Mitchell's Neon Returns

There's good news for the vintage neon Mitchell's Liquors sign on the Upper West Side. After reporting earlier this month that the sign was removed, to be junked, I heard earlier this week that it would be returned.

Stephen wrote in: "I thought you'd appreciate that it appears the neon sign will be returning. They have remodeled both the inside and the facade and there are definitely new holes placed where neon tubes should go. Can't wait to see it completed!"

He sent in the following photo of the new sign in progress:



I also heard from William, who wrote: "I passed Mitchell's Wine and Liquor today and the neon sign seems to be going back up! I saw the letters on the ground and they were drilling new holes in the facade to mount them. I also spoke with the workers who said it was, in fact, being reinstalled."

And behold!

West Side Rag shares the following shot of the new sign--a replica of the old. And Rob writes in, "The new sign is maybe not as elegant, and I haven’t seen it lit, but it sure looks good."

Mitchell's Neon

A reader writes in to let us know that Mitchell's Wines & Liquors on West 86th has lost its antique neon sign--or is in the process of losing it.



"Losing" is not the right word. The owners have decided to remove it and replace it with something new. Perhaps a lovely sheet of plastic?



It's a gorgeous neon sign, dating back to the 1940s.

Sounds like they almost "lost" it a few years ago, too. But it remained.



Our tipster, Mr. E., says, "If only owners could see the value in the history of these signs as icons and how the distinctive designs set them apart from the competition, perhaps we could begin the trend towards preserving them."

He and some friends are "working on salvaging what we can, but its home on that store seems finito."

UPDATE: Reader Janice sends in a photo of the damage, as of today:

Lee's Art Shop

VANISHING

After 65 years in business, Lee's Art Shop on West 57th Street is closing sometime in the next four to six weeks.


from Lee's Art Shop

The building was purchased in 2013 by real estate investor Joseph Safdieh of Safka Holdings, after which he proceeded to sue the owners, David Steinberg and Jill Isaacs, according to The Real Deal, "for refusing to further extend the due diligence period on the property despite several outstanding issues relating to its certificate of occupancy."

That deal fell through--and Thor's Joe Sitt got in on the action. Safka then sued Thor.

Through all the fighting over the property, Lee's stayed open.


photo: NY Times

Steinberg and Isaacs are the children of Gilbert Steinberg, who died in 2008. With his wife, Ruth, Steinberg bought the original store in 1951 and moved it to this building in 1975. They purchased the building 20 years later.

"The building would likely be transformed into a high-end retail box," industry pros told The Real Deal three years ago. The distinctive structure was built in 1897 and is known as the Society House of the American Society of Civil Engineers. It was once home to a Schrafft’s restaurant. And it is landmarked.

Lee's is beloved across the city. "It never fails," wrote the Times in 2012. "You go into Lee’s Art Shop, half a block from Carnegie Hall, as a customer — usually for something prosaic like a couple of Pilot Razor Points from their amazing 215-slot pen rack — and leave wishing you were an artist."

The shop is currently having a major liquidation sale, with deals up to 75% off.

Bway and 88th in 1970

Some time ago I came upon this black and white film taken in 1971 (or, more likely, 1970) from a traffic island on Broadway near 88th Street. It was filmed by Nicholas West.



It's in slightly slow motion, so it feels underwaterish. Nothing much happens. People walk across the street or they sit and watch the traffic. Cars go by. The neon sign of the New Yorker cinema blinks off and then on again. On the marquee, a double bill: Pudovkin's "The End of St. Petersburg" with Hani's "Bwana Toshi," subject of a lukewarm 1970 review in the Times.

Wrote the reviewer, "In its emotional density and its cool compansion [sic], Hani's eroticism seems a good deal more humane than his humanism. It is also, of course, more erotic."

There is nothing apparently erotic about Broadway and 88th Street in the winter of--not 1971--but 1970. It is, however, loaded with humanity.

Art Brut on Hudson

Up along the Hudson River Greenway, somewhere around Harlem, if you're going on foot or by bicycle and you're paying attention, you'll find some odd pieces of art.



Gathered from the detritus that washes up from the Hudson, they don't seem to be commissioned and have no sense of permanence.



They're built from driftwood, sticks, chunks of rope and floating bits, Styrofoam and lengths of corrugated tubing.



I wonder who made them and why. I wonder how long they'll last before they're washed and blown away, and if their creator will make something new in their place once they're gone.

A man named Tom Loback used to make them. He said there were other artists, too. From the Times:

"Mr. Loback said he does not have his open-air gallery to himself, noting that there are other artists who make something out of logs and tree branches gathered along the riverbank. He calls them El Ropo and Doodad because one’s signature element is rope binding the wood together, and the other’s distinctive touch is some little plastic object atop the sculpture. Mr. Loback said he does not know who El Ropo and Doodad are, though he suspects he has met them along the riverbank."

Here's Tom's work on video.

Barbara Gee Danskin

VANISHING

The Barbara Gee Danskin shop on Broadway at 82nd Street is closing. They've been in business since 1975.


photo: Elizabeth Shelton

Reader Elizabeth Shelton sent in the news, along with a video interview of their salesman Mike for #SaveNYC.

He says the shop is closing for "economic reasons--rent and everything else that goes along with it."

3 Star Coffee Shop

Recently, I was disappointed to read about the shuttering of the Upper West Side's 3 Star Coffee Shop.



On her Tumblr blog, Raven Snook took a photo of the papered-over windows and noted: "Apparently, 3 Star Coffee Shop went out with a whimper in February when it failed to reopen after being closed down for a third time by the Health Department due to violations."

West Side Rag went inside for a look at the trashed interior.



Located at Columbus and 86th, across from a Starbucks, next to a Chase bank, and down the block from new luxury condo 101 W. 87, the modestly named 3 Star (why not 4 or 5?) Coffee Shop had that look of something that could not last.

3 Star had an A rating at the time of its closure. Do city agencies like the health department target these old joints, especially when they're located on desirable corners? It often makes me wonder.



Most of the reviewers on Yelp loved this place, citing it as one of the last old-school coffee shops left in the neighborhood.

3 Star's shuttered storefront means one more for a stretch filled with long-shuttered businesses. As West Side Rag noted, "The south half of the block is now almost entirely shuttered, except for one remaining dry cleaners. The Olympic deli on the North corner is also closed, but is seeking a new tenant. Some of the businesses have been empty for years, and they don’t seem like they’re looking aggressively for new tenants."

All in the same building. We have to wonder if the landlord is holding out for a block-long chain to move in.

Ding Dong Lounge

VANISHING

The Ding Dong Lounge, a 21st-century dive bar up by Columbia, is closing.

Ding Dong DJ Linda Rizzo writes in: "The Ding has lost its lease. Victim to landlord greed, avarice, and douchebaggery. The Ding Dong Lounge at 929 Columbus Avenue will close its doors (hopefully only until a new location is found) on Thursday, July 31. It was a real pioneer being a rock & roll dive bar/music venue above 14th Street, and one with nary a television."


photo: Linda Rizzo

Opened by Bill Nolan, former owner of Motor City Bar (also just vanished), the Ding Dong got started in 2001, so not a very long time ago, but it gained a reputation. Gothamist called it "dirty in all the right places," a "blissfully local" "cheap dive with oodles of personality that is almost never filled (and certainly never with Columbia kids)."

The Village Voice named it the Best Cheap Manhattan Dive New York 2013. They described it: "There is not a single television set. The bathrooms are—well, the place has bathrooms. There's usually a DJ who likes classic punk and new wave."

In 2002, the Times credited the bar with helping to revitalize the neighborhood. And you know what that means. Said Nolan at the time, "I think this neighborhood has real potential, especially for entrepreneurs. There aren't many places left in this city where you can be the first of anything. I just need some more adventurers."

There's just one week left to check out the Ding Dong before it joins the rest of dirty, cheap New York--under the boot heels of the latest adventurous entrepreneurs. Linda will be spinning tonight and on 7/30, when, she says, "to quote Parliament, I will ‘tear the roof off the sucker.'"

Crafts on Columbus

For the past 34 years, a popular arts and crafts fair called Crafts on Columbus has thrived in a choice spot along Columbus Avenue between 77th and 81st Streets. For six weekends each year, white tents line Theodore Roosevelt Park. This coming weekend, however, is slated to be their last. Their permit expires this month and Community Board 7 denied a renewal.



Peter Salwen, artist and author of Upper West Side Story: A History and Guide, has started a petition to save the fair. It has over 1,450 signatures so far.

He calls the fair one of the great cultural features of the neighborhood. “In 1980,” he says, when the fair began, “the Upper West Side was a dangerous place. The fair contributed substantially to changing the area’s character. Now the artists are being attacked, as they were in SoHo and other parts of town, pushed out by the financiers.”


Peter Salwen's paintings

It’s unclear who exactly is responsible for the fair’s demise. Long-time fairgoer Pat Joseph says, “It’s just two crazy people on the Board with a lot of power. They want it gone for some strange reason. But who gets rid of something so good?”

It is difficult to make sense of it. In a city where so many cookie-cutter street fairs routinely commandeer the avenues, hawking the same tired wares in between mozzarepas and bouncy castles, Crafts on Columbus is a genteel operation. It’s the place to go when you need a gift for your Aunt Myrna, who loves a brooch made of antique wristwatch parts; or your mother, who looks fabulous in a hand-painted silk scarf; or your nephew, the newly minted psychotherapist, who needs art for his first office. Simply put, they’ve got nice Upper West Sidey stuff.



Opponents of the fair have argued that the vendors sell “junk,” but there are no two-for-one tube socks here, no t-shirts upon which Borat gives the thumbs-up and says “Sexy Time.”

Opponents claim that the fair overcrowds the sidewalk, but the entire length of it spans the backside of the Museum of Natural History, impeding not a single business nor residence. Meanwhile, Shake Shack across the avenue hosts a daily scrum of burger fanatics, jamming a residential sidewalk year round.

Opponents say the fair is noisy and that it hurts the businesses across Columbus. But the yuppies and white-haired ladies who peruse the handbags and cardamom-ginger soaps don’t make much of a peep. As for the businesses across the way, from the boutiques to the delis, they say the fair brings more customers into their stores (I asked them).

So what is this really about?


Simon Gaon with painting of a friend

Simon Gaon, artist, founder of the fair, and executive director of the American Arts and Crafts Alliance, blames local political maneuvering and a kind of Upper West cabal. “A few people over on 81st Street,” he says, “have ganged up with the farmer’s market.”

On Sundays year round, the 79th Street Greenmarket occupies this same desirable length of Columbus. On the six Sundays when Crafts on Columbus is here, the Greenmarket moves to a schoolyard on 77th Street. “They’re inconvenienced,” says Gaon. “That’s what this is about.” But Michael Hurwitz, director of the Greenmarket Program, told me: “Greenmarket has not been involved in any of the discussions concerning the Craft Fair permit.”

Since a greenmarket also brings crowding, noise, and commerce, this does seem to be an issue of changing tastes. When Community Board 7 wrote their resolution to deny the craft fair’s license (pdf), they clearly stated a preference for the Greenmarket, calling it “extremely popular with residents,” and citing its occasional displacement to a “smaller and less visible space” as the number one disadvantage of the fair.

Gaon has offered a compromise, proposing to cut the fair back from six weekends a year to just two, for Mother’s Day. “I thought that was a reasonable offer,” he says, “but the Community Board said the decision is final. They never gave us a hearing. We weren’t even invited to the meeting. They did this under the darkness of night.”

In 1979, when Gaon started planning the fair, he was a struggling artist. “I was second-generation welfare,” he says. “I didn’t go to college. I wasn’t articulate.” His therapist thought the fair could be a good way to make an independent living while helping other artists in the process. Three decades later, Gaon looks back and says, “This fair made me into a man. It gave me empowerment.”

When the fair shuts down after next weekend, a hundred artists and artisans—many of them local--will lose a place for making a living and finding empowerment in community. In our urban foodie culture, where buzzwords like “grass-fed beef” and “foraged greens” send fashion-conscious crowds clamoring for the next trend, farmers carry more cachet than artists.

Next May, instead of a nice hand-painted scarf, mothers across the Upper West Side will be getting handfuls of ramps.


But there's still hope:

• Sign the petition here.
• Tonight at 6:00, Councilmember Helen Rosenthal will put the craft fair's case before Community Board 7. Please attend--at the David Rubenstein Atrium, Broadway between West 62nd and West 63rd Streets.

Gotham Food

Reader Mitch writes in: "News is that the Gotham Deli -- Columbus Ave between 72nd & 73rd Street (East Side of Street) -- will be closing due to a rent hike. The Starbucks located next door will be expanding into the deli's space."



Gotham is just a little deli, a place for sandwiches, but it's been there a long time and people in the neighborhood like the place. Do we really need more of Starbucks?