Time for Part 3.
If you need to catch up here is Part 2.

A friend sent me the news today that the Second Avenue Deli is closing.

I love her commentary:

"As for this town and the rich, gosh I want a revolution, the rich here have not even an
air of skills or style to be credited with anything. Maybe the lack of struggle and [not having to be] earning
anything numbs people out to evolving.

"This is a town of past reputation. How can you create quality when you can not pay basic
survival costs. So you get rich kids who can spend their time designing and creating a
line of vanity items for other richies, that really are just boring and safe. So the people with new ideas
and skills can not compete with the rich brats and funded students who have all the free
time to shop and think they are so cool because they are here. But they don't add anything.

"Did you hear about
2nd Avenue Deli closing around the corner from my Apt. They have been there 50 years
and were paying nearly $27,000 in rent, and the Landlord wanted to raise the rent to
something around $32,000. Crazy, I can't imagine what the new level of standards are for some
people here now. It is more than just simple greediness, it is more like rapacious greed
without any consideration or restraints."

Went out last night with a merry band of bon vivants... real bright fiesty fierce talented folk who are all ...moving to Jackson Heights!! Seems that the E.V. has pushed em out to Bollywood.... apparently J.H is the new E.V. who knew!? Am ready.... (love the grocerys there and those indian buffets, not to mention all that random Columbian boy trade).

I have spent manys an eve in JH-- little wonder!

The people who have started renting in the building I'm in near C are now 30ish types who are just taking rooms for the weekend. They don't work, and just want a place in the EV to party on the weekends. At, like, $1,400 a month for a tiny 500 sq ft room, it is totally the idleclass.

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eeek oh seven that is such glum news - I live in Williamsburg and I barely know anyone here anymore. Many people have moved overseas. Or LA of all places. Or Philly. Or anyplace where they have time to make art and live creatively. People used to make fun of me for living in Brooklyn but for a short time it was magic to live here. Because the rest of the world left us the fuck alone to do whatever we wanted. Perhaps NY needs another crime wave. sigh

I think that is just the right idea missweb. We should just form a gratuitous crime gang and lower the living standards to the gentry-flight level. We should start with the Whole Foods going in on Houston St. near the Bowery.

Let's stage a giant food fight and smash their tomatoes!

Is it true? Florent about to end due to cost of rent for that hood..... jeez

God how many times I fell asleep there over my $3 plates of fries on Sundays at 5 a.m., makeup running down my face.. Remember Lex? The Daily News yesterday said:

Are last orders in sight for the Meatpacking District landmark Florent?

Real-estate vultures have been circling the beloved Gansevoort St. diner amid rumors that its lease was about to become available.

A knowledgeable source tells me that the lease, in fact, has two years left to go. However, the source also says that it might not be renewed.

"I haven't made any decision either way," owner Florent Morellet tells me about the future of his restaurant. "I have a couple of years to be my fabulous self, so let people talk, and as long as they're talking, it means that I'm still alive."

Morellet has been a tireless activist for local preservation, as well as the gay and HIV-positive communities. (He quirkily keeps track of his T-cell count, an indicator of HIV progression, on the diner's specials board.) The restaurateur and City Council speaker Christine Quinn will be grand marshals of this year's gay pride march, and the AIDS group amfAR plans to honor him on June 7 at an Ellis Island gala.

Florent has been a pilgrimage destination for celebrities, club kids, families and new arrivals to New York for 21 years. Pals say they expect to mount a campaign to keep the restaurant open.

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Ah, Madge ... the memories of Florent! Mine go even further back than the clocking of your post-Click-n-Drag 6 a.m. mascara runs. I can still remember performing at Florent's Bastille Day celebration in 1992 with my old band Louis Quatorze (we went on right after Sherry Vine as Edith Piaf in granny orthopedic shoes and support hose).

If it does close, can we really call it 'the end of an era'? Seems to me the era of the Meatpacking District already ended some time ago. But Florent's closing would mark it officially I guess, since they were the first ones there.

For a spell I had a studio apartment right next to the Old Homestead Steakhouse, circa 1993-95. It was such a kick when my mom and her brother came to visit me once and I took them to Florent one night for dinner. They had no idea where we were going as we trudged through darkened streets in that foul-smelling air with trannie hookers switching past and giving my uncle the eye. The cobblestones were so slick with lard and grease that my mother almost fell but managed to steady herself against an overflowing dumpster. Naturally I loved every second of the walk. Finally we turn the corner and see the light at the end of Gansevoort with limos outside and fun people going in and out. Home at last!

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When i first moved to NYC I lived in a company apt "shaggin towers" on Horatio (some of the go-go boys from jackie might remember that huge space) but it was a company apt (i were livin large back den) and so the very very first place i was taken to for dinner was... Florent
so.... its the end of an era for me too

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Its always the same, when the lease is up the place has to go.
There is no more relocating.
Whomever owns New York New York Casino in Las Vegas should be alerted, maybe Florent's owner can garner a few retirement ducats... let the culture vultures
tear out the fixtures and 'recreate' our beloved last-stop dead-of-night Florent for the middle-American tourists.

BAH

I like S'tan's Las Vegas suggestion. There could be an alternate universe New York there. Kind of like a Twilight Zone scene. One street with Florent, the Second Avenue Deli, CBGB's, etc. You could dose someone here with roofies, fly them to Vegas, dump them on the corner, wait for them to wake up, and then watch them go mad.

The last time I ended up at Florent was around 1993, with this person who said they wanted to break up with me but couldn't quite do it. They kept coming back to fuck all night. And then we would end up at Florent around 3 or 4 AM. And everyone would look at us like they could smell the fornication. By that time in the evening I could care less about a scene and would just slump back from a table, usually massively intoxicated, and fit in without really trying to. But that is what the place was great for if you ask me. As much as there were people straining really hard to be some kind of scenesters there, the place was actually much more amenable to just letting yourself be your old outre' self and not care at all about having to be scrutinized for a hipness factor. In fact, most places in the district there at that time were like that, you could just be your regular old fabulously demimonde self and not give a shit about it being a scene. When there are too many self-conscious people, to my mind that is when a place starts to lose it.

The escargot were fan-tas-tic!!!

(They kind of smell like ass too.)

There ACTUALLY IS a fake NY in Vegas, I wasn't making it up -- the New York New York Casino....
featuring Joey Arias in Zumanity I think that's her (ass) right on the front page

http://www.nynyhotelcasino.com/pages/index_noflash.asp

Here is their verson of the East Village

http://www.nynyhotelcasino.com/pages/dining_village.asp

Imagine this:
Florent 6:30 AM. After a very long Jackie. Unseen by the trickle of truckdrivers ordering egg sandwiches and the bombed eurocouple snuggling in the corner, a certain Showgirl's alter-ego, Justine, provides oral service to a certain Meat Market Gnome right at our table...

New York, New York undoubtedly features such performances at its Village eatery, no?

No, hatches, they will have to make that
a tableau vivant in "Zumanity." No doubt they
have on tap a plethora of dwarves
who are not dwarfish where it counts.

Hello Hideous New New York I'll be there soon -- anything awful, something newly destroyed that I shouldn't miss while I am there?

It's Spring. Everything is changing again. Just stand on the street, something will fall on you, or get erected over you. There's a nice Edvard Munch show up now at MoMa.

Let's see. Scenic, the bar that was Guernica, and in its ancient incarnation Robots, recently closed its doors because one of its weeklies got way out of control with regards to substance use and open sex. In the past that would be reason to franchise. But in this era it means time to close. But maybe by the time you arrive it will have opened as The Rack, or something like that, and there will be a momentary resurgence of naughtiness.

ewwwww I don't like to watch

Edvard Munch is more like it, and The Downtown Show!

I would like to ask your okay to burglarize your neighbors' apt. and trash their plasma TV. What are they like when they explode? As satisfying as shooting a regular tube model? Please post their hours, so we all have a shot.

I want to go back to Wonderbar and Hattie's night and etc. etc. it's not there.
And Hot Fruit! Madgie as DJ.

bye lovers of orange

There's also supposed to be a film by Matthew Barney and Bjork opening this week, I think. If you're a Barney fan.

Sorry. I already blasted the neighbors' plasma screen. It was a dissapointment soundwise. But I kept the 2001 Space Odyssey DVD running just for the symphonic overload. I used a huge pair of upholstery shears to whack the screen.

Maybe you can catch the last supper at Florent? We could just make a huge pile of escargot in one of the back booths and stand out front of the place with the door open to beckon all passing queens inside with the promise of a lot of ass.... all that escargot would be wafting out the door and literally pull our marks in. It has worked for me before.