Stoned Crow Closes Tonight

The Stoned Crow, beloved Village dive, closes tonight after 17 years. Here's one last look at the chair where the owner surveys the pool activity and makes sure no injury comes to her beloved table.

Arthur Avenue Gives Good Awning

I always thought, of all the plastic awnings in the city, Catania's Pizza on Arthur Avenue in The Bronx may be the most impressive. The 61-year-old slice joint holds court on a sweeping curve where Arthur Avenue meets E. 184th Street, and its bright red awning hovers over every inch of that angle. It's quite obvious that Coca-Cola footed the bill for the massive thing. Best advertising they ever bought.

News on Freddy's

From a commenter, regarding the Prospect Heights bar that fell in the wake of Atlantic Yards:

Freddy's IS rising again on 5th Avenue near 17th Street in the old (well sort of, they only lasted about 2 years) Ellis...I am collaging the bathroom doors with images from Donald O'Finn's video collection...it's all looking swell, a mix of the old stuff salvaged from the original Fred's mixed with some new(old)..should open in about 3 weeks.

Queens Chaos Caught

That the author of the blog Restless is a fine and artful photographer is no secret to anyone who follows the site. But the above image deserves special acclaim. He sent it to me as one of two of his favorite images of the year. The picture captures such an array of visual chaos, it comes off as a surreal collage, warped and off-kilter, the crazy New York we sometimes see in the harried prism of our mind.

Merry Christmas from Lost City

The poinsettias inside a makeshift greenhouse at the Union Square Farmer's Market. Merry Christmas to all who do Christmas!

Bring Out Your Dead! 2010 Roundup of Lost New York Landmarks

As in every year of the Bloomberg administration, 2010 was a bad one for preservation-minded New Yorkers. There were a couple major restaurant losses in Gino and Fedora, cultural signposts of their time and neighborhoods that can never be brought back now that they're gone. Otherwise, the two biggest victims of this final year of the first decade of this depressing century were Coney Island and New York's dive bars. The seaside playland continues to be the most maliciously punished neighborhood in the City, wrung of all history and character and dignity by the twin evils of City Hall and Joe Sitt. Meanwhile, crusty old taverns who patronize the kind of people who used to live in New York by the drove, but are now being forced out by escalating rents, are dropping left and right. Mars Bar, Ruby's Bar & Grill, Max Fish, Rum House, you name it.

Gone, Baby, Gone

Gino, the 65-year-old, Upper East Side red sauce club with the crazy zebra wallpaper and devoted clientele, threatened to close and threatened to close for years, and this year finally did. A heartbreaking loss.
Fedora, unlike Gino, chose to retire after after decades of service to her eponymously named subterranean Village restaurant. Gabe Stuhlman, a local hotshot restauranteur, bought the lease and promised to keep the name and some of the interior. But it won't ever be the same. In fact, he didn't preserve the old neon sign, he replicated it.
Carmine's at the Seaport, a bedrock South Street Seaport business, closes after 107 years.
Empire Diner, yet another of the City's few remaining stand-alone diners goes belly-up.
Cono & Sons O'Pescatore Restaurant, a remnant of pre-hipster Williamsburg and political gathering place.

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Merry Christmas from Carroll Gardens

Strap that tree to the wall!

Christmas Songbook Authenticity Guide

Unlike many of my thinking brothers and sisters, I never tire of Christmas music, even though I understand that much of what pours out of the radio these wintery days is syrupy pap and treacle. My imperviousness can mainly be chalked up to the fact that I approach the Christmas songbook as a historian. Every song you hear—the secular ones I mean, coined in the 20th century—not the religious standards—had a debut year and an original interpreter. In many cases, the tune was penned by one or two of America's finest songwriters and first warbled by a master vocalist. "White Christmas," to name one great instance, has perhaps been wrung of all meaning and dignity over the years by thousands of hack cover versions, but nothing can take away from the fact that it was written by Irving Berlin and crooned into this world by Bing Crosby. That initial version still gives me a chill when I hear it for the first time every yuletide.

It's occurred to me that, in this world, where we are aurally pummeled by the likes of Josh Groban and Mariah Carey every day, many folks may not know the origins of some of our best holiday melodies. So I wrote up this brief guide to the most prevalent Christmas favorites, listing their year of creation, author, and original singer—just to give a general idea of why these songs were once thought to be good enough to be covered by so many lesser artists year in and year out. If you haven't heard the original artists sing these numbers, do yourself a favor and seek out these cuts.

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Dive Bar Death Watch

These are bad days for New York's dive bars. City Hall and developers do not see their charms. So they are on their way out. And in December, they've been falling like barflies. Let's count them down, shall we?

• The Rum House. One of the last surviving dives in Times Square, exited in late September.
• Ruby's Bar and Grill. Coney Island legend. Not quite out (it keeps stubbornly opening even though it's supposed to shutter), but definitely down, and probably a goner.
• Mars Bar. The East Village ur-dive. Due to close for two years in 2011 to make way for a highrise. The owner says it will reopen and be bigger than ever. Whether it will be better, or ever the same, is highly in doubt.
• Max Fish. LES mainstay. Victim of a rent hike. Owners says they will relocate. But where, at a reasonable rent, in today's pricey Lower East Side?
• The Stoned Crow. Beloved Village dump, calling it quits on New Year's Eve.
• Hickey's. The latest victim. Dead on 33rd Street after 40 years.

Station Cafe, Holland Bar, Holiday Cocktail Lounge, Subway Inn, Rudy's Bar and Grill and all the rest—watch your back.

Fresh and Blessed at Borgotti's Ravioli

Borgotti's Ravioli and Egg Noodles (very specific name, that) is one of my regular stops whenever I get up to Arthur Avenue in The Bronx. The pasta is fresh—often it's made right as you order it—and the atmosphere is of another time; counters and shelves and equipment that haven't changed in decades.

The small store was crowed on a recent Thursday night just before closing. Pre-Christmas rush? Or just the usual logjam? The old lady under the sign listing the types of pasta and their prices (the Borgotti matriarch, I assume) was doing her thing, packing up bags of pasta for the customers.

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