It's been a bad trip for the legendary bohemian Chelsea Hotel ever since longtime kooky owner Stanley Bard was kicked out as manager last year. As the Observer reports, Bard re-appeared to shoot an interview in the lobby of the hotel recently, and the following anecdote illustrates perfectly how the new corporate management are just complete tightasses: "The new management comes running out of the back and is like, 'You can't shoot that here!' said the writer Ed Hamilton, a 13-year resident of the iconic lodge on West 23rd Street. 'He tried to charge Stanley $600 to film in the lobby.'" [NY Observer] There are also several new books out or forthcoming about the Chelsea Hotel:

The Barnes & Noble bookstore on 21st and Sixth closed on Monday after fourteen years in the neighborhood. "We can't pay those kinds of rents," a bigwig told City Room. When you're finished mourning and moaning, please be sure to visit one of the eleven other Barnes & Nobles in Manhattan and Brooklyn. (What kind of New York do we live in when otherwise sensible people get upset over the demise of a big-box corporate bookstore?)

"I signed up with some friends to play kickball in McCarren (because running and drinking outdoors is fun!)" writes a tipster. "I was worried that I wouldn't be diehard enough for the people who normally turn out for this league, and Christ Almighty, I think I was right. The E-mail below is from a self-described "league vet" who needs to get a fucking life..." The email below proves that people have no idea how difficult it is to organize a Brooklyn kickball league these days...

Berliniamsburg: everybody's doing it! The European sister of Williamsburg is perfect for a perennial trend piece on the antidote to gentrification: you know, just chillin' while being a beatiful loser or an artist or a creator in Berlin. (Even me. I'm so going on vacation in two weeks!) And then T magazine tortures us with photos of two stylish musicians in a Berlin apartment to stab for. As it turns out, "What New York was in the 80s, Berlin is now," is a cliche, according to an interviewee.

"Now demographers say Manhattan is increasingly a borough of babies, and more and more of them are white and well-off." We've been saying that for years! But these demographers are talking about the actual kind of babies, ones that drool, whine, and live in expensive apartments, but are not the full grown adult versions. The Washington Post, in the cute way that it always hops on NYC trend coverage several months or years after it becomes passé up here, finds that Manhattan is no longer "an island of adult vices," home to "hustlers, runaways, addicts, murderers." No, today this gritty island enclave is being overrun by wealthy Caucasian toddlers!

Last week, annoyingly one-named reporter for The New York Times, Toure, wrote about his middle class guilt and snitching to the cops about a crack house on his block. The article was illustrated with this photo of some handsome residences in Toure's neighborhood. But, oops!

I didn't mourn for the closing of CBGB, only for the children whose parents put them in CBGB's onesies. Now developers are turning the alley behind the old club into a mall, and even that doesn't bother me. Gentrification is fun. But they insist on calling this shopping center "slice of the Left Bank," and that annoys me. Pablo Picasso, Jean-Paul Sartre and Ernest Hemingway were not mallrats. [via Curbed]

Things are so F'ed at the Times. First the buyouts and now they're cutting their late night shuttle van service from the office to Penn Station and Grand Central. The Times says increased safety around Times Square made the cut possible. But gentrification can't hide the truth: The internet age has made shuttle buses irrelevant. Telecommute home! Full memo after the jump. [via Media Mob]

On that bastion of important community issues known as the Brooklynian messageboard, a user named BrownStoneOwner has a question about taking her doggie to Prospect Park: "I noticed recently that whenever I take my frenchie and poodle off the leash in Prospect Park, I get screamed at by people playing soccer or cricket to put them back on the leash. These people are usually very rude and agresssive." But wait, there's more! (As if advertising your brownstone-owning status isn't annoying enough.) Not only are these people rude, but they're also black and Mexican.

Progress marches on with the inevitable opening of IKEA in Red Hook, Brooklyn. That will mean no more seventh-circle-of-hell bus rides to Elizabeth, New Jersey, on the dreaded Port Authority IKEA bus. (That experience was perhaps best summed up by this essay, titled "Yellow is the Color of Fear.")
[Brooklyn Paper]

Much-beloved neighborhood-y French bistro (and after-hours tranny hangout) Florent is on the market, after months of rumors. The rent on the last relic of the old Meatpacking District has been raised from $6,000 to 'bout $58,000. Per month. "No steak frites joint in the city could afford that kind of rent in today's Meatpacking District. Come May, if a buyer is found at all, it's going to be retail, and it's going to be high end," Eater predicts.

Peas & Pickles, DUMBO's biggest grocery, is having a problem, the Brooklyn Paper reports. It's "beggars," loitering outside and asking for change! You know, panhandlers, the kind that exist in every urban setting. Apparently, said beggars have rattled the "rapidly gentrifying" neighborhood's residents and grocery-store patrons. Some have even stopped shopping there! Oh, meow. Have New Yorkers completely lost their ability to engage with reality?

What with Super Tuesday and the Super Bowl parade going on yesterday, how to decide what to watch? It's enough to flummox an Ivy Leaguer! "Having two events with the word 'Super' in them is confusing," Columbia student Julie Schneyer told the Daily News. "Frankly, I'm voting for the Giants." Haha, politics is boring. We feel the same way sometimes. But then again, we're not President of one of the most vocal political activist groups at Columbia.

"Someday a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets:" Travis Bickle, the crazed gunman played by Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver, was genius at predicting gentrification. De Niro himself will open his new Tribeca hotel, the Greenwich, in April. Only $725/night! Included in that price is free Internets and iPod docks, plus Moroccan tile and Tibetan rugs (in some rooms). [NYP]

"Did you get the press release? Everything sounds better with 'of art' after it, don't you think?" Filip Noterdaeme said from his bed, where he was under the covers. He wore a glued-on beard and squinted into the light at a tiny slide in his hand. "I'm smoking a Vermeer," he said, dropping the slide into his pipe. A taxidermied coyote, the museum's publicity director, sat in a pram with a microphone in front of its muzzle, and I could see myself on a closed-circuit TV on the other wall. There was a girl in the corner behind a tripod, videotaping us, as well as another guy with a camera. Are they are part of The Homeless Museum—now The Homeless Museum Of Art!—too? (They are not. They are journalism school kids from Columbia, making a project.)

Author John Strausbaugh, speaking on a panel made up of contributors to a new book about how New York was better back then, basically declared the entire island of Manhattan culturally dead because everyone has been priced out of it besides that Hearst girl and Jared Kushner. And then he described gentrification in v. v. loaded language: "What's kind of going on now is a benign ethnic cleansing of the borough of Manhattan, and that mix is going to be gone for a very long time."

Rod Townsend sometimes receives phone calls from The Future, a mysterious entity that knows where things will be in New York after the Starbucks and Whole Foods have blanketed the town and then disappeared.

It's the fight this city's been waiting for: Pups against the children. Who will win the battle of cuddliness? Times culture-war reporter Alex Mindlin braves the Manichean battlelines on the future of West Village's Seravalli Playground. Neighborhood arrivistes want a dog run installed for their bichons and puggles to run free in; parents want more play space for their Bugaboo toddlers. A recent community meeting served as their Waterloo.

If you're like us, all you know about Kansas City is that it was nuked by the Russians in 1983 (in some made-for-T.V. movie we saw on the SciFi channel the other night). But they've rebuilt! And they're having a renaissance! Creative types priced out of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Jersey City, Philadelphia, Providence, Wilmington, and Columbus, Ohio are flocking to Missouri's largest city, leading some wags to call it "the 11th borough."

The guy who is running the Hotel Chelsea now is a "a 26-year-old eurotrash beachbum from St. Louis, Missouri, who enjoys hotels, travel, and drinking with friends. He is straight (Hey Girls!) but in a relationship (Awwwww!) and his favorite movie is Ferris Bueller's Day Off." [Hotel Chelsea Blog]