In case you didn't know, the Lower East Side is an increasingly popular location for merchants to set up shop. Crain's reports that high-end retailers are swarming to the area to take advantage of all the fat-walleted fauxpeople who stride its streets in search of that self-satisfying fauxhemian feeling. But not everyone is convinced.
Sunday Styles has a semi-anti-semitic-seeming profile today of one Sion Misrahi, who parlayed the family bargain men's store into Lower East Side real-estate moguldom, thereby transforming the old neighborhood from ethnic enclave to liminal hipster space to liminal yuppie space to crappy modernist condo wasteland. The Times throws bones to both the Post and Time Out for being earlier to the Lower East Side No Longer Cool party, but conspicuously fails to mention the above post from Riff Market, personal blog of brigand/hero Nick Sylvester, apparently written by fellow music kritik Chris Ott as a parody of some whiny chick named ultragrrl. Whatever! The point is "i fucking hate the lower east side," from a post dated way back to May 9. New Media Revolution! Yes, those are the Sprouse Twins.Lower East Side is Under a Groove [NYT]
A triplex penthouse recently sold for $10 million dollars. It is located between Avenues C & D. This is a complete mindercoaster. The apartment, as the Sun reports, is part of the building known as The Flowerbox, due to the "self-irrigating flowerboxes, a nod to the neighborhood's history." Uh, history of what, free-range junkies? We don't have any info on who the buyer is, since the building, at 259 E. 7th Street, is not yet built. But every unit in the building seems to be in contract. And it's in contract with folks who like to keep it real.
New listings with the "New York Commercial Realty Services" show that recently-opened Pizzeria Di Santo on Ludlow Street might be out on the street. (Mediocre pizza and a cheap Street Fighter arcade machine will only get you so far, it seems. And here we all thought it was Cronkite that would conk out first.) Also for lease is the space that contains Zozo's, the weird "fresh" fast food place on Stanton and Orchard—on the market for "only" $9,000 a month. More opportunities! Fuelray is going for $17,500 a month—it's that old nasty N.Y.U. hangout on W. 3rd Street. And Moomia, at $16,800 a month, is a barren hookah bar on Lafayette. The already-closed Chelsea institution The Biltmore can be yours for $16,500 a month. But what will become of the old and beautiful Ottendorfer Library branch on 135 Second Avenue? 115 years old, and the first building to be constructed specifically to be a library, it just underwent a $3.1 mil renovation. Now advertised as "Perfect for Restaurant/Bar," it's going for $150 per square foot. We didn't think a fatter drunker less literate East Village was possible, but turns out we were wrong. —Josh
Moby, America's favorite tea-loving vegan and sometime musician, recently fled the Lower East Side for the more staid Upper West Side. According to Luci On Tour, his apartment once belonged to an opera buff and was "painted floor to ceiling in pastels, depicting jesters with bells on their toes, elephants with frilly collars, monkeys wearing childrens' clothes, flowers, trees, and anything else you can imagine that is busy and weird." Oddly, Moby completely redid the place. Perhaps monkeys in childrens' clothes and elephants with frilly collars smacked too strongly of animal cruelty—or the Lower East Side on a Friday night. —Josh
Hell Square, epicenter of the blogosphere, recently lost its favorite horrendously shitty diner Loside. Happily in its stead will be Calle Catorce, which can't possibly be worse than its predecessor. The place filed for a full liquor license on April 16th, so it looks like along with the Hat, the Toilet and El Castillo De Jagua, internet losers will have yet another South of the Border place in which to gather with their "One Tequila Two Tequila Three Tequila Floor" t-shirts and Macbook Pros. For now however, such a convivium is only speculative, as, absent an opaque window frosting, nothing much is yet doing. But ! Around the corner, another Mexican place is much closer to being open. As Eat for Victory's Nina Lalli reports, Mole, "A Mexican Bar and Grill," will be arriving in mere days. Two! Trend! Hell Square is all about Mexican now!
If our father is to be believed, living in the shadow of Jason Pomeranc's Allen Street hotel is a lot like what it's like to be married: Each day you wake up with something uglier and uglier. The Lower East Side hotel is slogging towards completion, even as Pomeranc flirts with moving to Miami. Last week, a muddy Debbie Downer glass fa ade went up, and it was soon followed by a slate gray panel siding. Without the color of Blue or the light airiness of THOR, it seems like Pomeranc is subscribing to the Secretive Government Organization school of architecture. Ominous!
Curbed came across some utterly ridiculous plans for a new tower planned to desecrate the Lower East Side. Dubbed the Delancey Tower, the building was designed by Harlem architects Peter L. Gluck and Partners and was to rise opposite the azure excrescence known as Blue. But the fact that the firm seemed to be using pre-chewed gum to build models made us suspect the thing has less of a viable future than Sanjaya. We're delighted to report the building is indeed stymied, or in the words of architect Tommy Gluck, "temporarily on hold." And if the building's experience of being on hold is anything like our experience of being on hold, that hold will be interminable and cruel, and scored to Vivaldi's Spring.
One of the nicer things about the Lower East Side is that it isn't Park Slope. Sadly, that nice thing became a little less true with the news that the Cocoa Bar will be opening at the end of April down at 21 Clinton Street. Those of you who've had the misfortune of stumbling on the original 7th Avenue Cocoa Bar in Park Slope might know what this arrival heralds. Dave Matthew's Crash Into Me blaring through shitty speakers, a barista with dreadlocks and a kerchief (signed by Trey, if you're lucky) indolently doling out lattes with a malicious I-went-to-Skidmore glint in her eye. In the corner, meanwhile, two mothers passive aggressively share baby stories while their tots systematically pour coffee on the laptops of the other customers. A boob comes out, an infant suckles. Hello, reverse suburbanification. Brooklyn is winning the game.
One of the more interesting autochthonic New York species is trustafarian skate rat. You know him from shops like Supreme where he congregates on the pavement in groups of five or six. Feet tucked into a pair of marshmallow-like collector Nikes, scrawny arms swimming in the sleeves of a $90 t-shirt. Perhaps best in show in this category is Aaron "A-Ron: The Downtown Don" Bondaroff, the original 30-year-old LES hipster. But the lot of Bondaroff isn't an easy one. Bondaroff used to be a cool for hire. As new clubs were popping up in the LES, they'd call A-Ron to lend his credibility to the venture. Like Robert Johnson, he sold his soul, traded his street cred for drink tickets and now he wants both back. As the Post's Maureen Callahan notes, it may be too late for all that now.
Yet another life-shattering item we somehow missed early this week! (Can someone explain why this was buried in the bottom of a real estate column?) Anyway! We already knew that Madonna and the Lower East Side have plenty of things in common. Both love leotards. Both love to dance. Both trade on their at-this-point dubious Judaism. But we did not know it was only a matter of time before the pop star and the neighborhood joined forces.
Top Chef season 2 contestant Sam Talbot, the Jonathan Rhys Meyers of culinary reality TV, is coming to the Lower East Side. The gentle giant is slated to open a beer 'n' burger place at 101 Rivington called Spitzer's Corner. Ostensibly an homage to the very same immigrant-run garment store it's replacing (Spitzer's Dress Shop), we have it on good word (that word being our gut) that Talbot is sucking up to new Governor (and by extension State Liquor Authority guru) Eliot Spitzer. I wouldn't put it past him. That man is a charmer. Remember when he banged Padma Lakshmi on the Kenmore Kitchen Pro? Wait, that didn't happen. Happily, Talbot, who is teaming up with the Fat Baby guys, won't need an expensive dishwasher. His abs will do just fine.
The Bowery Hotel is, gasp, on the Bowery. Down there, apparently, the close proximity of poverty and luxury raises some hairy questions. One of the questions it probably doesn't raise is the one Denny Lee chooses to ask in the Times: "So what if you might have to step over a few vestigial bums to get there?" Yeah, so what? Also enjoyable is Lee's characterization of Midtown as a "glassy city on a hill" while the East Village resembles "a dim valley of grimy walkups." On the bright side, better the hotel be in Travel than the much more widely-read-by-jerkfaces Styles section. That way, that vestigial bum might have a few more moments slumber before the onslaught of city-on-a-hill transplants flood the lobby.
As anyone who eats and/or lives below 14th street knows, today at 8:00 a.m. the Whole Foods Bowery will throw open its doors to the unwashed masses desirous of fresh produce and hoity-toity foodstuffs in aisles stretching toward infinity. Many predict a foodie riot when the doors open, as residents who have waited years, YEARS, for the opening clamor for a taste . I'm suiting up in my flak vest, and yuppie fatigues to check out the scene. Expect live updates via Blackberry, (stk is sld out, womn gves birth! LOL) after the jump!
The Village Voice's food scribe Nina Lalli recently bemoaned the sheer meanness of the servers at Chef Iacopo Falai's Lower East Side bakery Falai Panetteria. As per Lalli, the service isn't only "scattered or overwhelmed or forgetful, but in our experience, the servers have been more than unfriendly. They've been a little scary." General consensus, both in our office and in other reviews, is: NO DOY.
With the Whole Foods Industrial Complex set to open March 29th on Houston and Bowery, a paroxysm of speculation has surrounded the area. Will it have a Fresh & Wild salad bar? (Yes) Will it have an Italian Osteria? (Yes, Rustica Minardi). Whither goest the 8 dollar yogurts of Gracefully? But perhaps most pressingly, what's the deal with the illustrations of racial stereotypes on the windows?
Sad news from Curbed:
The Style.com video library just keeps getting better! After chronicling the Tinz and co. on Halloween, they've now moved on to the socialites of the Lower East Side, the MisShapes. They've filmed Geordon and Leigh "Princess Coldstare" Lezark (or Lezard, if you're Vogue) waxing nostalgic about the early days of their empire ("Three years ago we threw this New Year's party. It was kind of a joke—we didn't want to go out") and the legions of partygoers who have paraded in front of the infamous white wall ("People come dressed to the nines. People come in a tank top. To us, there's no difference").
