Let us know if you come across any viable contraband that may have been tossed in the antique loo during some bygone raid, will you please? Maybe some laudinum?

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Wow, that class sounds great Betty. Can Hattie and I sit in some day? It would bring back memories.

Anytime, Daddy.

Of late I've become resigned to the notion that I'll be renting for the rest of my life, or at least as long as I remain in this stinking town. Owning an NYC condo seems as remote a possibility at this point as skyrocketing to Andromeda, even as I continue to squirrel money away for a future downpayment/mortgage. At times the possibility of buying a little house somewhere with a pool in the backyard has tempted me, but I'll probably remain a slave of New York till the Grim Reaper comes, ever-aspiring to that loft with the exposed brick and wood-burning fireplace. (maybe ... if my novel sells ... well whatever)

This town is so obscenely expensive, it's the new Hong Kong.

Oh please don't say so. I don't wanna pay $20 for a shot of Jack Daniels.

As per the original post on this topic: The PLAZA! Bloomberg did something sort of right, he 'Saved" the Plaza -- under enormous pressure from hotel emplyee unions!

This is a funny article with just the right dose of mordant wit:

http://www.curbed.com/archives/2005/04/14/breaking_plaza_hotel_saved_sort_of.php


The lobby I'm betting will re-open as a trashy 1920s theme park. Cornball moms and daughters will continue going to the Palm Court to have debutante moments. Wannabe hookers may nostalgically trawl in the Oak Bar for out of towners. The rich johns will jaw their tobacco-flavoured chewing gum and drink themselves senseless on $20. JDs "just like in the old days." Tourists will stomp through the lobby and trash the rest rooms. A great NY institution will live on, flattened by homogenized memory and congealed in lucite.

Farewell Charming Old NY!! I am going back to the other desert, the one with the other kind of toad. After I dance around Bergdorf's tonight... helping to scatter the ashes of a rich old (dead) bitch, allegedly sprinkled in the Delman shoe salon.

Ever onward and ... sideways.

http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/realestate/features/11960/index.html

At the above link is a good story about the Ansonia building at 73rd and Broadway replete with its 1970's incarnation as the Continental Baths and later as Plato's Retreat. I like the bit about Bette Middler's piano accompanist being Barry Manilow wearing only a bath towel. Choice reading. Full of nineteenth century pervs and modern rip-off tycoons.

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So Messy Madge et Hubby were strollin around the WEST Village at the weekend... oh how it's changed... I moved there in '91 and lived over that end for 6yrs... it was 'gay' then. Now it's just "Barneys".(And I don't mean the purple dinosaur). It's just an Epcot version of the Village... Consumerism very lil real culture.. just packaged goods... and flocks of Sex n City Wannabees shuffling in from L.I. to Marc Jacobs and Magnolia Bakery. It's way too twee... I cant wait till they Epcot Chinatown too ...am sure that will 'go' at one point!

PS on another note.... I did venture to Brighton Beach with my kid on Sunday... that place is a hoot... i just love the over processed mad colored hair on the women in the stack heels, tight pink nylon leisure suits, wearing proud their underbreast belly fat that is larger than their tits! God bless Brighton Beach feel right at home there!

Gone!

In just a couple of days the gorgeous old Variety Theater was torn to the ground. The oldest continuosly run theater in America is now rubble. And what's going to replace it? We hear a twenty story NYU Dorm. What else?
In the last couple of years NYU has torn down the legendary and landmarked Palladium to put up an ugly twenty story dorm, and they called it The Palladium just to rub it in. Around the corner they tore down the legendary and landmarked Louchow's Restaurant to put up an ugly twenty story dorm.
How could they do that you ask?
Well, there was a fire and Luchow's burned.
But isn't it directly across the street, maybe 30 feet away from the fire house you ask?
Why yes it is...
Funny how it burned down and became a dorm.
Yes, funny.
So now The Variety is gone.

Less historic Old New York.
More NYU dorms.
More hideous NYU students on cell phones.
More Lawyers and investment bankers.
Not a fair trade if you ask me.

The Variety Theater (with the new Palladium Dorm in the backround) and The beautiful Luchow's.
Gone.

I would have put up a picture of The Palladium as well (I used to DJ there) but it's just a blur to me as it is to a lot of you I'm sure.

I think it looked something like this.

its horrific what has happened to this city in the last 6yrs just HORRIFIC.
Thanks God I have the memories of the ole Palladium.. the first wk I arrived in the city i attended a amall birthday party in the legendary Paladium 'engine room' for Quentin Crisp.. it was there I met for the first time.. Daddy, the Empress (also there was Kelly Cuttrone, Ed Callahan, Barroness Sherry, Lee Chappell, Joey Arias.. the rest are a blur!).
It was also at the Paladium where I did the very last public cartwheel i ever did. And it was ALSO in the Palladium where I met the two hot Moroccan 'terrorists' one new years eve... bringin em back to my pad as my then 'husband' sat with a tranny zombied watching tv grinding their teeth coked to the gills....awww those were the days, when my daily life was like a David Lynch movie.........now on the very same spot are those ghastley students, its all gone Mary Kate and Ashley.

Ah, I remember it well...
The party in the Engine Room for Quentin Crisp.
Your last public cartwheel.
The two hot Moroccan 'terrorists'.
But mostly I remember your then 'husband' and 'the Tranny'.
Bah!

And the Mike Todd Room! Scene of many group nose candy snorts. The 'Love Machine' party on Tuesdays before Formika became the Mistress and Lahoma Van Zandt was still falling onstage for effect. Those were the days.

I can't believe they tore down the VARIETY!
Utterly shocking.
What is wrong with people.
Don't they have eyes?

You all must be hysterical... that's your neighborhood.

Ten years from now everything south of 14th to Houston and East of B'way will be the greater NYU Technitutionalplex and Consumer Carnivale. Around Astor Place there will be a little East Village Pavillion with The Junky Rollercoaster, Bohemian Souvenier Shop, and dioramma of T2 Park. NYU students will individually sponsor the twelve actual performers and artists that still live in the area. Unfortunately for civic planners this will also create the largest single concentration of recreational drug users in Manhattan. It's true, some things never change.

It seems that NYU has learned a valuable lesson from the whole Cooper Square debacle when dealing with those durned preservationists: Keep it all secret and lie; that way no one will object when another piece of NY history is gutted.

From The Villager 12/21/04...

"Asked if N.Y.U. had any interest in the property, university spokesperson John Beckman said, "We've had no conversation about this. Nobody has approached us about this. I'm not going to get into these hypotheticals. I think we need to get out of the habit of, every time a piece of property changes hands in the neighborhood," assuming N.Y.U. is involved, Beckman said. "When N.Y.U. is having serious discussions about acquiring or leasing a property, we inform the community," he continued. "And that's how it's been and that's how it's going to be going forward."

Right.

The sad fact is that there is a major building boom going on all over Manhattan, and buildings that are an important part of our history are being torn down right and left. Witness the fight to save old PS 64 on East 9th Street, and that's still going on...
In my neck of the woods, though no historical structures have been ravaged yet, every available bit of land is being built on to create (surprise, surprise) even more million dollar + condos; I guess they will house those NYU students after they graduate.

Don't get me wrong, I am all for change and progress. But this is a free-for-all. There's not an iota of sensible city planning in any of it. And it's all been given a rubber stamp by our City Administration. This should definitely become an issue in the upcoming election. And I cannot wait to see Bloomberg's final plan for the "revitalization" of the Lower East Side Waterfront. Bah!

NYU has got to be bigger than the Catholic Church at this point. In New York anyway.

And...
I was told the other day that the way they got around the "landmark problem" in tearing down The Palladium was that it suffered severe "sound damage" from its years as a night club.
Oh,
So now it's MY fault.

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And...
I recently cabbed by our old JACKIE 60 / MOTHER space. It's all boarded up and under construction, as to what it will be, I have no idea. At one point I heard an Armani store. We'll soon find out.
When we closed MOTHER we wanted to bomb the whole thing and save it the indignity of becoming a boutique, a hotel or a dormitory. When I designed the last invite, (MOTHER's END) this is REALLY what we had in mind. It's funny, when I drove by and looked through the doors at the demolition and this is EXACTLY what it looked like.

I've suspected for some time now that NYU is really a big real estate conglomerate masquerading as a school.

Still, the multitudes of young college boys roaming the hood do turn me out. The other day in K-Mart there was a 6'2" blonde hottie I was on the verge of offering a live-in houseboy position. I should be in charge of Twink Scholarships.