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April 13, 2006
Euwwwww. There will be no Prague Spring in the East Village if residents of East 4th Street have their way. Pulling every string and trick in the CB playbook, they are waging quite a campaign to prevent the success of block newcomer EU, an oddly named (given the graphics and logo imply the name is ‘Soviet Bloc’) eatery being billed as a ‘gastropub’ -- which I take to mean ‘a place the serves food and alcohol’. And they say the East Village has lost its edge. Initially, the arrayed forces hoped to stop them cold, but have had to settle for what is being touted by the proprietors as a temporary ban on alcohol sales, making it, for the time being, a ‘gastro’.
The residents have good cause to be suspicious. Both Le Souk and No.1 Chinese, just around the corner on Avenue B, started life as restaurants, and still serve food (which, based on my experience tops out at mediocre), before morphing into whatever it is they are now. I can’t claim to know precisely, not having been in either in some time, but I do know that they both draw crowds, hordes even, of loud, drunk and endlessly obnoxious patrons. You know the type -- being screechy and sloppy seems to be the only validation they have that socializing has occurred. The is nothing about situation that is charming or cool or interesting; the entire scene is redolent of what are the worst elements of nightlife here: honking cabs, people imported from other areas, states or countries, who seem to think their embarrassing behavior provides us with the necessary local color. Unlike a place like il Bagatto, around the corner on 2nd Street, they cannot claim to have been any sort of neighborhood fixture or transformative business, ushering in a new era of safety or conviviality. If anything, the preceding five years on Avenue B were safer, quieter and more interesting. The advent of EU, brought to the world by AvroKO, which fancies itself a category-busting high-concept outfit (think The Apartment, but with less pink), is not likely as crass an effort as the angry locals are painting it. But even if they aren’t seeking to fill another 50 feet of East Village sidewalk with velvet rope and kids from Metuchen that doesn’t mean there isn’t a credible point about noise and crowd control. The Frank empire outpost that directly preceded No. 1 Chinese was Supper, just down the block from il Bagatto. Supper has excellent food, but the scene there in warmer months is pretty officious, the sidewalk packed with people drinking and smoking, waiting for poorly scheduled reservations, or suckers for the ’15 minutes’ scam that induces the drinking of pricey house wine.I’m a fan of al fresco dining (and drinking, even more) as much as the next person, but side street sidewalk seating or waiting simply shouldn’t be allowed in many areas. Or, at least, there should be a reasonable minimum required of sidewalk space. Struggling to get past early evening revelers waving wine glasses and cigarettes while humping home bags of groceries meant more than once throwing a shoulder to the rude and oblivious in front of Supper. The folks are 4th Street fear more of the same. Why does this tiff look so petty and ridiculous? Any time you introduce the words ‘neighborhood activist’ you induce some eye rolling. Mix that with mealy-mouthed club owners who claim it isn’t their fault the people they just spent all night selling alcohol decide to shriek at cabs and each other on the way out, and blend it all with a confused hierarchy of licensing (the Community Boards get to recommend, but the state has the final say), and the result is the foolish spectacle of the police being called into police the dream of high quality BYOB food in the EV rather than addressing the persistent offense drunks only a block away. There is a good, market driven solution to all this: restrict business types to side streets with minimum sidewalk width. It’s not a logical regulation -- a restaurant doesn’t need more sidewalk than a laundry -- but most zoning is a retrospectively capricious process. Since most side streets are narrow, it pushes eating and drinking establishments to avenues, and has the attendant effect of driving down rents, preventing owners from squatting on empty space in hopes of gouging a bar. A friend was recently complaining about line of shuttered storefronts on lower Avenue B. I pointed out it was likely that property owners were asking rents that couldn’t be sustained by retail shops, and the alcohol licensing mess made opening a eatery a dicey proposition (something the folks at AvroKO know well now). But wouldn’t such a regulation eliminate the possibility of such storied EV locations like Le Tableau, il Bagatto, Old Devil Moon, and my long lost favorite, Les Amis et Les Deux Lapins (don't believe the hype about the new location)? Yes and no. Restrictions on sidewalk seating and wall penetrations (EU has both a street service window and can be fully open air) will condition the restaurant type. After all, no one is complaining about Lavagna.
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April 5, 2006
Disinterwha? This site is mostly referred to as an architecture blog. That’s what I say most of the time as well. Occasionally I will refer people to the tagline that falls at the bottom of the page and maunder for a while about figures like William Whyte or Jimmy Breslin, and here assiduously work to avoid the overuse of terms that run to jargon (though I don’t work as hard as anything resembling concision, even as I am reprimanded time and again).
Anyhoo, this blog is supposed to be about is the intersection of the impermanent (lives and events) and the semi-permanent (buildings and institutions), and how they interrelate, and create meaning through that intersection [insert de Certeau-inflected PoMo cultural studies hoo hah]. The challenge is finding some of that life. Since the worst possible blog post is some variant of why I’ve been not, an excuse or promise to the contrary, the recent dormancy has been a more opaque reflection of a relatively flat existence, impermanance-wise. Usually I can get around this by commenting on something newsworthy and plenty of found or remembered knowledge. Lately, even that has been rough, and the delimits of a professional services flunky have been driven home by two absurd instances, one personal, the other somewhat wider, of disintermediation. Disintermediation is a term that means something like the Internet was supposed to make it cheaper and easier for us to buy porn and cheetos in our underwear. And that has certainly worked out. I know I'm misusing the term, but the series of absurd prefixes strung together seems an apropos way to describe some of the stranger effects resulting from the insertion of a screen between us and the world, one that is now almost completely pervasive (phones, handhelds, cars, elevators, etc). A few weeks back, I was working when the usual cacophony of honking horns, squawking walkie-phones and sirens took on a more urgent note (it’s been rumored that adjacent building has gas supply problems, so I tend to be more vigilant about sirens). I looked around, and it seems the fire trucks were closing in on my block from every direction. Even this isn’t atypical, but after another dozen minutes of blaring horns and sirens, I looked again. Sure enough, a small but dense cloud of dark smoke was rising what appeared to be about a block away. I went to the roof, saw it was a little further off. So what did I do? Well, I checked the Internet. Not that I expected NY1 to carry this obviously big story, but given the number of bloggers in the neighborhood, it wouldn't be unheard of if the fire were being covered real-time. It wasn’t, and I went back to work, craning my neck occasionally to see if anything more exciting happened. Since it wasn’t in the direction I normally walk, I watched the news for a day or two to see if it was an almost noteworthy event. But here’s the twisted part: I was curious enough about it for two days to check news sites more than once, but never actually walked the two blocks to see where and what it was. Now, there’s no clear evidence of where it was. Then, last week, there was the sad tale of the Rivington Street synagogue remains. Seems someone tried to cart off a portion that may or may not have been destined for scrap (a stone Star of David inset). Being a sizable object or simply ineffectual thieves, it was dropped a few blocks off. And there it lay. For days. Long enough to get a Flickr pool and two different blogs to start lively comment threads about desecration of religious symbols -- including at least one call for someone to rescue this possibly sacred artifact. Follow me for a second: two blogs, a dozen people calling for protection of the site and its remnants and a series of photos documenting the theft, many of them living within walking distance, and it might still be laying there. It’s not like we’re talking Buddhist monuments in Pakistan. It is sort of the Kitty Genovese of preservation. But I hope somebody does something about it. Or calls someone. The ur-text of this is a story told by a communications professor about the first video camera he owned. Certain that it would drastically change our perceptions of reality, he lugged around one of those two-component, twenty pound bastards for something like two years, and claimed to have done everything with it. Including driving. And getting in a car accident. The moment when he realized he had fully disintermediated himself was his response to the driver he had just rear-ended: “But I couldn’t have hit you. I zoomed out.”There is the irony of even bothering to establish a blog about living in the city, since it only serves to diminish the moments left for actually that. I guess my rationalization is if I can’t justify the ten minutes I need to walk three blocks to see if the neighborhood is burning down, I can steal a hair less to say I couldn’t be bothered.And if you are wondering if this is just the most elaborate post ever crafted to say, um, I’ve been busy, well, that too. I could have simply written a post that said a somewhere a developer was proposing a shitty, overpriced condo and that Ground Zero is a calcified orgy of ineptitude, but that would have been too easy.