Global West Village

Al-Jazeera reports on the closing of a family-run grocery store in my neighborhood.

Well, in the context of how small businesspeople are hurting in the credit crunch, actually.

But still.

Small business [sic] such as the Jefferson Market, in Manhattan, will be among the first to fall.

Angelo Montuori, who owns a grocery shop in the market, says his store is almost empty most days.

He says that after a very slow summer, he does not have the money to re-stock and is looking to the banks for help.

"If we get the credit, we get the merchandise, I think everything will work out fine. Most of out customers are loyal here. They come in now and say I hope you make it," Montuori told Al Jazeera.

"The problem is, bankers aren't lending new money in case they don't get it back as more and more businesses are beginning to show signs of failing."

"If we can't get the merchandise it will be very difficult ... and we need a lot of merchandise."

Al-Jazeera English - Europe - Stocks climb on hopes of US bailout

(via Jeremiah's Vanishing New York.)

I'm betting that Al-Jazeera's New York correspondent either lives in my nabe or knows someone who does pretty well... Jeff Market is a wonderful place, but definitely of local interest (usually) only.

Jefferson Market storefront (undated)
See also... Photo gallery: Jefferson Market in happier times @ nymag.org

See also:

• In New York City, Rivals Overtake A Grocery's Stock (New York Times)
• Jefferson Market - full coverage @ Racked

Following in Dylan's footsteps

A walking tour of Greenwich Village, following in Dylan's footsteps.

No, not that Dylan.  Dylan Thomas.

Drawn up by Dylan’s daughter Aeronwy, who is also a poet, and Welsh writer Peter Thabit Jones, the tour takes in all of his old haunts, including the Cherry Lane Theatre, where he held a special reading of his poems; the Washington Square Hotel, where he often stayed; and, of course, the White Horse Tavern, where he enjoyed drinking with his contemporaries. It also includes St Vincent’s Hospital, where Dylan died after allegedly downing 18 straight whiskies – a fact that is discounted during the tour.

When I recently visited New York for the first time with three friends, our trip coincided with the inaugural tour, led by Catrin Brace from the [Welsh] Assembly’s New York office.

Following in Dylan's Footsteps (WalesOnline.co.uk)

A raw box in the Brutalist style: my doctor's office building

Via Kottke:

In the July 2008 Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens ponders (among other things) a bit of a dispute about urban planning in New York City's West Village:

Since 1984, when St. Vincent’s Hospital knocked down the Elizabeth Bayley Seton Building, dating from 1898, to put up a raw box in the Brutalist style, the intersection of Greenwich and Seventh and 11th to 13th Streets has been slightly scarred by an inconsiderately ugly, if unobtrusive, division of St. Vincent’s Hospital. Now, under the pretext of expanding health-care facilities, St. Vincent’s has gone into partnership with the ever ambitious Rudin Management Company, a family real-estate concern. Together, the two investors propose a huge demolition on either side of Seventh Avenue. The inaugural plans featured on one flank a vast new medical building of half a million square feet, standing 329 feet tall and 288 feet wide, and on the other flank a Rudin condo tower of luxury apartments, also consisting of half a million square feet, while standing 265 feet tall and 208 feet wide. (If you have the desire to keep abreast of this battle for human scale in the living and working streets and squares of Greenwich Village, I invite you to visit www.protectthevillage.org.) Like two huge toads, these ugly and tedious and uninspired structures would impede the view and block the light of one of New York’s historic neighborhoods: a district that in a previous generation survived even Robert Moses and his plan to slam a neo-Brutalist urban highway through Bohemia. (The story of that battle is told by Jane Jacobs in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities.)

[...]

I could easily have guessed what the advocates of the big, expensive, tall buildings would say. They would claim that those who opposed them were “elitists.” And so it proved.

The friends of St. Vincent’s and the promoters of the Rudin super-condo claim that their Village opponents are of the sort who prefer buildings to people. And this is true if the buildings are on a human scale like the O’Toole and if the people are the ones who have already annexed most of the modern cityscape and fashioned it to suit themselves. Can they really not rest until every street and every block reflects their own ambition back to them, and until one size fits all? All of the hospital’s designs—which, along with the application for demolition of the O’Toole Building, were returned to sender by the Landmarks Preservation Commission, but have been resubmitted under the self-pitying rubric of “hardship”—look like a plan made by Donald Trump’s people on an especially uninspired day.

Last Call, Bohemia (Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair, July 2008)

This proposed development is right around the corner from where I live; there's a picture of the building (and surroundings) in the VF article.

I understand the theoretical importance of things like historic landmarking, but I've *been* inside the building they're proposing to tear down. A medical specialist I saw once or twice has an office in there. The building (inside) is a poorly designed space. Look, it's a toilet of a space, okay? And it ain't so beautiful on the outside, either.

If Rudin and St. Vincent's tear down that building and build this new space, it's going to disrupt my life, personally, for the duration of the demolition and construction periods and beyond. As I said, we're right around the corner from this spot.

But being against change in New York City is like resenting the tide for coming in.

Welcome to the Village

Sometimes, the best way to see yourself is through a stranger's eyes.

That's certainly the case with this lovely travel article from The Hindu Business Line (of Mumbai, India) in which an Indian journalist delightedly discovers Greenwich Village.

(Naturally, she finds the "Dosa Man" in Washington Square Park almost immediately.)

The Hindu Business Line: Off To The Village

More regional ignorance from the Michelin Guide

I hold in my hands the Michelin Guide New York City, 2007 edition.

Actually, that's not completely correct. What I'm holding in my hands at the moment is my aching head, because I just read this paragraph orienting Michelin readers to my neighborhood (which, disastrously, is now captioned "Greenwich, West Village, and Meatpacking," apparently by a native speaker of French for whom English is a fourth or fifth language.)

Centering on Washington Square, New York's historic bohemia lies between Houston and 14th streets, and contains within it several distinct areas. From Avenue of the Americas (Sixth Avenue) to the Bowery, the West Village keeps itself young with New York University's student population. Greenwich Village, bounded by the Hudson River, is the prettiest and most historic of the West Village neighborhoods...

(Michelin Guide New York City, 2007 edition, p. 116.)

The error is further compounded in the descriptions that follow.

As a friend of mine would say, "that's not even wrong." It would have to be more accurate in order to be merely incorrect.

It is, in fact, egregiously, laughably, damnably incorrect.

Michelin has got the situation exactly reversed: Greenwich Village is a container for the West Village, and not the other way around; moreover, the freaking West Village most certainly does not run from Sixth Avenue east to the Bowery. (The particular chunk of real estate they are struggling to describe there is what some people refer to as the "Central Village," and the eastern boundary is Broadway, dammit, and most of us just call it "NYUland" these days because NYU owns most of it.)

Listen up, mes chers rédacteurs:

The boundaries of Greenwich Village are: the Hudson River on the west, 14th St on the north, Broadway on the east, and Houston (pronounced HOW-ston) Street on the south.

The West Village, an enclave within Greenwich Village, arguably begins at Avenue of the Americas (Sixth Avenue) and goes west to the Hudson, but certainly, once you're west of Seventh Avenue, you're in the West Village, mmmkay?

Also, the "West Village" does not "keep itself young with New York University's student population," because they don't live here; the only young people here who aren't being pushed down the sidewalk in $500 strollers are the underaged bridge-and-tunnel homosexuals who congregate on far-west Christopher Street and the Hudson River piers.

The people who actually live here tend to be rich (or at least well-to-do) old (or at least middle-aged) professionals, because who else could afford the ruinous rents and prices?

(Also, the pier kids keep the local economy of the West Village going by buying and consuming heroic quantities of low-quality drugs and pizza-by-the-slice, while the New York University students buy slightly higher-quality dope from the few dealers in Washington Square Park who aren't actually New York City police officers.)

Mother of God, do they have no local editors and fact-checkers reading these things before they ship them to the world?

At least they're not calling the New York City subway the "Métro" this year.