Jeremiah's
Vanishing New York

Your own private driveway. Your own private bowling alley. Your own private movie theater. Your own private spa. Your own private lookout.

These promises of privacy are repeated on banners that circle Extell's One Manhattan Square on the Lower East Side, the latest luxury monstrosity to vandalize our skyline and bully its way into our low-rise neighborhoods. (There will also be a private golf simulator, a private pet spa, a private fitness complex, a private squash and basketball court, and an entire acre of private gardens.)



With so much private space, why venture out of the complex at all? Why engage with city life? The insistence on privacy and the turning away from the street exemplify the suburban mentality come to the city in the 2000s.

One resident of a luxury building loaded with suburban amenities told The Observer in 2008, “Everything's always convenient, always safe, always clean. You don't have to worry about gross things. Like mice! And creepy things like that." Said another, "It sometimes feels like I'm not in New York when I'm in the building... It's trying to have things that a suburban housing complex would--everything at your fingertips, where you don't have to leave [the building] much if you don't want.”

As Sarah Schulman has noted, “They came not to be citified, but rather to change cities into places they could recognize and dominate.”



This process of domination has just begun.

Under the FDR, along the East River Esplanade, someone has taped several flyers from One Manhattan Square, saying: "Join us for weekly complimentary cross fit classes." They are posted all over the spot used by local Chinese people for Tai Chi and other exercise.

It's clearly some kind of tool for selling more condos, but we have to ask: Why, when the people of One Manhattan have so much private space, do they also need to expand into the public space?



I was recently watching the 1979 movie "Breaking Away." It's about conflict between working class townie kids and upper class college kids. On hot days, the townies swim in the quarries where their fathers once cut stone. When the college kids go to swim at the quarry, one of the townies gets angry and says, "They've got indoor pools and outdoor pools on the campus, but they still got to come here!"

One Manhattan has a private spa, a private fitness complex, and an acre of private gardens, but they still have to use the space long enjoyed by the lower income local people.

It doesn't matter if the cross fit class doesn't happen at the same time as the Tai Chi sessions. It doesn't matter that it's free for anyone to join. It is quite clear who the cross fit classes are for. Just look at the people on the flyer.



Recently I was introduced to the concept of "ontological white expansiveness." Shannon Sullivan writes, "As ontologically expansive, white people tend to act and think as if all spaces—whether geographical, psychical, linguistic, economic, spiritual, bodily, or otherwise—are or should be available for them to move in and out of as they wish. Ontological expansiveness is a particular co-constitutive relationship between self and environment in which the self assumes that it can and should have totally mastery over its environment."

I would add that it's not only whiteness, but also the power of class that convinces people that the whole world is for them. Try making this argument to the people who benefit from that expansiveness. They will often tell you that this is public space and "We have a right to be there." They might even say, "We're integrating this neighborhood." And they'll use language like, "Everyone is welcome here."

But all of that covers up what's really going on--the semi-privatization of our public space, and the turning of public spaces into amenities for luxury developments (like we've seen at Astor Place).



The thousands of new people who will flood in to this neighborhood are already changing the East River Esplanade.

More upscaling is coming.



The city just installed a ferry landing nearby. It is an absolute eyesore, blocking formerly uplifting views of the harbor as you walk or bike downtown. But as City Realty pointed out, "Residents of the Lower East Side apartments for sale at One Manhattan Square will have access to a brand-new stop on the NYC Ferry at Corlears Hook."

Who is the ferry meant for?



And, of course, the whole gritty, open esplanade is being renovated -- better to fit the needs and aesthetics of the condo developers and their clients.

More mega-towers are coming. Activists are fighting them.

When the towers come, they will bring more people who don't want to engage with the city as it is. They will emerge from their private pleasure gardens and they will expand into the public space, only to alter it to their taste. And it will be too late to fight it.

In the Times today, an article celebrating the gentrification of Canal Street is getting strong reactions.



This type of article is a long-time staple for the paper. For years, they've sent writers into "up and coming" neighborhoods to highlight the new shops and eateries. As a record of the changing city, these articles are invaluable--I relied on them when I wrote my book, Vanishing New York. But they also help to hype the changes.

And in all of them, someone makes a statement about how the old neighborhood was dead and the new one is alive, how "no one" was there before and now it's full of "people."

In today's piece, the owner of an upscale new jewelry shop says, “I think people were afraid of Canal Street for so long, and now they’re recognizing there are just so many advantages to the area. I think we’re just beginning to see the neighborhood come alive."

In the hyper-gentrifying city, where City Hall works with developers and corporations to rezone and "renew," where more and more upper-class white newcomers move into working-class neighborhoods of color, we hear this sentiment all the time. It is what one writer referred to as colonial myopia. In her book Harlem Is Nowhere, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts recalls sitting in a new Harlem café listening to a conversation between two white men. One lived in the neighborhood and one was visiting. “This is fabulous,” the visiting friend exclaimed. “Really, you have to do something to get the word out. There need to be more people up here!” As Rhodes-Pitts points out, the men were “afflicted by that exuberant myopia common to colonists.”

Bloomberg's Planning Commissioner, Amanda Burden, was famous for this affliction. She told the Times in 2012, “We are making so many more areas of the city livable. Now, young people are moving to neighborhoods like Crown Heights that 10 years ago wouldn’t have been part of the lexicon.” Livable for whom? Which young people? Whose lexicon?

We know who.



In the lead photo for the Canal Street article, we see two young, fashionable, well-heeled white women walking into Canal Street Market, a kind of clone of Chelsea Market, that hyper-gentrification machine.

Behind them are at least five people of color, not fashionable and not well-heeled. But they are not the focus of the photo. They are not the stars of this story. They are in the background, as if already fading into the past. They have been coming here for years, shopping for the bargains that Canal has long been known for. But they are not here. They are not part of the lexicon.



Like much of the city, Canal has recently been high-rent blighted. Bloomberg cracked down on counterfeit handbag sellers. Legit shops were forced shut.

In their place are coming new shops for a new population of people who want their spaces controlled, curated, and very clean.



But the wild and vital messiness of New York life still hangs on here.

The aliveness of Canal Street are the crowds of bargain shoppers. The diversity of its clamor. The gray-market merchants and knock-off artists. Canal Plastics and Canal Rubber. (It was, until very recently, the crazy spillage of Argo Electronics. And Pearl Paint. And the Cup & Saucer.) It's the Chinese vendors with their carts of fruits and vegetables and delicacies sending up steam. It's the t-shirts with their "New York Fuckin City" slogans next to "I Heart NY."

This place has been alive for a long time. And now it is being killed by the same force that is killing so much of the city.



On the Times article, the vast majority (if not all) of the comments are critical. Readers are angry.

Tony says, "Seems to me this story is saying in all sorts of coded language that Canal Street became reputable once it became less Chinese and more white. Shade, anyone?"

(Some of that coded language, with a reference to Mandarin, was removed in an online edit last night. The original headline, "Canal Street Cleans Up Nice," was changed to "The Gentrification of Canal Street.")

Scott says, "This article is incredibly tone deaf. Chinatown locals are being pushed out by rising rents, and these writers are celebrating the means by which this is happening."

Bronx girl says, "Real people lived and shopped and went to work and created crowds on Canal Street... This is so distressing. Bye home."

BB says, "Having lived a blocked removed from canal Street for the past 4 decades, Canal Street was the livliest are for as long as I can remember, filled with real people living and working as normal people do most parts of the world. That NY Times would write 'I think we’re just beginning to see the neighborhood come alive,' is offensive to those of us that's lived and enjoyed our real neighborhood."

It goes on.



So maybe it's time for the Times to retire this feature. No more celebrating gentrification. No more selling the corporate white-washing of New York's neighborhoods. The tide is turning on gentrification. People are simply tired of it.

(From an old post I never posted.)

C&L Sunrise Grocery was a little newsstand on Hester Street at Bowery. Its facade is remarkable thanks to the old, hand-painted sign that hangs above its awning, announcing: "Chung's Candy & Soda Stand," with 7-Up and Coca-Cola logos, also painted by hand.



The place sold candy and newspapers, lottery tickets and umbrellas. The usual stuff. Awhile ago, I went by to find a "Space for Lease" sign on its rolled-down shutter. (Maybe by now it's reopened as a new newsstand?)

Meanwhile, at another corner of Chinatown, where Lower East Side-style gentrification is seeping in, another newsstand vanished.


before

At Rutgers and East Broadway, against community objections last year, Jajaja Plantas Mexicana moved in to what had been the Golden Carriage Bakery and a little newsstand with a metal awning.

The popular restaurant serves vegan Mexican food. They left the newsstand signage, but it looks kind of sad, hanging out there without its old soul.


after

VANISHED

Reader Ted Rao writes in:

"The amazing Wong Kee, located on Mott Street between Canal and Grand, succumbed to a new landlord and rising rents. Its last day was 1/21/18."


photo via Yelp

According to this video from SinoVision, Wong Kee was in Chinatown for nearly 30 years.

The lease ended and apparently was not renewed by the landlord. According to SinoVision, "The landlord plans to take the property back and construct a pharmacy in its place." There are already several pharmacies nearby.

VANISHED

After close to four decades, Argo Electronics on Canal Street has closed. Tribeca Citizen shared the news today, writing, "I’d have to wager that the building—and the one(s) to the west—aren’t long for this world."


photos from 2015

Argo was a beautiful little remnant of old Canal, its wares organized in cardboard boxes spilling out to the sidewalk, a cacophony of useful junk and stuff.



Power cords. Extension cords. Remote controls. Rolls of duct tape. Rolls of masking tape.



Motherboards. Keyboards. Key chains. Coffee pots. Flip flops. Watch bands.



I never got the chance to go inside, but I always liked the look of the place and photographed it each time I went by, mostly because it had that look.

You know the look. The one that says: I won't last much longer in this new New York.

For videos of the inside, visit Tribeca Citizen.

This summer we saw the tragic end of the Cup & Saucer, thanks to a non-negotiable rent hike.



It didn't take long for the beautiful old signage to get stripped.



And replaced by a bunch of shitty For Rent banners.

The Cup & Saucer luncheonette on Canal and Eldridge closed this past week due to the landlord nearly doubling the rent. After the shutters came down one last time, neighbors and friends hung posterboard and pens to gather goodbye and thank you notes.


click to enlarge and read



Among the heartfelt goodbyes and good-lucks, they ask to "Save Chinatown" and "Support the SBJSA," the Small Business Jobs Survival Act, the bill that could have stopped the closure of the Cup & Saucer, as well as many, many others.

It wasn't lack of love that killed the Cup & Saucer.



As I went to leave, a man in construction vest and hardhat walked up and stared at the notes. It's a familiar scene, the devoted regular who hasn't heard that his or her favorite place has shuttered, the New Yorker who shows up to find it gone. They always have the same look of confusion and loss.

"Did you eat breakfast here?" I asked the man.

"I used to eat breakfast here," he replied. "Guess I don't anymore."

We shook our heads. He turned to go and then turned back. He had something else to say.

"This is probably going to be some CVS or Duane Reade or some other useless fucking thing," he said, frustration in his voice. "I live in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, and all the little shops are gone. There's nothing left. The rents are totally out of control."

I told him what the rent went up to on the Cup & Saucer: "Almost sixteen grand."

He shook his head and waved his hand, brushing it all away. And then he went, looking for another place like this, a place he won't be able to find.

Today is the last day of the Cup & Saucer.



Last week, the Lo-Down announced the closure. Today the classic diner got its goodbye feature in the Times. They describe a neighborhood in the midst of being wiped out:

"The family jewelry and wholesale shops that once dominated the area are long gone, and more expensive restaurants and bars have moved in. This time, Mr. Vasilopoulos and Mr. Tragaras said, the rent increase was too steep for Cup & Saucer. Mr. Vasilopoulos and Mr. Tragaras have owned the restaurant since 1988, but Cup & Saucer has occupied the space since the early 1940s, Mr. Vasilopoulos said. In March, they learned their $8,200 a month lease would increase by $7,600 per month. Attempts to negotiate with the landlord, 99 Canal Realty, failed, they said."



If the City Council had passed the Small Business Jobs Survival Act, the Cup & Saucer might not be closing today.

It could have been saved.

If you're sick and tired of watching the city die, why don't you send an email to Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and tell her to pass the thing already? You can send one to the mayor, too. It's easy--we already wrote the email for you, just click and send. You really have no excuse.



I went for my last meal at the Cup & Saucer on Friday. I had a BLT, fries, and a Coke.

The place was packed. More than usual, but the diner was always busy. Once again, don't say it closed because business was slow. Don't say it closed because "tastes have changed." It closed because the landlord nearly doubled the rent. It closed because small businesses cannot afford to pay nearly double the rent. It closed because hyper-gentrification. It closed because greed.

The Cup & Saucer did not close because it wasn't loved.

It was loved.



By the register, there's a page from the New Yorker magazine, an artwork by Maira Kalman. She writes of "The Optimism of Breakfast":

In the Optimism of the Morning, it is Wise to Get Going.
To be Confident, Expansive, Exuberant. If you find
yourself at the Cup and Saucer Coffee Shop--or
any Coffee Shop--with a Jelly Doughnut and a
cup of coffee, staring out the window at
the parade of passersby, you could do worse.
A whole lot
worse.


from the New Yorker

Kalman is right. We can do a whole lot worse--and we will.

Whatever comes after the Cup & Saucer will be worse, because it won't be the Cup & Saucer. It won't be the faded Coca-Cola sign that says LUNCHEONETTE. It won't be the 3-D letters washed by years of weather. It won't be the shapely swivel stools padded in orange-sherbet vinyl. It won't be the doughnut case lit in fluorescent light, or the cup and saucer inlay in the floor.

It won't be co-owner and cook Nick Tragaras singing softly to the music of metal spatula hitting grill.

It will, I promise you, be worse.

VANISHING

Fong Inn Too is the oldest family-run tofu shop in New York City and, quite possibly, in the United States. Founded on Mott Street in Chinatown in 1933, it closes forever tomorrow--Sunday, January 15.


Paul Eng

Third-generation co-owner Paul Eng showed me around the place. Upstairs, a massive noodle-making machine churns out white sheets of rice noodle, sometimes speckled with shrimp and scallion. Downstairs, a kitchen runs several hours a day with steaming woks and vats of tofu and rice cake batter, including a fragrantly fermenting heirloom blend of living legacy stock that dates back decades.

Eng's family came to New York from Guangzhou in the Guangdong province of China (by way of Cuba), like many of Chinatown's earliest immigrants. His grandfather, Geu Yee Eng, started the business, catering mainly to the neighborhood's restaurants. His father, Wun Hong, and later his mother, Kim Young, took over after World War II and kept it going, branching out from tofu to many other items, including soybean custard, rice noodle, and rice cake.


Brown rice cake waiting to be cut

The rice cake is the shop's specialty. It has nothing to do with the puffed rice cakes you eat when you're on a diet. This cake is fermented, gelatinous, sweet, and sticky like a honeycomb. It comes in traditional white as well as brown, a molasses creation of Geu Yee Eng, and it is an important food item for the community.

A few times each year, the people of Chinatown line up down the block for rice cake to bring to the cemeteries, leaving it as an offering to their departed relatives.

"It's a madhouse," says Paul. "They come early to beat the traffic and fight each other for the rice cake." No one else makes it--Fong Inn Too supplies it to all the neighborhood bakeries. "Once we're gone, it's gone." Customers have been asking Paul where they will get their rice cake for the next cemetery visit. "I tell them I don't know."


Cutting the white rice cake

The Engs have sold their building and Fong Inn Too goes with it. Business has been hard, though Paul's brothers, Monty and David, have done their best. Their father passed away earlier this year. Their eldest brother, Kivin, "the heart of the place," also passed. Their mother tried to keep it going, but "her legs gave out," and she had to stop. The closing, Paul says, has been hardest on her. "This place is like a child to her."

Paul is the youngest of his siblings and, while he worked in the store as a kid, he doesn't know the business anymore. Like many grandchildren of immigrants, his life is elsewhere. As for the fourth generation, there's no one available to take over.


Paul Eng

"I'm in mourning," Paul told me--for the shop, for family, and for his childhood home. Maybe also for the Chinatown he used to know. "The neighborhood has changed a lot. When I was a kid this was all hustle bustle. Now it's so quiet. No one lives here anymore."

"No one" means no Chinese people. "Gentrification," says Paul, is "starting to trickle in. This old section of Chinatown is kind of orphaned off. It doesn't know where it's going to be." He wonders if it will become like the Chinatown of Los Angeles, with no Chinese people, just tourists and souvenir shops for tourists, a theme park of what a neighborhood used to be.



You have only this weekend to visit Fong Inn Too (46 Mott St.) and buy their delicacies. After tomorrow, they'll make no more.

The family will stay around to celebrate one last Chinese New Year on January 28 and February 4. They'll sponsor a few big dragon dances and then say goodbye.


The noodle machine in action--this photo by Paul Eng

In June, I reported on the eviction of Reverend Jen and her Troll Museum. Now she will be resurrecting the museum, for only a short time, in a community art space called Chinatown Soup.


photo by Mr. E

She writes on the Facebook invite: "For years the LES Troll Museum made many people happy, made them feel like, maybe, the LES hadn't turned into a real-estate shitshow bedroom community for the rich."

The event will run for one week, opening tonight, August 16 at 7:00pm, at 16 Orchard Street.

"Expect a killer opening, weird performances, drawings, paintings, plays, a troll hair-dressing station, a troll-coloring book station, shit that's for sale, a 'Troll Parade' and informative monologues about the importance of Troll Commerce."

As you know, the beloved Pearl River Mart closed when its rent was hiked from $100,000 to a reported $500,000 per month.

Here's what remains.



#SaveNYC.

VANISHED

As I reported last week, the restaurant 69 Bayard closed in Chinatown this weekend. I went in for a final meal--and also a first.



The line went down the block and around the corner. Most of the patrons were young Chinese people, long-time regulars, and a few older folks.

According to NPR, 69 Bayard had been here for 80 years. They closed because the landlord hiked the rent, denying them a new lease. It's the story we've heard now a hundred thousand times.



Inside the busy restaurant, I shared a table with a Chinese family.

The mom told me how she used to pick up her son from school and bring him in every day for a good, affordable meal. "Lots of memories," she said.

We talked about Chinatown and changes. "Everything in Chinatown," she said, "is going up. Everything's more expensive."



I ate my chicken wings while regulars came in and out, hugging the waiters, taking pictures, saying goodbye.

On the wall near my table, a pair of dollar bills read: "Sweetness was here. 69 Bayard 4 ever." It's quite possible that Sweetness is somebody's name, but I prefer to think it refers to the flavor of the place, which is sweet--and warm and friendly. I don't know if there's a word in Chinese for the Yiddish word Haimish, but if there is, it applies to 69 Bayard.



If you'd like to try and stop the bleeding, join #SaveNYC. Help pass the Small Business Survival Act. Let the city know we need protections for our beloved small businesses.

 VANISHING

69 Bayard is the little restaurant in Chinatown where the walls are covered with dollar bills.


photo: Winston Wanders

It's been there a long time--I don't know how long and the man who answered the phone was too harried to answer that question when I called, but he did tell me that this Saturday will be 69's last day in business.

I also don't know the reason for the closure.

The restaurant is known and loved for being a late-night nosh.

It will be missed by many.


photo: Larry C. on Yelp

This past spring, Crain's reported that Pearl River Mart, the excellent Asian emporium, would be forced to close at the end of the year due to an insane rent hike.

Now reader Andrea R. writes in with a final (ish) date. A friend who works in the store told her: "the closing date is around February 10."



Pearl River first opened in Chinatown in 1971. It has since moved twice, but this may be the end of it, due to sky-high rents all over the city. As Crain's reported, "Pearl River currently pays more than $100,000 a month for its shop, and rent would rise more than five times when the lease expires."

That's over $500,000 per month.

And this is why we need to #SaveNYC.