them? By opening the gate to blue-chip development. Bring in those office towers, where the locals won't be able to rent space! Bring in those condos, where the locals can't afford to live! Tear down the low-scale buildings, some part of the landscape for 100 years, and cast the open, airy street in darkness!
Why is glass, steel, office space and luxury housing this administration's answer to every city planning "problem." Is there no other way to revitalize a neighborhood? Must every neighborhood look like a place where Bloomberg could work and live? Are anonymous condo complexes more attractive than brownstones, however tumbledown? Is an anodyne doorman lobby better than a bumptious bodega?
To Burden's mind, probably so. Which brings us to that very telling comment of hers. She told the Times that "The idea that the street needed development hit her, she said, when she attended a recent Roberta Flack concert at the Apollo with a friend who works on the street. After the concert ended, Ms. Burden said, she asked her friend where they should eat. `Downtown,' the friend replied. "There should be a million different eateries around there, and this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to frame and control growth on 125th Street. The energy on the street is just remarkable, and it’s got to stay that way."
Uh?
I'd be embarrassed for her if I weren't so furious. Dining choices? For upper-crust twits? That is a reason to overhaul a street, to irrevocably change its personality, erase the legacy of a people who have lived and died there for a century? You know what? If I had gone to that Roberta Flack concert and was hungry afterwards, I would have known where to eat. I would have known where to go. Anyone who knew the first thing about Harlem would have. The place may not have had white tablecloths or a snooty hostess or careful lighting, but it would have had good food, some of it of a kind you can't find the better of anywhere in the City. Sylvia's, Amy Ruth's, Rao's and Patsy's, just to begin with the legendary places. There is wonderful Senegalese food to be found. A Zagat's will tell you about plenty more.
Much Jean-Georges open something on old 125 for Harlem to past muster?
Wait a minute! It's all coming together now. Mayor Mike likes Subway sandwiches and Cheeze-Its. The Parks Department doesn't like the Red Hook Ballfields food vendors. Burden doesn't think there is anything to eat in Harlem. It's all so clear! The Bloombergians hate good food! No wonder they're so miserable.
Still no action at would-be Court Street Trader Joe's. (And can they please fix the clock?)
Somebody tore down the 114-year-old Church of the Master (cool name) because, you know, they just had to.
The bad news about Meatpacking landmark diner Florent maybe closing appears to be true. The Observer says the restaurant's lease is up March 31 and the owner may not renew. If you have $70,000 (a month) the space can be yours.
A cool film of Blackwell's Island circa 1903 made by Thomas Edison.
Some good citizens (and one City Councilman) participated in a rally at Borough Hall in support of the drive to downzone Carroll Gardens.
And, off-island: I like pizza places that call themselves "Apizza." New Haven rocks!
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