"Chow" Shines Again

As loathe as I am to say anything good about the business that took the place of Second Avenue's late great Chop Suey joint Jade Mountain—as heartbreaking a closure as any this blogger has ever had to face—well, here I go. I'm going to say something good. A couple things, actually.

First and foremost, the bar, called Shoolbred's, has kept Jade Mountain's iconic Chop Suey/Chow Mein sign hanging, and, what's more, kept it lit—at least the half of it that lit during the last days of Jade Mountain's life. Second, Shoolbred's has replaced the great Jade Mountain neon sign with an almost equally great neon sign saying Shoolbred's. Look at it. You've gotta admit, if someone told you that sign was 50 years old, you'd think it was fantastic.

Additionally, the new bar has a weird and wonderful New York provenance. It's co-owned by William Ivey Long, a longtime Broadway costume designer and a true New York eccentric. (Read this profile.) Long collects houses, mainly down in the Carolinas, and many of the antiques in the bar are from his several homes down there. And the name of the place isn't a goof. It's the last name of Long's Scottish grandfather. Not a bad selection of scotch, either.

All that taken into consideration, I have decided not to boycott the place. Just a hunch, but the owners seem like the kind of guys who would have actually appreciated Jade Mountain.

Some Stuff That's Interesting, and One to Make Your Blood Boil

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.

One Day Before the Clarett Showdown, 340 Court Starts A-Comin' Down

Not sure what it says about tomorrow's meet between the Clarett Group and the good people of Carroll Gardens over the fate of the property known as 340 Court Street—perhaps it says nothing—but bright and early this morning, said real estate titans were busy tearing down the International Longshoreman's Association building on that site, brick by off-white brick. Funny timing.

The Cat backhoes were working feverishly high atop the boxy structure at the corner of Union and Court, seemingly ensuring that the modernist piece of architecture would surely be gone in a matter of weeks.

On Thursday at 7 PM, Clarett will present their plans for what they believe will be a bee-yootiful, 7-story wonderment, with setbacks (maybe like this), underground parking and room for ground-level retail. The sure-to-be-capacity crowd will no doubt be at the ready with bugged-out eyes in their heads and ripe tomatoes in their fists.

The meeting will be at 7 PM at P.S. 58 Carroll School, 330 Smith Street.

Savior of St. Savior's

By some ridiculous miracle, St. Saviour Church of Maspeth, Queens, is going to be saved.

I confess that I long ago consigned this 161-year-old, unlandmarked Richard Upjohn country church to the dustbin of history. Months and months of outcry from citizens and the media seemed to do little to inspire local politicians or City Hall or the Landmarks Commission to lift a finger to stop the forces of development that wanted to steamroll this structure into the dusty ground.

According to the The Daily News, preservationists somehow came to an understanding with Tomer Dafna of Maspeth Development LLC, which owns the property bounded by 58th St., 57th Road, Rust St. and 57th Drive, where the church has long sat. The church and its tower will be either hauled a few blocks down Rust Street to a site owned by Phil Galasso, president of the Maspeth Industrial Development Corp., or taken apart and reassembled on the same site. It will stay there until it reaches its final destination to be at All Faiths Cemetery in Middle Village.

The preservationists efforts were not enough to save the trees (many between 60 and 100 years old), a parsonage and a meeting hall which were recently leveled.

Copious praise should go to the blog Queens Crap, which never stop hounding the people who would have demolished the church, and whose coverage of the story was unflagging.

It's a good outcome, but also depressing one, since it took years and untold sweat and toil and hollering to get a thing done, the rightness of which should have been recognized immediately.

What I Learned at Coney This Weekend

I can order Mozzarepa, "A combination of sweet ground corn and Mozzarella cheese."

This slightly horrifying-sounding treat is apparently a variation on the Columbian arepa. The "sweet ground corn" are probably better described as cornmeal cakes. So the thing is sort of like a grilled-cheese sandwich, only different.

At amusements parks and street fairs, you can order food you can't get anywhere else, and wouldn't even think of eating anywhere else. Corn dogs, foot-long hot dogs, funnel cakes, candy apples, cotton candy, sno-cones. Every food is a carnival act, a stunt, a gimmick. The food must be part of the fun. No prosaic snacks. Deep-fried this and caramel-dipped that and frozen the other. Food shaped like clouds, and snowballs and rockets. Coney Island food.

Ouroussoff Sounds Off

There's a must-read piece in the New York Times today by Nicholai Ouroussoff, addressing the coming battle over St. Vincent's plan to tear down several buildings within the Greenwich Village Historic District in order to throw up a couple very tall towers, one to house the hospital itself, one chock full of co-ops.

Here are a few tastes:

Sadly, the hospital’s application reflects the pernicious but prevalent notion that any single building that is not a major historical landmark — or stands outside the historical mainstream — is unworthy of our protection. Pursue that logic to its conclusion, and you replace genuine urban history with a watered-down substitute. It’s historical censorship....

In patronizing fashion, hospital officials have suggested that preservationists are choosing buildings over lives, as if the two were in direct opposition. This is the kind of developer’s cant that is ruining our city. The addition of up to 400 co-op apartments is about money, not saving lives. There are plenty of other ways that the hospital could upgrade its facilities....

...the O’Toole Building is part of a complex historical narrative in which competing values are always jostling for attention. This is not simply a question of losing a building; it’s about masking those complexities and reducing New York history to a caricature. Ultimately, it’s a form of collective amnesia.

At St. Vincent’s, the damage is likely to be only compounded by the design of these new co-op buildings, a sentimental faux version of the past.

If we continue down this path, we’ll end up with the urban equivalent of a patient on meds: safe, numb, soulless. Is this choosing lives?

Nice to see someone at the Times come out swinging. The blogs and the tabloids can't do all the work.

Another Diner Goes Down

The Daily News reports that the Cheyenne Diner, the 68-year-old eatery at Ninth and W. 33rd, will shut its doors on Sunday. Ironically, the place's landlord is the Skylight Diner down the street. George Papas, owner of the Skylight, said he plans a nine-story building housing 13 one- and two-bedroom apartments. Spiros Kasimis, a fellow Greek-American, is the owner of the Cheyenne.

The Cheyenne will follow the Moondance and the Market down to death (though there are reports that the Market will return.) NYC gets less noir by the minute.

Clarett's Day in Court

The Clarett Group plans to finally unveil their plans this Thursday for 340 Court Street, which promises to be the most controversial Carroll Gardens address since 360 Smith. Team Clarett owns the big 'ol chunk of land at Court and Union where the International Longshoreman's Association still stands (for now), and plans to erect a seven-story, 70-foot building on the spot. As the nifty illustration above shows, the building will have a couple setbacks, as well as a national retailer in the ground floor space and parking spaces under the building. It will easily be the tallest, biggest thing in the area (not counting certain church steeples.) Since, under current zoning, they have the right to build as high as 20 stories, I guess we should count our blessings, but still...

I plan to be there, because, well, I just hate progress and change! Not in MY Backyard—that's what I say! This isn't the way things were done back in my native Kansas!

But seriously, I'm going to check it out, if only to see what Clarett's got in mind. The meeting will be at 7 PM at P.S. 58 Carroll School, 330 Smith Street.

(Thanks to Gowanus Lounge for the picture)

Wooden Phone Booth Sighting: Fedora

Haven't spotted one of these in a while. The wooden phone book at the half-century-old Fedora Restaurant in the West Village sits just to the left as you enter the joint. This particular booth may be singular in the City in that it contains an actual working rotary pay phone. That's right, folks. Your credit cards and phone cards won't work in this baby!


Previous Wooden Phone Booth Sightings:
Old Town Bar
Capsouto Freres
Sam's

Throwing Trash Away Is Fun at Astroland