The Most Untouched Block in SoHo?

I was walking through SoHo yesterday and feeling pretty well alienated. Chain store after luxury store after chain-luxury store. Unless you're on a shopping mission and have a credit card in your pocket with a high limit, there's little reason for a New Yorker to hang out in this neighborhood.

Then I turned the corner at Prince and West Broadway, and I breathed a little easier. Could the short block of Prince between West Broadway and Thompson be the most untouched in this very-changed area? At the corner of Thompson and Prince, you have the old standby bar Milady's, that hangs on year after year, despite a lack of glitz and glam. Across the street is the old M & O Market ("Imported and Domestic Products"), one of the few sizable groceries in the neighborhood.

A couple doors down is the frowsy Cafe Borgia, pretending since 1975 that its still 1963. And across the street is Vesuvio Bakery, which, though it's now a branch of City Bakery, still retains its classic facade and uses its basement ovens. The stretch has a so much more relaxed atmosphere that the surrounding blocks.

A Look at the Vesuvio Ovens

City Bakery's Maury Rubin e-mailed me today, asking if Vesuvio Bakery—the landmark, Irish-green storefront in SoHo that he recently brought back to life as Birdbath Neighborhood Green Bakery—might be taken off my home page tally of "Recently Lost Landmarks." Though the true Vesuvio is indeed lost forever, he has a point that the space is now back in operation, and in its original capacity as a bakery, so I agree to amend the listing.

He also sent me some super-cool photos of the coal-fired ovens built into the earth underneath 160 Prince Street. (The photos were taken by Chris Callis.) Looks like an archeological dig you might find in some ancient town in southern Italy. Love the fine pyrometer by L. Mueller of tiny Cliff Street (one block long) in downtown Manhattan.

And Some Good News As Well

I guess it can't all be bad news on this hot and gloomy Monday.

New York, via Eater, reports that, while SoHo's classic Vesuvio Bakery will never again greet another sunrise as itself, it will as least not lose its identity as an honest-to-goodness bakery.

Birdbath, City Bakery's line of small eco-conscious offshoots, will open its third location (not counting the High Line) in the old Vesuvio Bakery space, saving it from tear down or major conversion. The 90 year-old neighborhood staple closed early last summer, professing to reopen after a routine oven cleaning... It was a sad loss, but in a day and age where it could have easily be turned into a Qdoba or a Baoguette, it's a relief that Birdbath's Maury Rubin is taking it: "It’s an heirloom, it’s a treasure, it means the world...That I have a chance to have my bakery be in it is a gift.” This will be the first Birdbath with a made-to-order menu.

I like Rubin's sentiments. Perhaps he is the man to carry on the torch. Here's to him and his fine instincts.