Downtown Brooklyn: Scaffold City

Downtown Brooklyn is generally an ugly place, badly kept up and populated by decaying old buildings and charmless new ones.

Lately, however, it's more of an eyesore than usual. As I emerged recently from the Borough Hall subway stop recently, it dawned on me why this is. Downtown Brooklyn has become Scaffold City!

There is major scaffolding at each corner of the intersection of Court and Joralemon Streets, except for the the curve where Borough Hall sits. Enormous scaffolding. There's another scaffold further up Court, and a couple others a bit down Court towards Atlantic, including one that masks the beautiful 66 Court from sight. For a couple blocks—blocks walked by thousands every day—there is barely a building you can see.

Nothing depresses an area like scaffolding. It's horribly unsightly in itself, and it uglifies everything around it. It creates shadows and darkness where there was none, and replaces sometimes handsome storefronts and stone and brick building facades with cheap plywood and dull metal poles.

There seems to be a lot scaffolding around New York these days. It always baffles me how, when the building community seems to have plenty of money to erect awful new buildings, they can't find any to promptly fix the beautiful old ones.

Last Meal at Joe Jr.

As I post this, Joe Jr., the timeless Greenwich Village diner at Sixth Avenue and 12th Street, it locking its door for the last time. Though usually open until 1 AM, the owners chose to close at 3 PM on this, the final day in a tenure that began shortly after Kennedy was elected.


If there was any doubt that the corner diner is beloved by Villagers, it was dispelled today. There was a line outside Joe Jr. at 11:45 AM. I don't know about you, but I've never seen a line outside a greasy spoon before. Everyone made comments to the general effect that it was as low down dirty shame that the place was closing, that the landlord was a louse, that rents were too high all around, and that the Village was going to hell in a handbasket.


One youngish couple talked about how they had had their first date in New York at Joe Jr. some 12 years ago. A woman with kid, a German Shepherd and a skateboard in tow complained—to a woman looking for people to sign her petition to get a Cy Vance on the Democratic ballot for District Attorney—that "people under 30 don't understand what they're losing."


Inside, people expressed their condolences and sign the petition to save the eatery on the counter near the cash register. Customers took pictures of themselves posing with busboys. A woman nursing her coffee, and looking downright dejected, said she had been there for dinner Friday night and would be back before the place closed. The staff was stoic, doing their job with efficiency, as if it were any other day. Gregory, the beefy son of owner Eleftherios "Teddy" Hondros, wore an expression of grim resignation on his large, sweaty, unshaven face. Loyal customers asked if there wasn't another space in the neighborhood he could move to.


The Hondros family has owned the restaurant since 1977, and its thought the diner has been at the location for 45 years. No one know who Joe. Jr. was.

I ordered a bacon cheeseburger, well done, and a Coke. It was a good diner meal. That such a quintessentially American business should on July 4th is bitterly ironic.

This Week on Lost City: Say It Ain't So, Joe!

La Bonne Soupe Reopenes After Three Months Closure; We Lose Classic Greenwich Village Diner Joe Jr.; You Can Soon Have Your Tacky Wedding in the Classy Williamsburg Bank Building Lobby; The Sofia Brothers Set Me Straight; More Folks Hating on Bloomberg's Lawn-Chair Times Square.

No, Wait: THIS Is the Quote of the Day!

Again from the Times, via Gothamist:

At last night's Working Families Party mayoral forum with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, City Comptroller Bill Thompson and City Councilman Tony Avella, Bloomberg defended his campaign spending, "I made every dime that I have... I've used my money only to talk about what I would do and what I have done. There's nothing wrong with that as far as I can see... Rich people don’t always win...You can't buy an election. The public's much too smart for that. You can use it to get a message out." The NY Times, though, found the explanation "drew some hisses and even laughter."

Said the man who bought two elections.

Quote of the Day

In the Times, from a cabbie, regarding Bloomberg's widely derided pedestrian Times Square:

“If you have one fare to go to the theater district, your day or night is finished,” said Fhahidul Hossain, a cabdriver and part-time dispatcher at City Transport Management. “A 10-minute fare is going to take you an hour or so. It’s a nightmare.”

And Mr. Hossain offered what amounted to a cri de coeur for drivers who believe that the union of automobiles and Midtown — in all its exhaust-filled, horn-honking glory — is a coupling that cannot be quietly undone.

“In Manhattan, you have to move, man. You cannot do it like this,” he said. “This is not Europe. This is New York City, for God’s sake!”

Meanwhile, Janette Sadik-Khan, the Bozo transportation commissioner, called it a "Picasso" in the making.

La Bonne Soupe to Open July 4!

While we mourn the coming loss of Greenwich Village's Joe Jr. diner, we can at least dab our eyes and blow our noses with the napkins at the newly reopened La Bonne Soupe.

The Midtown legend, which was felled by a fire three months ago, will reopen on July 4, according to the restaurant's website.

How's that for celebrating the nation's birthday?!

More Sadness from Joe Jr.

It's all true.

Eater reports that Teddy Hondros, owner of the classic Village diner, and his son, have confirmed they have lost their lease and will close on Sunday. From Eater's reportage:

'It hurts. I'm trying to to cry right now—I grew up here'... They have over 300 signatures on the petition, but it was started at customers' behest, not the owners, so it doesn't mean much... What they're saying: there was old electrical systems in the building that the restaurant had been asking to be fixed for years. Landlord didn't fix it. Then there was an electrical fire and the buildings owner wants the restaurat to sign a new lease asking THEM to pay for $750,000 in repairs... The owner has gone in the back. The guy's heartbroken... The place is packed. People are really moved. There's even a pair of Japanese tourists!... There's a dude in here that's been coming for 40 years: 'It's a standard. A staple. This place is a part of my life!'

An Eater tipster adds:

It's not just about real estate apparently though the deal they had offered him is supposedly double his current rent. They want him to be responsible for the entire bldg in case of fire etc.

I'll be going for a last lunch there tomorrow or Sunday.

Bad News for Joe Jr.—And All of Us

Rotten news from Joe Jr., the homiest, most haimish of West Village diners. The 45-year-old landmark, a fixture at Sixth Avenue and West. 12th, is in trouble.
According to Eater:

Joe Jr's has lost its lease, and, barring divine intervention of some sort, will close. Per an email from author David Kamp to Ed Levine: "They have big handwritten signs in the window saying they've lost their lease. They are asking people to sign a petition to save Joe Jr. and to 'spread the word,' I guess in hopes of pressuring the landlord not to cut them loose."

How many more of these shuttering do we have to suffer until the Powers That Be are satisfied that New York no longer has any annoying thing you might call character?

Williamsburg Bank Building, Reception Hall--Same Difference

The beautiful, soaring, grand, ground-floor lobby of the Williamsburg Bank Building has finally found a new lease of life, after sitting idle and empty for years.

Manhattan promoter Jennifer Blumin is leasing the space use the space as a catering hall for weddings and other large events.

Kind of a comedown for the landmark. It's hard to think of people doing the chicken dance under that great ceiling. But I guess it's a better fate than the place becoming a Borders.

Rental prices will start at $15,000 a night, which Blumin calls "Brooklyn-sensitive pricing." Hm. Maybe "Brooklyn Heights-sensitive."

More Press Piles on Bloomberg's Shabby New Times Square

The NY Post hated it. The Daily News hated it. And now, finally, the NY Times hates it:

A Times Square for Our Time, Pedestrian in More Ways Than One

Open since late May, the pedestrian mall at Times Square, where the city boldly closed off traffic, has a rough, slipshod feel — if anything, more slipshod now that the folding lawn chairs the Times Square Alliance provides are starting to show wear and tear, their plastic strips poking out below seats that sag so much they all but touch the ground. With yellow tape roping off discrete areas and the tacky chairs inviting passers-by to have a seat, sections of Broadway now look like something between a crime scene and an audience, which may be an inadvertent tribute to the culture of the space, but does not offer much in the way of aesthetics.

Granted, the chairs and orange barrels demarcating the pedestrian space are temporary. In fact, the entire project may be temporary: the city will not decide until December whether to keep the street closed to traffic. In any case, on Tuesday workers began painting parts of the pavement red, and there are plans to add a gravel surface in the coming weeks.

But right now, the pedestrian mall, it must be said, looks a little unworthy of New York. The city may be reeling from recession, but the huge orange plastic containers and tatty hardware-store chairs give the sense that it’s already letting itself go, like some Lehman Brothers wife who has not just forsaken her golden highlights, but given up on grooming altogether. Surely someone at Ikea could have helped the city ease this transition — maybe some witty, oversize umbrellas (sure, weighed down), or at least chairs that do not look like they are lonely for the company of pink flamingos.

Or maybe the problem is not the quality of the seats. Maybe the problem is all the people sitting in them. New York is a city of walkers, not sitters; a city of motion, not repose. In Times Square, tourists should be looking at New York, caught up in the swarm of activity and lights and commerce and theater; instead, New Yorkers find themselves looking at the tourists, a cordoned-off display of the temporarily sedentary.

“Is that what you think?” asked Gulshan Mia, 30, who was sitting on one of those chairs between 43rd and 44th Streets one recent morning, listening to music on her iPod. “But that’s because you’re from New York.” Ms. Mia is from South Africa, and was living up until a few months ago in Taiwan; even now, with an apartment in Jersey City, she would not necessarily call herself a New Yorker.

But she is not a tourist, either. Ms. Mia works at Toys R Us in Times Square, and is what you might call a pedestrian mall regular. She wakes up every morning a half an hour early just so she can get to Times Square, sit in one of those seats, listen to music and people-watch. She comes there on her work breaks, too.

She said she enjoyed the meandering pace of the tourists, and the international sign language of couples bickering over who gets the one chair that’s open at any given time. She watches global diplomacy in action as the Germans bum cigarettes from the Italians and the Italians bum a light from the British. At lunchtime, she makes eye contact with fellow nontourists on their lunch breaks. “I don’t know if you know the nod,” she said. “I’m starting to feel like I belong now that I get the nod.”

The landscape designer Diana Balmori said she thought of the makeshift mall as a kind of “tidal marsh,” a place where the land and water push up against each other, and it is not clear which will take over. For Ms. Balmori, the phrase represents Broadway’s new tentative divide between a street for cars and a space for people. It’s also an apt description for Times Square itself, a space half-defined by the city and half-defined by the tourists who inhabit it. And it captures the people like Ms. Mia, someone living in New York but not of it, like a few of the other self-described regulars parked in Times Square that morning: a restaurant manager with a thick Argentine accent, a hitchhiker lounging on a chaise who said he lived in New Orleans but summered in Manhattan.

Sitting beside Ms. Mia, I was starting to rethink my impression of the pedestrian mall, appreciating some of its merits, messy though they may be. But only for a minute.

“I just really like it here,” she said. “I find it strangely peaceful.”

We’ve come to accept the multitudes of adjectives that rotate in and out of use for Times Square depending on the era: gritty, dangerous, commercial, touristy, kitschy, overpriced, overcrowded, flashy, tacky, corporate. But peaceful?

That’s just wrong.