Save Subway Inn

As we recently heard, Subway Inn, the beloved dive bar by Bloomingdale's since 1937, has been given the ax by the building's new owner, World-Wide Real Estate Group. The building is scheduled to be demolished, possibly along with its iconic neon sign, for luxury condos. As of now, they're being forced out by August 20.

But Subway Inn is not going down without a fight. They've started a petition and an Indiegogo campaign to help pay for lawyers.



"Save Subway Inn! For our Neighborhood and our Family," reads the Indiegogo page. "We believe that New York City is about more than rich investors gobbling up small family businesses to make a quick buck thereby destroying the integrity of the Upper East Side of Manhattan. For more than 40 years -- the ENTIRE Salinas family has poured its heart and soul into this neighborhood landmark."

"We call on lawmakers and concerned New Yorkers to STAND UP to these actions, and to stop World-Wide Real Estate from destroying our home by ripping it away from those who helped build this city -- and who would never be able to afford the multi-million dollar condos that they are planning to put in place of a neighborhood treasure."

Please sign the petition, consider a donation, and pass the word. Watch the story of the Subway Inn and Salinas family here:



If you would like to make a plea to the source, the CEO of the World Wide real estate group, the new owner of Subway Inn, is Victor Elmaleh. His corporate contact information is:

World Wide Holdings Corp.
150 East 58th Street
New York, NY 10022
212-500-7217

Chumley's Door

The collapsed and (almost) resurrected Chumley's just got a piece of its old self back. The front door was re-installed just yesterday.


yesterday

The door looks to be the original antique, albeit with a new green paint job.


photo: Paul Rush NYC walks

A peek inside the building revealed that the work is coming along slowly. The fireplace is in place, but otherwise it still looks like a hollow cinderblock, not yet the warm and cluttered old joint that collapsed in 2007.

The guy supervising the work didn't know when it would reopen. These days, the new neighbors are trying to stop Chumley's from coming back, saying they don't want the noise from this historic literary landmark.

Maybe the new Chumley's can "86" all the loudmouths and keep the place as peaceful as it used to be:



P.S. The back door has also been re-installed--you can see it through the wide-open windows of the opulent, high-security townhouse next door.

Daily Beast

Journalist and author Tim Teeman just did an interview with me over at The Daily Beast. In "The End of New York," we talk about chain stores, cellphones, suburbanization, hyper-gentrification, and polar bears.  

Read it here.



P.S. You can buy Tim's book, In Bed with Gore Vidal, at Three Lives bookshop in Greenwich Village.

Hair Box Barber Shop

VANISHED

On Spring Street in SoHo, the Hair Box barber shop has closed.



Signs in the window say: "This has been a barber shop for over 100 years and we are sad to see it go," followed by a frowny face emoticon.

Gone are the crazy Styrofoam heads from the window.



Gothamist called Hair Box "The Best Place for a Shave" in 2006, and The New York Times profiled the place in 2010:

"Many businesses in SoHo have come and gone, but 203 Spring Street has housed a barbershop, through several identities and owners, for over 100 years. It has been the Hair Box since 2001, but two of the shop’s three barbers began working there long before that, including Rocco Milano, 79, who had cut hair there for nearly 40 years before having a stroke in September. (He plans to return once he feels up to it.)

Lingering like the combs submerged in dark blue Barbicide is a cast of neighborhood old-timers who sit inside, watching the weather forecast, or outside in lawn chairs chained to a post, surveying the passing shoppers as if guarding the last section of the old neighborhood."



For now, barbers Irina and Aida will be at Anonymous Hair Salon, over on Sullivan Street. "No worries," they say on their sign, "same price! ;)"

No word about why it closed, but one reader was told "high rent." The owner of the Tasti-D-Lite next door said he will be expanding into the Hair Box space. Goodbye 100-year-old barber shop, hello frozen yogurt.

POV NYC

Janko Puls is a journalist and photographer--and also a reader of this blog. He recently published Point of View New York City, a guessing game of locations. Filled with photos of well-known city places, seen from unusual angles, the book challenges readers to test their knowledge of New York.

On Thursday, August 7, at 6:30pm, Janko will present the book, along with a slide-show, talk, and guessing game, at the Mid-Manhattan branch of the New York Public Library.



Q: What inspired you to do this book?

A: I moved here from Germany in 2006 as a journalist and, driven by curiosity, I wanted to get to know my new home, workplace, and playground. During many city walks with my wife, a born Manhattanite, she commented all the time, "This was here, and that was there." To my surprise, I started singing along with her lamentations within a few months.

Following blogs like yours and E.V. Grieve's raised my attention further to the rapid changes in the city. Seeing these losses happen firsthand sometimes really hurt, and following the blogs was at times too frustrating. I grew up in a city which was founded by the ancient Romans, and on my daily walk to school I passed buildings and city walls from the last 1200 years. So I am appalled and baffled to see how New York is neglecting and destroying so much of its own heritage without even blinking. Yes, great new things are created as well, and this relentless change is one of the huge driving forces of this city, but at times it feels that everything is about the money and not much else.

If the guessing game in the book helps raise attention to what we still have here and what we're losing, the better it is.



Q: What attracts you to little-known parts of the city?

Basically, my curiosity. Wherever I've lived so far, I've always wanted to get the full picture of a city. As a student in Berlin, I spent the first months after my moving there as a messenger to make sure I would see every corner of the city. That was a year before the wall came down, and after that there was so much more to discover.

Here in New York, I ride the MTA or my bicycle and then walk, walk, walk. It is probably impossible to get an all-encompassing knowledge of New York, but you can stretch far beyond your comfort zone.



Q: How has the book been received so far by readers?

A: All reactions have been positive so far. Some have asked already for a follow-up edition. Before I started putting the photos for the actual book together, I played the guessing game with friends and family to feel out what they would recognize. So it turned out to be a bit Manhattan-centric, but that's a beginning.

Many readers start rapidly flipping through the book, only to get stuck on some page, look up the location in the index and start reading the back stories. After three or four minutes, they usually look up smiling, and saying something like "Oh, that will take me a bit if time to see the whole book, but I am looking forward to it."

Q: What can people expect from the Aug 7 event at the NYPL?

A: I'll play the guessing game with you, for sure! I'd also like to introduce the underlying concept of "Point of View New York City" and its different functions--as a photo book, as an interactive game, as a very selective, very personal city guide. Last but not least, I'd like to try to inspire people to wander around with open eyes and to map their own city.



You can follow Janko and POV NYC on Facebook. Until August 7, you can find his photos of the city for sale at Bar & Lounge Verlaine, 110 Rivington St.

The Dog

On Sunday, I had a piece published in The Daily News on a new documentary called The Dog, about the real guy behind Dog Day Afternoon. You can read it here in the paper.



The unedited, original version of my essay--including a few more details--is here:

On a sultry day in August, 1972, John Wojtowicz tried to rob a bank in Brooklyn. He needed the money for his transgender wife’s sex reassignment surgery. He failed. He did succeed, however, in entertaining and titillating the entire city, becoming an “only in New York” cult figure, and getting immortalized by Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon. Wojtowicz gave the movie money to his wife, she got her surgery, and he went to prison—where he styled himself as a Gay Liberation icon.

“I’m like Babe Ruth, but the gay Babe Ruth,” says Wojtowicz in The Dog, a riveting 100-minute documentary about one man’s unconventional life.

After earning high praise on the festival circuit, The Dog, co-directed by Allison Berg and Frank Keraudren, opens in New York on August 8 at IFC Center and Lincoln Center. Packed with old-school outer-borough characters and rare archival footage from the lost gritty city, the film’s arrival in today’s squeaky-clean New York is a rollicking reminder of when life was less orderly.

“Things were looser then,” says Berg. “It was a messier time. Today it feels like we’re in one big sanitized city. We loved getting back to the fast-talking, street-hustling dirty New York. It was full of characters you just don’t have today.”

Characters like John’s first wife, Carmen Bifulco, and his prison wife, George Heath. Liz Eden, the reason for the robbery, is here in grainy archival interviews, a lithe, beautiful boy who transitions into a striking woman. There’s the captivating Terry, John’s elderly mother, an Italian-American spitfire. And, of course, there’s The Dog himself—charismatic, controlling, and unabashedly foul-mouthed.

Says Keraudren, “John’s like if you took all of Scorsese’s characters and rolled them into one. But he’s also gay.”

Wojtowicz was a Stonewall-era fighter for LGBT rights. With the Gay Activists Alliance, he participated in the first gay marriage protest at City Hall. Then he held people hostage at gunpoint, because his wife was suicidal and only surgery would save her. Through all his seemingly conflicting words and actions, what emerges is a fascinating story of a complex character who fell somewhere between hero and loser, sane and crazy, good and bad.

Bob Kappstatter, reporting for The Daily News, was on the scene at the robbery. He recalls meeting a twitchy Wojtowicz face to face, with NYPD sniper rifles pointing at them. The robber was impatient—and sweaty. The police had turned off the air conditioning in the bank and the hostages suffered.

“The hostages liked him,” recalls George Heath. “They realized he wasn’t a criminal criminal. He gave them all money.”

Was Wojtowicz the heroic figure he longed to be? Kappstatter calls him “a person with a strong ego, passion, and a flair for screwing up his and others’ lives.” Heath says, “John was a hero in his own way. He saved someone’s life. He did what he felt needed to be done.”

As filmmakers, Berg and Keraudren try not to choose sides. “You’re not there to judge,” Keraudren explains. “On a good day, John was great. On a bad day, he was sociopathic.”

“We had complicated feelings about him,” says Berg. “He was a once-in-a-lifetime character. He also drove us up the wall.” The filmmakers followed Wojtowicz for a decade, until his death from cancer in 2006. He also followed them, calling at all hours of the night and showing up on doorsteps. “Once you were in John’s world,” says Berg, “he wanted you there all the time.”

Maybe that’s what ultimately drove Wojtowicz’s actions—an obsessive need, call it a doggedness, to keep people in his world, all the time.



In addition, a photography show accompanies the film. It opens tomorrow. 

From the press release: "On Wednesday, August 6th at 7:00pm the Film Society of Lincoln Center's The Furman Gallery at the Walter Reade Theater will premiere photos taken by Marcia Resnick of The Dog himself, John Wojtowicz, the inspiration for Al Pacino's character in Dog Day Afternoon, at his most candid in the 1970's. The exhibit will stay up until August 15th."

Tap Jam

In my latest essay for Metro NY, I venture down into Smalls jazz club for the Wednesday night Tap Jam:



On a recent summer night I wandered past Smalls jazz club on West 10th Street in the Village. The Maine Coon cat reclining on the doorstep caught my attention, and the chalkboard announcement of “Tap Jam” held it. The cat is called Minnow and the Tap Jam is not to be missed.

On Wednesday nights, from 6:00 until 9:00 p.m., the basement club fills up with dancers. Dressed casually in shorts and t-shirts, baseball caps, and summer dresses, they are an unassuming group. No sequins, no bugle beads. No ramrod dancer’s posture or louche way of walking. On the street, you wouldn’t notice them. Then they put on their tap shoes.

Michela Marino Lerman, the host of the jam and tap dancer extraordinaire, calls out a name and asks, “You got your shoes on?” ...

Read the rest of the essay here