Is it or is it not hard to believe the New York Post's recent story on the Chinatown brothels on Eldridge Street? The tabloid claims that pimps are recruiting our children! Specifically, they say fellas on the street were hitting up high school students from Pace, distributing business cards promising low, low prices for women. ($35, according to a plainclothes cop.) Stranger things have happened!
The Marc Jacobsification of the West Village is like a slow gay manifest destiny. The ass-baring designer is opening his third store on Bleecker Street. Like the Creek, Navajo and Shoshone before them, the natives are upset. According to one West Village resident quoted in the Villager, "They scream, they shout, they bang the metal door constantly," said Patricia Avallone, a longtime resident at 96 Perry St. "I think something has happened here that should not have happened." And then the gays weighed in.
Park Slope residents are saddened that a de facto brothel, a "by the hour" hotel, is being developed into expensive condos.
A long time ago, when I was reckless and young, I had an affair with my ballet teacher. Her boyfriend of 18 years—at the time they'd been together longer than I'd been alive— was clearly gay. (He was a stylist and Sunday tea party enthusiast.) His gayness didn't prevent him from wanting to kick my ass, however, so some of the affair was conducted at Jerry's, a Soho restaurant right next to the Apple Store, although before the Apple Store existed. Jerry's had okay oatmeal, a good burger and, most importantly, capacious single person bathrooms. And now, as gossip auntie Ben Widdicombe tells us, Jerry's is closing for good come Sunday. A Michael Kors store will open up in its place. Of course it will.
[Photo: Eater]
Great news for real New Yorkers! The only person gunning people down in New York today (so far!) is in New York-New York, the casino in Las Vegas. Yay us! "Investigators are still collecting bullets," said the local cops. That is sad. But don't worry, gamblers. Someday the gentrification of New York will reach all the way to Nevada.
Oh, downtown, we love your little kielbasa storefronts and fly-by-night mailbox huts and your crazy houses of coffee. We've worried about the new giant Walgreen's moving into Astor Place where the wine store was—as if the K-Mart wasn't enough, right by the two Starbucks! The chain stores will destroy all our independent businesses. And guess what? Maybe the small businesses deserve it!
With the Chinatown Holiday Inn being converted into a "high-end cutting-edge destination" boutique hotel by the secretive monolithic enterprise Highgate Holdings, the area has begun its walkabout from slightly gritty ethnic enclave to gleaming diorama of "New York City." As the Post's Cuozzo reports, the Highgate hotel at 138 Lafayette will fully embrace the "downtown aesthetic," recruiting Edison-bulb-loving firm AvroKo and bringing in Marc Packer of Tao and Richard Wolf of AvroKo-designed Stanton Social.
Hey, have you heard about Williamsburg? Apparently, it's this Brooklyn neighborhood that used to be an industrial ghetto, and then it was a secret haven of artists and Orthodox Jews. Now it's a really cool and cutting-edge place to live—except that luxury condos rising on the newly rezoned waterfront are about to displace the last remnants of the old neighborhood. How nefarious! How shocking. Luckily, the Washington Post has come to town!
Yesterday we reflected on the inanity of the New York neighborhood gentrification story; namely, that every one follows the exact same format (bad, scary area now expensive, boring area). But we'd like to propose a new real estate story trope: de-gentrification. This is what happens when big, greedy real estate developers build one too many shiny expensive condos, then can't find anyone to live in them.
The gentrified neighborhood story never gets old, it seems—even when said neighborhood has been gentrified for years. Today's victim was Alphabet City, which the Post breathlessly notes was really crappy back in the day. Why, people even did heroin in Tompkins Square Park!
When the Flatbush Pavilion movie theater went dark, its marquee remained unchanged, a memorial to the movies that killed it for good: Van Helsing and Man On Fire.
