Suspenders

Founded by a group of firefighters, Suspenders Bar & Restaurant opened on lower Broadway in the Financial District in 1988. Tonight is their last night.


photo: Midtown Lunch

Reader Kevin Corrigan wrote in with the news: "Before I even sat down, I heard one of the bartenders saying, 'Yeah, tomorrow might be the last day.' I ordered a Guinness and overheard a few other things like, 'Are you going to move to another location?' I heard a waitress say, 'It's just too emotional for me right now.'"

The Tribeca Trib reported the story earlier this month, writing that the pub's landlord, Capital Investments, refused to negotiate the lease or give an extension. June 1 was the closing date given, but I called the bar to confirm and tonight is the end for Suspenders. They'll stay open until midnight, as long as they get a crowd.


photo: Kevin Corrigan

After 9/11, Suspenders became a place for first responders to take a break, find community, and forget the pit for a little while. "We were firemen before we were restaurant owners," co-owner Bill Ahearn told the Tribeca Trib, explaining how the place stayed open through the post-9/11 days. The pub's website describes it as "a de facto emotional safe haven...forever rooting itself in New York City history."

So, in the same week that the 9/11 museum opens, with its gift shop filled with commemorative cheese plates of death, a place run by firefighters that served the neighborhood and the people who did the recovery work at Ground Zero just can't get a break in the new New York.


photo: Kevin Corrigan

The owners of Suspenders hope to find a new location in the neighborhood. Follow their Facebook page for updates.

Fucking FroYo

Someone has started a Twitter feed and a Tumblr page called "Now It's a Fucking FroYo Place."

"Tracking New York's downfall," one froyo place at a time, the site puts together Google Streetview images of city locations before and after they were taken over by frozen yogurt shops.



"It was a photo shop," reads one entry, "and now it’s a fucking fro-yo place!" "It was a local bar," reads another, "and now it’s a fucking fro-yo place!" "It was a bodega...and now it’s a fucking fro-yo place!"

You get the gist. To quote from Manhattan, "It's pithy yet degenerate."

The lost places aren't all winners, but that's not the point. The point is that the streets of the city are being taken over by monoculture--chain stores, banks, condos--and the froyo place has come to exemplify a certain strain of this banality, one that is multiplying like a virus.

So here's to "Fucking FroYo," keep up the good work!

Olympic Diner & Jade Fountain

On Delancey and Essex, the Olympic diner has been in business for nearly 35 years. They'll be closing soon.



The mega-development known as Essex Crossing is coming, massive glass boxes filled with upscale retail, condos, a glitzy Warhol Museum, and some affordable housing.

From the website: "Essex Crossing will feature a compelling array of restaurant, retail, entertainment, and office space highlighted by The Market Line... a continuous three-block shopping experience."



Most of Essex Crossing will rise on parking lots, but here and there, some people and their businesses will need to be removed. The original Essex Market will be demolished, its vendors given a prime new space inside the development. (However, we hear the vendors' rents might go up, so who knows how that will actually shake out.)

The Olympic is also in the way. I asked if they were getting a new space inside the glass box to come and was told, simply, "No."

A young woman waiting for her order overheard this and chimed in, "That's not right. This is the best place to eat around here." It is a good place to eat. A regular old coffee shop, with cheap food and friendly service, it's one of a dying breed.



The Olympic has been on a month-to-month lease for some time. They're not sure when they'll close exactly. Maybe in July or August.

And we have to assume that, with this building coming down, we will also lose the neighboring Jade Fountain liquor store, locally famous for their sign that proclaims "AS OLD AS HILLS." How old? "Since 1920," according to the sign, "over 80 years old," which is most likely a vast exaggeration.



Jade Fountain is a gritty little spot, covered with graffiti inside and out.

There's a man who often stands outside, asking ingoing customers to buy him a half-pint of Georgi vodka, which he then quickly empties, tossing the empty bottle over the fence and into the parking lot next door. Piled up around the weedy ailanthus, among the litter of broken glass, are dozens of his bottles, a sort of accidental art installation. Sort of.



I tried to ask the Jade Fountain lady when they're closing or if they'll be getting a space inside Essex Crossing, but she only made an impatient sound through the Byzantine construction of bullet-proof Plexiglas and waved me away after I paid for my booze.

So we're left to guess that, like the Olympic, Jade Fountain won't have a place among the artisan bread and cupcake shops, the Prada and Pastis that fill the architect's renderings of the new shopping mall to come. When it's all done, Delancey will be a very different place.

Mars & Micheline

With Mars Bar gone and vanished, replaced by the "Jupiter 21" luxury building and now a TD Bank, along with a new bar coming that will serve organic juices and quinoa, I've said what I had to say about its considerable significance in the neighborhood. On a more personal note, for me the place will also be indelibly linked to Beat poet Jack Micheline. He introduced me to it when I was young and still new to the East Village.

For what it's worth, I include here my journal entry about that night, my first time at Mars Bar--when I didn't even know the name of the place. It was exactly 20 years ago.


Jack at Mars, photo: Ellen Lynn

May 16, 1994

Last night I ran around the East Village with Jack Micheline. I met him up at Harris’ bookstore and we went out for coffee. We walked up and down the streets, stopping in bookshops and bars. He smoked Camels, unfiltered, one after the other, coughing and farting. We went into a bar somewhere around 1st Street.

We smoked and talked. He told me about Franz Kline, “Larry” Ferlinghetti, Janis Joplin, Allen Ginsberg, and an ex-girlfriend of his who was cruel and mean. Later he found out she’d been college roommates with the woman who shot Andy Warhol.

A song came on the jukebox by a woman Jack knows. Her band is called Nice Undies. He said he gave them a song he had written for Janis Joplin, but “Janis was into this heavy lesbian relationship at the time and it’s a real hetero song.” So Nice Undies got it.

Jack told me about the time he was "shit-drunk" with Bukowski. Jack pulled out a toilet plunger and kissed it. He said it blew Buk’s mind. Jack told him, “If you can’t kiss a toilet plunger, then you can’t be a great poet.”


Jack at Mars, photo: Ellen Lynn

Later, alone, I retraced our steps back to Mars Bar (which I now thought was spelled "Marz" because of the way the name was painted on the side at the time) and eventually took friends to the place. I also spent more time with Jack.

In my journal I wrote:

"Jack came in and sat on my couch and chain-smoked Navy Cuts. The cockroaches were crawling on the walls. He'd just been to his art show with Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg. He told me more about his days with Janis Joplin, getting drunk with her. 'She was just a person,' he said, 'a regular person. She was a good kid.' He explained how uncomfortable she was offstage, with her low self-esteem, and about all her lovers. One woman, he told me, wrote a book called Going Down on Janis, which was all about what it says it's about and, according to Jack, 'terrible.' I lent him my harmonica for his show. He played a few tunes, then we went to Kiev."


my last drink at Mars Bar

In these journal entries and others, I was so young and excited to be in the East Village, hanging out with poets. There are all these scenes--being kissed by Allen Ginsberg, drinking beer at the Cedar Tavern with Anne Waldman, Ed Sanders, and Joanne Kyger (who amazed me by eating sugar straight from the packet with her fingertip).

There are all these meals (at Kiev and the Jones Diner) and drinks (at the Telephone Bar and back at Mars Bar again) and trips to bookshops like Tompkins Square Books and Harris Books (does anyone remember Harris Books on the second floor?).

Twenty years later, all those places are gone. The East Village is no longer a bohemian space. Mars Bar just opened as a TD Bank. Jack's gone, too. He died in 1998, alone on the BART train out of San Francisco. I never did get my harmonica back, but it doesn't matter.


Previously:
The Loss of Mars
Blue & Cream on Mars
Before Mars Bar
Remembering Kiev

Mars Bar to TD Bank

This weekend, the East Village celebrated the Grand Opening of another TD Bank -- on the sacred ground that once held Mars Bar.



With free coffee and cookies, games to play and raffles to win, the energetic TD Bank people flanked the sidewalk in suits and ties, accompanied by a green-faced, wedge-shaped mascot who waved his mitts and thrust his pelvis in a delirious attempt to attract new recruits. It's all part of TD's aggressive expansion throughout the city.

"Win prizes!" the bank people called as East Villagers walked by, some of them stopping for cookies. "Take a chance! You know you want to!"

Inside, a bored-looking DJ in a TD Bank polo shirt played watered-down versions of 1980s punk and New Wave classics.



If you stand on the spot where the long wooden bar used to be -- at the front by the windows where the sunlight used to ooze in through smeared and graffiti-covered glass -- if you stand there, with your back against the ghost of the bar, and look out at what had been the Mars Bar view, you will be faced with a phalanx of ATMs.

Three clones in a row, extruded from some multinational design, with their bellies full of bills, like slot machines they wait for their buttons to be pressed.

No one is telling stories or cracking jokes. No one is slapping art on the walls. And the yeasty smell of beer has been replaced by new carpets, slowly off-gassing their volatile organic compounds.


Vivienne Gucwa, flickr

El Quijote

Updated post: A reliable source is letting us know we should go to El Quijote very soon. In the interest of protecting the source's source, I've been asked not to say more at this time, and to delete the details previously shared in this post.



All I've agreed to say is this: El Quijote has been in the Chelsea Hotel since 1930. It hasn't changed much since, and if you'd like to experience it as it's always been, go have a good, affordable meal while you still can. Changes are coming.

Update: My information has now been confirmed via Eater.

Times Square to East Village: 1986

In the summer of 1986, downtown videographer Nelson Sullivan filmed a group of drag queens on a walk from Times Square to the East Village. At some point, they run into RuPaul. And a shirtless guy in velvet pants with a large boombox on his shoulder.

The streets, compared to today's throng, are practically empty. Ice cream cones are had at the dearly missed Howard Johnson's.

RuPaul drifts down Avenue A in angel wings made of shredded paper, making a crunching noise in boots made of plastic grocery bags.

These are not your fresh and clean drag queens of today.