New York's upper crust is struggling with the age-old existential question, “Do I have an affair, get a divorce or get a downtown apartment?”

After the recent unexpected death of its namesake founder, the new owners of Don Hill's closed the downtown nightlife institution for good on Monday night. Developers are going to turn it into a condo. Welcome to the new downtown Manhattan!

If you are really familiar with what the fuck is up then you know that Aaron "A-Ron" Bondaroff is a downtown LES cool guy for hire, founder of the aNYthing brand, and generally, you know, the man with the brand that is downtown, and all that, once upon a time.

How bad is it out there? So bad that innocent citizens are being assaulted in fawncy downtown NYC much more than they were last year! Panic! How bad is it really? It's not that bad:

This is exactly the type of shit you won't be missing if you have the blessing of going out of town this weekend: being yelled at by jerks at the trendiest new dive-themed dive bar downtown. This week's culprit: Taavo-Somers designed nautical spot The Rusty Knot, where a tipster went the other night:

Back in the old days, man, downtown was so much better. So much realer. So raw. In fact, it was so real that we had to paddle a canoe across it. (The pic on the left is of Collect Pond in the early 1800s, which as you can see from the map on the right, was where downtown is today.) Click to enlarge. [via The Bowery Boys: NYC History]

What do you get when you take the snobbish manufactured exclusivity of the downtown NYC faux-celebrity modeltrash circuit and combine it with the barren urban nightmare that is Atlantic City? I don't know, but idly rich hipsters across the tristate area will soon be paying big money to find out, if cultural connoisseur Paul Sevigny has anything to say about it!

So, Tuesday night, former Seventeen editor and current girly-empire-building MySpace queen Atoosa Rubenstein goes to ridiculous Lower East Side hotspot The Box. Some trannies were doing a show, with some person of indeterminate gender stripping for a midget and simulating fellatio. (Louche times!) The climax of the act: Shim/herm stands up and has what looks like ejaculate running down his/her face. Atoosa is in a booth right in front of the stage there. And the M.C. says, "See, girls, this is why you should always swallow." And then looks right at Atoosa, and says, "You don't look like you swallow. You look like a guzzler."

Architect Lebbeus Woods on his 1999 drawing of a dammed and dug-out Lower Manhattan: "Le Corbusier was totally misunderstood by New Yorkers who thought, oh, our buildings aren't tall enough—we've got to go higher! Of course, he wasn't interested at all in their height—more in their plan relationship.... New York is not going to be able to compete in terms of size anymore. It used to be a large city, but now it's a small city compared with São Paulo, Mexico City, Kuala Lumpur, or almost any Asian city of any size. So I said maybe New York can establish a new kind of scale." [BLDGBLOG]

Hey, we got something slightly tangled the other day. (I know, right?) In the police raid on gay party hangout Mr. Black that the Voice reported on (by the way, the cops stonewalled us on this, and ridiculously refused to give us the names of people arrested), the cops arrested seventeen employees, considered charging them with "criminal nuisance" (some twisted version of like, aiding and abetting drug use or sales, perhaps), and 16 of the 17 employees weren't charged with anything in the end. A bunch of them were strip-searched while being held. Of 13 other people arrested, two were charged—with one sale each. (Dollars to donuts those charges will be thrown out.) All in all, this is a really lame raid. We also made fun of what sounded like a pretty vast array of drugs scattered about; we hear that employees say that two random guys turned out their pockets and dumped their stashes when the cops arrived. So sadly, Mr. Black is not, like, a rainbow carpet of coke and ludes every day. And we hear there's much, much more coming on this story next week.

Red alert for the Lower East Side! Vegan electronica gnome Moby just finished refurbishing the Central Park West apartment he bought two years ago. But now he's sent out an email to his friends about moving back downtown—according to our source, the Mobester is wracked by class guilt and "can't deal with living in a nicer place."

Though Mercat, the new tapas bar at 45 Bond St., is good, maybe super, it seems destined to inhabit the vestibule of its full potential without ever reaching its peak. (Hash that metaphor!) Dwell, for a moment, on how much better and how much more excited one might be for a place called Meerkat, but as a topless bar. Cuddly mammals, boobs—it would get a Michelin star in months. Instead the Bond street restaurant which opened this week after a prolonged gestation serves Catalonian tapas to affluent bohemians. Which isn't a bad thing, especially if you're an affluent bohemian yourself. Well? Aren't you?

In general, real estate listings traffic in the hyperbolic. Views aren't nice or tolerable, they're spectacular and expansive. A neighborhood isn't simply a nice place to live but the most exclusive, the hottest, or the most peaceful. But rarely does shilling of real estate agents become transcendent. And when it does, as it does in this LOHO listing, the opportunity shouldn't be missed to celebrate the poetry in the pedestrian, the arias of areas and the doggerel of realtors.

A week after the New York Times spun a hefty cautionary tale on the dangers of buying a unit before it's built, they've gone and sent Suzanne Slesin to the as-yet-unbuilt William Beaver House, Andr Balazs's vaguely vaginal condominium on William and Beaver streets downtown. When Slesin gets "out of a cab at the triangular site," she's immediately invited to eat the fragrant lotus of the marketing mock-up and forget forever about returning home. And it seems, when it comes to unbuilt units, experience has no sway over love. Slezin immediately falls hard for the negging of architect Calvin Tsao's mixture of soft sell and hard-to-get pitch.

One of the nicer things about the Bowery Hotel, up until recently, was that after a night drinking Pimm's Cups and being too much of a schlub to approach the women whose long languorous limbs are so thoroughly draped over every armchair, you could stumble to Bowery Video, a video store-cum-brothel, right next door. Now it has been closed for "prostitution." (We're going with "downlow gay sex" ourselves.) And now, the Bowery days of wine and hos are really over.

It's real! The MisShapes coffee table book that you simply must own will at last arrive in September. Why, this MTV book is "a document of their unique world," with portraits of "cutting edge" folk, "some from different generations, alongside the youth of down town New York." Who, you ask? Who? Why: "Madonna, Yoko Ono, Michael Stipe, Axl Rose, Kelis, Peaches, Hedi Slimane, Michel Gondry, Nan Goldin, Sienna Miller, Chloe Sevigny" and much more. And "with each subject posed amidst the downtown scene's dense and riotous environment" you'll be sure to feel as if you're really there in the heart of it all, your head swirling in the toilet bowl, your nostrils flushed with some crystalline tropane alkaloid or other. What's more, the Dark DJs That Could are hitting the road in a group tour this summer—make sure you get Coldstared down at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas in June!