Save Our Supermarket

Neighborhood supermarkets are dropping like flies all over the city, pushed out by rising rents. Here goes another.

The Associated Supermarket on 14th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues is being forced to close by a 500%+ rent increase from its landlord, Pan Am Equities.

Councilmember Corey Johnson and a bunch of other folks will be protesting this Sunday, March 13, at 1:30 pm. They say:

"This supermarket is an important source of affordable groceries for the residents of Chelsea and Greenwich Village. Join us on Sunday as we call on the landlord to negotiate in good faith and preserve a vital source of affordable groceries."

Ghost Sign Gone

You may recall, back in 2008 or 2009, a building on 8th Avenue between 46th and 47th came down and revealed a fantastic ghost sign.

Rooms with steam heat, housekeeping, hot and cold water. Superimposed over a cigar box. A beauty.



Then another building came down, and a new building went up, the Hotel RIU Plaza. The tower was set back far enough that it did not cover the ghost sign.

Still, how long could it last? Would the powers that be really let the sacred tourists look out from their gleaming windows of the RIU Plaza at a gorgeously scuzzy antique like this?

No.



On a recent visit to Times Square, I found the ghost sign has been wiped out. Buffed. Whitewashed. Destroyed beneath a thick coat of gray paint.

Gone.



In this city, nothing old is allowed to stay.

Get Angry

If you're on Facebook, you know about the new "reactions," a set of emojis you can choose to react to a post. Instead of just "like," you can now express: Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, and Angry. You can probably guess that this is all about collecting emotional data for the purpose of advertising. But it also provides data to the individual user about how readers are reacting to their posts.

And that confirmed something I've long suspected about the emotional state of New Yorkers--at least the ones who follow Vanishing New York.



Last week, we experienced a number of losses in the city, especially in the East Village. Trash & Vaudeville left St. Mark's Place. St. Mark's Bookshop shuttered for good. The Stage restaurant announced it would not reopen. I posted the news on my Facebook page and people reacted. While the majority still used the old "like" button, many others opted for an emoji.

How do people feel about these closures? Most feel sad. And not enough feel angry.

Reacting to the news of The Stage vanishing, 22 people chose Angry while 43 chose Sad. For the closing of 69 Bayard in Chinatown, 15 were angry while 26 were sad. For Trash & Vaudeville, 80 were angry and 148 were sad. For each post, it seems that twice as many people choose sad instead of angry.

And that's not good.



While sadness is certainly a natural reaction to loss, the emotion often comes with resignation and hopelessness. It can collapse on itself, coupling with a sense of futility, and may lead to apathy. Sadness does not move anyone to take action. Sadness curls into a ball. Or it sits on the couch, clicks buttons, eats snacks, and says, "What's the point?"

Anger, on the other hand, is energizing. It helps people to move, to fight, to stand up and say "No!" Anger can lead to action and creativity. Anger can lead to positive change.

While I understand the despair and its attendant feelings of powerlessness--I feel it, too--this city needs angry people. But every time I post news of a closure, I watch the Sad faces multiply twice as fast as the Angry faces.

I suspect that you feel more sad than angry because you think that all these losses are inevitable, part of the natural cycle of normal urban change. Listen: These losses are not inevitable and they are not natural. They are the direct result of decades of public policy. And policy can be changed--but only angry people can change them.

We can act up against the homogenization of our city. We can act up against hyper-gentrification. We can act up against rising rents and evictions. It is not futile. We are not powerless. But you're going to have to get angry. You're going to have to muster something better than a sad face.



Go to #SaveNYC and Take Action. Send a letter. Start a group. Organize an event, a protest, a rally. Make public art. Even simpler: Just talk about what's happening in a different way.

This is important. Stop saying "it's sad." Stop saying "New York is always changing." I'm sick of hearing that one. While there is of course truth in that statement, it is being used to disempower you and distract you from the truth. While we're on the topic, you are not "just being nostalgic." You are watching a city die. It is a global pandemic. It is real. And it has been engineered by the people in power. Doesn't that piss you off?

We have to change the discourse around this or we will not have a city tomorrow. At the very least, shift your emotions. An emotional shift can take us in a different direction. Get angry. Then tell your friends and families and coworkers that you're angry. Tell them that these changes are not natural. Tell them you're not just being nostalgic. And tell them what can be done to save the city.

Let New York see your angry face. It's now or never.

Moving Out Trash & Vaudeville

Before the corpse could get cold this week, movers have already started emptying out the recently shuttered Trash & Vaudeville.



The legendary punk shop closed this past Sunday. It is moving to a smaller space on 7th Street.

According to the Times, owner Ray Goodman "decided to relocate because of the rent, which had risen to $45,000, and because the street, once synonymous with punk culture, 'became a food court,' he said."

If The Gap and 7-Eleven and the 9 million Japanese restaurants and fro-yo joints didn't kill the iconoclastic soul of St. Mark's, well, the loss of Trash & Vaudeville has got to be the final nail in the coffin. (What's left to lose? St. Mark's Comics, Grassroots...)



The Trash & Vaudeville movers moved quickly.

Out went alien heads, framed Ramones posters, and Doc Martens boot stands. Boxes, crates, and lots of hot-pink bags.

A crowd of mannequins, still dressed in their Blondie t-shirts and chaos pants, lay stacked together in the moving truck, awaiting their new home. They looked like the former denizens of St. Mark's Place, their style no longer fitting for the street's new clientele. They should be wearing NYU sweatshirts and UGGs.



The upstairs of the shop is now empty, a hollow shell of white walls in need of a thorough spackling.

And that shadowy downstairs window, once a beacon to punks both young and past their prime, has lost its lightning-boltish TRASH neon sign, its spiked bracelets, and creeper shoes. I must have walked past it a hundred thousand times, looking to it for solace in the twenty-first century night.

The vitrine now holds nothing but a layer of pink netting and faux fur. Trash & Vaudeville has left the building.



And the building has been sold for $11.9 million. What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

My guess: A high-end, shopping mall clothing chain--the shape of St. Mark's to come. Or else another karaoke bar.

The Stage

VANISHED

After being forced to close after the Second Avenue explosion, after fighting eviction from their landlord, Icon Realty, and crowdfunding for support, The Stage just announced they will not be reopening. On Facebook they write:

"Today we officially close our doors....As overwhelmingly unfortunate as it is, it's always important to look on the bright side of things. Time to say goodbye to yesterday and hello to tomorrow."



Last night, their metal gates were open, causing some of us to hope for a reopening. Robert Brenner took a photo and wrote on his Facebook page:

"Saw the gate up at the Stage Restaurant after being shuttered for months and got hopeful. But my source tells me the landlord was just changing the locks. The landlord has doubled the rent and wants the Stage out of there one way or another."

And it's another heartbreaking loss for the East Village. #SaveNYC.


photo: Robert Brenner

Stage owner Roman adds the following message via Facebook:

Dear wonderful and loyal customers, fans, friends, and neighbors,

It is with bittersweet emotions that we at Stage Restaurant are announcing that we are closing our doors permanently after 35 amazing years. The events of the year have been overwhelmingly devastating on us and we have decided to close the Stage’s door.

Over the past year, we have resolved our dispute with the landlord and Icon Realty Management. Stage Restaurant never engaged in any wrongdoing; however, after our prolonged closure and because of the cost to make the repairs and expenses of reopening, we are sad to say that the Stage cannot reopen.

It has been our great honor and pleasure to serve and truly be a part of the community over the past 35 years. We are so grateful to all who have made the experience of running this restaurant in such a vibrant, and supportive area of this great city a remarkable and unforgettable journey for us. We will greatly miss our staff, many of which have put as much care and effort into the business as our family has. We would like to thank all of the customers we have had the pleasure of meeting for your business and friendships. Thank you all for your support, your signatures, your donations, and especially your kind words. We could not have realized our passion and love for nourishing and providing a place of comfort and gathering to the community without you all. Your loyalty, support, kindness and love have been a true blessing, and something we will never forget. Thank you all from the bottom of our hearts.

Roman Diakun


And here's how one angry local expressed their feelings about the closure today -- via E.V. Grieve -- a notice taped to the door that reads "Closed by order of a money grubbing landlord and real estate development scum."

The Chelsea Stone

The Chelsea Stone
Restoring St. Peter’s Chelsea

Guest post by Romy Ashby



One of my favorite neighborhood places is St. Peter’s, the pretty old stone church on West 20th between 8th and 9th Avenues where it has stood since 1837.

It has a wonderful history, and I love the sight of it on misty nights when the tower all but disappears, leaving just the glowing clock. In nice weather I like to sit on the steps in the evening and read a book. Sometimes the mysterious black-and-white churchyard cat emerges from the shadows, at the magic hour before dusk, to examine the glass bowls set out for her at the side of the rectory. That’s a moment when I can feel flooded with quiet love for New York, and all feels right in that little corner of the world.

I love the interior as much as the outside of the church--the original pews with their little doors and latches, the Tiffany windows, the wooden balconies, the two magnificent organs, both built by prominent local organ builders of the day, Henry Erben and the Roosevelt Organ Company.

The church bell in the tower was made locally as well, by the F.A. Allaire ironworks company, and the original mechanism that turned all four clock faces at once, made by Seth Thomas, is still in place, although the clock now works on a computer. Reverend Stephen Harding, the interim pastor of St. Peter’s, has climbed up into the old tower to make little videos and then posted them on YouTube so all the world can see its marvelous secrets.

Pastor Harding is one of eight FDNY chaplains, and he personifies the welcoming kindness of the church itself. When he first came in 2013, he saw how bad the old church was feeling, with some of the symptoms hazardous. “The plaster underneath the balcony started to crack in a significant way, and the ceiling in the corners of the church were starting to fall,” he told me. “So I said to the vestry, ‘We have to do something, whether it’s fix the plaster so that it doesn’t drop on anybody and kill them, or fix the piers. It doesn’t matter. But we have to start.’ The vestry approved the hiring of William Stivale, who had done the work on our bell tower in 1990 and actually saved it, because it was about to fall apart.” Now that the four piers have been safely restored, the original tin roof of 1837 is about to be replaced.

“St. Peter’s has a pitched roof,” Pastor Harding explained, “and underneath the roof there’s an attic, and then there is the church ceiling with a catwalk over it. So when we’re in the church and we look up, we see the church ceiling, which is actually suspended from the roof. The worst-case scenario would be the plaster getting wet and then drying, adding an enormous amount of weight to the load the roof is holding, and then falling.”

The other vital project getting underway is the repointing of the stones--made of Manhattan Schist from Spuyten Duyvil--which means scraping out the old mortar and replacing it so that the stones don’t shift. Pastor Harding said he hopes that a high school or college group looking for a project might take on the restoration of the Henry Erben organ under supervision. “It’s a mechanical instrument, which means there’s no electricity in it,” he said. “You push here and something happens over there. It’s the one that Clement Moore played when he played the organ at St. Peter’s.”

Almost everything about the old church needs restoring or repair, and the same goes for the rectory next door. A little over two million dollars has already been raised so far, and Pastor Harding has said another thirteen million is needed.



Sometimes I volunteer in the church rectory, doing whatever task is at hand, and recently I’ve been going through old papers forgotten for decades in the time capsule of an old file cabinet. I’ve found all kinds of interesting things jumbled together there.

Beautifully printed 19th-century bulletins, flyers and newsletters from the ‘60s and early ‘70s announcing fights against evictions in Chelsea, anti-war events, a feminist costume ball, a theatrical performance called “Shades of Lavender” benefiting an early gay rights discussion group, and a demonstration planned before the Brazilian Consulate on Fifth Avenue to demand the release of Judith Malina, Julian Beck, and other members of the Living Theatre from prison in Brazil.



I found receipts from 1959 and 1960 for every imaginable church expense. For incense from the Ave Maria shop at 11 Barclay Street, hymnals from the Church Hymnal Corporation at 20 Exchange Place, furniture from the Lehigh Chair Company at 106 Duane Street, sheet music for William Byrd’s “O Magnum Mysterium” from H.W. Gray at 159 E 48th Street, letterhead from the Speed-O-Lite Offset Corporation at 121 W. 17th Street.





Beanies from Magnus Craft Materials at 108 Franklin Street, deposit slips from the Chelsea National Bank, and receipts for palm leaves sent over from the Kervan Company at 119 West 28th Street, where a huge new Hilton Hotel now stands. There were too many to list. In 1960, everything was bought and mostly made locally. I felt a pang looking at all this tangible evidence of the kind of self-sufficiency being championed by Jane Jacobs at that time.





Not long ago, on my way to the rectory, I stopped into a clearing-out sale at La Lunchonette, the charming little restaurant on 10th Avenue and 18th Street there since 1988. It closed recently, not because the owners wanted to close, but for the now unremarkable reason that the landlord had sold the building to a developer. It will be demolished along with several others--including two little ones on 18th Street once photographed by Berenice Abbott--to make way for a new condo building. I bought a few glasses, just to have something to remember it by, and left feeling terribly sad that La Lunchonette and the pretty buildings of that corner will no longer exist. Sometimes living in New York can feel like being in a state of perpetual mourning.

I asked Pastor Harding if he too notices how much of the city is disappearing. “Yes,” he said. “And it seems overnight. I grew up in the city in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and I’ve been living here since 1980 as an adult. And some days I walk in Manhattan and I think I’m in a theme park.” One of his reasons for taking on this huge project to restore the church building is so that St. Peter’s can once again be a force for good in the neighborhood. “We aren’t just making a museum out of it,” he said. “Our mission for the next four and a half years is to connect with our neighbors and the neighborhood.”

One of his ideas for how to raise money was to create the Adopt a Stone from St. Peter’s Campaign, where one can adopt a stone for $25, $50 or $100, and take stewardship of preserving an actual part of the church. Shortly after he told me about the idea, I excavated from the old filing cabinet a fragile collection of letters, papers and clippings. A printed sheet entitled “The Chelsea Stone,” dated “Advent—A.D. 1936,” caught my eye, announcing that a fragment of stone from the Chelsea Old Church on the Thames in London had been brought to New York and set in a wall of St. Peter’s (where it is today). The occasion was written about in the New York Sun. Then I read a letter dated October 23, 1946, sent to the rector of St. Peter’s from the incumbent of Chelsea Old Church in London, which was destroyed by bombing in 1941. “Its quiet beauty and charm, and its great historical interest drew many thousands of visitors to it before the war,” he wrote, “including many from the USA.” A decision had been made to rebuild the church, and what he wrote next I found particularly moving:

“We understand that the Government, through the War Damage Commission, will contribute largely to the cost of rebuilding, but it seems clear that a considerable sum of money will have to be raised by us, over and above whatever we may receive from this source. Historical and sentimental ties bind together your parish and ours, which the piece of stone from our Old Church, built into the fabric of yours, is a symbol: and it is on these grounds, as well as on those of the many strong bonds between the peoples of the USA and of Britain, that I am venturing to write this exploratory letter to enquire whether you feel that the people of your Chelsea would be willing to assist the people of ours to rebuild our famous and beloved Old Church.”



As part of a historic district, St. Peter’s Chelsea is landmarked. But such a designation doesn’t come with funds or guarantees. It may be safe right now from a fate like that of some of the churches demolished in recent years to make way for condo buildings, but were it to crumble, anything could happen. The only sure way to guarantee St. Peter’s safety and longevity is to restore it to health, and we hope that many people will be willing to assist in rebuilding our own famous and beloved old church. As Pastor Harding put it, “Our footprint is one of the only connections that exists to Clement Clarke Moore’s apple orchard. Here’s something you can do to keep this link to Clement Moore’s Chelsea alive,” he offered: “Help us preserve St. Peter’s by adopting a stone. Your participation in this campaign will help us repoint the walls of the church and keep it standing.”

To adopt a stone, visit the contributions page on the St. Peter’s Chelsea website or text xmaschurch to 50155. If you would like to make a larger contribution please contact Fr. Harding at sharding@stpeterschelsea.org.



Romy Ashby is the author of several books, most recently Stink. She also writes the blog Walkers in the City. You can find her at her website, RomyAshby.com.

Old 42nd Street

Starting in 1992, a group called The New 42nd Street began redeveloping historic theaters along the Deuce, making them safe for the new suburbanized, tourist-centered Times Square.



Anyway, they recently hung a banner along a portion of the street showing how it looked in 1987.

The panoramic photo comes from Battman Studios and includes the marquees of the Victory, the Lyric, the Times Square, the Apollo, and the Selwyn, along with the little shops in between. The effect is staggering, thrilling, and slightly disorienting.



The people of 2016 walk past the old Deuce, hurrying along. They look like time travelers, bent over iPhones, unaware they've gone back.

The people of 1987 appear to be a different breed of New Yorkers. No tourists. They all look up, alert and aware. They stand around. They've come to this block for porn or hot dogs or martial arts weaponry, to hustle and get hustled. To be surprised. They are not here for Applebee's.



The past and present collide. If you're like me, you'll want to slip inside the old world with its crummy marquees, its porn-theater glow, its grimy sidewalk--and, oh, the Grand Luncheonette!

That one might make you cry. I almost did, standing there, gazing in through its greasy windows, remembering.

(Remember when the Selwyn collapsed? Remember its ghost sign? "Cooped up? Feelin' low? Enjoy a movie today!" Does the new Times Square even imagine that a person might be feeling low? No low feelings allowed here.)

I have a recurring dream in which I travel back to the city of the past, most often to Times Square, with a digital camera. This banner is a bit of a dream come true.



The "New 42nd" has some information printed on the banner's end. It says, "Gone is the blighted, hostile 42nd Street landscape of 1987. Today, this legendary street at the Crossroads of the World is once more a vibrant destination for New Yorkers and visitors alike."

"Vibrant" is in the eye of the beholder. And the only reason a New Yorker might have to venture to 42nd Street today is to see this banner, to stand alongside it, and pretend that the dead has come back to life.

But, really, don't miss this.