Jeremiah's
Vanishing New York

If you're wondering what giant development is going up like gangbusters on 14th Street near 9th Avenue, here it is.



It's DDG Partner's "Gansevoort Square." The name pulls the Meatpacking District into what is not the Meatpacking District, tugging the neighborhood's glamor eastward.

In case you think it's too far from MePa, the copy reassures that it's "no more than a stone’s throw away from the many amenities the neighborhood offers."



It's topped with five penthouse apartments and "will also feature some of the Meatpacking District’s newest ground-up luxury retail, creating a natural transition into the vibrant shopping and cultural district."

The rendering, covered with runaway greenery, brings to mind a post-apocalyptic scene. I can't help but think of Lori Nix's dioramas.

Last week we learned that Mars Bar, the East Village dive, long a haven for punks and outcasts, will be replaced by a 12-story prison-block of an apartment building. The pangs of loss have been reverberating through the city, among the bar's regulars and non-regulars alike. This is a big one. It brings with it a larger feeling of defeat. The East Village has lost so much of itself in recent years, but Mars Bar feels symbolic, as if it contains all of those losses in one final blow.



As the glass tide of luxury has risen around it, the bar remained a symbol of defiance and hope, a sign that the bastards could not grind us all down. We went inside for a drink and felt, ourselves, like holdouts, survivors, undefeated. Just walking past that corner and seeing the painted riot of Mars Bar could boost your soul. It was as if that crumbling little corner was giving a big "fuck you" finger to all the shiny towers rising around it, and all the shiny people swarming in, radically changing the culture of this historically anarchistic neighborhood.

Mars Bar seemed, at times, like the old East Village's last stand.

Just within the past decade, before the Bowery tsunami washed in, Mars Bar existed in a different world. The two blocks bound like two halves of a book by the spine of First Street, between Second Ave and Bowery, were quiet, ramshackle blocks dotted with cultural touchstones. Empty lots overflowed with weeds and graffiti. Brick buildings held the secrets of deep history and eccentric residents.


Everettsville: Looking east along 1st St. in 2002


Same view today

Standing at the intersection of 1st and Bowery, looking to Mars Bar one block east, you had CBGB and the Amato Opera House to your left. On your right, you had feminist author Kate Millett's home, formerly McGurk's Suicide Hall.

Then, in 2003 NYU opened their Second Street residence in the parking lot next to the Amato Opera House. The lot had been used by singers to practice--you could listen to the arias as you walked by. The new building stopped that and blocked the Amato's mural. At the time, the opera's co-director was frustrated about the dorm, but hopeful it might bring positive change. She said to NYUNews, "Maybe the empty store lots will become delis, and the store fronts will be brighter."

But there were no delis coming.


Amato mural, my photos, circa 1994

In 2004, after a three-year fight from the feminist activist, the city evicted Kate Millett and the Avalon Communities' Bowery complex leveled old McGurk's to put up an enormous, block-long glass box. Said Millett at the time of her eviction, "It’s going to do in the neighborhood."

She was right.


Niznoz: McGurk's in 2005


Same view today

With NYU and Avalon now flanking these two blocks, the interiors quickly collapsed. Everything fell like dominoes. In 2006, venerable CBGB closed its doors, and a John Varvatos boutique opened in the space in April 2008.

In 2007, the Avalon announced their plans to turn Extra Place into a slice of the Parisian Left Bank and today their scheme is proceeding, with artisanal chocolate shops and the like. Said Cheetah Chrome to the Post. "If that alley could talk, it's seen it all. All of Manhattan has lost its soul to money lords."


Everettsville: Extra Place 2002


Extra Place today

A second giant box went up on the northeast corner of 1st St. and Bowery--it holds a Chase Bank--and a third went into the northwest corner of 1st St. and 2nd Ave., across from Mars Bar. Hamptons boutique Blue & Cream opened in the Avalon and started selling $140 Bowery hoodies. After a claim of trademark infringement from a lawyer for the storied punk club from which he co-opted the name, celebu-chef Daniel Boulud opened "DBGB" in that same glass box--the Voice called this move "dancing on the ashes" of CBGB.

In January 2009, the Amato Opera House announced its closure after 60 years. The owners of a chain of bars plan to move in with a giant restaurant and possible theater. And now Mars Bar, the last Mohican, will fall for another ticky-tacky glass box.

All of this happened in only 7 years. These photos by Everettsville (see more) are not from the distant, blighted 1970s--they are from 2002. When people talk about how the city is "always changing," I tell them this story, the story of a historic, culturally relevant neighborhood sold down the river, demolished to the roots, and rebuilt into an unrecognizable playground for people passing through with money to burn. All in less than a single decade.


Everettsville: Looking west on 1st St. in 2002


Same view today

Of course, the city's leaders have been chomping at the bit for 40 years, since the Cooper Square Urban Renewal Plan was originally hatched as The Alternate Plan to Robert Moses' slum clearance designs.

In 1970 the New York Times described the plan: "Bleak storefronts, where derelicts sag and sleep in doorways, crumbling tenements and ancient office buildings will eventually be supplanted by more than 1,000 apartments for low- and middle-income families." Somehow, between the radicalism of yesterday and the consumerism of today, the plan went from mainly supporting the poor and middle-class to providing luxury homes, hotels, shopping, and dining for the wealthy. It was a project designed, in the words of the Times, "to restore a measure of dignity to an area that over the decades has become the motif of alcoholic degradation and futility in the city."

But where is our dignity now? A new kind of futility has taken hold and we are degraded when our symbols of hope are ripped away from us. Are we really still responding to Robert Moses? He would have bulldozed Cooper Square and the Bowery in one fell swoop. Now it's going down, agonizingly, piece by piece.

When Mars Bar is demolished, it will be Moses' ghost swinging that wrecking ball, a coup de grace as he delivers the death blow to the world we once knew.

See deeper into Mars Bar history here

In 1995 the Whitney Museum held a retrospective on the work of Edward Hopper. I must have attended the exhibit a dozen times. One of my favorite paintings of Hopper's, Early Sunday Morning, can still be seen at the Whitney, and it was there then, too.



I remember standing at this painting with a docent who described the shadowy block in the upper-right corner, how it symbolized a high-rise encroaching on these little brick buildings. It meant a dark future was coming and the world of these sun-drenched bricks would vanish.

Sometimes, I find myself unconsciously repeating Hopper's composition in snapshots--the pairing of low-rise brick buildings, sunny and warm, blushing in the light, with a cold monolith encroaching, upper right. This isn't hard to do. The image is everywhere.


my flickr

Have you seen it? If you have, add it to the Vanishing New York Flickr Pool. Tag it "Early Sunday Morning."

In Brooklyn there's a block of Bergen Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues, that wasn't there a year or so ago. The block itself was there, the street, the sidewalk. People lived on it. But today, almost overnight, it has become a tightly constructed microcosm of hyper-gentrification. Urban scholars should study this block. It's a New Urbanist dream come true.

It went up as quickly and completely as a Hollywood set and exemplifies everything that "White People Like." Which, as we know, is less about whiteness and more about "Bobos in Paradise." In fact, the entire 21st-century, urban, upwardly mobile, heterosexual reproductive cycle can be completed utilizing only the new businesses on this block.



Imagine a couple, let's call them Ben and Lauren. They are 35 years old, both of them "creatives" at a multimedia design "lab." They go on their first date at Melt, which they love for its "pure, honest and sustainable" food choices and "live off the land philosophy." They marry. For the wedding, Ben buys a pair of John Varvatos Converse at the men's boutique Private Stock, because he doesn't want to look like a total douche in his tux.

They try to get pregnant. Sex becomes tense. So they head back to Bergen to do some shopping at Toys in Babeland. They pick up a vibrator for Lauren and a buttplug for Ben. It works. In a few months, Lauren is shopping at Bump, right next to Babeland, for maternity fashion. While she's browsing stretch-waisted skinny jeans and calendula nursing balm, Ben heads next door to Bergen Street Comics, that "sleek clubhouse for the sophisticated fanboy."

Little does he know, while he's reading the latest Dan Clowes book, Lauren's in Eponymy charging a Gucci handbag to the house account. They'll argue about it later, down the block, while sipping fair-trade coffees and dipping kale chips into a bowl of "live" hummus at Sun in Bloom cafe.



In time, baby Cullen will be born. Ben will rent a rugged jogging stroller at Brooklyn Ride, and while he's pushing Cullen through the bike lanes of the Brooklyn he will inherit, Lauren will stay on Bergen, taking her Pilates Garage class at Lululemon, trying to tooth-and-nail it back to her pre-baby body. Lauren considers herself a devout "Luluhead." After their morning exercise, the whole family will reunite at "artisan chic" Bark for hot dogs smothered in baked heirloom beans and oak barrel aged sauerkraut.

"Did you hear," says Ben, between gulps of his retro-hip Foxon Park diet white birch soda, "That crummy bookstore down the block is going to be a store for tweens."

"That's great," says Lauren, patting her flat tummy, "It'll really come in handy when little Sophie gets big."

"Little Sophie?" says Ben, "Really? Another baby? I guess it's back to Bump!"



I stepped off the Bergen Block (after my own browsing through comic books and personal lubricants) and wondered how something so unreal-looking could pop up in such a short amount of time. It couldn't have been an organic process, I thought. All the signs are exactly the same. What condo developer engineered this so he could stuff his brochures with pretty pictures of nearby amenities? It's like Disney's master-planned Celebration, I muttered, passing by sheets of blue plywood and the skeletons of up and coming condos.

The Brooklyn Paper reported that the engineering was done, indeed, by the Pintchik brothers of Flatbush fame. They carefully transformed the block, says the paper, "into a little slice of some small town Main Street in just two years."

I can't say what the ultimate goal is, but we all know that the Bergen Block will act as a fertile harborage for more of the same, that its commerce will attract, breed, hatch, and spread as efficiently as, well, bedbugs. It's biological class warfare--like introducing lady bugs into the garden to rid your prize roses of aphids.


Nantucket shops

Said one of the business owners on the block, "Coming here is like stepping off of Flatbush Avenue into Nantucket."

I guess if Greenwich Village has Little Wisco, Park Slope can have "Little Tucket."

Back in January, The American Prospect was all about The Post-Boom City. I just got around to it. In her essay "Gentrification Hangover," writer Alyssa Katz discusses "how New York could create affordable housing from its empty glass condo buildings and failed takeover projects."



Some excerpts:

"Commuters arriving in Brooklyn via the Manhattan Bridge are greeted with a shiny vision of New York City's future that never came to be: condo buildings with names like the Oro, the Toren, and Forté, towering monuments to real-estate developers' credit-bubble hubris..."

"On the opposite sidewalk of Flatbush Avenue one drizzly fall evening, more than a hundred demonstrators, members of the Right to the City Coalition, drew attention to another possibility: A city starved for affordable housing could find it in the glassy confines of failed luxury dreams..."

"New York City made the Scarface mistake: It got high on its own supply."


photo by Lori Nix

Remember back in October 2007, when New York offered its "Doomsday Primer"? They commissioned artist Lori Nix to do these photographed dioramas of abandoned condo towers and Wall Street offices, and we fantasized about the "condo-pocalypse."

Who imagined we would be there in just a couple years? The article in American Prospect might give us hope, but Katz has some words of warning:

"Bloomberg is unlikely to concede that his coddling of luxury developers has only deepened the city's perpetual housing crisis. Nor has his administration rid housing-subsidy programs of their fatal flaw: They eventually expire. Most of the affordable housing New York City has been building under Bloomberg won't be affordable anymore by 2030. Even the condos the city hopes to turn into middle-income residences will eventually revert to top-shelf prices."

Last time I checked in with Weird Way West, the westernmost margin of Greenwich Village, life on bricky, cobblestoney Charles Lane was still fairly quiet. Today, it's an explosion of undulating glass. 166 Perry Street has fully arrived--totally glazed and complete with a $24 million penthouse.



Looking a whole lot like the Chelsea Modern with its wavy, boxy windows and louvers, it promises "sweeping views in the heart of the West Village," according to the giant sales office advertising up the street.



Of course, according to recent reports and market predictions, those views will most likely be of transgender sex workers and their clients getting busy at the edge of the West Side Highway.

Or maybe right there, down there, in the shadows by that tree...



Post Script:
On my walk to Charles Lane, I happened to pass a woman flagging down her local garbage men. She had a big, tabletop-sized plate of glass on the sidewalk and asked the men, "Can you take this? I'm afraid if I leave it here, it will get smashed--you know, with all the changes in the neighborhood."

When was the last time you heard someone in this city talk about scary neighborhood changes and they didn't mean hyper-gentrification?

Is glass no longer safe in Meier Haven--now that Charles Lane may be turning back into some semblance of Pig Alley?

Nick Paumgarten in this week's New Yorker wonders what the city will look like in our new Depression. He imagines the future. A quick look around town reveals that the future is now:

"Walking or riding along the avenues, you can imagine the storefronts without tenants. Bank branches, juice bars, shops selling electronics and scarves: all of them gone, unable to make the rent, and the landlords, verging on default, unable to lure replacements."


8th Street ghost town

"A friend who worked in Southeast Asia in the nineteen-nineties, during the recession there, recalls visiting Bangkok and Jakarta to see the abandoned high-rises of the preceding economic boom. He found ranges of half-finished buildings, derelict superstructures occupied by tent shanties and with squatters gathered around fires. It may be no great leap from there to a vision here of burning garbage cans and jerry-rigged cardboard in Washington Mutual’s cashless vestibules or the bare aisles of Circuit City."


14th St and 7th Ave


Little West 12th

"We have inherited, from the good years, a glut of housing, almost all of it of the unaffordable kind—condos galore—and an increase in office space amid a sudden, steep decrease in the need for it. Throw in the high cost, or total unavailability, of capital, owing to the credit freeze, and you have a New York that may be frozen in time."


4th Ave, Park Slope

Related posts:
New York Pentimento
Manhattan Apocalypse

There are people who move to a place because they love what is already there. And then there are those who move because they love some vision of a scrubbed future--they only tolerate what is already there, as they wait for it to vanish. That vision is bulldozing East Harlem.

The City Council just approved a rezoning plan for a $700 million development on East 125th, while a trail of luxury development already zigzags across and down the neighborhood. The residents are concerned.



I hesitate to publicize all this info, but the fact is: East Harlem is an enchanting place that feels like an older New York City.

The sidewalks of 116th, especially, are thriving and alive. People walk without cell phones and iPods. They talk to each other, calling from one side of the street to the other. They even talked to me--at least three people made pleasant, impromptu conversation on the street. Mothers with strollers steered out of the way. No one--not one person, in that sea of humanity--bumped into me.



Brazen enough to set up right outside Taco Bell, sidewalk taco stands do brisker business than the chain. Every other storefront is a restaurant, serving Mexican and Puerto-Rican food. Many have outdoor gardens in the back. Shops sell cowboy boots and hats, santeria spells, and musical instruments. There's a peaceful hum to it all.



On visits this summer I dared to fantasize about moving there, in the hopes of living again in the real New York, but I know its charms will not last. Not with dozens of developments taking over. Before we know it, East Harlem will become like everywhere else.



According to the developers, East Harlem lacks amenities and needs more, more, more. "This mall is going to totally change that," said a VP at Corcoran about the development at East River Plaza, "Everyone is super excited about the Target."



Not everyone is super excited. Graffiti in the streets says "Take back El Barrio," and across plywood walls, "Take back East Harlem," "Revolution Is Coming." With all the fighting and protesting over the super-gentrification of Harlem, who is fighting for El Barrio, other than a few graffitists?



Condos are popping up everywhere. Few people live in them yet. And if the Gawker post-recession NYC map is correct, East Harlem could be saved just by being "marginal," meaning, "a recession could send gentrifiers fleeing." Already, the economic downturn seems to be taking its toll on the new real estate.

From 124th and 3rd down to 117th and over to East River Plaza, you can walk a trail of lonely, yellowy-brick construction. Start at the Bridges, a pair of condos recently turned rental when buyers stopped buying.



119th and Third is still under construction and offering a 25-year tax abatement if you will just please buy something already. "Call us...if you want to get good prices," says their home-made video. 119th also has Karl Fischer's non-descript Sloane, to be followed by his newly announced high-end Conrad on 110th.


karl fischer's sloane

The Ivy is at 118th and 2nd. For the hell of it, I went to their opening, which apparently wasn’t their first, since they had a kick-off sales party back in 2006. Across from The Ivy is the purple Casa Brava. Next door, a massive Fedders box has risen.


119th and 3rd


the ivy's common courtyard


tenements squeezed between ivy and fedders box

118th has Blue Rhythm, which isn’t blue. And on 117th, there’s 416 East 117, followed by The Leah, The Nina, The Pinta, and The Santamaria. (Kidding about those last two.)

Finally, over a dozen developments later, you’ll find East River Plaza, where the massive parking garage for the savior of every “SpaHa” broker (the Holy Trinity of Target, Best Buy, Costco) has risen upon the FDR, awaiting its flock.



I went into a condo office where the salesman tried to convince me to buy, saying, "This neighborhood is finally becoming residential." Finally? It's already filled with residential buildings, packed with families and working people. He listed several of the condos going up and told me that the neighborhood will soon be completely changed. In short time, he said, "You won't even recognize it."

Why would I want that? Why would anyone?

• Photos of East Harlem
  
• Photos of East Harlem development
• Claudio's Barber Shop
• Dance of the Giglio

EV Grieve points us to this week's extensive article in New York Magazine on the transformation of New York into a city of glass.

Chronicling the massive architectural shift, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Justin Davidson gives readers a pretty incredible before-and-after collection of photos and such startling numbers as: "In the past fifteen fat years, more than 76,000 new buildings have gone up, more than 44,000 were razed, another 83,000 were radically renovated."



Davidson is critical but ultimately optimistic about the changes. He writes, rather eloquently, "I hear in the cacophonic symphony of construction the sound of a still vigorous and hungry city. I see in all that moving of dirt and hoisting of concrete panels the New York I’ve always known: unsentimental and steadfast in its refusal to stay the same, yet vigilantly proud of its past."

Part of me wishes I could see it this way. To have such hope would be less painful. Instead, I'll stick with urban nostalgist and poet James Merrill, a league I'm happy to let Davidson put me into when he writes:

"As pieces of the city evaporate, they take our memories with them. It gets hard to remember which block that old Chock Full o’Nuts was on or what was next to a lamented laundromat. This chronic amnesia is part of the New York condition. In his 1962 poem 'An Urban Convalescence,' James Merrill captured the feverish yet methodical sacking of the city and the way it toys with our sense of comfortable familiarity.

As usual in New York, everything is torn down
Before you have had time to care for it.
Head bowed, at the shrine of noise,
let me try to recall
What building stood here.
Was there a building at all?

Among Merrill’s disciples is one Jeremiah Moss, who maintains the engagingly gloomy blog Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, which he terms 'an ongoing obituary for my dying city.' His topic is the steady erosion of the city’s texture. He is the defender of all the undistinguished hunks of masonry that lend the streets their rhythm and give people a place to live and earn a living: bodegas, curio stores, a metalworking shop in Soho, diners, and dingy bars."

• Read the entire Merrill poem here
  

Now and then, I like to take a walk through way west Chelsea and see how things are progressing in the massive condofication that's going on. Every time I go, they're more enormous, more glassy, more metallic, just more, more, more.


chelsea modern

The Chelsea Modern on 18th is completely glassed, with crazy windows that pop straight out on springy suspension devices--perfect for losing cats or small dogs who like to sit on windowsills. Its neighbor, 459 18th, which was but a little sprout until very recently, looks completed, too. They grow up so fast, don't they?

We talk about New York changing, and we all know that the city is always evolving, but today it mutates like a cockroach, its DNA radically altering itself from month to month. At this rate, how long will it take for every block to be encased in glass?


459 and modern

Nouvel Chelsea has taken shape, towering, undulating, and accompanied by a big swaying crane. The L-shaped 245 10th, with its wobbly-looking beams, has wrapped itself territorially around the Lukoil gas station, and now has a scant skin of pockmarked metal and glass on its ass, just where it kisses the Highline behind it. We'll see these finished by the fall, no doubt.


nouvel chelsea


245 10th

Finally, HL23 has birthed a sales office--well, they call it a "Sales Tin"--tucked under the Highline, complete with neon lights and bamboo shoots for enticing buyers.





It's not news that the whole neighborhood around the Highline is being hurriedly buffed and built up in a construction frenzy for uber-rich investors to enjoy, at least occasionally, when they come to town. But recent reports show there might be a bit of trouble in paradise. Seems some ruffians have been abusing Vespas and putting garbage onto the hoods of cars. Head for the hills!

• More pics of these condos
• Chelsea Towers West, 1/08
• The Condo Shall Inherit the Earth, 10/07

I've been wondering why the old building on the corner of St. Marks and 2nd Ave recently received a swanky, brown-and-blue, Jonathan-Adleresque awning and renovated entrance. Now we know: This building has become The Theatre Condominiums.



Why theatre? Probably because, years ago, the independent, way-off Broadway St. Marks Playhouse was here. It was the one-time home of the Negro Ensemble Company and later became the St. Marks Cinema.

Many will remember the St. Marks Cinema for its cheap double features. Jim Jarmusch was an usher there and shot scenes from his student film, Permanent Vacation, in the lobby. Later, it became a Gap and now it's Pizzanini (with wine bar, sort of). Kim's video used to be on the second floor. I got my videos there.

Here, a new resident enjoys her view of BBQ:




In this lengthy article worth reading from the Times, they visit the changing St. Marks of the early 1990s and ask some important questions:

"It was an odd day when, in March 1988, a Gap store opened up in space once occupied by the St. Marks Cinema. People on St. Marks Place laughed. What, they wondered, did the Gap have to say to the anarchistic spirit of St. Marks Place? What was next, Bloomingdale's?"