An inviting block; on screen and off
Our Town downtown
July 31, 2006
Sunlight sprays down on to Morton Street from 7th Avenue on a clear morning. It disappears at the entrance to Morton, where Morton meets Bedford. From Hudson to Bleecker, Morton Street is shaped like an extended arm, bent slightly at the elbow. And if you walk slowly from Bedford to Hudson, it’s easy to see the building facades on either side scrolling by like the surface of a curved wall.
There is not a shop in sight, just trees, bikes, people and cars. With the exception of a young woman yakking on her cell phone, walking briskly, it is remarkably quiet here, especially considering that Hudson’s to the west and 7th’s to the east.
Some of the first floor windows are filled in with unusual dressing – a snowman blanket with an American flag draped over it are inside of number 42. And a torso sculpture that’s been separated like a shell, in front of a shade, inside of number 45. A bookcase is visible, just to the side. It’s not all that hard to imagine why people here might want to shield their living spaces from view. There are too many idyllic blocks in Manhattan, let alone the Village, to declare one The Perfect Street, or the Most Desirable Address, but Morton, between Bedford and Hudson is definitely up there. It would be tempting to just walk up to a door, walk inside a building and call it home for oh, say, the rest of your life.
Buying Here
54 Morton is under contract to be sold, according to David Allouch, a Senior Associate at The Corcoran Group. The asking price is $4.5 million.
The only other property sale since 2005 was a one bedroom in 65 Morton, which sold for $499,000. (Maintenance is $684.) Otherwise, most of what’s available now, is “further West,” he says.
Renting Here
At the low end, there are studios in the $1700-1800 dollar range in 55 Morton. 44A, a 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom townhouse (with two wood-burning fireplaces), goes for $10,000 a month.
Amenities
Food and Drink
On Hudson: Barrow’s Pub; Golden Rule Wines & Liquor; Alexandra (American); Out of the Kitchen! (American/Coffee/Sandwiches); Ray’s Deli; Tutto Bene Pizza; Henrietta Hudson Bar & Girl (Lesbian); EN (Japanese); The Candy Café (American, takeout); Setacci (Italian) (italics)
On Bedford: Taverna (Greek)
On Bedford between Morton and Commerce: Casa (Brazilian)
Groceries
On Hudson: Hudson Grocery
On Morton between Bedford and 7th: Hercules Fancy Grocery
Education
On Hudson: Matrix Global Academy (hair styling)
On Hudson and Clarkson: City-As-School High School
Dry Cleaners
On Hudson: Hudson Dry Cleaners
On Bedford: Bedford Street Laundry
On Bedford between Morton and Commerce: RS.
Clothing
On Hudson: Disco Lemonade (children)
Health and Wellness
On Hudson: Printing House Fitness & Racquet Club; P. Roth Acupuncture
Florist
On Hudson: Magnolia
Other
On Hudson: David’s Shoe & Watch Repair; Zoomies (pet accessories).
Who lives here:
“Italian and Irish holdouts,” live in the “Old Law tenements [that] interrupt the street,” according to the “AIA Guide to New York City.” “[They] remind their more affluent neighbors of an earlier, less monied Village.”
Who lived here
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (convicted of treason in 1951, executed in 1953); Novelist Henry Roth; Eda Lou Walton (poet, literary critic, editor, college professor, Roth’s lover); experimental filmmaker Maya Deren; playwright Charles Ludlam; Comedian John Belushi, who was living at 64 Morton when he died.
What happened here
According to the FBI, the Rosenbergs and other Soviet sympathizers ran a “spy den” out of 65 Morton for the purpose of passing atomic secrets to the Russians. President Eisenhower denied them clemency as one of his first acts in office, they were executed, and to many, the case was considered a miscarriage of justice.
Number 66 dates back to 1852 is a popular home for movie characters. It was Harrison Ford’s house in “Working Girl,” Matthew Broderick’s in “The Night We Never Met,” and Winona Ryder’s in “Autumn in New York.”
“Naked City,” a TV show, based on the 1948 movie “The Naked City,” was filmed in number 44, a Greek Revival.
Henry Roth wrote most of “Call it Sleep,” his classic coming-of-age novel about growing up on the Lower East Side, while living with Eda Lou Walton in number 61.
Sources: NY Songlines; “The AIA Guide to New York City;” The Internet Movie Database; American Treasures of the Library of Congress online; tvguide.com; University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law online; The New York Times; The Washington Post; Newsday; Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum online; The New Yorker; Newsweek.
-- Matt Elzweig
Monday, July 31, 2006
Q& A with Mouhebat Sobhani, Bahá’í Activist
Our Town downtown
July 31, 2006
Iranian followers of the Bahá’í faith have been persecuted by the Iranian government since their religion was founded in Iran in 1844, Mouhebat Sobhani says. Sobhani, who works in real estate, is a member of the New York City Bahá’í Center in the East Village. He immigrated to the United States from Tehran in 1963, and has been an American citizen since 1972. For most of the past four decades he has lived in Greenwich Village, and is trying to spread understanding of the Bahá’í principles in the hope that it will serve to improve conditions for Bahá’ís in Iran, where they are a religious minority, and where he says their situation has worsened since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
Recently, Human Rights Watch, The New York Times and other news and human rights organizations reported on discrimination against Bahá’ís in Iran, including arrests, property confiscations, and education and employment restrictions under the administration of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was elected president last year.
According to the Bahá'í International’s Community’s Web site, there are over 5 million Bahá'ís worldwide. Bahá'ís believe that Bahá’u’lláh, a Persian nobleman who gave up his material comforts was a messenger of God. One of the most basic Bahá'í principles is that there is a single, unified human race. Other concepts are a complementary relationship between spirituality and science, an abandonment of prejudice, a unified world government and equality of the sexes.
How were Iranians you knew affected?
From the start of the Iranian revolution, I lost three members of the family. And of course I lost many, many friends in the revolution. Altogether, more than 215 Bahá’ís were executed, and some of them disappeared. We have no news from them.
You say you ‘lost’ them. Were they executed?
Yes.
What were the charges?
The general charges made against many people [were] like “warring with God,” “corruption on earth.”
Is anyone you know still there?
[Yes, many of my cousins and friends are there.] Some of them have been jailed. Their property’s been confiscated. [They were] released on bail. They don’t have anything now.
How do you communicate?
By e-mail, by phone. But we have to be careful of course – what we say, what we write.
What specific types of discrimination do Bahá’ís face in Iran?
Well right now … since [the] revolution, Bahá’ís are not allowed to go to universities or get their diplomas from high school. They cannot have a government job … Usually, many of them, they don’t work in their field. They try to get by by buying, selling [things], or trying to get [a] job in [the] private sector.
Khatami, Iran’s last president was labeled a reformer by the mainstream media in the U.S. Were things the same under his rule as they are under Ahmadinejad’s?
Basically, it hasn’t changed that much because Khatami tried to give a lighter picture of the Islamic government, but he had no power to implement his ideas.
Did he genuinely want to reform the country?
[He was] genuine, but not according to Islam, because he was trying to use the Western philosophy.
The clerics overpowered him?
You should remember that in the world of Islam there are 1,400,000,000 Muslims and the Shias, which [are] the majority population of Iran – they are [only about 10] percent of the population of the Muslim world … Sunnis [are in the world majority] and they do not consider the Shia as the real Muslims because the problem started after [the] prophet Muhummad died, and [has persisted].
[And now, Ahmadinejad] basically represents a small Muslim community in Iran, which has not represented more than 10 percent of the population. This group is called the Hojatieh. They were organized originally to combat the Bahá’ís.
Why don’t people know about the Hojatieh?
At the beginning of the revolution, they had [some problems] with the Ayatollah Khomenei, so they weren’t very visible.
Do you think that Ahmadinejad will get the things he wants for Iran?
I don’t think he will, as for … Israel, the Jewish community. I don’t think [there] will be a new holocaust because even in Iran and in Arab countries, [the great] majority of people, they will not buy what he is trying to sell, because people in the world have realized that mankind is becoming very united and very close through mass communication, satellite and traveling.
Do you believe this or are these your hopes? Are you being idealistic?
No, because I’m in touch with many of my Muslim friends in Iran – which [are] the young people … They are 75 percent of the population. And [they are] thinking [in] the same way as the Americans or Europeans, or people from South America. I think the president of Iran, Mr. Ahmadinejad, he should travel more and stay more outside of Iran and get a fresh [breath] of air, and [study the] the religions of people around the world.
There are some Jews and Christians in the Iranian parliament ,who hold minority seats. What are they thinking?
But you know, the fact is … the Jews, the Christians, the Bahá’í, the Zoroastrians (which was the religion before Islam), they’ve been living together for centuries. The problem [began] with these religious fundamentalist leaders.
All the minorities have same problem, even the Sunnis. They are discriminated against too. [Bahá’ís have it the worst.]
How is that?
One of the reasons that they don’t like the Bahá’ís [is] that [the Shia] believe Mohammed is the last prophet, and therefore there will not be any new religion. So when the Bahá’í faith started in 1844, the clergy and the government, they started to persecute, and [they] executed the [founder] of [Bahá’í]. We consider [the founder] to be the 12th Imam – that [the Shia] are waiting for. [So our existence threatens their legitimacy.] They say that we’re trying to close their shop.
Do you think the fundamentalists are sincere in their beliefs?
[It’s] basically [about] power and money. Of course many of these people are not happy with themselves. They cannot manage a family, let alone a country.
What’ s your take on the unfolding crisis in Lebanon and Israel?
I think people are sick and tired of fighting over there and I know many of my Arab friends and Jewish friends, they want to live together [in] peace, with friendship. Of course you’ve got to remember that for a long time, Lebanon was considered the Switzerland of the Middle East. [It had] great universities and places to see historically, but the last 30, 40 years, what happened from outside, basically, the Shias and Palestinians [who came to Lebanon from the outside] – they have not contributed to the progress and prosperity of [Lebanon].
The real thing [is] the Iranian government miscalculated. They thought they were going to start this thing and Arab world was going to stand up [with them]. But the Arabs don’t like the Persians, historically. There are more Muslims in Haifa than any other part of Israel, and the Jews and the Muslims there – the Arabs – get along well.
What are you doing to get the word out about the situation for Bahá’ís in Iran?
We’re trying to give the message to our non-Bahá’í friends who don’t know about the [principles] of the faith. All they’ve been told by some of the fundamentalists is that we don’t believe in God and we are agents of Zionists or imperialism, which is not true. [We are] talking [to people] all over the world.
[Over the] past 12 years, we’ve printed more than 500,000 of [my booklet, which is a compilation of the original Bahá’í writings].
[And] after the revolution, hundreds of thousands of our fellow Persian countrymen [have] been helping the Bahá’ís anyway they can because they learned the truth about the Bahá’í faith. We are very thankful.
Even, I tried to give Mr. Ahmadinejad one of [my] booklets when he came here last year [to the United Nations]. I delivered three in English and Persian [to] Dr. Zarif’s house [for] President Ahmadinejad. Dr. Zarif is [Iran’s] ambassador to the United Nations. I hope Dr. Zarif was able to give it to the president, that he was able to read it. He was on his way back to Iran [and] I figured he’d have time to read it on the plane. I gave him three copies in English and three copies in Persian. In Persian, it’s four times as long.
Has he responded?
No. I hope I get something. If [Zarif] gave it to him, I’d be very curious to get an answer, but what kind of an answer I don’t know because many of the things in the booklet refer to things he’s saying. I’d like to get his reaction, his comments.
-- Matt Elzweig
July 31, 2006
Iranian followers of the Bahá’í faith have been persecuted by the Iranian government since their religion was founded in Iran in 1844, Mouhebat Sobhani says. Sobhani, who works in real estate, is a member of the New York City Bahá’í Center in the East Village. He immigrated to the United States from Tehran in 1963, and has been an American citizen since 1972. For most of the past four decades he has lived in Greenwich Village, and is trying to spread understanding of the Bahá’í principles in the hope that it will serve to improve conditions for Bahá’ís in Iran, where they are a religious minority, and where he says their situation has worsened since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
Recently, Human Rights Watch, The New York Times and other news and human rights organizations reported on discrimination against Bahá’ís in Iran, including arrests, property confiscations, and education and employment restrictions under the administration of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was elected president last year.
According to the Bahá'í International’s Community’s Web site, there are over 5 million Bahá'ís worldwide. Bahá'ís believe that Bahá’u’lláh, a Persian nobleman who gave up his material comforts was a messenger of God. One of the most basic Bahá'í principles is that there is a single, unified human race. Other concepts are a complementary relationship between spirituality and science, an abandonment of prejudice, a unified world government and equality of the sexes.
How were Iranians you knew affected?
From the start of the Iranian revolution, I lost three members of the family. And of course I lost many, many friends in the revolution. Altogether, more than 215 Bahá’ís were executed, and some of them disappeared. We have no news from them.
You say you ‘lost’ them. Were they executed?
Yes.
What were the charges?
The general charges made against many people [were] like “warring with God,” “corruption on earth.”
Is anyone you know still there?
[Yes, many of my cousins and friends are there.] Some of them have been jailed. Their property’s been confiscated. [They were] released on bail. They don’t have anything now.
How do you communicate?
By e-mail, by phone. But we have to be careful of course – what we say, what we write.
What specific types of discrimination do Bahá’ís face in Iran?
Well right now … since [the] revolution, Bahá’ís are not allowed to go to universities or get their diplomas from high school. They cannot have a government job … Usually, many of them, they don’t work in their field. They try to get by by buying, selling [things], or trying to get [a] job in [the] private sector.
Khatami, Iran’s last president was labeled a reformer by the mainstream media in the U.S. Were things the same under his rule as they are under Ahmadinejad’s?
Basically, it hasn’t changed that much because Khatami tried to give a lighter picture of the Islamic government, but he had no power to implement his ideas.
Did he genuinely want to reform the country?
[He was] genuine, but not according to Islam, because he was trying to use the Western philosophy.
The clerics overpowered him?
You should remember that in the world of Islam there are 1,400,000,000 Muslims and the Shias, which [are] the majority population of Iran – they are [only about 10] percent of the population of the Muslim world … Sunnis [are in the world majority] and they do not consider the Shia as the real Muslims because the problem started after [the] prophet Muhummad died, and [has persisted].
[And now, Ahmadinejad] basically represents a small Muslim community in Iran, which has not represented more than 10 percent of the population. This group is called the Hojatieh. They were organized originally to combat the Bahá’ís.
Why don’t people know about the Hojatieh?
At the beginning of the revolution, they had [some problems] with the Ayatollah Khomenei, so they weren’t very visible.
Do you think that Ahmadinejad will get the things he wants for Iran?
I don’t think he will, as for … Israel, the Jewish community. I don’t think [there] will be a new holocaust because even in Iran and in Arab countries, [the great] majority of people, they will not buy what he is trying to sell, because people in the world have realized that mankind is becoming very united and very close through mass communication, satellite and traveling.
Do you believe this or are these your hopes? Are you being idealistic?
No, because I’m in touch with many of my Muslim friends in Iran – which [are] the young people … They are 75 percent of the population. And [they are] thinking [in] the same way as the Americans or Europeans, or people from South America. I think the president of Iran, Mr. Ahmadinejad, he should travel more and stay more outside of Iran and get a fresh [breath] of air, and [study the] the religions of people around the world.
There are some Jews and Christians in the Iranian parliament ,who hold minority seats. What are they thinking?
But you know, the fact is … the Jews, the Christians, the Bahá’í, the Zoroastrians (which was the religion before Islam), they’ve been living together for centuries. The problem [began] with these religious fundamentalist leaders.
All the minorities have same problem, even the Sunnis. They are discriminated against too. [Bahá’ís have it the worst.]
How is that?
One of the reasons that they don’t like the Bahá’ís [is] that [the Shia] believe Mohammed is the last prophet, and therefore there will not be any new religion. So when the Bahá’í faith started in 1844, the clergy and the government, they started to persecute, and [they] executed the [founder] of [Bahá’í]. We consider [the founder] to be the 12th Imam – that [the Shia] are waiting for. [So our existence threatens their legitimacy.] They say that we’re trying to close their shop.
Do you think the fundamentalists are sincere in their beliefs?
[It’s] basically [about] power and money. Of course many of these people are not happy with themselves. They cannot manage a family, let alone a country.
What’ s your take on the unfolding crisis in Lebanon and Israel?
I think people are sick and tired of fighting over there and I know many of my Arab friends and Jewish friends, they want to live together [in] peace, with friendship. Of course you’ve got to remember that for a long time, Lebanon was considered the Switzerland of the Middle East. [It had] great universities and places to see historically, but the last 30, 40 years, what happened from outside, basically, the Shias and Palestinians [who came to Lebanon from the outside] – they have not contributed to the progress and prosperity of [Lebanon].
The real thing [is] the Iranian government miscalculated. They thought they were going to start this thing and Arab world was going to stand up [with them]. But the Arabs don’t like the Persians, historically. There are more Muslims in Haifa than any other part of Israel, and the Jews and the Muslims there – the Arabs – get along well.
What are you doing to get the word out about the situation for Bahá’ís in Iran?
We’re trying to give the message to our non-Bahá’í friends who don’t know about the [principles] of the faith. All they’ve been told by some of the fundamentalists is that we don’t believe in God and we are agents of Zionists or imperialism, which is not true. [We are] talking [to people] all over the world.
[Over the] past 12 years, we’ve printed more than 500,000 of [my booklet, which is a compilation of the original Bahá’í writings].
[And] after the revolution, hundreds of thousands of our fellow Persian countrymen [have] been helping the Bahá’ís anyway they can because they learned the truth about the Bahá’í faith. We are very thankful.
Even, I tried to give Mr. Ahmadinejad one of [my] booklets when he came here last year [to the United Nations]. I delivered three in English and Persian [to] Dr. Zarif’s house [for] President Ahmadinejad. Dr. Zarif is [Iran’s] ambassador to the United Nations. I hope Dr. Zarif was able to give it to the president, that he was able to read it. He was on his way back to Iran [and] I figured he’d have time to read it on the plane. I gave him three copies in English and three copies in Persian. In Persian, it’s four times as long.
Has he responded?
No. I hope I get something. If [Zarif] gave it to him, I’d be very curious to get an answer, but what kind of an answer I don’t know because many of the things in the booklet refer to things he’s saying. I’d like to get his reaction, his comments.
-- Matt Elzweig
Monday, July 24, 2006
The Manhattan Project: Gothamist started as an outpost on the Internet. Now it's a worldwide network.
July 24, 2006
Our Town downtown
Before Gothamist.com launched in 2003, Jake Dobkin and Jen Chung were just friends who had met at Columbia, who e-mailed each other Web items about things they were interested in – New York City restaurants, crime stories, odd news, animals.
Today, Gothamist.com, which evolved out of those e-mails, is the flagship site of a network scattered across the country and around the world.
Dobkin spent five years working in the dotcom world after college. His employer had an office in San Francisco and Dobkin spent weeks at a time there each year, so he was able to explore the blog (weblog, for the uninitiated) technologies that were being developed there.
Prior to 2000, blogs were kept primarily by “techies” Dobkin says at Café Borgia II, a coffee shop near his SoHo apartment. Blogger, one of the most widely used blog platforms was created by San Francisco-based Pyra Labs in 1999, according to the company (Blogger’s) Web site. (It was later bought by Google.)
By 2001, the Internet boom was starting to cool, and people like Dobkin and his friends had more downtime at work. “I had more time to sort of screw around online and put up my first blog” Dobkin says. That site was Bluejake.com, a photo blog he still maintains.
Meanwhile, his e-mails with Chung were becoming more and more frequent, and Chung and some of Dobkin’s other friends were visiting his site regularly, sharing their opinions about it with him. He decided to open it up to them by creating a section of the site where they could blog, and a few months later, it became Gothamist. (Dobkin chose the name.)
At first, the site consisted of short news digest posts, and was something that Dobkin, who graduated from business school last year, and Chung, who still works in marketing, were doing in their spare time. Unlike Dobkin, Chung had no idea the Internet was in her professional future. “I didn't have any specific expectations aside from wanting a job [after college]” Chung, who studied economics, says.
Neither of them had bigger plans for the site, and advertising was “not at all” a part of the initial concept.
Chung says that when Gothamist’s popularity first began to grow, they didn’t realize it. Then the e-mails started coming in, the numbers on the site’s traffic meter started to increase, and other sites began linking to them. Readers were making more and more onscreen comments about the articles. “We started to think ‘wow, we’ve hit a nerve’” Chung says, and in March 2004 they started selling ad space.
By the end of the year, they were selling to national brands, and things started to get more serious, Dobkin says. They could begin paying themselves and the writers who freelanced for them.
The content evolved too. Original content – food reviews, interviews, an advice column, and an arts and events section – now makes up about half the offerings, according to Dobkin. “Some sites are nothing but link blogs, but most of the good ones, widely read, do original content.”
People began e-mailing them from other cities to ask if they could set up their own sites, and in 2004, Chicagoist became the first of the –ist cities outside of New York. A friend of Chung and Dobkin’s who moved there from New York set it up as an experiment, and it was successful.
Once they decided to keep growing outside of New York, their “idea [was to] do the biggest cities in the United States and the five or ten ‘World Cities’ internationally” Dobkin says.
The international sites now include London, Paris, Shanghai, and most recently, Sao Paolo. (London was the first.)
With the exception of Shanghai, all of the international sites are in the cities’ native languages, to create the broadest appeal. (In China, the censors are more likely to crack down on Chinese language publications, according to Dobkin.) Tokyo, which will probably be the next international site, will be written in both English and Japanese, if possible.
Chung runs the editorial side of things for New York and manages the top editors in the other cities. She says where the international sites are concerned, “it’s really about the top editors of those cities being totally autonomous.”
Gothamist’s readers are young people who like to go out, and who like to know what’s going on around them, Dobkin says.
Chung says that some cities are “begging for a blog.” These would be cities with a lot of office workers, writers and people with WiFi access.
The Sao Paolo site launched on June 21st. Leandro Pinto, who edits it, wanted to start a blog about his city about a year ago. He found Gothamist online and pitched the idea to Dobkin. “People say Sao Paolo is the city that most resembles New York in South America. I agree with that,” Pinto writes in an e-mail. “We have a very diverse nightlife, art scene, music scene and a very ‘modern’ youth. People from 16-26 are very active on the Internet, like to read/write blogs and Fotologs.”
Chung says a lot of readers are transplants, people who have moved from New York and want to stay current, and sometimes parents whose kids attend college here.
Formerly someone who went straight to the arts section when she opened a newspaper, Chung’s interests have expanded since she started blogging. Reader response is a big part of that. For example, about a year and a half ago, there was a Gothamist article about skywalks (the enclosed hallways that join buildings, midair.) A reader saw it and then sent Chung a draft of a New York skyway study proposal from the 1970s.
Once she is able to devote more of her time to Gothamist she hopes to do a lot of ground level reporting.
Dobkin says that community – the back and forth between readers and bloggers – is the media void that Gotham fills. “Cities can be anonymous places,” Dobkin says. “What we do goes against that. We’re a community and I think we make the city a friendlier place, certainly a more interesting place to live [in.]”
Houstonist launched in November. “[Houston can] seem disconnected because of the sprawl and the commuter culture,” Houstonist editor Jim Parsons writes in an e-mail. He hopes his site will be “able to tap into Houston’s sense of community … by bringing together people who have a wide variety of interests, but share a love of the city.”
Dobkin compares Gothamist to The New York Times to illustrate his point about the community that has developed around it. “[The New York Times is] probably the best paper in the country, amazingly comprehensive, but lacking a personality. People read The Times. They don’t participate in The Times. They do participate in Gothamist.”
“Participation” comes in the form of reader comments, news tips from readers, the links and pictures they submit, and their attendance at Gothamist-sponsored events.
Dobkin says he has made close friends offline through Gothamist, that people have started dating through Gothamist, and that people who meet through the site occasionally end up married to one another.
Chung says that many of the writers are people who made onscreen comments about articles for a long time before contributing their own.
Because blogs can be published and updated in an instant, and because Gothamist’s contributors live all over the city, they can cover the occasional breaking news story with frequent updates. Gothamist did this with the recent transit strike and the Greenpoint warehouse fire, Chung says.
Blogging technology makes factual errors easily correctible, Dobkin says, and in terms of grammar and typos, he doesn’t think readers expect blogs to have the same standards as newspapers.
Gothamist inspired one longtime reader to start his own independent blog, Slice NY. Adam Kuban had wanted to create a media outlet for “rabid pizza fans” like himself, for several years. His original idea was a photocopied ‘zine, but he decided that it would be too difficult to distribute and circulate. When he began reading Gothamist, he realized how he could reach his audience. Kuban liked Chung’s editorial voice, the clean, clear design of the site, and noticed how “active” its community seemed.
“Once you start building a community, you’ll get all sorts of feedback – tips, great articles you missed” he says. “They’re also there to call you out if you give a place a bad review that everyone thinks is good. They can tell you then and there.”
Dobkin expects the –ist network to keep growing. One reason it’s doing so well is that it doesn’t have the same expenses as a company that has to pay for say, an office (Gothamist doesn’t have one), news vans, or other costs traditional media companies have to worry about. He says that revenue has increased “dramatically” in the past year. “And every month, across our network of 16 sites, we do about 4,000 posts. We have about 5 million page views.”
Dobkin would not say how many of those 5 million are from first time viewers (and how many are multiple visits by single readers.) “That’s advertising [information] … but we are profitable.”
Craig Newmark, who started Craig’s List in 1995, reads blogs like Gothamist, the Manhattan User’s Guide, NewYorkology and Flavorpill when he comes to New York.
Newmark says in a telephone interview, that an advantage the information on blogs has is that it comes “without the p.r. or corporate filtering … In the grassroots and blogging world, people are more likely to speak truth to power.” He thinks the “bigger message [is that] “professional and citizen journalism [(i.e. blogging)] are blending together.”
Sometimes, reader comments on what Dobkin refers to as “hot button issues” like “race, class [and] gender” can get out of hand. “Occasionally we have to delete [them].”
Kuban (who started Slice NY after reading Gothamist), has noticed overheated reader responses too, but says they’re “a symptom of [Gothamist’s] success.”
Gothamist will continue to seek out bigger brands to advertise on its sites and more of them, but it won’t touch the firewall that exists between its editorial and advertising sides, Dobkins says. “We get asked all the time about things … close to the wire, and we’ve never done it.” He knows his readers, the community he created, wouldn’t stand for it.
If Gothamist expands to another American city it might be Dallas or Atlanta. Overseas, it’s looking at Sydney and Hong Kong (in addition to Tokyo). Its current ambitions are mostly for the existing sites: more original content, more breaking news.
For Dobkin, a typical work day begins at around 7 a.m. He gets up, reads a deluge of e-mails (he works on MacBook Pro and ThinkPad laptops) and then tries to come up with story ideas. He does this from his apartment, and usually goes out for a lunch meeting. He devotes the afternoon to business matters, and then he writes the last post of the day – a compilation of links that may be of interest to his readers, but which don’t merit a full post of their own. There are usually some more meetings at night, and then it’s time to plan for the next day.
-- Matt Elzweig
Our Town downtown
Before Gothamist.com launched in 2003, Jake Dobkin and Jen Chung were just friends who had met at Columbia, who e-mailed each other Web items about things they were interested in – New York City restaurants, crime stories, odd news, animals.
Today, Gothamist.com, which evolved out of those e-mails, is the flagship site of a network scattered across the country and around the world.
Dobkin spent five years working in the dotcom world after college. His employer had an office in San Francisco and Dobkin spent weeks at a time there each year, so he was able to explore the blog (weblog, for the uninitiated) technologies that were being developed there.
Prior to 2000, blogs were kept primarily by “techies” Dobkin says at Café Borgia II, a coffee shop near his SoHo apartment. Blogger, one of the most widely used blog platforms was created by San Francisco-based Pyra Labs in 1999, according to the company (Blogger’s) Web site. (It was later bought by Google.)
By 2001, the Internet boom was starting to cool, and people like Dobkin and his friends had more downtime at work. “I had more time to sort of screw around online and put up my first blog” Dobkin says. That site was Bluejake.com, a photo blog he still maintains.
Meanwhile, his e-mails with Chung were becoming more and more frequent, and Chung and some of Dobkin’s other friends were visiting his site regularly, sharing their opinions about it with him. He decided to open it up to them by creating a section of the site where they could blog, and a few months later, it became Gothamist. (Dobkin chose the name.)
At first, the site consisted of short news digest posts, and was something that Dobkin, who graduated from business school last year, and Chung, who still works in marketing, were doing in their spare time. Unlike Dobkin, Chung had no idea the Internet was in her professional future. “I didn't have any specific expectations aside from wanting a job [after college]” Chung, who studied economics, says.
Neither of them had bigger plans for the site, and advertising was “not at all” a part of the initial concept.
Chung says that when Gothamist’s popularity first began to grow, they didn’t realize it. Then the e-mails started coming in, the numbers on the site’s traffic meter started to increase, and other sites began linking to them. Readers were making more and more onscreen comments about the articles. “We started to think ‘wow, we’ve hit a nerve’” Chung says, and in March 2004 they started selling ad space.
By the end of the year, they were selling to national brands, and things started to get more serious, Dobkin says. They could begin paying themselves and the writers who freelanced for them.
The content evolved too. Original content – food reviews, interviews, an advice column, and an arts and events section – now makes up about half the offerings, according to Dobkin. “Some sites are nothing but link blogs, but most of the good ones, widely read, do original content.”
People began e-mailing them from other cities to ask if they could set up their own sites, and in 2004, Chicagoist became the first of the –ist cities outside of New York. A friend of Chung and Dobkin’s who moved there from New York set it up as an experiment, and it was successful.
Once they decided to keep growing outside of New York, their “idea [was to] do the biggest cities in the United States and the five or ten ‘World Cities’ internationally” Dobkin says.
The international sites now include London, Paris, Shanghai, and most recently, Sao Paolo. (London was the first.)
With the exception of Shanghai, all of the international sites are in the cities’ native languages, to create the broadest appeal. (In China, the censors are more likely to crack down on Chinese language publications, according to Dobkin.) Tokyo, which will probably be the next international site, will be written in both English and Japanese, if possible.
Chung runs the editorial side of things for New York and manages the top editors in the other cities. She says where the international sites are concerned, “it’s really about the top editors of those cities being totally autonomous.”
Gothamist’s readers are young people who like to go out, and who like to know what’s going on around them, Dobkin says.
Chung says that some cities are “begging for a blog.” These would be cities with a lot of office workers, writers and people with WiFi access.
The Sao Paolo site launched on June 21st. Leandro Pinto, who edits it, wanted to start a blog about his city about a year ago. He found Gothamist online and pitched the idea to Dobkin. “People say Sao Paolo is the city that most resembles New York in South America. I agree with that,” Pinto writes in an e-mail. “We have a very diverse nightlife, art scene, music scene and a very ‘modern’ youth. People from 16-26 are very active on the Internet, like to read/write blogs and Fotologs.”
Chung says a lot of readers are transplants, people who have moved from New York and want to stay current, and sometimes parents whose kids attend college here.
Formerly someone who went straight to the arts section when she opened a newspaper, Chung’s interests have expanded since she started blogging. Reader response is a big part of that. For example, about a year and a half ago, there was a Gothamist article about skywalks (the enclosed hallways that join buildings, midair.) A reader saw it and then sent Chung a draft of a New York skyway study proposal from the 1970s.
Once she is able to devote more of her time to Gothamist she hopes to do a lot of ground level reporting.
Dobkin says that community – the back and forth between readers and bloggers – is the media void that Gotham fills. “Cities can be anonymous places,” Dobkin says. “What we do goes against that. We’re a community and I think we make the city a friendlier place, certainly a more interesting place to live [in.]”
Houstonist launched in November. “[Houston can] seem disconnected because of the sprawl and the commuter culture,” Houstonist editor Jim Parsons writes in an e-mail. He hopes his site will be “able to tap into Houston’s sense of community … by bringing together people who have a wide variety of interests, but share a love of the city.”
Dobkin compares Gothamist to The New York Times to illustrate his point about the community that has developed around it. “[The New York Times is] probably the best paper in the country, amazingly comprehensive, but lacking a personality. People read The Times. They don’t participate in The Times. They do participate in Gothamist.”
“Participation” comes in the form of reader comments, news tips from readers, the links and pictures they submit, and their attendance at Gothamist-sponsored events.
Dobkin says he has made close friends offline through Gothamist, that people have started dating through Gothamist, and that people who meet through the site occasionally end up married to one another.
Chung says that many of the writers are people who made onscreen comments about articles for a long time before contributing their own.
Because blogs can be published and updated in an instant, and because Gothamist’s contributors live all over the city, they can cover the occasional breaking news story with frequent updates. Gothamist did this with the recent transit strike and the Greenpoint warehouse fire, Chung says.
Blogging technology makes factual errors easily correctible, Dobkin says, and in terms of grammar and typos, he doesn’t think readers expect blogs to have the same standards as newspapers.
Gothamist inspired one longtime reader to start his own independent blog, Slice NY. Adam Kuban had wanted to create a media outlet for “rabid pizza fans” like himself, for several years. His original idea was a photocopied ‘zine, but he decided that it would be too difficult to distribute and circulate. When he began reading Gothamist, he realized how he could reach his audience. Kuban liked Chung’s editorial voice, the clean, clear design of the site, and noticed how “active” its community seemed.
“Once you start building a community, you’ll get all sorts of feedback – tips, great articles you missed” he says. “They’re also there to call you out if you give a place a bad review that everyone thinks is good. They can tell you then and there.”
Dobkin expects the –ist network to keep growing. One reason it’s doing so well is that it doesn’t have the same expenses as a company that has to pay for say, an office (Gothamist doesn’t have one), news vans, or other costs traditional media companies have to worry about. He says that revenue has increased “dramatically” in the past year. “And every month, across our network of 16 sites, we do about 4,000 posts. We have about 5 million page views.”
Dobkin would not say how many of those 5 million are from first time viewers (and how many are multiple visits by single readers.) “That’s advertising [information] … but we are profitable.”
Craig Newmark, who started Craig’s List in 1995, reads blogs like Gothamist, the Manhattan User’s Guide, NewYorkology and Flavorpill when he comes to New York.
Newmark says in a telephone interview, that an advantage the information on blogs has is that it comes “without the p.r. or corporate filtering … In the grassroots and blogging world, people are more likely to speak truth to power.” He thinks the “bigger message [is that] “professional and citizen journalism [(i.e. blogging)] are blending together.”
Sometimes, reader comments on what Dobkin refers to as “hot button issues” like “race, class [and] gender” can get out of hand. “Occasionally we have to delete [them].”
Kuban (who started Slice NY after reading Gothamist), has noticed overheated reader responses too, but says they’re “a symptom of [Gothamist’s] success.”
Gothamist will continue to seek out bigger brands to advertise on its sites and more of them, but it won’t touch the firewall that exists between its editorial and advertising sides, Dobkins says. “We get asked all the time about things … close to the wire, and we’ve never done it.” He knows his readers, the community he created, wouldn’t stand for it.
If Gothamist expands to another American city it might be Dallas or Atlanta. Overseas, it’s looking at Sydney and Hong Kong (in addition to Tokyo). Its current ambitions are mostly for the existing sites: more original content, more breaking news.
For Dobkin, a typical work day begins at around 7 a.m. He gets up, reads a deluge of e-mails (he works on MacBook Pro and ThinkPad laptops) and then tries to come up with story ideas. He does this from his apartment, and usually goes out for a lunch meeting. He devotes the afternoon to business matters, and then he writes the last post of the day – a compilation of links that may be of interest to his readers, but which don’t merit a full post of their own. There are usually some more meetings at night, and then it’s time to plan for the next day.
-- Matt Elzweig
Monday, July 17, 2006
Q & A with Sven Lindblad, President and Founder, Lindblad Expeditions
Our Town downtown
July 17, 2006
“[I’ve never] experienced jet lag like this,” Sven Lindblad says. He’s used to shorter flights, and does seem a little groggy in the reception area of his company’s headquarters on Morton Street. He’s just back from a ten-day (“depending on how you count the dateline”) expedition between Fiji and Raratonga, in the Cook Islands.
Lindblad, whose late father, Lars-Eric Lindblad, took the first-ever travel expedition to Antarctica in 1966, has been offering clients a very different kind of travel for almost three decades. This spring, the Charles Darwin Foundation named a newly discovered Galapagos insect in his honor (italics) (Undulambia lindbladi) (italics), and he was recognized at Luxembourg’s Grand-Ducal Palace, for his sustainable tourism work in the Islands.
Not many people can say they’ve had an insect named after them. How does it feel?
I feel very delighted to have anything named after me. It’s not very often a species is discovered. It’s the sentiment behind it, [really]. I said ‘you know, it seems strange you’re giving all these accolades for normal behavior’ [because ] if we’re going to run programs in the Galapagos Islands, why shouldn’t [we] reinvest and support programs that [allow] that place to thrive?
How much time do you spend in New York each year?
Probably 8 months.
Do you ever get claustrophobic here, with your interests in wildlife and open spaces?
No. I’m very much an omnivore when it comes to travel. I mean I need, I love being in wide open spaces as [much] as I can – it’s like vitamins.
What’s the difference between an “expedition” and a trip or vacation?
99 percent of our business is on ships. The main advantage is you can get away from tourism. [I don’t want to degrade anything], but what we want to do is escape tourism, basically. Unfortunately, most of the places people go on vacation are extremely crowded. So for example, probably over 90 percent of the people who go to Baja, California, go to a place called Cabo San Lucas, which is a vastly overpopulated tourist ghetto. But you can go on a ship for a week in the Sea of Cortez and see virtually nobody else – being surrounded by one of the most beautiful places in the world, by masses of birds, fish – [just] 10 miles away from that place.
What things do your clients have in common?
Diversity has increased substantially, post-9/11. 9/11 rocked this world in many ways, some positively. In any great tragedy, there are some positive elements. Obviously you don’t want to deal with such horror to get there. An example of that, I think, [is] that people subsequently took their friendships more seriously, their families more seriously -- and we’ve had an explosion of family travel. I can’t help but think that one explosion led to another.
Your expeditions are designed to respect their destinations. Can the ideas you use be replicated in other parts of the travel industry?
[They] should be replicated. We live off the sea. We’re a very funny society in that we’re so smart, yet reasonable care of our resources has been considered a left-wing fringe idea, which is one of the dumbest things [out there]. [We take these initiatives for a few reasons]. Part of it is to affect the [clients’] enjoyment of their expeditions. Part of it is to set some seeds that might affect their future.
As the world gets smaller and smaller, is keeping the mystery, the adventure of travel becoming more difficult?
Absolutely. I think there [are] a lot of places that are not mysterious anymore because they’ve been overwhelmed by people. [But it’s not necessarily due to technology advances.] [For] example, the Antarctic. You could’ve read 1,000 books, watched 100 television programs, and you’d still be awed by the experience of being there.
Do you think climate change is reversible?
I think that it can be mitigated. I’m not a scientist. I think it’s point-blank idiotic to debate whether it exists. There’s not a single reason that it should be a debate any longer. Recently, [there’s been] a big shift [in] realizing [it]. I think “Inconvenient Truth” is a big part of that. I think what happened with Katrina is a big part of that. I think people are scared. That’s a great motivator. Our folks have seen it in Antarctica and Alaska and places like that. In a really short amount of time they’ve seen glaciers retreat hundreds of meters. That’s a big deal.
What are some overlooked travel destinations?
Nicaragua is one. I think it’s just a lovely country. I wish a lot more people would go there. There are not a lot of countries. [There are] pockets within places.
Do you read travel books or do you just prefer the real thing?
[I] started reading “Voyage of the Turtle” [by] Carl Safina. [He’s] one of the greatest thinkers, [a] sort of philosopher king of the sea.
Is there a “next frontier” of travel?
The undersea is where the great opportunities lie. There’s just so much down there. We have a lot of technology that can bring the undersea [to the expedition]. We have an ROV [(Remotely Operating Vehicle camera)]. Ours can go down to 500 feet. At the end of the day there aren’t many great swaths of geography to discover. (My father didn’t leave much.) [There is] no more pure discovery. When that aspect is removed, you have to replace it with something. That’s hard work. So you have to be much more creative than we were 20 years ago.
-- Matt Elzweig
July 17, 2006
“[I’ve never] experienced jet lag like this,” Sven Lindblad says. He’s used to shorter flights, and does seem a little groggy in the reception area of his company’s headquarters on Morton Street. He’s just back from a ten-day (“depending on how you count the dateline”) expedition between Fiji and Raratonga, in the Cook Islands.
Lindblad, whose late father, Lars-Eric Lindblad, took the first-ever travel expedition to Antarctica in 1966, has been offering clients a very different kind of travel for almost three decades. This spring, the Charles Darwin Foundation named a newly discovered Galapagos insect in his honor (italics) (Undulambia lindbladi) (italics), and he was recognized at Luxembourg’s Grand-Ducal Palace, for his sustainable tourism work in the Islands.
Not many people can say they’ve had an insect named after them. How does it feel?
I feel very delighted to have anything named after me. It’s not very often a species is discovered. It’s the sentiment behind it, [really]. I said ‘you know, it seems strange you’re giving all these accolades for normal behavior’ [because ] if we’re going to run programs in the Galapagos Islands, why shouldn’t [we] reinvest and support programs that [allow] that place to thrive?
How much time do you spend in New York each year?
Probably 8 months.
Do you ever get claustrophobic here, with your interests in wildlife and open spaces?
No. I’m very much an omnivore when it comes to travel. I mean I need, I love being in wide open spaces as [much] as I can – it’s like vitamins.
What’s the difference between an “expedition” and a trip or vacation?
99 percent of our business is on ships. The main advantage is you can get away from tourism. [I don’t want to degrade anything], but what we want to do is escape tourism, basically. Unfortunately, most of the places people go on vacation are extremely crowded. So for example, probably over 90 percent of the people who go to Baja, California, go to a place called Cabo San Lucas, which is a vastly overpopulated tourist ghetto. But you can go on a ship for a week in the Sea of Cortez and see virtually nobody else – being surrounded by one of the most beautiful places in the world, by masses of birds, fish – [just] 10 miles away from that place.
What things do your clients have in common?
Diversity has increased substantially, post-9/11. 9/11 rocked this world in many ways, some positively. In any great tragedy, there are some positive elements. Obviously you don’t want to deal with such horror to get there. An example of that, I think, [is] that people subsequently took their friendships more seriously, their families more seriously -- and we’ve had an explosion of family travel. I can’t help but think that one explosion led to another.
Your expeditions are designed to respect their destinations. Can the ideas you use be replicated in other parts of the travel industry?
[They] should be replicated. We live off the sea. We’re a very funny society in that we’re so smart, yet reasonable care of our resources has been considered a left-wing fringe idea, which is one of the dumbest things [out there]. [We take these initiatives for a few reasons]. Part of it is to affect the [clients’] enjoyment of their expeditions. Part of it is to set some seeds that might affect their future.
As the world gets smaller and smaller, is keeping the mystery, the adventure of travel becoming more difficult?
Absolutely. I think there [are] a lot of places that are not mysterious anymore because they’ve been overwhelmed by people. [But it’s not necessarily due to technology advances.] [For] example, the Antarctic. You could’ve read 1,000 books, watched 100 television programs, and you’d still be awed by the experience of being there.
Do you think climate change is reversible?
I think that it can be mitigated. I’m not a scientist. I think it’s point-blank idiotic to debate whether it exists. There’s not a single reason that it should be a debate any longer. Recently, [there’s been] a big shift [in] realizing [it]. I think “Inconvenient Truth” is a big part of that. I think what happened with Katrina is a big part of that. I think people are scared. That’s a great motivator. Our folks have seen it in Antarctica and Alaska and places like that. In a really short amount of time they’ve seen glaciers retreat hundreds of meters. That’s a big deal.
What are some overlooked travel destinations?
Nicaragua is one. I think it’s just a lovely country. I wish a lot more people would go there. There are not a lot of countries. [There are] pockets within places.
Do you read travel books or do you just prefer the real thing?
[I] started reading “Voyage of the Turtle” [by] Carl Safina. [He’s] one of the greatest thinkers, [a] sort of philosopher king of the sea.
Is there a “next frontier” of travel?
The undersea is where the great opportunities lie. There’s just so much down there. We have a lot of technology that can bring the undersea [to the expedition]. We have an ROV [(Remotely Operating Vehicle camera)]. Ours can go down to 500 feet. At the end of the day there aren’t many great swaths of geography to discover. (My father didn’t leave much.) [There is] no more pure discovery. When that aspect is removed, you have to replace it with something. That’s hard work. So you have to be much more creative than we were 20 years ago.
-- Matt Elzweig
The Block: East 6th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues
Little Germany Became Little India
Our Town downtown
July 17, 2006
On the corner of 2nd Avenue and 6th, there’s a bright mural of a beach scene. “A Sunny Fort Lauderdale Day,” it reads. It could be a joke; this is a shady street with cheap bicycles chained up in front of graffiti-blemished shop gates. A quick Web search reveals that it’s just an ad from the Greater Fort Lauderdale visitors bureau.
A long line of cars is oddly, double parked. Most of them are empty. Several of the bicycles have baskets and a few of them have handmade signs stuck to their seats instructing their owners to park elsewhere in the future.
When the gates roll up at around noon the garbage that’s been sitting in front of the shops will disappear, and so will the graffiti.
The garbage bags are too thin, and residents can tell when one of them has a tear, because that’s when they hear the seagulls, Chuck Walsh, who has a real estate company here, says in a telephone interview.
At dinnertime, the hawkers will emerge from the shops and urge all passersby to take advantage of their dinner deals.
This is Curry Row or Little India, not Curry Hill. (That’s in Midtown.) To Richard Ruben, a chef instructor at the Institute of Culinary Education (ICE), it’s Curry Lane.
Ruben says it’s “highly doubtful,” that this strip of South Asian restaurants shares a single kitchen, despite an urban legend that says as much. “If anything it’s [because] they all serve the same food” he says.
Juventino Avila, who also teaches at ICE says it just wouldn’t be possible for the restaurants to share a kitchen. “…It’s an entire block.” He knows that some of the restaurants have open kitchens, so if cooks were going back and forth between the buildings, customers would know it. And it would be discovered by food inspectors no matter what.
What happened here
One of the greatest tragedies in New York history was set in motion.
The Greek Revival at 323 has been the Community Synagogue (orthodox) since 1940, but was St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church several decades earlier.
In the late 19th Century, the neighborhood was known as Kleindeutschland or Little Germany. St. Mark’s’ congregants were German, and on June 15, 1904, they chartered a steamboat, as they often did, to take them to a recreation spot called Locust Grove on the Long Island Sound. Just after their boat, the General Slocum, passed through the Hell Gate (the channel of the East River between Wards Island and Astoria) it caught fire. Over 1,000 people died, eclipsed only by the number killed in the 2001 Trade Center attacks.
By 1910, Yorkville was a much bigger German area. Only 10 percent of German-born residents lived in Little Germany.
Buying here
Walsh says he is not aware of any sale properties on the block at the moment. Most of the buildings are “walkup tenements with four apartments per floor.” The other buildings are “20-footers,” several of which are 1-family houses.
Renting here
1,800-2,100/month for one bedrooms, and 2,300-2,600/month for 2 bedrooms, which are rare. Studios average between 1,500-1,600/month. “The apartments hit the market and they’re gone in the blink of an eye” Jim Taipovic of Matel Realty, says.
Amenities
Food and Drink
South Asian Brick Lane Curry House; Taj Mahal; Angon; Raj Mahal; Calcutta; Spice Cove; Sonali; Panna; Mitali East; Banjara; Gandhi; Baluchi’s (2nd Avenue). Other restaurants Bamboo House (on 2nd, Chinese/Japanese); Gasparino’s (Italian); Awash (Ethiopian); Mara’s Homemade (Southern/Cajun); Mancora (on 1st Avenue, Peruvian); Zerza (Moroccan)Groceries Met Foodmarkets (2nd Avenue); Village Magazine Cigar & Gourmet Food (2nd Avenue)
Real Estate
Chuck Walsh’s Apartment Agency; Matel Realty
ATM
Village Magazine; Bamboo House (2nd Avenue)
Bank
Self Reliance (NY) F.C.U.
Laundry
97 2nd Ave Launderette
Music
Tribal Soundz
Flowers
Sunny’s Florist
Spiritual
Community Synagogue/Max D. Raiskin Center; Middle Collegiate Church (2nd Avenue)
Health and Wellness
Block Drug Stores (2nd Avenue); Odyssey House Teen Leadership Center
Zhou’s Service, Inc. (bodywork, including acupuncture)
Communications
Internet Access (Mr. Fresh Bread, 2nd Avenue); Payphone bank (2nd Avenue)
Sources: Community Synagogue/Max D. Raiskin Center Web site; NY Songlines; general-slocum.com; Bartleby.com (The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition); “AIA Guide to New York City, Fourth Edition”; Lower East Side Tenement Museum Enclopedia online.
-- Matt Elzweig
Our Town downtown
July 17, 2006
On the corner of 2nd Avenue and 6th, there’s a bright mural of a beach scene. “A Sunny Fort Lauderdale Day,” it reads. It could be a joke; this is a shady street with cheap bicycles chained up in front of graffiti-blemished shop gates. A quick Web search reveals that it’s just an ad from the Greater Fort Lauderdale visitors bureau.
A long line of cars is oddly, double parked. Most of them are empty. Several of the bicycles have baskets and a few of them have handmade signs stuck to their seats instructing their owners to park elsewhere in the future.
When the gates roll up at around noon the garbage that’s been sitting in front of the shops will disappear, and so will the graffiti.
The garbage bags are too thin, and residents can tell when one of them has a tear, because that’s when they hear the seagulls, Chuck Walsh, who has a real estate company here, says in a telephone interview.
At dinnertime, the hawkers will emerge from the shops and urge all passersby to take advantage of their dinner deals.
This is Curry Row or Little India, not Curry Hill. (That’s in Midtown.) To Richard Ruben, a chef instructor at the Institute of Culinary Education (ICE), it’s Curry Lane.
Ruben says it’s “highly doubtful,” that this strip of South Asian restaurants shares a single kitchen, despite an urban legend that says as much. “If anything it’s [because] they all serve the same food” he says.
Juventino Avila, who also teaches at ICE says it just wouldn’t be possible for the restaurants to share a kitchen. “…It’s an entire block.” He knows that some of the restaurants have open kitchens, so if cooks were going back and forth between the buildings, customers would know it. And it would be discovered by food inspectors no matter what.
What happened here
One of the greatest tragedies in New York history was set in motion.
The Greek Revival at 323 has been the Community Synagogue (orthodox) since 1940, but was St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church several decades earlier.
In the late 19th Century, the neighborhood was known as Kleindeutschland or Little Germany. St. Mark’s’ congregants were German, and on June 15, 1904, they chartered a steamboat, as they often did, to take them to a recreation spot called Locust Grove on the Long Island Sound. Just after their boat, the General Slocum, passed through the Hell Gate (the channel of the East River between Wards Island and Astoria) it caught fire. Over 1,000 people died, eclipsed only by the number killed in the 2001 Trade Center attacks.
By 1910, Yorkville was a much bigger German area. Only 10 percent of German-born residents lived in Little Germany.
Buying here
Walsh says he is not aware of any sale properties on the block at the moment. Most of the buildings are “walkup tenements with four apartments per floor.” The other buildings are “20-footers,” several of which are 1-family houses.
Renting here
1,800-2,100/month for one bedrooms, and 2,300-2,600/month for 2 bedrooms, which are rare. Studios average between 1,500-1,600/month. “The apartments hit the market and they’re gone in the blink of an eye” Jim Taipovic of Matel Realty, says.
Amenities
Food and Drink
South Asian Brick Lane Curry House; Taj Mahal; Angon; Raj Mahal; Calcutta; Spice Cove; Sonali; Panna; Mitali East; Banjara; Gandhi; Baluchi’s (2nd Avenue). Other restaurants Bamboo House (on 2nd, Chinese/Japanese); Gasparino’s (Italian); Awash (Ethiopian); Mara’s Homemade (Southern/Cajun); Mancora (on 1st Avenue, Peruvian); Zerza (Moroccan)Groceries Met Foodmarkets (2nd Avenue); Village Magazine Cigar & Gourmet Food (2nd Avenue)
Real Estate
Chuck Walsh’s Apartment Agency; Matel Realty
ATM
Village Magazine; Bamboo House (2nd Avenue)
Bank
Self Reliance (NY) F.C.U.
Laundry
97 2nd Ave Launderette
Music
Tribal Soundz
Flowers
Sunny’s Florist
Spiritual
Community Synagogue/Max D. Raiskin Center; Middle Collegiate Church (2nd Avenue)
Health and Wellness
Block Drug Stores (2nd Avenue); Odyssey House Teen Leadership Center
Zhou’s Service, Inc. (bodywork, including acupuncture)
Communications
Internet Access (Mr. Fresh Bread, 2nd Avenue); Payphone bank (2nd Avenue)
Sources: Community Synagogue/Max D. Raiskin Center Web site; NY Songlines; general-slocum.com; Bartleby.com (The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition); “AIA Guide to New York City, Fourth Edition”; Lower East Side Tenement Museum Enclopedia online.
-- Matt Elzweig
Monday, July 10, 2006
A Fighting Irishman:St. Brigid’s demolition opponent speaks out
Our Town downtown
July 10, 2006
Jerome O’Connor went to The Department of Buildings on June 30th to make his case, again. St. Brigid’s Church should not be torn down. This time it seems they agreed.
O’Connor is certain the Archdiocese of New York is not the condemned church’s rightful owner as has been represented in public documents. Before O’Connor left that afternoon, the department revoked the diocese’s permit to demolish the historic East Village church, citing an item of code that requires owners or owner-authorized boards to sign off on any plans, including demolition.
A day earlier, the Committee to Save St. Brigid’s Church had lost its appeal at the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court. The judges concluded that the archdiocese had the “ecclesiastical authority” to demolish the historic church, and that to intervene would “impermissibly involve the court in the governance and administration” of the church. The former parishioners of St. Brigid’s Church were skeptical. They were skeptical about the archdiocese’s motives when, citing structural damage, it closed the church in 2001. They were skeptical of the $6.9
million price tag the diocese estimated for repair costs. And they were skeptical when the diocese dissolved the parish in 2004.
An entry on the Department of Buildings Web site shows that on September 11, 2003, the archdiocese received a work permit to, among other things, “convert [the] existing church into apartments.”
That address — 119 Avenue B — is the rectory, not the church building. The church building’s street number is 121-123. Although it is unclear whether the work permit is to demolish one or both buildings, the permit supports the claim that investment property was at least one motive to remove St. Brigid’s from the East Village landscape.
O’Connor, a real estate developer, movie producer, writer and former bar owner, is obsessive about the projects he wants to complete. But generally, he doesn’t like to involve himself with committees. It took his friend Frank Murray, a committee member, three phone calls before O’Connor agreed to participate in the fight to save the church. O’Connor attended the NY State Appellate Division hearing on June 13th, and it was there that his suspicions really began to take shape. He felt the committee had made a strong case that the ownership of the building was in question; it didn’t make sense that the archdiocese had been able to obtain a demolition permit in the first place.
The Religious Corporations Law is at the heart of the argument that Harry Kresky, the committee’s lawyer, has been making throughout the proceedings. St. Brigid’s is a not-for-profit religious corporation and therefore not under the “ecclesiastical authority” of the archdiocese.
In other words, it is not the archdiocese’s property to knock down, convert or otherwise alter.
On the NY State Division of Corporations online database, St. Brigid’s is registered as an “active domestic not-for-profit corporation,” and both the church and the rectory are listed as taxable properties on the city finance department’s site.
Another point Kresky is emphasizing is that the archdiocese never formed a proper board for St. Brigid’s, the corporation. Under the Religious Corporations Law, the archdiocese is required to form a board consisting of five members: three trustees from the clergy and two lay trustees.
The archdiocese has not chosen the lay trustees. Even if it had,committee members speculate that the archdiocese would choose lay trustees partial to its own interests.
Something just didn’t seem right about the way the archdiocese was conducting itself, and after the June 13th hearing, O’Connor checked the work permit data on the Buildings Department Web site.
In order to receive a demolition permit, an applicant must complete 20 items on a checklist that is listed online. On the entries for the rectory and the church building, the last four items were listed as “WAIVED.”
The most significant of these items were the required letters from the Landmarks Commission and the title searches, which establish ownership. In order for a building to be demolished, the Landmarks Commission must write a letter to the permit applicant (in this case, the archdiocese) stating that the building is not a landmark.
O’Connor didn’t understand how it was possible not to consider St. Brigid’s a landmark, let alone how it was possible to waive the letter requirement altogether.
St. Brigid’s has been standing since December 1849, and is one of the first religious structures Patrick Keely, a self-taught architect, and (like O’Connor), an Irish immigrant, designed. Built by shipwrights, it is also known as the Famine Church because most of its original parishioners were Irish displaced by the Great Famine.
O’Connor speculates that possibly the archdiocese didn’t want to embarrass the Landmarks Commission by allowing it to become public knowledge that the Commission didn’t consider the building worthy of landmark status – so the archdiocese didn’t include the letter in the application.
“What it says is that [Landmarks] is only around to protect certain buildings,” O’Connor says. (If the church is demolished, O’Connor will get the NYC Irish community to petition for the closing of the Landmarks Commission, he says.)
Who waived the letter requirement, and who waived the title search is still a mystery.
Two days later, O’Connor went to the Buildings Department to present printouts from the Web site. First, he was sent to the Building Enforcement Safety Team (BEST) office on Centre Street. The BEST office sent him back to Buildings, and as he would later write in frustration to Mayor Bloomberg he “became aware very soon that nobody at [the BEST] office wanted to deal with [the waiver] issue.”
He continued to try to get a meeting for four hours, and finally met Richard Rosen for the first time. Rosen’s official title is senior project advocate. His job, essentially, is to respond to customer complaints and requests, usually made by builders and developers, to ensure that certificates of occupancy – the main document that allows a building to be designated for a particular use or purpose – are issued on time. He describes himself as an “internal trouble shooter.” O’Connor explained the Web site discrepancy to Rosen, who then left to investigate. O’Connor says that when Rosen returned, he told O’Connor no one at Buildings was responsible for the waivers to his knowledge, and that he figured they must have been entered illegally in the computer system. He then said it was common to waive these checklist items. He searched for a file folder containing the checklist items and came up empty. A search for microfilm also yielded nothing. Rosen admitted,
O’Connor says, that to issue a demolition permit without microfilm was in violation of the building code and qualified for a revocation of the permit. He suggested O’Connor put his complaint in writing. When he got home, O’Connor faxed his complaint to Rosen and called Rosen to make sure he had received it. This time Rosen said that the folder might not be missing, that it might be in the Buildings legal department and that he couldn’t take action until he ruled that out. He told
O’Connor that it could take 10 days to investigate and that he would get back to him the next day. O’Connor says Rosen didn’t and he wrote about the incident in the letter to Mayor Bloomberg that appeared in Our Town downtown on June 26th.
The NY State Appellate Division handed down its decision in favor of the archdiocese on the 29th. Immediately after, the archdiocese sent Rosen a letter that supposedly established ownership of St. Brigid’s. Rosen had requested this earlier since he recognized problems with its paperwork, O’Connor says. He says their rush to submit the letter indicates that they intended to “go in and demolish as soon as possible.” Rosen read it to O’Connor over the phone the next morning.
The letter proved nothing, O’Connor says. “It was a letter from a bishop authorizing another bishop to sign the application for the permit, even though the archdiocese doesn’t own the property. It definitely wasn’t sufficient.” (The Department of Buildings declined to provide a copy of the letter to Our Town downtown.)
Now, Rosen was saying that he had located the folder and that O’Connor could come to the Buildings office to see it. The title searches and non-designation letters were inside, Rosen said.
On June 30th, acompanied by this reporter, O’Connor went to the Buildings Department intending to look the folder contents over carefully. He hoped to find the Landmarks letters and title searches that were listed as waived and examine whatever else might be inside. On the third floor, he asked for Rosen and Acting Borough Commissioner Chris Santulli, but was sent back and forth between two adjacent
offices. This happened several times before he actually met with Rosen. The constant explanation from the Buildings employees he spoke to was that they were in meetings. He decided to wait it out anyway. When Rosen finally appeared, he would only talk to O’Connor from behind the glass at first. He did show him the folder, but wouldn’t let him touch it. He flipped through it, making marks with a hi-liter responding
to O’Connor’s cool, but rapid questioning.
He repeatedly tried to prevent O’Connor from handling the folder, and at one point, said that this reporter would have to make a FOIL (Freedom of Information Law) request because the case was “in litigation,” and it could take a week before a reply. He also offered the number of the department’s press contact.
I declined and asked him how he could reasonably expect me to make sense of his flip book approach to explaining such a sensitive matter. I asked Rosen for a photocopy, and he said yes, but that he’d have to copy it in another room. This was basically how our dealings continued that day and for the next week. He would say no, I would say why not, and he would say okay after some resistance. Each time I’d get a little
further along.
After more back and forth, O’Connor made it into Rosen’s office for a real meeting, and with the department’s liaison to law enforcement present for much of the time, O’Connor looked over the folder and discussed it in detail.
Rosen was now saying that the waivers on the Buildings site were not the result of any illegal tampering, but “a clerical error.” O’Connor looked for the documents that were listed as waived on the Buildings site – the titles and the Landmarks letters – and found only one Landmarks letter. When he looked up the address on OASIS, an online property database, he discovered that the letter was for the rectory – not for the church building.
“The demolition [permit] has got to be revoked immediately,” O’Connor said. By the time O’Connor left Rosen’s office, Rosen agreed to photocopy the entire folder. O’Connor went out for coffee while he did this, and when he got back he met with Santulli, the acting borough commissioner of buildings and Rosen. O’Connor learned that the ten-day letter had gone out to the archdiocese. Although he seemed pleased, he also learned that technically, the archdiocese could knock down the building within that 10-day waiting period.
O’Connor doesn’t think this is likely though, given the circumstances. Even the Ancient Order of Hibernians, a very pro-Catholic organization, spoke out against the archdiocese’s plans to demolish St. Brigid’s, in a letter.
During this meeting Rosen suddenly produced the missing Landmarks letter—for 121-123 Avenue B, the church building. O’Connor now has a copy of the folder. It contains a Work Plan (form PW-1) for the rectory, signed by Kevin Shaughnessy, assistant director of the archdiocese’s Building Commission under the “Owner’s Statements”
section, and numerous letters from the Archdiocesan Building Commission’s director, David Maddox, notifying banks and interested parties in the area surrounding St. Brigid’s of its plans to demolish the church and rectory. In this notice, Maddox claims to be writing “on behalf of St. Brigid’s parish,” the same parish that is trying to prevent them from knocking St. Brigid’s down.
At the bottom of the PW-1 form is a small line of type. “Falsification of any statement is a misdemeanor under Section 26-124 of the Administrative Code, and is punishable by a fine or imprisonment, or both.” Rosen remembers June 30th differently. He says that both Landmarks letters were present when we he met with O’Connor in his office.
Joseph Zwilling, spokesman for the archdiocese, is not indicating whether there is a specific timetable for demolition. “We do not have a [demolition] date,” he said in a July 5th phone interview. “It is still our position though, that the building is a hazard and needs to come down.” He says that there is “no particular reason why lay trustees have not been appointed yet,” and that these two people are the only barrier keeping a proper board from being formed. “We already have a board. The
question has always been the lay trustees.”
An e-mail to David Maddox of the Building Commission was not returned, and an archdiocese real estate officer named Edward Newman declined an interview request saying that everything had to go through Zwilling. Otherwise, he could get in “trouble,” he said.
Rosen finds it odd that the archdiocese was awarded a permit so long ago but still hasn’t demolished St. Brigid’s. He says demolition usually occurs right away. Newman was “agitated about the whole thing,” Rosen said in a telephone interview. He said Newman told him that he had “done hundreds of demolitions and never had a problem. [He] didn’t understand why [the] objection was raised.” Rosen concluded that the objection was raised because of the ownership question.
As for the signature that appears on the work plan form (the PW-1), Rosen says that if someone other than the owner is going to provide a signature they will typically make it known that they are acting as an agent of the owner, and nothing indicated that the archdiocese was doing this.
“Transparency may be an important word in the Department of Buildings, but it’s not in the Catholic Church,” O’Connor said.
As of July 6th the church building’s demolition was listed on the Department of Buildings site as “on hold.”
O’Connor plans to go to the Buildings Department on Monday, July 10th, when the 10-day period ends, to see whether the archdiocese will have provided the proper paperwork, and will have a full board in place. But in the meantime, O’Connor, a man who believes that you either fight with “the gloves off” or not at all, is busying himself by visiting St. Thomas the Apostle Church in Harlem, where a similar controversy involving the archdiocese is underway.
-- Matt Elzweig
July 10, 2006
Jerome O’Connor went to The Department of Buildings on June 30th to make his case, again. St. Brigid’s Church should not be torn down. This time it seems they agreed.
O’Connor is certain the Archdiocese of New York is not the condemned church’s rightful owner as has been represented in public documents. Before O’Connor left that afternoon, the department revoked the diocese’s permit to demolish the historic East Village church, citing an item of code that requires owners or owner-authorized boards to sign off on any plans, including demolition.
A day earlier, the Committee to Save St. Brigid’s Church had lost its appeal at the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court. The judges concluded that the archdiocese had the “ecclesiastical authority” to demolish the historic church, and that to intervene would “impermissibly involve the court in the governance and administration” of the church. The former parishioners of St. Brigid’s Church were skeptical. They were skeptical about the archdiocese’s motives when, citing structural damage, it closed the church in 2001. They were skeptical of the $6.9
million price tag the diocese estimated for repair costs. And they were skeptical when the diocese dissolved the parish in 2004.
An entry on the Department of Buildings Web site shows that on September 11, 2003, the archdiocese received a work permit to, among other things, “convert [the] existing church into apartments.”
That address — 119 Avenue B — is the rectory, not the church building. The church building’s street number is 121-123. Although it is unclear whether the work permit is to demolish one or both buildings, the permit supports the claim that investment property was at least one motive to remove St. Brigid’s from the East Village landscape.
O’Connor, a real estate developer, movie producer, writer and former bar owner, is obsessive about the projects he wants to complete. But generally, he doesn’t like to involve himself with committees. It took his friend Frank Murray, a committee member, three phone calls before O’Connor agreed to participate in the fight to save the church. O’Connor attended the NY State Appellate Division hearing on June 13th, and it was there that his suspicions really began to take shape. He felt the committee had made a strong case that the ownership of the building was in question; it didn’t make sense that the archdiocese had been able to obtain a demolition permit in the first place.
The Religious Corporations Law is at the heart of the argument that Harry Kresky, the committee’s lawyer, has been making throughout the proceedings. St. Brigid’s is a not-for-profit religious corporation and therefore not under the “ecclesiastical authority” of the archdiocese.
In other words, it is not the archdiocese’s property to knock down, convert or otherwise alter.
On the NY State Division of Corporations online database, St. Brigid’s is registered as an “active domestic not-for-profit corporation,” and both the church and the rectory are listed as taxable properties on the city finance department’s site.
Another point Kresky is emphasizing is that the archdiocese never formed a proper board for St. Brigid’s, the corporation. Under the Religious Corporations Law, the archdiocese is required to form a board consisting of five members: three trustees from the clergy and two lay trustees.
The archdiocese has not chosen the lay trustees. Even if it had,committee members speculate that the archdiocese would choose lay trustees partial to its own interests.
Something just didn’t seem right about the way the archdiocese was conducting itself, and after the June 13th hearing, O’Connor checked the work permit data on the Buildings Department Web site.
In order to receive a demolition permit, an applicant must complete 20 items on a checklist that is listed online. On the entries for the rectory and the church building, the last four items were listed as “WAIVED.”
The most significant of these items were the required letters from the Landmarks Commission and the title searches, which establish ownership. In order for a building to be demolished, the Landmarks Commission must write a letter to the permit applicant (in this case, the archdiocese) stating that the building is not a landmark.
O’Connor didn’t understand how it was possible not to consider St. Brigid’s a landmark, let alone how it was possible to waive the letter requirement altogether.
St. Brigid’s has been standing since December 1849, and is one of the first religious structures Patrick Keely, a self-taught architect, and (like O’Connor), an Irish immigrant, designed. Built by shipwrights, it is also known as the Famine Church because most of its original parishioners were Irish displaced by the Great Famine.
O’Connor speculates that possibly the archdiocese didn’t want to embarrass the Landmarks Commission by allowing it to become public knowledge that the Commission didn’t consider the building worthy of landmark status – so the archdiocese didn’t include the letter in the application.
“What it says is that [Landmarks] is only around to protect certain buildings,” O’Connor says. (If the church is demolished, O’Connor will get the NYC Irish community to petition for the closing of the Landmarks Commission, he says.)
Who waived the letter requirement, and who waived the title search is still a mystery.
Two days later, O’Connor went to the Buildings Department to present printouts from the Web site. First, he was sent to the Building Enforcement Safety Team (BEST) office on Centre Street. The BEST office sent him back to Buildings, and as he would later write in frustration to Mayor Bloomberg he “became aware very soon that nobody at [the BEST] office wanted to deal with [the waiver] issue.”
He continued to try to get a meeting for four hours, and finally met Richard Rosen for the first time. Rosen’s official title is senior project advocate. His job, essentially, is to respond to customer complaints and requests, usually made by builders and developers, to ensure that certificates of occupancy – the main document that allows a building to be designated for a particular use or purpose – are issued on time. He describes himself as an “internal trouble shooter.” O’Connor explained the Web site discrepancy to Rosen, who then left to investigate. O’Connor says that when Rosen returned, he told O’Connor no one at Buildings was responsible for the waivers to his knowledge, and that he figured they must have been entered illegally in the computer system. He then said it was common to waive these checklist items. He searched for a file folder containing the checklist items and came up empty. A search for microfilm also yielded nothing. Rosen admitted,
O’Connor says, that to issue a demolition permit without microfilm was in violation of the building code and qualified for a revocation of the permit. He suggested O’Connor put his complaint in writing. When he got home, O’Connor faxed his complaint to Rosen and called Rosen to make sure he had received it. This time Rosen said that the folder might not be missing, that it might be in the Buildings legal department and that he couldn’t take action until he ruled that out. He told
O’Connor that it could take 10 days to investigate and that he would get back to him the next day. O’Connor says Rosen didn’t and he wrote about the incident in the letter to Mayor Bloomberg that appeared in Our Town downtown on June 26th.
The NY State Appellate Division handed down its decision in favor of the archdiocese on the 29th. Immediately after, the archdiocese sent Rosen a letter that supposedly established ownership of St. Brigid’s. Rosen had requested this earlier since he recognized problems with its paperwork, O’Connor says. He says their rush to submit the letter indicates that they intended to “go in and demolish as soon as possible.” Rosen read it to O’Connor over the phone the next morning.
The letter proved nothing, O’Connor says. “It was a letter from a bishop authorizing another bishop to sign the application for the permit, even though the archdiocese doesn’t own the property. It definitely wasn’t sufficient.” (The Department of Buildings declined to provide a copy of the letter to Our Town downtown.)
Now, Rosen was saying that he had located the folder and that O’Connor could come to the Buildings office to see it. The title searches and non-designation letters were inside, Rosen said.
On June 30th, acompanied by this reporter, O’Connor went to the Buildings Department intending to look the folder contents over carefully. He hoped to find the Landmarks letters and title searches that were listed as waived and examine whatever else might be inside. On the third floor, he asked for Rosen and Acting Borough Commissioner Chris Santulli, but was sent back and forth between two adjacent
offices. This happened several times before he actually met with Rosen. The constant explanation from the Buildings employees he spoke to was that they were in meetings. He decided to wait it out anyway. When Rosen finally appeared, he would only talk to O’Connor from behind the glass at first. He did show him the folder, but wouldn’t let him touch it. He flipped through it, making marks with a hi-liter responding
to O’Connor’s cool, but rapid questioning.
He repeatedly tried to prevent O’Connor from handling the folder, and at one point, said that this reporter would have to make a FOIL (Freedom of Information Law) request because the case was “in litigation,” and it could take a week before a reply. He also offered the number of the department’s press contact.
I declined and asked him how he could reasonably expect me to make sense of his flip book approach to explaining such a sensitive matter. I asked Rosen for a photocopy, and he said yes, but that he’d have to copy it in another room. This was basically how our dealings continued that day and for the next week. He would say no, I would say why not, and he would say okay after some resistance. Each time I’d get a little
further along.
After more back and forth, O’Connor made it into Rosen’s office for a real meeting, and with the department’s liaison to law enforcement present for much of the time, O’Connor looked over the folder and discussed it in detail.
Rosen was now saying that the waivers on the Buildings site were not the result of any illegal tampering, but “a clerical error.” O’Connor looked for the documents that were listed as waived on the Buildings site – the titles and the Landmarks letters – and found only one Landmarks letter. When he looked up the address on OASIS, an online property database, he discovered that the letter was for the rectory – not for the church building.
“The demolition [permit] has got to be revoked immediately,” O’Connor said. By the time O’Connor left Rosen’s office, Rosen agreed to photocopy the entire folder. O’Connor went out for coffee while he did this, and when he got back he met with Santulli, the acting borough commissioner of buildings and Rosen. O’Connor learned that the ten-day letter had gone out to the archdiocese. Although he seemed pleased, he also learned that technically, the archdiocese could knock down the building within that 10-day waiting period.
O’Connor doesn’t think this is likely though, given the circumstances. Even the Ancient Order of Hibernians, a very pro-Catholic organization, spoke out against the archdiocese’s plans to demolish St. Brigid’s, in a letter.
During this meeting Rosen suddenly produced the missing Landmarks letter—for 121-123 Avenue B, the church building. O’Connor now has a copy of the folder. It contains a Work Plan (form PW-1) for the rectory, signed by Kevin Shaughnessy, assistant director of the archdiocese’s Building Commission under the “Owner’s Statements”
section, and numerous letters from the Archdiocesan Building Commission’s director, David Maddox, notifying banks and interested parties in the area surrounding St. Brigid’s of its plans to demolish the church and rectory. In this notice, Maddox claims to be writing “on behalf of St. Brigid’s parish,” the same parish that is trying to prevent them from knocking St. Brigid’s down.
At the bottom of the PW-1 form is a small line of type. “Falsification of any statement is a misdemeanor under Section 26-124 of the Administrative Code, and is punishable by a fine or imprisonment, or both.” Rosen remembers June 30th differently. He says that both Landmarks letters were present when we he met with O’Connor in his office.
Joseph Zwilling, spokesman for the archdiocese, is not indicating whether there is a specific timetable for demolition. “We do not have a [demolition] date,” he said in a July 5th phone interview. “It is still our position though, that the building is a hazard and needs to come down.” He says that there is “no particular reason why lay trustees have not been appointed yet,” and that these two people are the only barrier keeping a proper board from being formed. “We already have a board. The
question has always been the lay trustees.”
An e-mail to David Maddox of the Building Commission was not returned, and an archdiocese real estate officer named Edward Newman declined an interview request saying that everything had to go through Zwilling. Otherwise, he could get in “trouble,” he said.
Rosen finds it odd that the archdiocese was awarded a permit so long ago but still hasn’t demolished St. Brigid’s. He says demolition usually occurs right away. Newman was “agitated about the whole thing,” Rosen said in a telephone interview. He said Newman told him that he had “done hundreds of demolitions and never had a problem. [He] didn’t understand why [the] objection was raised.” Rosen concluded that the objection was raised because of the ownership question.
As for the signature that appears on the work plan form (the PW-1), Rosen says that if someone other than the owner is going to provide a signature they will typically make it known that they are acting as an agent of the owner, and nothing indicated that the archdiocese was doing this.
“Transparency may be an important word in the Department of Buildings, but it’s not in the Catholic Church,” O’Connor said.
As of July 6th the church building’s demolition was listed on the Department of Buildings site as “on hold.”
O’Connor plans to go to the Buildings Department on Monday, July 10th, when the 10-day period ends, to see whether the archdiocese will have provided the proper paperwork, and will have a full board in place. But in the meantime, O’Connor, a man who believes that you either fight with “the gloves off” or not at all, is busying himself by visiting St. Thomas the Apostle Church in Harlem, where a similar controversy involving the archdiocese is underway.
-- Matt Elzweig
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
Q & A with John Mulaney, Comic
Our Town downtown
July 3, 2006
John Mulaney went full-time about 10 months ago. He got his start at age seven, performing with a kids’ improv group. And although his parents wouldn’t let him audition for “Home Alone,” he continued pursuing a career in entertainment. He’s a co-creator of “I Love the 30s,” which can be seen on Comedy Central’s MotherLoad (online) channel. And the short film he co-wrote, “Cavalcade of Personalities,” appeared on Comedy Central’s “Jump Cuts,” earning him an Emerging Comics of New York Award in 2004.
Mulaney first started doing sketch comedy in a student group at Georgetown University, where he majored in English. (He graduated two years ago), and he does standup around New York City and the country. With Nick Kroll, he co-hosts a weekly comedy night at Rififi in the East Village. Recently, he toured the country with Mike Birbiglia’s Medium Man on Campus College tour.
How was the college tour?
Fantastic. America is wonderful.
Which places stand out?
Salt Lake City is wonderful. And the buildings are low, and there’s this big temple. The mountains in the background…Everyone’s really friendly because they want you to become a Mormon … And I’m susceptible to that … If I’d have stayed more than a week, I’d have converted because I’ll do anything …I’ll listen to anyone who’s nice to me. One waiter kept refilling my hot chocolate. It was wonderful. Very attentive.
Chicago’s your hometown. How does it compare to New York?
The neighborhood I grew up in, in Chicago, is called Lincoln Park. And it’s a lot more neighborhood-y. I mean there are alleys … It’s more neighborhood-y … Greenpoint and Williamsburg are the closest thing to it. They feel more like Chicago than Manhattan does.
Is getting your own show still a big goal for stand-ups?
I think it was, from what I’ve seen .. I’m new to all this, so someone could give you a much better perspective … on the industry. (But) from what I’ve seen, the idea that …the idea of … a comic thinking ‘I’m gonna be the next Jerry Seinfeld’ − that model, is probably a little outdated now because it’s been proven to be a very difficult path, because there was (a) rush of comics who thought that ‘I’m gonna get my own sitcom based on my act.’ Like, you know, that it’s gonna be like the things you talk about in your act − that ‘that’s gonna be my network show.’ I don’t think as many comics would think that ‘yeah, that’s the ticket,’ anymore …I could be wrong.
So what about the cliché that says all comics are crying on the inside?
Some do, some don’t. Just like anything else.
Ever see “Punchline,” that old Tom Hanks movie?
Punchline is, fucking ridiculous! My friend Jacqueline Novak, who’s also a really funny comic … she and I used to watch that all the time. We used to talk about it all the time … It’s a silly movie.
Is it authentic?
Not to me.
So do comics tend to hang out together? Or do they avoid each other? It could become a pissing contest (like, who’s the funniest) …
Yeah. Comics love hanging out. Some can be loners. I think a lot like to hang out with each other. And yeah, it can become a pissing contest. In a good way, though. A lot of good shit gets bounced around when comics are hanging out.
Do people who know what you do try slipping jokes into conversation, to try and impress you?
I think every comic deals with the same thing probably. As clichéd as it sounds, people honestly come up to you and say, “you know what? You should write a joke about-” And I mean that, word for word.
Do they ever give you good suggestions?
No.
What’s the difference between that person who can make you laugh at a party, and the one who can make you laugh on stage? Is there a difference?
There is a real difference between party funny and stage funny. But I’ll say this – I don’t know what it is. I actually don’t know what makes somebody able to get on stage and be funny and others not. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not like a trick. It’s not like a freak trick. The ability to be on stage performing your own stuff and get laughs is a real skill that you develop and work on. However, while it is something you can work on, there is an innate difference, I think, in the people that can develop it.
You mentioned that there are other things you want to do. Such as …
…I want to do everything from like, tour standup clubs, to write a musical…
A musical? About what?
Not about the life of John Lennon, I’ll tell you that.
What’s your writing process like?
(Well for example) Nick Kroll and I have this show called “Oh, Hello!” and we’re fleshing it out into a sketch show that’s going to be …at Upright Citizen’s Brigade. (It’s) 2 middle-aged (divorced) men, who live on the Upper West Side and they’re fantastic … They worship, they love, Alan Alda. They bring … comics on the show and they interview people, and they love to have a good time … We saw two guys at The Strand who were like them …(and) we just kind of imitated them.
-- Matt Elzweig
July 3, 2006
John Mulaney went full-time about 10 months ago. He got his start at age seven, performing with a kids’ improv group. And although his parents wouldn’t let him audition for “Home Alone,” he continued pursuing a career in entertainment. He’s a co-creator of “I Love the 30s,” which can be seen on Comedy Central’s MotherLoad (online) channel. And the short film he co-wrote, “Cavalcade of Personalities,” appeared on Comedy Central’s “Jump Cuts,” earning him an Emerging Comics of New York Award in 2004.
Mulaney first started doing sketch comedy in a student group at Georgetown University, where he majored in English. (He graduated two years ago), and he does standup around New York City and the country. With Nick Kroll, he co-hosts a weekly comedy night at Rififi in the East Village. Recently, he toured the country with Mike Birbiglia’s Medium Man on Campus College tour.
How was the college tour?
Fantastic. America is wonderful.
Which places stand out?
Salt Lake City is wonderful. And the buildings are low, and there’s this big temple. The mountains in the background…Everyone’s really friendly because they want you to become a Mormon … And I’m susceptible to that … If I’d have stayed more than a week, I’d have converted because I’ll do anything …I’ll listen to anyone who’s nice to me. One waiter kept refilling my hot chocolate. It was wonderful. Very attentive.
Chicago’s your hometown. How does it compare to New York?
The neighborhood I grew up in, in Chicago, is called Lincoln Park. And it’s a lot more neighborhood-y. I mean there are alleys … It’s more neighborhood-y … Greenpoint and Williamsburg are the closest thing to it. They feel more like Chicago than Manhattan does.
Is getting your own show still a big goal for stand-ups?
I think it was, from what I’ve seen .. I’m new to all this, so someone could give you a much better perspective … on the industry. (But) from what I’ve seen, the idea that …the idea of … a comic thinking ‘I’m gonna be the next Jerry Seinfeld’ − that model, is probably a little outdated now because it’s been proven to be a very difficult path, because there was (a) rush of comics who thought that ‘I’m gonna get my own sitcom based on my act.’ Like, you know, that it’s gonna be like the things you talk about in your act − that ‘that’s gonna be my network show.’ I don’t think as many comics would think that ‘yeah, that’s the ticket,’ anymore …I could be wrong.
So what about the cliché that says all comics are crying on the inside?
Some do, some don’t. Just like anything else.
Ever see “Punchline,” that old Tom Hanks movie?
Punchline is, fucking ridiculous! My friend Jacqueline Novak, who’s also a really funny comic … she and I used to watch that all the time. We used to talk about it all the time … It’s a silly movie.
Is it authentic?
Not to me.
So do comics tend to hang out together? Or do they avoid each other? It could become a pissing contest (like, who’s the funniest) …
Yeah. Comics love hanging out. Some can be loners. I think a lot like to hang out with each other. And yeah, it can become a pissing contest. In a good way, though. A lot of good shit gets bounced around when comics are hanging out.
Do people who know what you do try slipping jokes into conversation, to try and impress you?
I think every comic deals with the same thing probably. As clichéd as it sounds, people honestly come up to you and say, “you know what? You should write a joke about-” And I mean that, word for word.
Do they ever give you good suggestions?
No.
What’s the difference between that person who can make you laugh at a party, and the one who can make you laugh on stage? Is there a difference?
There is a real difference between party funny and stage funny. But I’ll say this – I don’t know what it is. I actually don’t know what makes somebody able to get on stage and be funny and others not. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not like a trick. It’s not like a freak trick. The ability to be on stage performing your own stuff and get laughs is a real skill that you develop and work on. However, while it is something you can work on, there is an innate difference, I think, in the people that can develop it.
You mentioned that there are other things you want to do. Such as …
…I want to do everything from like, tour standup clubs, to write a musical…
A musical? About what?
Not about the life of John Lennon, I’ll tell you that.
What’s your writing process like?
(Well for example) Nick Kroll and I have this show called “Oh, Hello!” and we’re fleshing it out into a sketch show that’s going to be …at Upright Citizen’s Brigade. (It’s) 2 middle-aged (divorced) men, who live on the Upper West Side and they’re fantastic … They worship, they love, Alan Alda. They bring … comics on the show and they interview people, and they love to have a good time … We saw two guys at The Strand who were like them …(and) we just kind of imitated them.
-- Matt Elzweig
Movie Review: "Wordplay"
Our Town downtown
July 3, 2006
Wordplay
Directed by Patrick Creadon
PG, US, 2006
94 minutes
IFC Center
Each day, Will Shortz’s name appears prominently above The New York Times crossword puzzle. But Shortz edits the puzzles. He doesn’t create them from scratch. The name of the writer or “constructor” appears in much tinier letters under the puzzle’s lower left hand corner. This is not to belittle Shortz’s role. It’s just that his chief responsibilities are writing the clues that go with the words, making sure that they’re in keeping with the Times’s style, and making sure that they’re actually words.
Viewers learned all of this in a May 8th NY1 feature about Shortz that was hosted by Budd Mishkin (“One On 1”). They also learned that Shortz, who has been editing the world’s most popular crossword since 1993, works from his home in Westchester, where he lives alone. By the time the piece ended and the next portion of the newscast began, viewers learned that he graduated from the University of Virginia Law School, but never took the Bar exam, knowing he was destined for the puzzle world − that he took a job as the editor of Games Magazine where he worked for 15 years − and that he created the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in 1978.
After it premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, “Wordplay,” a documentary about Shortz and the crossword fanatics who depend on him for their daily fix, quickly became associated with Shortz’s face. It was in the foreground of various advertisements for and reviews of the film, and it was easy to conclude that he really was what “Wordplay” was all about. But “Wordplay” reveals less about Shortz in an hour and a half than the NY 1 segment did in a fraction of that. And those expecting a trip deep inside the head of a game maker so obsessed with puzzles that he created his own major in Enigmatology (the study of puzzles) while an undergraduate at Indiana University, might be disappointed.
It’s at least as much about the top crossword competitors at the annual tournament, held at the Marriott in Stamford, Connecticut, and the famous people who attempt The Times crossword every day − as it is about Shortz.
“Initially, the film was going to be about one man and his puzzle,” Patrick Creadon writes in a “Director’s Statement,” on the Tribeca Film Festival Web site. (It was shown at this year’s festival.) “We would talk to well-known puzzle constructors who submit puzzles to Will … examine famous puzzles from the past, and talk about the various intricacies of how crosswords are made. The only problem with this approach was that we felt it would only appeal to hardcore puzzle enthusiasts.”
We are introduced to several of those hardcore enthusiasts, among them Ellen Ripstein, also a puzzle editor. Ripstein was known as “The Susan Lucci of Crosswords,” having been denied the championship, but finishing close to the top for 18 years, before 2001, when she finally won. We meet Trip Payne, who at 24, was the youngest person to win the tournament in 1993. We meet Tyler Hinman, a two time-champion from Troy New York, who was a fraternity brother at the Rensselear Polytechnic Institute when “Wordplay” was filmed. We meet Jon Delfin, a piano player who has won the tournament 7 times; and we meet Al Sanders, a project manager at Hewlett Packard who had come in third place five times before the 2005 tournament.
“The most important trait of a good crossword puzzle solver, I think, is mental flexibility,” Shortz writes in a question and answer forum with readers, on the Times Web site. And in one of the film’s most interesting scenes, he notes that the two groups great crossword puzzle solvers tend to come from are mathematicians and musicians. To illustrate this, Delfin is interviewed at a studio where singers are auditioning. He can sight read three staffs of music at a time without a hitch, and can improvise harmonies with ease, behind the vocalists. Delfin correlates both of these talents, especially the second one, with his ability to outmaneuver Shortz.
These people are featured with the tournament in mind. And we watch them as they prepare for it. And although “Wordplay,” does culminate at Stamford, Merl Reagle, a puzzle constructor is revisited several times as he drafts a crossword on a blank grid. It serves another frame for the story, a box within a box.
It’s hard not to sympathize with Al Sanders, who has a habit of crumbling under pressure - or Ripstein, who once had a boyfriend who made fun of her for her studious dedication to crosswording. (But you admire the way she doesn’t care what other people think of her, too. “‘What are you the best in the country at?’” she says she asked him.)
“Wordplay’s” other subjects are the famous people who try to complete Shortz’s puzzles every day. Some are obvious devotees − Bill Clinton, Ken Burns, Jon Stewart and Daniel Okrent (who was once the Times’s ombudsman). And then there’s Yankees pitcher Mike Mussina, who implies that at least some of his teammates work on it with him.
Most of these cameos work well, although Jon Stewart, who vividly expresses his frustration with the omnipresent Shortz, as he sits at his desk with the puzzle, comes across as a little staged. (On the other hand, Bill Clinton, presumably in his Harlem office, seems very off-the-cuff, but that’s always been one of his specialties.)
There’s a quick section on the history of crossword puzzles that’s just long enough at the beginning of the film. There are conversations with Shortz, but ultimately his role is that of an all-seeing-eye that is often not physically present, but never really leaves the room.
If “Wordplay,” is taken to be the film that Creadon describes in his director’s note, it can be fully enjoyed having met those expectations. But for those who go in wanting the movie that Creadon first envisioned, the one that ended up on the cutting room floor, “Wordplay,” is decent and kind of uplifting, like a New Yorker cartoon that elicits a chuckle or two on the subway, but lacks the edge to really produce side-splitting laughter.
-- Matt Elzweig
July 3, 2006
Wordplay
Directed by Patrick Creadon
PG, US, 2006
94 minutes
IFC Center
Each day, Will Shortz’s name appears prominently above The New York Times crossword puzzle. But Shortz edits the puzzles. He doesn’t create them from scratch. The name of the writer or “constructor” appears in much tinier letters under the puzzle’s lower left hand corner. This is not to belittle Shortz’s role. It’s just that his chief responsibilities are writing the clues that go with the words, making sure that they’re in keeping with the Times’s style, and making sure that they’re actually words.
Viewers learned all of this in a May 8th NY1 feature about Shortz that was hosted by Budd Mishkin (“One On 1”). They also learned that Shortz, who has been editing the world’s most popular crossword since 1993, works from his home in Westchester, where he lives alone. By the time the piece ended and the next portion of the newscast began, viewers learned that he graduated from the University of Virginia Law School, but never took the Bar exam, knowing he was destined for the puzzle world − that he took a job as the editor of Games Magazine where he worked for 15 years − and that he created the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in 1978.
After it premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, “Wordplay,” a documentary about Shortz and the crossword fanatics who depend on him for their daily fix, quickly became associated with Shortz’s face. It was in the foreground of various advertisements for and reviews of the film, and it was easy to conclude that he really was what “Wordplay” was all about. But “Wordplay” reveals less about Shortz in an hour and a half than the NY 1 segment did in a fraction of that. And those expecting a trip deep inside the head of a game maker so obsessed with puzzles that he created his own major in Enigmatology (the study of puzzles) while an undergraduate at Indiana University, might be disappointed.
It’s at least as much about the top crossword competitors at the annual tournament, held at the Marriott in Stamford, Connecticut, and the famous people who attempt The Times crossword every day − as it is about Shortz.
“Initially, the film was going to be about one man and his puzzle,” Patrick Creadon writes in a “Director’s Statement,” on the Tribeca Film Festival Web site. (It was shown at this year’s festival.) “We would talk to well-known puzzle constructors who submit puzzles to Will … examine famous puzzles from the past, and talk about the various intricacies of how crosswords are made. The only problem with this approach was that we felt it would only appeal to hardcore puzzle enthusiasts.”
We are introduced to several of those hardcore enthusiasts, among them Ellen Ripstein, also a puzzle editor. Ripstein was known as “The Susan Lucci of Crosswords,” having been denied the championship, but finishing close to the top for 18 years, before 2001, when she finally won. We meet Trip Payne, who at 24, was the youngest person to win the tournament in 1993. We meet Tyler Hinman, a two time-champion from Troy New York, who was a fraternity brother at the Rensselear Polytechnic Institute when “Wordplay” was filmed. We meet Jon Delfin, a piano player who has won the tournament 7 times; and we meet Al Sanders, a project manager at Hewlett Packard who had come in third place five times before the 2005 tournament.
“The most important trait of a good crossword puzzle solver, I think, is mental flexibility,” Shortz writes in a question and answer forum with readers, on the Times Web site. And in one of the film’s most interesting scenes, he notes that the two groups great crossword puzzle solvers tend to come from are mathematicians and musicians. To illustrate this, Delfin is interviewed at a studio where singers are auditioning. He can sight read three staffs of music at a time without a hitch, and can improvise harmonies with ease, behind the vocalists. Delfin correlates both of these talents, especially the second one, with his ability to outmaneuver Shortz.
These people are featured with the tournament in mind. And we watch them as they prepare for it. And although “Wordplay,” does culminate at Stamford, Merl Reagle, a puzzle constructor is revisited several times as he drafts a crossword on a blank grid. It serves another frame for the story, a box within a box.
It’s hard not to sympathize with Al Sanders, who has a habit of crumbling under pressure - or Ripstein, who once had a boyfriend who made fun of her for her studious dedication to crosswording. (But you admire the way she doesn’t care what other people think of her, too. “‘What are you the best in the country at?’” she says she asked him.)
“Wordplay’s” other subjects are the famous people who try to complete Shortz’s puzzles every day. Some are obvious devotees − Bill Clinton, Ken Burns, Jon Stewart and Daniel Okrent (who was once the Times’s ombudsman). And then there’s Yankees pitcher Mike Mussina, who implies that at least some of his teammates work on it with him.
Most of these cameos work well, although Jon Stewart, who vividly expresses his frustration with the omnipresent Shortz, as he sits at his desk with the puzzle, comes across as a little staged. (On the other hand, Bill Clinton, presumably in his Harlem office, seems very off-the-cuff, but that’s always been one of his specialties.)
There’s a quick section on the history of crossword puzzles that’s just long enough at the beginning of the film. There are conversations with Shortz, but ultimately his role is that of an all-seeing-eye that is often not physically present, but never really leaves the room.
If “Wordplay,” is taken to be the film that Creadon describes in his director’s note, it can be fully enjoyed having met those expectations. But for those who go in wanting the movie that Creadon first envisioned, the one that ended up on the cutting room floor, “Wordplay,” is decent and kind of uplifting, like a New Yorker cartoon that elicits a chuckle or two on the subway, but lacks the edge to really produce side-splitting laughter.
-- Matt Elzweig
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
The Block: Prince Street between West Broadway and Sullivan Street
The lights are out at The Cub Room on the corner of Sullivan and Prince. Like Raoul’s, the French restaurant across the street, it’s no dive, but looks inviting all the same. These two blocks are a far cry from the shopping district just a walk away.
If you put enough stock in the conventional wisdom about SoHo, then you might miss this section. And the conventional wisdom goes something like this: once commercial rents went up, the art galleries and independent boutiques that filled the area were forced to migrate to more affordable neighborhoods. The boutiques went to NoLita, the art galleries moved up to Chelsea, and the high end retail stores replaced them. Today, SoHo is one great big shopping mall.
There is truth to this idea, and it seems pretty evident on West Broadway and Prince, where there’s no shortage of flagship shops or tourists. But this part of Prince Street has what Spencer Ostrander, who sells real estate and lives here, calls “a friendly neighborhood atmosphere.”
There are plenty of “old-timers” who have been here for generations, he says, old-timers who stayed through the art boom, and are here now that it’s for the most part, gone. Many are Italian.
It’s drizzling this morning, and there are some members who could be from this group walking east. There are also some young mothers with their kids. And there are a lot of the kind of unusually attractive people you normally associate with SoHo, who can make a seven feel like a five, and a five like a three − the kind of people who probably look this way after wearing the same clothes two days in a row, the kind of people you can imagine smelling like flowers after shoveling manure for an entire afternoon. But it still feels like a neighborhood, Beautiful People notwithstanding. If they promenade on West Broadway, they stroll down this part of Prince, with its zigzagging fire escapes, planted trees and markets.
What happened here
A whacking. Back when the neighborhood was still a part of Little Italy, Gerard Vernotico was found dead on the roof of 124 Thompson, along with a witness in the wrong place at the wrong time. The date was March 16, 1932. The cause was strangulation. The motive was jealousy; twelve days later the victim’s wife, Anna Petillo Vernotico married Vito Genovese (of the Genovese crime family). But later, she testified against him in court. (Source: NY Songlines)
Buying here
Unlike the territory east of West Broadway, the buildings are tenements not loft spaces, and space averages from 350 to 600 square feet per unit. At one building on the corner of Prince and Thompson, one and two bedroom co-ops start at around $400,000 and top out in the $750,000 range Ostrander says.
Renting here
Studios, one and two bedrooms are what’s available. Studios start at about $1750 a month and two bedrooms top out at $3,500.
Amenities
Food & Drink
Vesuvio Bakery; Café Borgia; Milady’s Bar & Restaurant; The Cub Room; Caffe Tina; Nagomi; Il Corallo Trattoria; Raoul’s; M & O (market).
Information
Lord News International.
Art
The Artist’s Gallery
ATM
Prince St. Copy.
Retail
Swatch; Marisa Perry Atelier; Ling Skin Care; Joseph Pearl; Hannah; GirlPROPS; Joel Name; Kokopelli; Luzern Laboratories; Hans Koch; by boe. Spiritual Saint Anthony’s.
Real Estate
bapple inc.
Subways
R on Prince and Broadway; C, E, on Spring and 6th Avenue.
-- Matt Elzweig
If you put enough stock in the conventional wisdom about SoHo, then you might miss this section. And the conventional wisdom goes something like this: once commercial rents went up, the art galleries and independent boutiques that filled the area were forced to migrate to more affordable neighborhoods. The boutiques went to NoLita, the art galleries moved up to Chelsea, and the high end retail stores replaced them. Today, SoHo is one great big shopping mall.
There is truth to this idea, and it seems pretty evident on West Broadway and Prince, where there’s no shortage of flagship shops or tourists. But this part of Prince Street has what Spencer Ostrander, who sells real estate and lives here, calls “a friendly neighborhood atmosphere.”
There are plenty of “old-timers” who have been here for generations, he says, old-timers who stayed through the art boom, and are here now that it’s for the most part, gone. Many are Italian.
It’s drizzling this morning, and there are some members who could be from this group walking east. There are also some young mothers with their kids. And there are a lot of the kind of unusually attractive people you normally associate with SoHo, who can make a seven feel like a five, and a five like a three − the kind of people who probably look this way after wearing the same clothes two days in a row, the kind of people you can imagine smelling like flowers after shoveling manure for an entire afternoon. But it still feels like a neighborhood, Beautiful People notwithstanding. If they promenade on West Broadway, they stroll down this part of Prince, with its zigzagging fire escapes, planted trees and markets.
What happened here
A whacking. Back when the neighborhood was still a part of Little Italy, Gerard Vernotico was found dead on the roof of 124 Thompson, along with a witness in the wrong place at the wrong time. The date was March 16, 1932. The cause was strangulation. The motive was jealousy; twelve days later the victim’s wife, Anna Petillo Vernotico married Vito Genovese (of the Genovese crime family). But later, she testified against him in court. (Source: NY Songlines)
Buying here
Unlike the territory east of West Broadway, the buildings are tenements not loft spaces, and space averages from 350 to 600 square feet per unit. At one building on the corner of Prince and Thompson, one and two bedroom co-ops start at around $400,000 and top out in the $750,000 range Ostrander says.
Renting here
Studios, one and two bedrooms are what’s available. Studios start at about $1750 a month and two bedrooms top out at $3,500.
Amenities
Food & Drink
Vesuvio Bakery; Café Borgia; Milady’s Bar & Restaurant; The Cub Room; Caffe Tina; Nagomi; Il Corallo Trattoria; Raoul’s; M & O (market).
Information
Lord News International.
Art
The Artist’s Gallery
ATM
Prince St. Copy.
Retail
Swatch; Marisa Perry Atelier; Ling Skin Care; Joseph Pearl; Hannah; GirlPROPS; Joel Name; Kokopelli; Luzern Laboratories; Hans Koch; by boe. Spiritual Saint Anthony’s.
Real Estate
bapple inc.
Subways
R on Prince and Broadway; C, E, on Spring and 6th Avenue.
-- Matt Elzweig
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