Our Town downtown
October 30, 2006
If a mixed media artist were to create a collage depicting a night in the East Village or on the Lower East Side in 2006, he’d have to include car horns, the loud voices of revelers, urine, trash and vomit. This work, if done well enough, could also be used to depict the morning after.
Amy Westpfahl, who has lived in the area for 13 years and on Clinton Street between Delancey and Rivington for eight, says things were different until recently.
“Back when I moved to the Lower East Side, you know, it was still kind of a sketchy—Clinton Street was very sketchy. It was mostly empty storefronts.”
These days, though, Clinton Street is like DUMBO, she says—in a bad way.
Today, the Lower East Side and the East Village are awash with nightlife, their streets thick with crowds who frequent spots like Pianos and Le Souk.
Westpfahl says the arrival of Lotus Lounge, a coffee shop and bar on Clinton, a little over ten years ago, was the spark that ignited the proliferation of bars and clubs in the area, but she says the staff manages its crowd well, and she does not put Lotus Lounge in the same category as the bars that she says are now causing problems in her neighborhood.
She says that the majority of the clubbers and bar hoppers are from outside the area. “They don’t live in the neighborhood. You know … you never see them around otherwise.” That’s why they have no respect for the neighborhood, she thinks. From what she’s observed, they’re in their 20s and 30s. And in her dealings with them, they’ve been “nasty”—so much so, that she and a friend have had to change their nightly dog-walking route, which had been down Suffolk, up to Houston, down Clinton and then across Rivington, on weekends, just to steer clear of the party scene, which she says now starts as early as Wednesday. “There’s always people on the sidewalk. They won’t even move. You say ‘excuse me’ … and they’ll just be like ‘no excuse you’ or something. She says that while bouncers at some bars and clubs are good about clearing the sidewalks, at several establishments the bouncers “just don’t care.”
The partying goes on through Saturday, she says. And she’s seen Avenue B busy as late as 4 a.m. On Friday and Saturday nights she stays in and goes out on Sundays and Mondays instead, to avoid the crowds. She says Avenues A and B and Rivington and Orchard are some of the most affected streets.
She’s been spared in terms of sleep deprivation because her apartment is in the back of the building she lives in, but the people who live in the front apartment moved their bedroom from the Clinton Street-facing room to the middle one, because the noise coming from the bars and the traffic coming off the Williamsburg Bridge into the neighborhood was keeping them up.
She volunteers at ABC No Rio, a community center on Rivington Street, which she says experienced problems related to the surrounding bars after it removed its gate to prepare for upcoming renovations. “Ever since we did that … [the] weekend crowd … they’ve been pissing and barfing in our front vestibules … and so it’s kind of disgusting when you come in, in the morning … it’s people from those Rivington bars … and we have to clean it up.”
To Westpfahl, one of the worst offenders is Le Souk, a lounge on Avenue B. “That crowd is so obnoxious. They’re always out on the sidewalk. There’s always cars pulling up. There’s always drunk people late at night, darting across the street to the pizza place, nearly getting hit by cars and being totally vulgar to like, the cars and the cabbies.” She also witnessed a fistfight between a patron exiting Le Souk and a bouncer there.
Jessica Hornado, a spokesperson for Le Souk, says that complaints about the lounge may come from people who are jealous that they can’t get inside. She says that the neighborhood is “up and coming” and noise is a consequence of gentrification. She thinks that more aggressive crowd control is the answer to the neighborhood’s noise and related problems.
Charles Sturcken, a spokesperson for the city’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), says that Avenue B between Houston and Seventh Streets has been especially problematic in terms of noise complaints “in the last couple of years.”
In July, the mayor’s new noise code, which was passed at the end of 2004, will go into effect, which could prove to be a piece of the puzzle. It is the first revision of the code in three decades, and Sturcken says that some of its more significant provisions are a lower acceptable decibel level for “commercial music,” which he describes as live or recorded music coming from an eating or drinking establishment, and which DEP inspectors can measure using noise meters; easier measurement of bass levels by noise meters; and a directive to look for newer technologies to measure noise—the agency placed ads this week soliciting bids to develop newer, more portable, less expensive and more durable noise measurement devices, so that other “enforcement personnel” (i.e. cops) will be able to carry them and respond quickly to complaints.
Noise meters do not address the problem of car horns and radios however, which is a big part of the problem, Daniel O’Connell, who lives on East 12th Street, on about the border of the central and East Villages, says. The co-op building he lives in is behind Webster Hall and surrounded by NYU dorms and the bars on Third Avenue. He says his street, which doesn’t have any nightlife establishments itself, experiences a lot of the problems that Amy Westpfahl says plague the Lower East Side. He compares it to another nightlife-heavy neighborhood he lived in before moving to his current apartment. “This is much worse. It’s just the people that come here, come here with louder cars, windows down, hip hop music playing, you know … they come here on their way to a party.” Webster Hall, he says, has been a good neighbor to residents in his building—sending sound engineers over to set up sound barriers for apartments and to neighborhood residents in general, sending other staff to take posters down once a performance is finished.
He thinks the city is slow to make parking regulations on his street clearer, displaying the “night regulations” signs more prominently, for example, because it’s “a great revenue generator,” and incoming partiers can be counted on to park there without paying attention to the rules.
Liquor licenses are a big part of the nightlife debate, and Amy Westpfahl, who lives on Clinton Street and used to be on the Rivington Street Block Association, says the State Liquor Authority hands them out too freely. She was a member of the association about “two years ago when [bars and clubs were] just becoming a problem,” she says. “They just seem to hand out those licenses like nobody’s business.”
The New York State Liquor Authority (SLA) has a three-member board which receives recommendations from SLA committees of local community boards, and votes on whether to grant an establishment its liquor license. By law, there must be a hearing for applicants in areas where there are three or more bars within 500 feet of one another. Bill Crowley, a spokesperson for the SLA, says most bars in Manhattan fall into this category, but there is currently a moratorium on new liquor licenses that went into effect in September after two young girls were murdered after drinking in downtown nightspots. And it is not scheduled to end until January 1st.
The first time they tried to get a liquor license for their new restaurant, European Union, on East 4th Street, Bob Giraldi and his business partner Jason Hennings say they came up against fierce opposition from Community Board 3 and the East 4th Street Block Association. Despite arguing that they were strictly a restaurant, had no desire to become a part of the ruckus, and were going to cater to local residents, not people from other neighborhoods, they were denied the license and had to close, temporarily, six weeks later.
“The fact of the matter is, in New York City and cosmopolitan areas, even if … 70 percent is food and 30 percent is beer and wine or liquor, they won’t come for the 70 if they can’t get the 30. They just won’t eat finer food if they can’t have a glass of wine,” Hennings says.
Neither one faults the residents for having reservations about newcomers, and they acknowledge the problems that bar culture has brought to New York City neighborhoods. “On 4th Street and Avenue B it’s pretty, pretty loud—and pretty raucous, and pretty raunchy late at night. A lot of students, not adults. Students. Young kids. And a lot of bars. Too many bars. Too many clubs. Too much drink and too much drugs. You know, it’s excess,” Giraldi says.
Hennings says residents were misinformed about what European Union really was, that they were talked into signing a petition before they got a chance to see it, and that once they did, they became apologetic and upset, and ended up supporting the restaurant.
Ultimately, Giraldi and Hennings were successful in getting their beer and wine license and reopened on October 26th. Giraldi says they would like to revisit applying for the full license at some future date, but for now they’re content to “make a go of it.”
Hennings says that European Union will be “militant about [its] exterior” and will have cameras installed in the front of the building to ensure that no one is creating a disturbance, and will make sure people are keeping their voices down.
The SLA experience made him question why the neighborhood doesn’t have a community alliance like his SoHo neighborhood does. He found the community meetings he attended going through the process unproductive. “It’s like an umbrella of arguments instead of anything actually getting done. And I wanted to say, ‘Let’s all get together, all the business owners, the restaurant owners. Pay dues.” … In SoHo “people are out cleaning the streets, and there are people that … represent a true alliance of the neighborhood looking out for itself.”
Daniel O’Connell, who lives behind Webster Hall, on East 12th Street, thinks the most immediate problem in his neighborhood is honking from cars taking people to the bars on Third Avenue, and that the answer is a zero tolerance policy and a lowering of fines, since, he reasons, cops are probably reluctant to charge cab drivers fines they think will really eat into a driver’s daily earnings. “Make it 65 dollars, make it like a parking ticket, but then just give them out. ‘Honk?’ ‘Hey that was easy. Bam. Ticket’ … If it’s enforced, it changes everything.” He says that he’s taken this idea to the community board, but they’ve been unresponsive.
Robert Bookman, who lobbies for the New York Nightlife Association, doesn’t know why people laugh when he suggests repealing the smoking ban, to lower the volume outside bars and clubs. Now, he says, about three and half years after the ban went into effect, there has been a “dramatic increase in late night street noise.” Or maybe, he says, the smoking ban could be altered so that after midnight, smokers could come back inside with their cigarettes. And the bars could install the kind of air filtration systems seen in the “infectious disease wards” of hospitals. If people can’t live with this solution, they should stop complaining, he says; after all, they’re living in Manhattan, not “Forest Hills.”
Amy Westpfahl has been meaning to write the city to ask for “no honking” signs for her Clinton Street neighborhood, but also to ask them to address the cars that come speeding off the Williamsburg Bridge on their way to the bars. She’s already seen people hit. “The direction of traffic used to be the other way on Clinton Street, and when they finished the renovation of the bridge … instead of going down Suffolk Street, they come down Clinton now, so definitely some … speed ordinances or something.” She also wants to write the city about the possibility of putting trees on her block between Delancey and Rivington. She’s not sure if it will help, but she has a hunch it could absorb some of the noise.
Living in the middle of so many bars and clubs has affected her daily routine and her state of mind, but says she would be “stupid to leave” her three-bedroom rent-stabilized apartment in the heart of the Lower East Side.
-- Matt Elzweig
Monday, October 30, 2006
Movie Review: "Running With Scissors"
Our Town downtown
October 13, 2006
Playing at: Clearview Chelsea Cinemas, Landmark’s Sunshine Cinema
Run Time: 116 min.
Rating: R
Director: Ryan Murphy
In the world of psychotherapy there are professionals, there are quacks, and then there are Quacks.
The moment the Burroughs family was told by their psychiatrist, Dr. Finch, that the room just to the right of his desk was his Masturbatorium, where he did exactly what it sounds like one would do in a place with that name, they should have run straight to the nearest counseling center, the nearest reputable one, without looking back. But they didn’t, at least Deirdre Burroughs (Annette Bening) didn’t.
Instead, the Burroughses divorced and Dr. Finch’s drugs paved the way for Deirdre’s already nascent path to madness. But Augusten, their teenage son (Joseph Cross), was the one who ended up, as a result, in the most bizarre place of all – Dr. Finch’s house.
Adapted from the real-life Augusten Burroughs best-selling memoir of the same name, the film follows Augusten’s unfortunate upbringing in Western Massachusetts, an upbringing that became even less fortunate when his mom actually signed him over to her psychiatrist (Dr. Finch), so she could concentrate on other things.
Among her chief concerns at the time were tapping into her “creative unconscious” so she could become a famous poet, emphasis on the famous, defeating all the “oppressors” in her life, and asserting herself as a woman. (Hear her roar.)
Brian Cox is great as the Freudishly-clad Dr. Finch. Bening is convincing as a narcissistic, yet not completely unloving person, who’s losing her mind by the minute. There’s Joseph Cross, who does a good job of portraying a normal teen forced to deal with circumstances that are anything but. On the other hand, whoever cast Gabrielle Union as a hotheaded lesbian is probably a good candidate for psychoanalysis themselves.
There are individual pockets of eccentricity that entertain – the unbelievable, but supposedly true things that go on inside Finch’s Broken Angel-like mansion. There’s the “Bible-dipping” that Hope Finch (Gwyneth Paltrow) and her mother (Jill Clayburgh) engage in by opening the Good Book at random to determine what’s for dinner; there’s the prophesy that Dr. Finch receives one day by examining the angle at which his morning elimination floats in the water; and a number of scenes that have probably been alluded to or given away by the trailers.
Still, whether it’s the pacing (too many dead spots in between the memorable scenes, which compete with each other for sheer weirdness); the excessive number of mental breakdowns (just a little too much realism for the pre-winter season); or the classic rock soundtrack (yes, it’s obvious the story takes place in the seventies, but “Benny and the Jets” is one of the most annoying pop hits from that decade, and the literal matching of scene and song in one of Deirdre’s breakdowns where she stares up at an imaginary glow as “Blinded by the Light” plays in the background is amateurish), “Scissors” is an also-ran, just weeks before Election Day.
Those who aren’t completely made of stone will find it hard not to feel for Augusten’s plight and ability to “overcome such tremendous obstacles,” finding love and himself in the process. As he makes entries in his journal to record it all, the “cathartic power of writing” is on full display, the hard road he’s had to tread comes through in vivid color.
But then again, like all memoirists, his real-life counterpart sure has gotten a lot of mileage out of it.
-- Matt Elzweig
October 13, 2006
Playing at: Clearview Chelsea Cinemas, Landmark’s Sunshine Cinema
Run Time: 116 min.
Rating: R
Director: Ryan Murphy
In the world of psychotherapy there are professionals, there are quacks, and then there are Quacks.
The moment the Burroughs family was told by their psychiatrist, Dr. Finch, that the room just to the right of his desk was his Masturbatorium, where he did exactly what it sounds like one would do in a place with that name, they should have run straight to the nearest counseling center, the nearest reputable one, without looking back. But they didn’t, at least Deirdre Burroughs (Annette Bening) didn’t.
Instead, the Burroughses divorced and Dr. Finch’s drugs paved the way for Deirdre’s already nascent path to madness. But Augusten, their teenage son (Joseph Cross), was the one who ended up, as a result, in the most bizarre place of all – Dr. Finch’s house.
Adapted from the real-life Augusten Burroughs best-selling memoir of the same name, the film follows Augusten’s unfortunate upbringing in Western Massachusetts, an upbringing that became even less fortunate when his mom actually signed him over to her psychiatrist (Dr. Finch), so she could concentrate on other things.
Among her chief concerns at the time were tapping into her “creative unconscious” so she could become a famous poet, emphasis on the famous, defeating all the “oppressors” in her life, and asserting herself as a woman. (Hear her roar.)
Brian Cox is great as the Freudishly-clad Dr. Finch. Bening is convincing as a narcissistic, yet not completely unloving person, who’s losing her mind by the minute. There’s Joseph Cross, who does a good job of portraying a normal teen forced to deal with circumstances that are anything but. On the other hand, whoever cast Gabrielle Union as a hotheaded lesbian is probably a good candidate for psychoanalysis themselves.
There are individual pockets of eccentricity that entertain – the unbelievable, but supposedly true things that go on inside Finch’s Broken Angel-like mansion. There’s the “Bible-dipping” that Hope Finch (Gwyneth Paltrow) and her mother (Jill Clayburgh) engage in by opening the Good Book at random to determine what’s for dinner; there’s the prophesy that Dr. Finch receives one day by examining the angle at which his morning elimination floats in the water; and a number of scenes that have probably been alluded to or given away by the trailers.
Still, whether it’s the pacing (too many dead spots in between the memorable scenes, which compete with each other for sheer weirdness); the excessive number of mental breakdowns (just a little too much realism for the pre-winter season); or the classic rock soundtrack (yes, it’s obvious the story takes place in the seventies, but “Benny and the Jets” is one of the most annoying pop hits from that decade, and the literal matching of scene and song in one of Deirdre’s breakdowns where she stares up at an imaginary glow as “Blinded by the Light” plays in the background is amateurish), “Scissors” is an also-ran, just weeks before Election Day.
Those who aren’t completely made of stone will find it hard not to feel for Augusten’s plight and ability to “overcome such tremendous obstacles,” finding love and himself in the process. As he makes entries in his journal to record it all, the “cathartic power of writing” is on full display, the hard road he’s had to tread comes through in vivid color.
But then again, like all memoirists, his real-life counterpart sure has gotten a lot of mileage out of it.
-- Matt Elzweig
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Book Review: "The Tattoo Artist" by Jill Ciment
Our Town downtown
October 23, 2006
Vintage Books
$12.95 (paperback)
A cello means nothing on a ski lift, Swahili means nothing when spoken to a doorknob in Arkansas. And when Philip and Sara Ehrenreich arrive on the fictional island of Ta’un’uu in “The Tattoo Artist,” they have no frame of reference either.
The Great Depression may have blown them out of their Washington Mews stable house and out of the New York avant-garde art world. But when they find themselves marooned indefinitely on a South Pacific island, things are suddenly more surreal than even they could have imagined.
This impressive, concise novel spans the romance these self-styled revolutionaries (the nonviolent kind, with Philip seemingly more committed than Sara) kindle in 1920s New York; the Great Depression plummet that leads them to the South Pacific, to where Philip is commissioned to find masks for a mysterious collector; Sara’s native turn, and her return to New York, 30 years later.
When they meet, they’re both young people who find their upbringings too stifling to bear. Sara, through whose voice the story is told, is the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side, and a seamstress. Philip is the son of wealthier, worldlier German Jews.
They have struck out on their own at a time when calling yourself a Marxist is more than an ironic party joke or an academic delusion. And their relationship is one of the most interesting sides to this many-angled book.
Sara is first drawn to Philip at a union meeting where he’s delivering a lecture. He is an artist, and though Sara doesn’t pick up a pen, paper or paintbrush until after they get together, it’s obvious to both of them that her talent far outstrips his. This is clearly an issue for Philip who dreams of fathering a Utopian workers’ revolution by creating avant-garde art.
Sara allows him to keep many lovers and sometimes “collaborates” with them. But at one point, fearing he may actually leave her for a socialite, Sara asks him what he sees in this other, frumpish woman.
Philip’s response illustrates his resentment for Sara: “She respects … my work, Sara … You decide to dabble in the avant-garde, and sure enough, everything you touch turns new … You have no idea how humiliating mediocrity can be.” But despite Philip’s jealousy and his free love sensibilities, it’s pretty clear that he and Sara share a deep, passionate love.
Sara silently admits that his paintings are mediocre, but believes it’s because he’s stubborn, rather than untalented: “Had Philip only allowed his art a little ugliness, a little fallibility, a smidgen of human exhaustion. But he didn’t. He continued to believe, at forty-three, that art was perfection or it was nothing, and that the avant-garde artist, like the seer, felt only the eternally youthful upsurge of indestructible faith, or he was a fraud” she explains.
With nothing left to lose, Philip sees the mask-finding mission as a chance to finally prove his genius. Like Sara, he subscribes to what she says is a Western concept of art – that great, even good art is rewarded with a kind of immortality – although she will eventually outgrow this philosophy. “Collecting requires the same degree of genius painting does,” he tells her.
They quickly become captives of the Ta-un-uuans after they are abandoned by the merchant ship that drops them off at the island to search for masks.
The Ta’un’uuans, are a people who believe that tattoos can be used to communicate with their ancestors in heaven. (It’s a little more complex than that. Just read the creation story, which takes up one very short chapter, a few extra times.)
At first they treat Philip and Sara cordially. But when Sara and Philip are blamed for a sudden, tragic event, the islanders punish them by tattooing their crimes onto their bodies in the most visible way imaginable.
But the longer that Sara stays with them, the more she begins to forget about home and integrate herself into their society. It’s less Patty Hearst than a natural progression in her attitudes, or a soft embrace of circumstances she can’t change.
The islanders have a much more temporal concept of the world and of art. When they die, their heavily-tattooed corpses are scrubbed to remove the stained skin, before being sent adrift into the ocean and, it is thought, on to heaven – since as a native explains to Sara, they believe that “the body is only temporarily leased to the living: it should be returned in the same unmarked condition that it was lent.”
Readers hoping for rich characterizations of the islanders will be disappointed. But they a very collective society and it’s fitting that usually, they are described en masse. This is a story that’s mostly about art and Sara’s internal life anyway.
Sara’s natural talents are inevitably applied to tattooing as she helps the islanders record the events of their lives on their flesh. They use their tattoos to present a united front to outsiders who arrive on Ta’un’uu, by coming together and creating a large “tapestry” with their bodies. (“The islanders had designed themselves so that the sum of their creation was always greater than its parts. An individual’s tattoos were considered by the tribe to be no more meaningful than a word taken out of context.”)
Sara becomes a fragment and an architect of this human mosaic, and it becomes easy to group her with the popular idea that all works of art are part of a bigger, single story – a story that’s constantly being added to, subtracted from and refined – one that’s built up, knocked down, yet outlasts all of its contributors, no matter what.
-- Matt Elzweig
October 23, 2006
Vintage Books
$12.95 (paperback)
A cello means nothing on a ski lift, Swahili means nothing when spoken to a doorknob in Arkansas. And when Philip and Sara Ehrenreich arrive on the fictional island of Ta’un’uu in “The Tattoo Artist,” they have no frame of reference either.
The Great Depression may have blown them out of their Washington Mews stable house and out of the New York avant-garde art world. But when they find themselves marooned indefinitely on a South Pacific island, things are suddenly more surreal than even they could have imagined.
This impressive, concise novel spans the romance these self-styled revolutionaries (the nonviolent kind, with Philip seemingly more committed than Sara) kindle in 1920s New York; the Great Depression plummet that leads them to the South Pacific, to where Philip is commissioned to find masks for a mysterious collector; Sara’s native turn, and her return to New York, 30 years later.
When they meet, they’re both young people who find their upbringings too stifling to bear. Sara, through whose voice the story is told, is the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side, and a seamstress. Philip is the son of wealthier, worldlier German Jews.
They have struck out on their own at a time when calling yourself a Marxist is more than an ironic party joke or an academic delusion. And their relationship is one of the most interesting sides to this many-angled book.
Sara is first drawn to Philip at a union meeting where he’s delivering a lecture. He is an artist, and though Sara doesn’t pick up a pen, paper or paintbrush until after they get together, it’s obvious to both of them that her talent far outstrips his. This is clearly an issue for Philip who dreams of fathering a Utopian workers’ revolution by creating avant-garde art.
Sara allows him to keep many lovers and sometimes “collaborates” with them. But at one point, fearing he may actually leave her for a socialite, Sara asks him what he sees in this other, frumpish woman.
Philip’s response illustrates his resentment for Sara: “She respects … my work, Sara … You decide to dabble in the avant-garde, and sure enough, everything you touch turns new … You have no idea how humiliating mediocrity can be.” But despite Philip’s jealousy and his free love sensibilities, it’s pretty clear that he and Sara share a deep, passionate love.
Sara silently admits that his paintings are mediocre, but believes it’s because he’s stubborn, rather than untalented: “Had Philip only allowed his art a little ugliness, a little fallibility, a smidgen of human exhaustion. But he didn’t. He continued to believe, at forty-three, that art was perfection or it was nothing, and that the avant-garde artist, like the seer, felt only the eternally youthful upsurge of indestructible faith, or he was a fraud” she explains.
With nothing left to lose, Philip sees the mask-finding mission as a chance to finally prove his genius. Like Sara, he subscribes to what she says is a Western concept of art – that great, even good art is rewarded with a kind of immortality – although she will eventually outgrow this philosophy. “Collecting requires the same degree of genius painting does,” he tells her.
They quickly become captives of the Ta-un-uuans after they are abandoned by the merchant ship that drops them off at the island to search for masks.
The Ta’un’uuans, are a people who believe that tattoos can be used to communicate with their ancestors in heaven. (It’s a little more complex than that. Just read the creation story, which takes up one very short chapter, a few extra times.)
At first they treat Philip and Sara cordially. But when Sara and Philip are blamed for a sudden, tragic event, the islanders punish them by tattooing their crimes onto their bodies in the most visible way imaginable.
But the longer that Sara stays with them, the more she begins to forget about home and integrate herself into their society. It’s less Patty Hearst than a natural progression in her attitudes, or a soft embrace of circumstances she can’t change.
The islanders have a much more temporal concept of the world and of art. When they die, their heavily-tattooed corpses are scrubbed to remove the stained skin, before being sent adrift into the ocean and, it is thought, on to heaven – since as a native explains to Sara, they believe that “the body is only temporarily leased to the living: it should be returned in the same unmarked condition that it was lent.”
Readers hoping for rich characterizations of the islanders will be disappointed. But they a very collective society and it’s fitting that usually, they are described en masse. This is a story that’s mostly about art and Sara’s internal life anyway.
Sara’s natural talents are inevitably applied to tattooing as she helps the islanders record the events of their lives on their flesh. They use their tattoos to present a united front to outsiders who arrive on Ta’un’uu, by coming together and creating a large “tapestry” with their bodies. (“The islanders had designed themselves so that the sum of their creation was always greater than its parts. An individual’s tattoos were considered by the tribe to be no more meaningful than a word taken out of context.”)
Sara becomes a fragment and an architect of this human mosaic, and it becomes easy to group her with the popular idea that all works of art are part of a bigger, single story – a story that’s constantly being added to, subtracted from and refined – one that’s built up, knocked down, yet outlasts all of its contributors, no matter what.
-- Matt Elzweig
Q & A with Brian and David Vendley, Vendy Award Finalists
Our Town downtown
October 23, 2006
Who is the best street food vendor in New York? Just six months after setting up their popular carne asada cart, Calexico, on Prince and Wooster in SoHo, the Vendley Brothers (Brian, David and Jesse) were named finalists in the second annual Vendy Awards, held at St. Marks Church-in-the-Bowery on October 22nd.
Downtown caught up with Brian and David, days before their showdown with Pieded “the Arepa Lady” Cano, Samiul Noor Haque (of Sammy’s Halal) and Thiru “Dosa Man” Kumar.
Tell me about Calexico, California.
Brian: Calexico is in the heart of what’s called Imperial Valley, which is in the southeast corner of California. And that area is known for its agriculture, and not much else. So anyway, Calexico’s one of the larger towns in that area. Our grandparents live really close to Calexico. It’s known for its carne asada, which is our main dish. My family and I included have lived there on and off, basically back and forth. And sort of every Christmas, every Thanksgiving that’s where we go. And out there the carne asada is like your turkey dinner for Thanksgiving. The cart idea came up right around when the Vendy Awards were last year. We saw people making homemade food, food that isn’t bought frozen and then just reheated like most cart food is. So that was the hit on the head.
What’s in carne asada?
B: Well from the bottom up, the kind of meat that we use is different. We use skirt steak. It’s a thick, juicy, good kind of steak. Most carne asada you get at a traditional Mexican restaurant, I’m not even sure what kind of steak you would call it, but it’s really thin. And as for seasoning, it’s literally a secret recipe – I don’t even know what it is. It’s a spice mix that we developed with a spice manufacturer in Brooklyn. Jesse had been trying to recreate the carne asada from Calexico and realized early on he couldn’t put it together with the spices he could buy at the store. They would give us a blend, and he would say ‘alright, this is good, but I need more of this, less of that, and let’s try some of this.’ And he’d give them another round. The deal with them though, is that they would do it for free, but they don’t disclose what’s actually in it. So it’s like a blind pact, kind of.
How competitive are the Vendy’s?
David: I don’t want to say they’re not competitive, but at least for us, we [were] really inspired by the last Vendys. For us it’s more humbling. We’re just really grateful and appreciative that we were recognized in this way. And the people that we are finalists with you know, all are like legendary in the New York street vending scene. It’s just really cool and nice, to be seen in the same light as those kind of legendary street vending people. Either way we’ll be happy.
B: One of things that’s really cool is that it encourages a lot of other vendors to sell food that they know from home. I mean, how cool would it be if most vendors on the street, instead of selling boiled hot dogs, were selling some great recipe that their mother taught them when they were little in whatever country they came from?
You must prefer working out here than in an office, right?
B: Sure. Yeah. Well I mean to be honest, it’s a lot more work than we thought it would be. So we’re just now kind of catching up with that. So, when we’re on top of it, which we’re getting to, then yes, I definitely enjoy it more. And I love the fact that the only person that’s telling me I gotta do this or that, is me, or my brother. At the same time it’s a little extra stressful because it’s not gonna get done unless I do it.
Is running a street cart a good way to meet girls?
B: I don’t think so.
Because I can think of one vendor in particular who’s always chatting up girls at his cart.
B: I think he’s just fooling himself. I’m friendly with a lot of people including a lot of pretty women that, you know, this neighborhood’s full of them. But you know, I provide you food, give it to you and say goodbye. You know there’s nothing more than that. As far as meeting people though, you do. You meet friends. I’m the host, the waiter, the chef, and the busboy, so you actually get to know me. So that’s pretty cool.
This is a pretty prime location.
B: I mean, when we were first doing this – we know how to cook – but I had never cooked for 50 people. And now we’re cooking for like 150 people. It was a little overwhelming. And there were times in the beginning, we’d be sold out in an hour and a half. And that’s just cause it’s all the food we could make. So anyway, there were a bunch of pickups in the business early on and people were always very tolerant. I couldn’t have gotten that in Times Square. I couldn’t have gotten that on Sixth Avenue by Rockefeller. And I know there’s business there. There’s lots. There’s 30 carts in a row, and a line on every one. But, maybe eventually, maybe in two years I’ll put one there. I don’t know. But I wanted a neighborhood, you know. I wanted to know people’s names and them to know mine.
-- Matt Elzweig
October 23, 2006
Who is the best street food vendor in New York? Just six months after setting up their popular carne asada cart, Calexico, on Prince and Wooster in SoHo, the Vendley Brothers (Brian, David and Jesse) were named finalists in the second annual Vendy Awards, held at St. Marks Church-in-the-Bowery on October 22nd.
Downtown caught up with Brian and David, days before their showdown with Pieded “the Arepa Lady” Cano, Samiul Noor Haque (of Sammy’s Halal) and Thiru “Dosa Man” Kumar.
Tell me about Calexico, California.
Brian: Calexico is in the heart of what’s called Imperial Valley, which is in the southeast corner of California. And that area is known for its agriculture, and not much else. So anyway, Calexico’s one of the larger towns in that area. Our grandparents live really close to Calexico. It’s known for its carne asada, which is our main dish. My family and I included have lived there on and off, basically back and forth. And sort of every Christmas, every Thanksgiving that’s where we go. And out there the carne asada is like your turkey dinner for Thanksgiving. The cart idea came up right around when the Vendy Awards were last year. We saw people making homemade food, food that isn’t bought frozen and then just reheated like most cart food is. So that was the hit on the head.
What’s in carne asada?
B: Well from the bottom up, the kind of meat that we use is different. We use skirt steak. It’s a thick, juicy, good kind of steak. Most carne asada you get at a traditional Mexican restaurant, I’m not even sure what kind of steak you would call it, but it’s really thin. And as for seasoning, it’s literally a secret recipe – I don’t even know what it is. It’s a spice mix that we developed with a spice manufacturer in Brooklyn. Jesse had been trying to recreate the carne asada from Calexico and realized early on he couldn’t put it together with the spices he could buy at the store. They would give us a blend, and he would say ‘alright, this is good, but I need more of this, less of that, and let’s try some of this.’ And he’d give them another round. The deal with them though, is that they would do it for free, but they don’t disclose what’s actually in it. So it’s like a blind pact, kind of.
How competitive are the Vendy’s?
David: I don’t want to say they’re not competitive, but at least for us, we [were] really inspired by the last Vendys. For us it’s more humbling. We’re just really grateful and appreciative that we were recognized in this way. And the people that we are finalists with you know, all are like legendary in the New York street vending scene. It’s just really cool and nice, to be seen in the same light as those kind of legendary street vending people. Either way we’ll be happy.
B: One of things that’s really cool is that it encourages a lot of other vendors to sell food that they know from home. I mean, how cool would it be if most vendors on the street, instead of selling boiled hot dogs, were selling some great recipe that their mother taught them when they were little in whatever country they came from?
You must prefer working out here than in an office, right?
B: Sure. Yeah. Well I mean to be honest, it’s a lot more work than we thought it would be. So we’re just now kind of catching up with that. So, when we’re on top of it, which we’re getting to, then yes, I definitely enjoy it more. And I love the fact that the only person that’s telling me I gotta do this or that, is me, or my brother. At the same time it’s a little extra stressful because it’s not gonna get done unless I do it.
Is running a street cart a good way to meet girls?
B: I don’t think so.
Because I can think of one vendor in particular who’s always chatting up girls at his cart.
B: I think he’s just fooling himself. I’m friendly with a lot of people including a lot of pretty women that, you know, this neighborhood’s full of them. But you know, I provide you food, give it to you and say goodbye. You know there’s nothing more than that. As far as meeting people though, you do. You meet friends. I’m the host, the waiter, the chef, and the busboy, so you actually get to know me. So that’s pretty cool.
This is a pretty prime location.
B: I mean, when we were first doing this – we know how to cook – but I had never cooked for 50 people. And now we’re cooking for like 150 people. It was a little overwhelming. And there were times in the beginning, we’d be sold out in an hour and a half. And that’s just cause it’s all the food we could make. So anyway, there were a bunch of pickups in the business early on and people were always very tolerant. I couldn’t have gotten that in Times Square. I couldn’t have gotten that on Sixth Avenue by Rockefeller. And I know there’s business there. There’s lots. There’s 30 carts in a row, and a line on every one. But, maybe eventually, maybe in two years I’ll put one there. I don’t know. But I wanted a neighborhood, you know. I wanted to know people’s names and them to know mine.
-- Matt Elzweig
Monday, October 16, 2006
Movie Review: Little Children
Our Town downtown
October 16, 2006
Playing at: Angelika Film Center
Run Time: 130 minutes
Rating: R
Director: Todd Field
Noise is among the major gripes that those who flee or stay away from cities altogether claim to have with them. But silence or near-silence can be just as maddening. Just ask a grad student who brings his books to a coffee shop rather than a library. He’ll reason that there’s something more jarring about a bulky knapsack falling off a table or a dry cough being hacked out within a study room’s artificial quietude, than road work being done a block away in the open air, or the blended rush of buses, cabs, and their horns.
In the same way, there are sounds native to the suburbs that can drive certain people up a wall.
In this film adaptation of Tom Perrotta’s 2004 novel, the cicadas emit their peculiar chirp at twilight as Sarah Pierce (Kate Winslet) and a friend go on their evening walk. It’s a regularly scheduled moment of freedom and solitude that she cherishes.
Not all suburbs are the same, but East Wyndham, Massachusetts, could just as well be somewhere in Westchester County, or in Connecticut or on Long Island. You don’t have to see entire scenes to know that somewhere, at some time of day, the buzzing of a weed whacker, or the whisk of a minivan’s side door sliding open, the kids spilling out as they arrive home from the mall or a Cub Scout meeting, are not far away.
Fairly recent movies in the “suburban malaise” genre, movies like “Happiness,” “American Beauty” and the remake of “The Stepford Wives,” have favored satire over a more earnest drama, and this one aims at something in between.
It’s likely that Sarah, with her Master’s in English Literature and ambivalence towards motherhood, is one of those people who grow uneasy when confronted with what she likely identifies as the sounds of settling.
Like the aptly-named Brad (Patrick Wilson), who the moms at the playground call “The Prom King,” for his just-out-of-reach air of confidence and his looks, Sarah who becomes his lover, has a spouse who doesn’t remember that relationships are like plants; leave them untended long enough, and they wilt. In one telling scene, Sarah walks in on her husband enjoying some Internet porn in the most visceral way imaginable.
Brad’s picture perfect wife (Jennifer Connelly) means well, but spends more time interviewing other people’s families for the documentaries she makes, than her own. And she’s frustrated with him because he’d rather be a housedad than study for the Bar (and fail a third time).
Brad, who was a college football star, reluctantly allows himself to be taken under the wing of a disgraced ex-cop named Larry (Noah Emmerich). Larry has made it his personal mission to torment the pedophile who has just returned to the neighborhood after paying his debt to society for indecent exposure.
The force that drives “Little Children” is the affair Sarah and Noah embark upon after a lengthy flirtation. The question is whether they’re willing to sacrifice the stability of their homes, a stability their community, where one person’s business is nearly everyone else’s, is designed to ensure.
The coach (Raymond J. Barry) of the nighttime football squad Larry recruits Brad for, doubles as a narrator, and he reads what sound like passages from a book. (He did the same thing in an old Eminem video, except that was supposed to be ridiculous). This prose was clearly written as a tie-in to Sarah’s literary sensibilities, but it is cloying in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way that’s distracts from the real action. But it’s done just little enough to avoid undermining the movie.
The literary motif does work, though, when Sarah’s friend drags her to a book group and she is asked to comment on Madame Bovary, who the hypercritical Mary Ann (Mary McCann) has written off as a “slut” insinuating that the neighborhood has caught wind of Sarah’s affair and does not approve. Sarah is quick on her feet, calling Mary Ann, who literally schedules time to have sex with her husband, and by extension the rest of the community, into question.
The sidebars and the central story in “Children” come together in a way that’s more linear than the haphazard mishmash of everyday living, by now a convention of the genre. But it brings to life reflections in the glass houses that make up a town beset by the unsettling reality that the good among us can be bad, the bad good, and that if a person is a story, he has at least three sides. To Brad and Sarah, life is one big compromise to be constantly balanced and reevaluated.
-- Matt Elzweig
October 16, 2006
Playing at: Angelika Film Center
Run Time: 130 minutes
Rating: R
Director: Todd Field
Noise is among the major gripes that those who flee or stay away from cities altogether claim to have with them. But silence or near-silence can be just as maddening. Just ask a grad student who brings his books to a coffee shop rather than a library. He’ll reason that there’s something more jarring about a bulky knapsack falling off a table or a dry cough being hacked out within a study room’s artificial quietude, than road work being done a block away in the open air, or the blended rush of buses, cabs, and their horns.
In the same way, there are sounds native to the suburbs that can drive certain people up a wall.
In this film adaptation of Tom Perrotta’s 2004 novel, the cicadas emit their peculiar chirp at twilight as Sarah Pierce (Kate Winslet) and a friend go on their evening walk. It’s a regularly scheduled moment of freedom and solitude that she cherishes.
Not all suburbs are the same, but East Wyndham, Massachusetts, could just as well be somewhere in Westchester County, or in Connecticut or on Long Island. You don’t have to see entire scenes to know that somewhere, at some time of day, the buzzing of a weed whacker, or the whisk of a minivan’s side door sliding open, the kids spilling out as they arrive home from the mall or a Cub Scout meeting, are not far away.
Fairly recent movies in the “suburban malaise” genre, movies like “Happiness,” “American Beauty” and the remake of “The Stepford Wives,” have favored satire over a more earnest drama, and this one aims at something in between.
It’s likely that Sarah, with her Master’s in English Literature and ambivalence towards motherhood, is one of those people who grow uneasy when confronted with what she likely identifies as the sounds of settling.
Like the aptly-named Brad (Patrick Wilson), who the moms at the playground call “The Prom King,” for his just-out-of-reach air of confidence and his looks, Sarah who becomes his lover, has a spouse who doesn’t remember that relationships are like plants; leave them untended long enough, and they wilt. In one telling scene, Sarah walks in on her husband enjoying some Internet porn in the most visceral way imaginable.
Brad’s picture perfect wife (Jennifer Connelly) means well, but spends more time interviewing other people’s families for the documentaries she makes, than her own. And she’s frustrated with him because he’d rather be a housedad than study for the Bar (and fail a third time).
Brad, who was a college football star, reluctantly allows himself to be taken under the wing of a disgraced ex-cop named Larry (Noah Emmerich). Larry has made it his personal mission to torment the pedophile who has just returned to the neighborhood after paying his debt to society for indecent exposure.
The force that drives “Little Children” is the affair Sarah and Noah embark upon after a lengthy flirtation. The question is whether they’re willing to sacrifice the stability of their homes, a stability their community, where one person’s business is nearly everyone else’s, is designed to ensure.
The coach (Raymond J. Barry) of the nighttime football squad Larry recruits Brad for, doubles as a narrator, and he reads what sound like passages from a book. (He did the same thing in an old Eminem video, except that was supposed to be ridiculous). This prose was clearly written as a tie-in to Sarah’s literary sensibilities, but it is cloying in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way that’s distracts from the real action. But it’s done just little enough to avoid undermining the movie.
The literary motif does work, though, when Sarah’s friend drags her to a book group and she is asked to comment on Madame Bovary, who the hypercritical Mary Ann (Mary McCann) has written off as a “slut” insinuating that the neighborhood has caught wind of Sarah’s affair and does not approve. Sarah is quick on her feet, calling Mary Ann, who literally schedules time to have sex with her husband, and by extension the rest of the community, into question.
The sidebars and the central story in “Children” come together in a way that’s more linear than the haphazard mishmash of everyday living, by now a convention of the genre. But it brings to life reflections in the glass houses that make up a town beset by the unsettling reality that the good among us can be bad, the bad good, and that if a person is a story, he has at least three sides. To Brad and Sarah, life is one big compromise to be constantly balanced and reevaluated.
-- Matt Elzweig
Monday, October 09, 2006
Movie Review: A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints
Our Town downtown
October 9, 2006
Playing at: Angelika Film Center
Run Time: 99 minutes
Rating: R
Writer/Director: Dito Montiel
Today, Astoria, Queens has four Starbucks, added cache and rents to match. But in the 70s and 80s, New York had a major crime problem on its hands and Astoria was no exception.
Dito Montiel wrote his 2003 memoir “A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints,” to commemorate all the people he was glad to have known growing up there. An actual book of saints that included their pictures and biographies inspired Montiel to it. This, the screen adaptation of that book, is his first film.
The memoir had far too many people and stories to put into the screenplay though, and as Montiel has explained in interviews, the movie contains fictional composites of only some of them.
The “saints” who matter most in the film are his parents, a Nicaraguan immigrant and his Irish-American wife who had their only son late in life; Dito’s troubled friends and Laurie, his then-girlfriend.
The struggles that Dito and his friends contended with, from gang violence to child abuse, are framed within the 15-year absence Montiel spent in California, not returning even after the book’s success. Staying away – leaving in the first place – was what made his father, played by Chazz Palminteri, disown him.
Dito returns home when his father gets seriously ill, and the stage is set for an airing of old grievances that doesn’t require alcohol to get ugly fast.
Antonio, (Channing Tatum) is Dito’s best friend and Monty (Dito’s father’s) surrogate son. Antonio is a self-hating leader of the pack who has learned to communicate with violence, at his father’s hand, and likes to walk around with his shirt off. And the line he’s willing to cross to settle scores, perceived or real, keeps getting closer. This doesn’t sit well with Dito’s mother (Dianne Wiest) who worries Antonio will drag her son down with him if her husband keeps encouraging the boys’ friendship.
Dito’s pivotal relationship with Antonio is clear enough, but his father’s reasons for wanting to keep him practically confined to the Five Boroughs for the rest of his life, are murkier. It’s fairly obvious that Monty’s afraid of empty nest syndrome, losing the entirety of his family unit, blah, blah, blah. But what would add a dimension to this old standby, would be some explanation. Basically, all that’s given, is a bunch of “no way, no how’s” with Chazz Palminteri doing his patriarch from the old country bit, while Robert Downey Jr., who plays the adult Montiel, gives his arms-folded, ponderous mug more than once, the critical moments between father and son unfolding like sluggish choreography.
The way the characters occasionally look right into the camera and address the audience doesn’t work either because it assumes the audience knows the memoir well enough to realize that that’s where this technique comes from, that it’s not just a misstep from student film night.
Every story probably been written already, but with a little fleshing out “A Guide” could have had more of an individual identity. In the end what’s left is a flowing soundtrack to New York in 1986 that is entertaining, but offers little more than atmospheric variations on the “coming of age,” “you can never go home again” tropes.
-- Matt Elzweig
October 9, 2006
Playing at: Angelika Film Center
Run Time: 99 minutes
Rating: R
Writer/Director: Dito Montiel
Today, Astoria, Queens has four Starbucks, added cache and rents to match. But in the 70s and 80s, New York had a major crime problem on its hands and Astoria was no exception.
Dito Montiel wrote his 2003 memoir “A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints,” to commemorate all the people he was glad to have known growing up there. An actual book of saints that included their pictures and biographies inspired Montiel to it. This, the screen adaptation of that book, is his first film.
The memoir had far too many people and stories to put into the screenplay though, and as Montiel has explained in interviews, the movie contains fictional composites of only some of them.
The “saints” who matter most in the film are his parents, a Nicaraguan immigrant and his Irish-American wife who had their only son late in life; Dito’s troubled friends and Laurie, his then-girlfriend.
The struggles that Dito and his friends contended with, from gang violence to child abuse, are framed within the 15-year absence Montiel spent in California, not returning even after the book’s success. Staying away – leaving in the first place – was what made his father, played by Chazz Palminteri, disown him.
Dito returns home when his father gets seriously ill, and the stage is set for an airing of old grievances that doesn’t require alcohol to get ugly fast.
Antonio, (Channing Tatum) is Dito’s best friend and Monty (Dito’s father’s) surrogate son. Antonio is a self-hating leader of the pack who has learned to communicate with violence, at his father’s hand, and likes to walk around with his shirt off. And the line he’s willing to cross to settle scores, perceived or real, keeps getting closer. This doesn’t sit well with Dito’s mother (Dianne Wiest) who worries Antonio will drag her son down with him if her husband keeps encouraging the boys’ friendship.
Dito’s pivotal relationship with Antonio is clear enough, but his father’s reasons for wanting to keep him practically confined to the Five Boroughs for the rest of his life, are murkier. It’s fairly obvious that Monty’s afraid of empty nest syndrome, losing the entirety of his family unit, blah, blah, blah. But what would add a dimension to this old standby, would be some explanation. Basically, all that’s given, is a bunch of “no way, no how’s” with Chazz Palminteri doing his patriarch from the old country bit, while Robert Downey Jr., who plays the adult Montiel, gives his arms-folded, ponderous mug more than once, the critical moments between father and son unfolding like sluggish choreography.
The way the characters occasionally look right into the camera and address the audience doesn’t work either because it assumes the audience knows the memoir well enough to realize that that’s where this technique comes from, that it’s not just a misstep from student film night.
Every story probably been written already, but with a little fleshing out “A Guide” could have had more of an individual identity. In the end what’s left is a flowing soundtrack to New York in 1986 that is entertaining, but offers little more than atmospheric variations on the “coming of age,” “you can never go home again” tropes.
-- Matt Elzweig
Q & A with Jacques Torres, Chocolate Maker
Our Town downtown
October 9, 2006
Fresh out of the French army in 1980, pastry chef Jacques Torres walks into the historic Hotel Negresco and, on a bet with a friend, approaches Jacques Maximin. Then he asks the Michelin two-star chef for a job and is surprised when he gets it. For the next eight years he serves out what proves to be a formative apprenticeship.
Today, Torres has two factories in New York – the original in DUMBO, Brooklyn, and the newer one in Hudson Square, devoted to a passion of his, chocolate.
Why are people obsessed with chocolate?
Chocolate is a mystic product. Chocolate used to be a currency. Chocolate used to be offered to the god at the Aztec time. Chocolate used to be a drink for the kings and queens and the emperor, the emperor of France, and the king of Spain.
An alcoholic drink?
No. Like the drinks before sex, for enhanced pleasure. Or a drink before going to work to give you power. It’s a mystic product, and I think that over the years chocolate [has] stayed a little bit mystic. But also, chocolate has the same chemical that your brain produces when you’re in love. So chocolate makes you happy. Chocolate makes you feel good. So that’s also something that perhaps, your body remembers, better than your brain. And your body will crave product, if you need it. Your body will ask for it. So you see a dark chocolate and you want it. It’s a way of your body asking for that. So, it’s one of the products that actually make you feel good.
The medicinal and nutritional properties in chocolate that pop up in news reports – are they for real?
What’s going on is, lately a lot of research was done with chocolates, and the ancients, in Mexico, in different countries in the Central America, used to use chocolate as a medicine. So now we start to do some research on dark chocolate, and we realize that dark chocolate can be good for you. It doesn’t have too much sugar. If you don’t eat too much of the sugar when you eat chocolate [it can be good for you]. And chocolate can be a mood elevator, it can you know, enhance your mood, like make you happier. Chocolate can actually make your blood thinner like aspirin. Chocolate has a lot of antioxidants, which is good for you. So chocolate is one of those products that can be good for you if it’s well-processed, and if it doesn’t contain too much sugar. So good chocolate, high quality chocolate will actually be good for you, dark chocolates.
When you introduced yourself to Jacques Maximin, it was on a bet, but did it take a lot for you to approach him cold like that? Or is that your nature?
I think that when you’re 20, you’re fearless … You know when you don’t know anyone it’s easy to do things like that. When you start to have a reputation, you can kill your reputation. So I went in and asked, and that was great, that worked. And in life you perhaps should you know, do this kind of thing.
Speaking of that, you’ve worked all over the world. Is there any difference between what types of chocolate are popular in different places?
Definitely yes. As an example, the milk chocolate in U.S. will be the same as in England, but not the same as in France or Switzerland or Belgium. The process, and the taste is different. Dark chocolate is a little bit more Belgian than French. French like darker and stronger. Belgians like it a little bit softer, and not as crazy flavor. So Americans like that type of dark chocolate. Milk chocolate is more English, English type milk chocolate.
Do chocolatiers have secret societies where they share their techniques like the ones magicians are supposed to have?
You know, it’s interesting, but big companies have trade secrets. You know, the way to make M & Ms the way to make the Snickers, the way to make the Hershey’s Kisses. They have equipment that they don’t show to anyone because they have this equipment made for them. [At a] smaller company, like mine, everything is open. It’s not in the equipment. The difference is in our heads and in our hands.
Your staff tests your products. Is it a formal or more casual process?
Very informal: I make something, I put it on the table. Everybody passes by. I don’t even tell them anything, and I look at the reaction, because you know sometimes they don’t tell you the truth. So if they look, and they put it back, that means, you know, it’s no good. If they eat and they eat, and they take another piece, this is good.
I read that you call some of your employees “Oompa Loompa’s.” Do you like the original Willy Wonka movie or the remake better?
I prefer the original. I like the magic of the first one. I would love to be in the factory where I have that kind of fantasy. I will be happy, I have that in my mind, you know that one day I will have a chocolate factory with fantasy stuff, that kids can walk around in. So perhaps one day that will happen.
-- Matt Elzweig
October 9, 2006
Fresh out of the French army in 1980, pastry chef Jacques Torres walks into the historic Hotel Negresco and, on a bet with a friend, approaches Jacques Maximin. Then he asks the Michelin two-star chef for a job and is surprised when he gets it. For the next eight years he serves out what proves to be a formative apprenticeship.
Today, Torres has two factories in New York – the original in DUMBO, Brooklyn, and the newer one in Hudson Square, devoted to a passion of his, chocolate.
Why are people obsessed with chocolate?
Chocolate is a mystic product. Chocolate used to be a currency. Chocolate used to be offered to the god at the Aztec time. Chocolate used to be a drink for the kings and queens and the emperor, the emperor of France, and the king of Spain.
An alcoholic drink?
No. Like the drinks before sex, for enhanced pleasure. Or a drink before going to work to give you power. It’s a mystic product, and I think that over the years chocolate [has] stayed a little bit mystic. But also, chocolate has the same chemical that your brain produces when you’re in love. So chocolate makes you happy. Chocolate makes you feel good. So that’s also something that perhaps, your body remembers, better than your brain. And your body will crave product, if you need it. Your body will ask for it. So you see a dark chocolate and you want it. It’s a way of your body asking for that. So, it’s one of the products that actually make you feel good.
The medicinal and nutritional properties in chocolate that pop up in news reports – are they for real?
What’s going on is, lately a lot of research was done with chocolates, and the ancients, in Mexico, in different countries in the Central America, used to use chocolate as a medicine. So now we start to do some research on dark chocolate, and we realize that dark chocolate can be good for you. It doesn’t have too much sugar. If you don’t eat too much of the sugar when you eat chocolate [it can be good for you]. And chocolate can be a mood elevator, it can you know, enhance your mood, like make you happier. Chocolate can actually make your blood thinner like aspirin. Chocolate has a lot of antioxidants, which is good for you. So chocolate is one of those products that can be good for you if it’s well-processed, and if it doesn’t contain too much sugar. So good chocolate, high quality chocolate will actually be good for you, dark chocolates.
When you introduced yourself to Jacques Maximin, it was on a bet, but did it take a lot for you to approach him cold like that? Or is that your nature?
I think that when you’re 20, you’re fearless … You know when you don’t know anyone it’s easy to do things like that. When you start to have a reputation, you can kill your reputation. So I went in and asked, and that was great, that worked. And in life you perhaps should you know, do this kind of thing.
Speaking of that, you’ve worked all over the world. Is there any difference between what types of chocolate are popular in different places?
Definitely yes. As an example, the milk chocolate in U.S. will be the same as in England, but not the same as in France or Switzerland or Belgium. The process, and the taste is different. Dark chocolate is a little bit more Belgian than French. French like darker and stronger. Belgians like it a little bit softer, and not as crazy flavor. So Americans like that type of dark chocolate. Milk chocolate is more English, English type milk chocolate.
Do chocolatiers have secret societies where they share their techniques like the ones magicians are supposed to have?
You know, it’s interesting, but big companies have trade secrets. You know, the way to make M & Ms the way to make the Snickers, the way to make the Hershey’s Kisses. They have equipment that they don’t show to anyone because they have this equipment made for them. [At a] smaller company, like mine, everything is open. It’s not in the equipment. The difference is in our heads and in our hands.
Your staff tests your products. Is it a formal or more casual process?
Very informal: I make something, I put it on the table. Everybody passes by. I don’t even tell them anything, and I look at the reaction, because you know sometimes they don’t tell you the truth. So if they look, and they put it back, that means, you know, it’s no good. If they eat and they eat, and they take another piece, this is good.
I read that you call some of your employees “Oompa Loompa’s.” Do you like the original Willy Wonka movie or the remake better?
I prefer the original. I like the magic of the first one. I would love to be in the factory where I have that kind of fantasy. I will be happy, I have that in my mind, you know that one day I will have a chocolate factory with fantasy stuff, that kids can walk around in. So perhaps one day that will happen.
-- Matt Elzweig
Monday, October 02, 2006
Movie Review: The Last King of Scotland
Our Town downtown
October 2, 2006
Playing at: Landmark’s Sunshine Cinema
Run Time: 121 Minutes
Rating: R
Director: Kevin Macdonald
Just out of medical school, Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy) is confronted with the sudden reality that most likely he’ll be following in his father’s footsteps as an uptight patriarch in a house where the dining room table is always set just so, the moldings in the foyer always polished to shine.
But he doesn’t head to a series of Thai backpacker hotels, conspicuously close to the airport. He doesn’t join his country, Scotland’s, equivalent of the Peace Corps, dance naked at Burning Man, or settle for a jumbo pack of Eurail passes either.
Instead, he spins the globe in his room in a panic, and vows to go wherever his finger lands. And before he can say dengue fever, he’s off to work at a medical clinic for the rural poor in Uganda.
It becomes obvious, pretty quickly that while his intentions are mostly noble, in choosing to ride out his quarter life crisis in East Africa, Nicholas is driven not by bravery or something simpler, like fearlessness, but a real ignorance that raises questions: were the newspapers on strike in Scotland while he was in med school? How did he graduate? In this way he is reminiscent of Shosei Koda, the young Japanese who went to Iraq in 2004 to see what was going on and ended up, literally, losing his head. But at least Koda knew something was going on in the first place. Then again, book smarts and common sense are supposed to be two very different things.
When he arrives in Uganda, it has only been independent of British Control for nine years. And soldier and former light heavyweight champion boxer Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker) has just overthrown his boss.
His stay in the country is marked by chance encounters. Almost as soon as he gets off the plane, Nicholas is getting it on with one of the natives, a girl he meets on a bus, and there are no visible consequences. But it is the first indication of which of Nicholas’s body parts will lead to his undoing.
His real date with destiny comes shortly afterward, when he finds himself wrapping the sprained of wrist of Amin, himself, who has just walked away from a minor car accident.
Amin, a man who once called himself the “King of Scotland,” (as well as “His Excellency Al-Hadji Field Marshal Dr. Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, CBE, Life President of the Republic of Uganda”) is tickled to learn that Nicholas is a Scot, not an Englishman; he seems to assume that Nicholas shares his enmity and general mistrust of the English, who initially supported Amin, but will forever remain the estranged father Amin’s petulant son.
Then and there, at the scene of the accident, Amin witnesses a quick display of willfulness by Nicholas, which he perhaps interprets as bloodlust, something he admires. The experience prompts Amin to ask Nicholas to be his personal physician.
At first, Nicholas is hesitant to abandon the clinic (and his mission to bed the head doctor’s wife).
But after an enticing state dinner, he is persuaded to take the job. And Amin assures him it will be easy work since he’s in robust health, and the date of his death has already been foretold in one of his dreams.
By the time Nicholas makes it to one of Amin’s nighttime orgies, he’s more than weary of the man’s possessiveness, manipulation, violence and paranoia and wants out. But first he’ll have to tie up some seriously loose ends.
The film’s violence, both physical and psychological is enough to make even desensitized Generation Y-ers squirm.
It’s hard to think of a bad Forest Whitaker performance. This is one of his best and is up there with his portrayal of Charlie Parker in “Bird.” His volatility as Amin is terrifying. And because of this – the claustrophobia it creates, and all the blood – it could be a horror movie, except that it’s too sophisticated. And for the most part, the events it depicts really happened.
Since it is based on a novel, “The Last King” requires some suspension of disbelief. But a few of the plot turns are a little too transparent to accept. It’s understandable that Nicholas is shocked by the poverty he discovers when he arrives at the clinic. But it’s harder to believe that he’s as squeamish as he seems to be while administering basic medical procedures.
This and his swift ascent (or descent) from fun-loving backpacker medic to personal advisor to the Despot-in-Chief, both stretch the imagination.
But the fact remains that Idi Amin did terrorize his country. And by the time Tanzanian forces finally ousted him in 1979, hundreds of thousands of people in Uganda were dead and he was their killer.
Giles Foden, who wrote the 1998 novel the film is based on, spent a significant portion of his childhood in Africa. He based Nicholas, in part, on a real life British soldier he spoke to, who was thought to have been Amin’s top advisor (and who sounds a lot harder to sympathize with than Nicholas).
In a promotional interview for the book, Foden compared the systematic way Hitler and Stalin killed their victims, to Amin’s frenzied, haphazard approach, which comes across clearly in the film.
As Nicholas says in one particularly grisly scene towards the end: “you’re a child. That’s why you’re so f__g scary.”
-- Matt Elzweig
October 2, 2006
Playing at: Landmark’s Sunshine Cinema
Run Time: 121 Minutes
Rating: R
Director: Kevin Macdonald
Just out of medical school, Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy) is confronted with the sudden reality that most likely he’ll be following in his father’s footsteps as an uptight patriarch in a house where the dining room table is always set just so, the moldings in the foyer always polished to shine.
But he doesn’t head to a series of Thai backpacker hotels, conspicuously close to the airport. He doesn’t join his country, Scotland’s, equivalent of the Peace Corps, dance naked at Burning Man, or settle for a jumbo pack of Eurail passes either.
Instead, he spins the globe in his room in a panic, and vows to go wherever his finger lands. And before he can say dengue fever, he’s off to work at a medical clinic for the rural poor in Uganda.
It becomes obvious, pretty quickly that while his intentions are mostly noble, in choosing to ride out his quarter life crisis in East Africa, Nicholas is driven not by bravery or something simpler, like fearlessness, but a real ignorance that raises questions: were the newspapers on strike in Scotland while he was in med school? How did he graduate? In this way he is reminiscent of Shosei Koda, the young Japanese who went to Iraq in 2004 to see what was going on and ended up, literally, losing his head. But at least Koda knew something was going on in the first place. Then again, book smarts and common sense are supposed to be two very different things.
When he arrives in Uganda, it has only been independent of British Control for nine years. And soldier and former light heavyweight champion boxer Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker) has just overthrown his boss.
His stay in the country is marked by chance encounters. Almost as soon as he gets off the plane, Nicholas is getting it on with one of the natives, a girl he meets on a bus, and there are no visible consequences. But it is the first indication of which of Nicholas’s body parts will lead to his undoing.
His real date with destiny comes shortly afterward, when he finds himself wrapping the sprained of wrist of Amin, himself, who has just walked away from a minor car accident.
Amin, a man who once called himself the “King of Scotland,” (as well as “His Excellency Al-Hadji Field Marshal Dr. Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, CBE, Life President of the Republic of Uganda”) is tickled to learn that Nicholas is a Scot, not an Englishman; he seems to assume that Nicholas shares his enmity and general mistrust of the English, who initially supported Amin, but will forever remain the estranged father Amin’s petulant son.
Then and there, at the scene of the accident, Amin witnesses a quick display of willfulness by Nicholas, which he perhaps interprets as bloodlust, something he admires. The experience prompts Amin to ask Nicholas to be his personal physician.
At first, Nicholas is hesitant to abandon the clinic (and his mission to bed the head doctor’s wife).
But after an enticing state dinner, he is persuaded to take the job. And Amin assures him it will be easy work since he’s in robust health, and the date of his death has already been foretold in one of his dreams.
By the time Nicholas makes it to one of Amin’s nighttime orgies, he’s more than weary of the man’s possessiveness, manipulation, violence and paranoia and wants out. But first he’ll have to tie up some seriously loose ends.
The film’s violence, both physical and psychological is enough to make even desensitized Generation Y-ers squirm.
It’s hard to think of a bad Forest Whitaker performance. This is one of his best and is up there with his portrayal of Charlie Parker in “Bird.” His volatility as Amin is terrifying. And because of this – the claustrophobia it creates, and all the blood – it could be a horror movie, except that it’s too sophisticated. And for the most part, the events it depicts really happened.
Since it is based on a novel, “The Last King” requires some suspension of disbelief. But a few of the plot turns are a little too transparent to accept. It’s understandable that Nicholas is shocked by the poverty he discovers when he arrives at the clinic. But it’s harder to believe that he’s as squeamish as he seems to be while administering basic medical procedures.
This and his swift ascent (or descent) from fun-loving backpacker medic to personal advisor to the Despot-in-Chief, both stretch the imagination.
But the fact remains that Idi Amin did terrorize his country. And by the time Tanzanian forces finally ousted him in 1979, hundreds of thousands of people in Uganda were dead and he was their killer.
Giles Foden, who wrote the 1998 novel the film is based on, spent a significant portion of his childhood in Africa. He based Nicholas, in part, on a real life British soldier he spoke to, who was thought to have been Amin’s top advisor (and who sounds a lot harder to sympathize with than Nicholas).
In a promotional interview for the book, Foden compared the systematic way Hitler and Stalin killed their victims, to Amin’s frenzied, haphazard approach, which comes across clearly in the film.
As Nicholas says in one particularly grisly scene towards the end: “you’re a child. That’s why you’re so f__g scary.”
-- Matt Elzweig
Q & A with Adriana Lopez Sanfeliu, Documentary Photographer
Our Town downtown
October 2, 2006
This month, American Photo magazine named Adriana Lopez Sanfeliu as one of its “10 Best Young Photographers in America.”
“I think that you’re looking at a very advanced and sort of sophisticated documentary photographer. Somebody who is a great storyteller, who can take pictures, and you put them together and they tell a story,” Dave Schonauer, American Photo’s Editor-in-Chief says of her work, in a telephone interview. “But each particular photo is complex… you could say visually compelling.”
Lopez Sanfeliu, divides her time between New York and Barcelona, her home city. Some of her ongoing projects include “Life on the Block,” a look of life in a Spanish Harlem neighborhood, “A gypsy life: The Salazar family,” which is being shot in the Barcelona area, and “The Tompkins: a wealth of wilderness,” about the world’s largest nature preserve, in Chile.
You immerse yourself in communities for extended periods of time. How do you gain the access?
First of all, spending a lot of time. When I work on these projects, there’s much more time invested just being present and photographing. Especially at the beginning. It takes awhile to build the relationship. It’s like any relationship, like a lover or family. You have to build trust. So you have to be yourself and let them know who you are and vice versa. The way you do it is really being present and being very honest about what I’m doing and being myself.
There are a lot of myths surrounding Gypsies.
My interest in approaching the gypsies was exactly that. I mean there’s a lot of clichés about the Gypsies. In the Spanish culture, I mean we live with them and they’re part of our society, but they have never been integrated. So Gypsies have, you know, tags. Like people would talk about them as thieves or people you can’t trust. So most of the time when I choose a project like that it’s because I wanna see what’s behind those stereotypes. The family I’ve worked with for five years don’t respond to those stereotypes at all. They’re actually you know, very beautiful, amazing people, that every time I go to a home, takes care of me. You know, they’re sort of like me. It’s not a money-based religion at all, which you know, that’s part of … They’re mostly nomad, merchants, vendors. That’s what they know, that’s their culture. So they’re always buy and sell, buy and sell. So it’s very hard to have a relationship with them, you know. But it’s not about that.
What’s your initial approach like?
In Spanish Harlem, they thought I was an undercover cop. So it took me a long time to gain access because there was a lot of drug dealing and they’re very resentful against the whites in this city etcetera. So it took me a few months to have them believe that I wasn’t an undercover cop. And for the Gypsies, same kind of thing. You know you want to take something from them so you have to give back. And what you give back is yourself. It’s a relationship, it’s an engagement, it’s a commitment. It’s like, any relationship.
Did anything you found in Spanish Harlem surprise you?
You can be super violent and angry and not care about life, and at the same time you can be an incredible caring father, or son. I photographed somebody that I saw him standing in the corner with a bulletproof vest and looking tough and always getting into fights and getting high and drunk and, whatever. And then, I stayed beside him when his baby was being born in the hospital and he had tears in his eyes, and he hugged me. And I’ve seen him just try to change his life because he cares about this baby and wants to be present for him. So it’s very complicated. You can see that people are not one-dimensional. I saw what I suspected I was gonna see, but I wanted to see it as a fact.
In “Life on the Block,” there’s a picture of a guy, Mickey I think, with his head in his knees, on the steps of a hospital. It’s hard to tell if he’s incredibly happy or devastated.
I think that first of all it’s a realization that he’s really becoming a father. There’s a lot of not planning in that community. I mean, they live day to day so it’s not like ‘oh, I’m gonna be a father. I’m gonna get a job. I’m gonna finance a home. And then when we’re settled, we’ll have a baby.’ Things don’t happen like that in their lives. It’s mostly an accident: she gets pregnant, he was in jail when he found out. They decided to go forward. So at that moment, he’s there with his head in his knees, she’s giving birth. He’s in front of the Mt. Sinai Hospital. He’s realizing this is happening for real. He is becoming a father. He all of a sudden understands that if he wants be there for his son, he’s gonna have to make major changes in his life.
Your Gypsies and Spanish Harlem work is in black and white, and The Tompkins is in color. How do you choose between the two?
Black and white is timeless. And it allows you to concentrate more on what’s happening in the moment more than the other details of the colors. Color is very sensual, so it’s very distracting. And sometimes of course it’s justified and you need to photograph in color because that color adds something to that concept of the story. But for me, when I’ve been working on these like social stories, I would say, and peoples’ stories, I think that black and white helps to focus more on the emotion and the feelings and the relationships.
-- Matt Elzweig
October 2, 2006
This month, American Photo magazine named Adriana Lopez Sanfeliu as one of its “10 Best Young Photographers in America.”
“I think that you’re looking at a very advanced and sort of sophisticated documentary photographer. Somebody who is a great storyteller, who can take pictures, and you put them together and they tell a story,” Dave Schonauer, American Photo’s Editor-in-Chief says of her work, in a telephone interview. “But each particular photo is complex… you could say visually compelling.”
Lopez Sanfeliu, divides her time between New York and Barcelona, her home city. Some of her ongoing projects include “Life on the Block,” a look of life in a Spanish Harlem neighborhood, “A gypsy life: The Salazar family,” which is being shot in the Barcelona area, and “The Tompkins: a wealth of wilderness,” about the world’s largest nature preserve, in Chile.
You immerse yourself in communities for extended periods of time. How do you gain the access?
First of all, spending a lot of time. When I work on these projects, there’s much more time invested just being present and photographing. Especially at the beginning. It takes awhile to build the relationship. It’s like any relationship, like a lover or family. You have to build trust. So you have to be yourself and let them know who you are and vice versa. The way you do it is really being present and being very honest about what I’m doing and being myself.
There are a lot of myths surrounding Gypsies.
My interest in approaching the gypsies was exactly that. I mean there’s a lot of clichés about the Gypsies. In the Spanish culture, I mean we live with them and they’re part of our society, but they have never been integrated. So Gypsies have, you know, tags. Like people would talk about them as thieves or people you can’t trust. So most of the time when I choose a project like that it’s because I wanna see what’s behind those stereotypes. The family I’ve worked with for five years don’t respond to those stereotypes at all. They’re actually you know, very beautiful, amazing people, that every time I go to a home, takes care of me. You know, they’re sort of like me. It’s not a money-based religion at all, which you know, that’s part of … They’re mostly nomad, merchants, vendors. That’s what they know, that’s their culture. So they’re always buy and sell, buy and sell. So it’s very hard to have a relationship with them, you know. But it’s not about that.
What’s your initial approach like?
In Spanish Harlem, they thought I was an undercover cop. So it took me a long time to gain access because there was a lot of drug dealing and they’re very resentful against the whites in this city etcetera. So it took me a few months to have them believe that I wasn’t an undercover cop. And for the Gypsies, same kind of thing. You know you want to take something from them so you have to give back. And what you give back is yourself. It’s a relationship, it’s an engagement, it’s a commitment. It’s like, any relationship.
Did anything you found in Spanish Harlem surprise you?
You can be super violent and angry and not care about life, and at the same time you can be an incredible caring father, or son. I photographed somebody that I saw him standing in the corner with a bulletproof vest and looking tough and always getting into fights and getting high and drunk and, whatever. And then, I stayed beside him when his baby was being born in the hospital and he had tears in his eyes, and he hugged me. And I’ve seen him just try to change his life because he cares about this baby and wants to be present for him. So it’s very complicated. You can see that people are not one-dimensional. I saw what I suspected I was gonna see, but I wanted to see it as a fact.
In “Life on the Block,” there’s a picture of a guy, Mickey I think, with his head in his knees, on the steps of a hospital. It’s hard to tell if he’s incredibly happy or devastated.
I think that first of all it’s a realization that he’s really becoming a father. There’s a lot of not planning in that community. I mean, they live day to day so it’s not like ‘oh, I’m gonna be a father. I’m gonna get a job. I’m gonna finance a home. And then when we’re settled, we’ll have a baby.’ Things don’t happen like that in their lives. It’s mostly an accident: she gets pregnant, he was in jail when he found out. They decided to go forward. So at that moment, he’s there with his head in his knees, she’s giving birth. He’s in front of the Mt. Sinai Hospital. He’s realizing this is happening for real. He is becoming a father. He all of a sudden understands that if he wants be there for his son, he’s gonna have to make major changes in his life.
Your Gypsies and Spanish Harlem work is in black and white, and The Tompkins is in color. How do you choose between the two?
Black and white is timeless. And it allows you to concentrate more on what’s happening in the moment more than the other details of the colors. Color is very sensual, so it’s very distracting. And sometimes of course it’s justified and you need to photograph in color because that color adds something to that concept of the story. But for me, when I’ve been working on these like social stories, I would say, and peoples’ stories, I think that black and white helps to focus more on the emotion and the feelings and the relationships.
-- Matt Elzweig
The Block: Centre Market Place between Grand and Broome Streets
Our Town downtown
October 2, 2006
Growing up in the shadow of greatness is supposed to be a tough hand to play, and in many ways, it probably is. On the other hand, it may provide the cover needed to avoid scrutiny and turn one’s self into something equally as impressive as the elder.
In 1973, when the NYPD abandoned its headquarters at 240 Centre Street, in whose shadow, literally, Centre Market Place is located, there were plenty of takers, most of whom were all talk. Plans for a renovation finally came through in 1988, while
Centre Market Place was left to fester behind it.
Enter Bob and Cortney Novogratz. A former stockbroker and his wife, who specialize in converting mixed-use properties to single-family townhouses, they bought several townhouses on Centre Market in 2004, gutted and rebuilt them, and today the street has a contemporary European look that complements the police building and stands well on its own two feet.
This quiet block is where Little Italy, Chinatown and SoHo converge, Steve Hakimzadeh, a founder of HH Realty Group, the rental company for number 8, says. “[It’s] extremely popular with the young professional crowd.”
It’s easy to miss with 240 Centre towering over it, and the commotion of the surrounding streets where the San Gennaro festival recently ended, but that’s probably the point.
Renting
Units at 8 Centre Market are typically shared 600-650 square foot two-bedrooms. Hakimzadeh says there hasn’t been a rental in the building in a year. Back then, each unit rented for $2,500, but he estimates they would command $3,000-$3,200 today.
What Happened Here
Until the NYPD moved out in 1973, 240 Centre Street (police headquarters) generated most of the happenings on Centre Market Place.
Designed with London’s Old Bailey courthouse in mind, it went up in 1909, with Teddy Roosevelt, then the city’s top enforcer, there to lay the cornerstone.
Crime reporters worked out of a teletype-equipped office facility at 4 Centre Market and spent their downtime at the restaurant now called Onieal’s, on the Centre Market and Grand. The restaurant still has an incomplete, underground passageway that’s rumored to have once led to police headquarters across the street. This tunnel, in what is now the wine cellar, is thought to have been patronized by some of New York’s finest during Prohibition when the bar area was a speakeasy, brothel and gambling den.
Several gun dealers were on Centre Market, including John Jovino Co., which dates back to 1911 and claims to be “the oldest gun shop in the USA.” In 2003, John Jovino Co., now on Grand Street, made the top 10 – of gun dealers whose guns were linked to New York City crimes between 1996 and 2000, in a Columbia University study. John Jovino Co. was only one of the gun dealers on Centre Market. The Cold War was still on when two men were arrested by Customs agents at JFK in 1984 as they were about to ship $1 million worth of illegal arms and related equipment to Warsaw. From there, it was suspected, the Polish government would resell the weapons to Middle Eastern buyers. The source of the contraband was Sile Distributors Inc., the gun dealer in number 7.
9 Centre Market Place housed the People’s Baths, which was opened in 1881 and converted to a church club for homeless men in 1902.
Amenities
Salon
Rescue Beauty Lounge
Clothing
Built by Wendy
No. 6
Nicola Luccarini
Food and Drink
Onieal’s Grand Street
Senior Services
Open Door Senior Center Chinese-American Planning Cneter, Inc./City of New York Department for the Aging
Sources: (brainyhistory.com; cityrealty.com; The Daily News; nyc-architecture.com; CTR Market Owners LLC; HH Realty Group; Massey Knakal Realty Services; The Museum of the City of New York online; The New York Times; The New York Post; The New York Times; Onieals.com.)
-- Matt Elzweig
October 2, 2006
Growing up in the shadow of greatness is supposed to be a tough hand to play, and in many ways, it probably is. On the other hand, it may provide the cover needed to avoid scrutiny and turn one’s self into something equally as impressive as the elder.
In 1973, when the NYPD abandoned its headquarters at 240 Centre Street, in whose shadow, literally, Centre Market Place is located, there were plenty of takers, most of whom were all talk. Plans for a renovation finally came through in 1988, while
Centre Market Place was left to fester behind it.
Enter Bob and Cortney Novogratz. A former stockbroker and his wife, who specialize in converting mixed-use properties to single-family townhouses, they bought several townhouses on Centre Market in 2004, gutted and rebuilt them, and today the street has a contemporary European look that complements the police building and stands well on its own two feet.
This quiet block is where Little Italy, Chinatown and SoHo converge, Steve Hakimzadeh, a founder of HH Realty Group, the rental company for number 8, says. “[It’s] extremely popular with the young professional crowd.”
It’s easy to miss with 240 Centre towering over it, and the commotion of the surrounding streets where the San Gennaro festival recently ended, but that’s probably the point.
Renting
Units at 8 Centre Market are typically shared 600-650 square foot two-bedrooms. Hakimzadeh says there hasn’t been a rental in the building in a year. Back then, each unit rented for $2,500, but he estimates they would command $3,000-$3,200 today.
What Happened Here
Until the NYPD moved out in 1973, 240 Centre Street (police headquarters) generated most of the happenings on Centre Market Place.
Designed with London’s Old Bailey courthouse in mind, it went up in 1909, with Teddy Roosevelt, then the city’s top enforcer, there to lay the cornerstone.
Crime reporters worked out of a teletype-equipped office facility at 4 Centre Market and spent their downtime at the restaurant now called Onieal’s, on the Centre Market and Grand. The restaurant still has an incomplete, underground passageway that’s rumored to have once led to police headquarters across the street. This tunnel, in what is now the wine cellar, is thought to have been patronized by some of New York’s finest during Prohibition when the bar area was a speakeasy, brothel and gambling den.
Several gun dealers were on Centre Market, including John Jovino Co., which dates back to 1911 and claims to be “the oldest gun shop in the USA.” In 2003, John Jovino Co., now on Grand Street, made the top 10 – of gun dealers whose guns were linked to New York City crimes between 1996 and 2000, in a Columbia University study. John Jovino Co. was only one of the gun dealers on Centre Market. The Cold War was still on when two men were arrested by Customs agents at JFK in 1984 as they were about to ship $1 million worth of illegal arms and related equipment to Warsaw. From there, it was suspected, the Polish government would resell the weapons to Middle Eastern buyers. The source of the contraband was Sile Distributors Inc., the gun dealer in number 7.
9 Centre Market Place housed the People’s Baths, which was opened in 1881 and converted to a church club for homeless men in 1902.
Amenities
Salon
Rescue Beauty Lounge
Clothing
Built by Wendy
No. 6
Nicola Luccarini
Food and Drink
Onieal’s Grand Street
Senior Services
Open Door Senior Center Chinese-American Planning Cneter, Inc./City of New York Department for the Aging
Sources: (brainyhistory.com; cityrealty.com; The Daily News; nyc-architecture.com; CTR Market Owners LLC; HH Realty Group; Massey Knakal Realty Services; The Museum of the City of New York online; The New York Times; The New York Post; The New York Times; Onieals.com.)
-- Matt Elzweig
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