"A New York Treasure" --Village Voice

Monthly Archives: March 2014

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Afternoon Art

garbo

My mother had a print of this 1931 photograph of Greta Garbo by Clarence Sinclair Bull hanging on the wall behind her desk in her office for years.

Beat of the Day

ross

Happy Birthday, Diana Ross.

[Photo Credit: Bruce Davidson]

New York Minute

bookstore

I spent a lot of my teenage years slumming around used bookstores in New York, especially on the Upper West Side. But Manhattan is no longer a place for bookstores of any kind.

Julie Bosman has the depressing details in the Times:

When Sarah McNally, the owner of McNally Jackson bookstore in Lower Manhattan, set out to open a second location, she went to a neighborhood with a sterling literary reputation, the home turf of writers from Edgar Allan Poe to Nora Ephron: the Upper West Side.

She was stopped by the skyscraper-high rents.

“They were unsustainable,” Ms. McNally said. “Small spaces for $40,000 or more each month. It was so disheartening.”

Rising rents in Manhattan have forced out many retailers, from pizza joints to flower shops. But the rapidly escalating cost of doing business there is also driving out bookstores, threatening the city’s sense of self as the center of the literary universe, the home of the publishing industry and a place that lures and nurtures authors and avid readers.

“Sometimes I feel as if I’m working in a field that’s disappearing right under my feet,” said the biographer and historian Robert Caro, who is a lifelong New Yorker.

[Photo Via: Afar.com]

Sluggo

ruth

Via Baseball Researcher and Richard Sandomir of the New York Times: Ruth hits.

[Photo Credit: Baseball Fever]

Taster’s Cherce

gluten

Alexandra gives gluten-free peasant bread.

The Real Harlem

harlem

Darryl Pickney reviews a terrific book of photography for the New York Review of Books:

Old heads in Harlem will tell you that in the 1960s, particularly after the riot of 1964, white policemen were afraid of walking an uptown beat. They were reluctant to come through even in patrol cars. Those who did were often on the take. White landlords would try to collect the rent, guns at their hips. Their black tenants defied them and in many cases the landlords walked away from their buildings, left them to run down.

Harlem was the place where you could do or get anything and get away with it. People would disappear for days into the cathouses and shooting galleries. One guy told me that at his corner of 124th Street and Lenox he once saw the garbage collectors in their truck nodding from heroin. They were parked for hours, the trash uncollected when they finally left. Delivery trucks at stoplights got held up. Sometimes a driver would be enticed by a woman to a room where he was then tied up. Down in the street, an orderly line was forming for the sale of his truck’s contents.

Drug money circulated fiercely. People could get shot in the middle of the afternoon and if you chanced to be on the street where it happened, you knew that you had seen nothing, heard nothing, and would say nothing. Many gave up because the streets and the schools were so bad, especially middle-class blacks who could at last go elsewhere. But jobs were plentiful in the city. If you didn’t like your boss, an old head told me, you could quit and have a new job by the end of the day. Some people had jobs as well as welfare. Blacks felt that they ran the place. You could pass out on a traffic island in Harlem and no one would bother you all day long. The only people around in those days were black, old heads say. If whites found themselves in Harlem, then they had to run. But you can meet whites who have spent their lives in Harlem, in their family homes, tolerated because they’d always been there, hadn’t run.

Buy Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto here.

Morning Art

cups

“Cups” by Diebs [Via Bo Fransson]

New York Minute

zoowrk

Henry Chalfant at the Steven Kasher Gallery.

Afternoon Art

cocktail

“The Cocktail Party” by Alfred Leslie (1967-78)

Beat of the Day

blueaasd

Grant Green Monday:

[Photo Credit: John Ciamillo]

Taster’s Cherce

grilled assdfsas

It’s a spring thing. 

Sundazed Soul

tumblr_n2mpp3GSdx1qe31lco10_r1_500

 Sunday groove. 

[Photograph by Sophie Harris Taylor via like a field mouse]

Saturdazed Soul

tumblr_n2sr8d0tBR1qz7wfjo1_500

[Photo Via: Ned Hepburn]

Straight to the Hole like My Man Malik Sealy

zimhoops

NCAA Hoops tonight and all weekend.

Have at it.

[Photo Credit: Joel Zimmer]

Beat of the Day

 fishbone

Finally Friday.

Taster’s Cherce

dumplingsssss

Serious Eats gives 26 Must-Eat Dumplings in NYC. 

Indeed.

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"This ain't football. We do this every day."
--Earl Weaver