There are so many. New York is dynamic – a place that you once loved can be gone. Or, for that matter, a place that once you wouldn’t have gone near can become a place of vibrant beauty, like Bryant Park (http://www.bryantpark.org/).
These are some places I mourn (lots of them are restaurants – they turn over fast).
Germantown
Yorkville (East 86th Street). Well, Yorkville's still there, but it's no longer Germantown. When I first moved to the neighborhood, 20-ahem years ago, it was filled with German restaurants and stores. I remember the Kleine Konditorei (little confectionery - which wasn't little at all, it was a big restaurant!), Bremen House, the Lorelei (do I remember that correctly?), and the Ideal (an inexpensive German lunch counter, that never recovered after a fire some years back). The Heidelberg is still there, just around the corner on Second Avenue, and it's a nice place, but it's a little touristy and pricey. The waiters' lederhosen are a bit self-conscious, but we love Hilde, the grandmotherly Sunday afternoon bartender.
It's a shame the Yorkville Inn gave up - it was a fun place, decorated with an odd combination of beer steins and baseball memorabilia. But German food went out of fashion - too rich and heavy for a lot of people. Glaser's bake shop (also Second Avenue) is still there, though. And you can still find Elk Candy, with the best marzipan in the city, though it moved from 86th Street to Second Avenue a few years ago.
Update: Somebody reading this site told me that Elk Candy had closed its doors, apparently for good this time, and I'm sorry to say they were right. The property is for lease, and there is no sign of a new location.
When I first moved to Yorkville (when it was still Germantown), the Christmas window of Elk Candy was a delight. A skating rink in a European "village," with little animated skaters, it appeared faithfully every year. When it disappeared, I was sad.
German immigrants moved to Yorkville almost exactly 100 years ago, after the Gen. Slocum disaster on June 15th, 1904. More than a thousand people died when the excursion boat the Gen. Slocum burst into flames in the East river. While many people know about the Triangle Shirtwaist fire that killed 124 immigrants trapped in a sweatshop behind locked doors, few realize that many more died on the Gen. Slocum. The disaster caused so much pain in the German community that they moved from the Lower East Side to Yorkville, near where the boat had caught on fire.
The Second Ave. Deli
The loss of the 2nd Ave. Deli - a landmark East Village Jewish deli - is hurting a lot of New Yorkers.
The original owner of the deli, Abe Lebewohl built the deli from the original coffee shop, where he worked as a waiter. It's said that the real estate contract was a handshake. The place was loved - for its food (Ukranian and Jewish), but most of all for Abie. When he was murdered in a robbery in 1996, New Yorkers wept.
Since then, things have changed. Abe's brother, Jack, took over the deli, and when new owners raised the rent drastically last year, he closed the doors, apparently with little warning to the customers or even to the staff. The cause was "renovations," otherwise known as "renegotiation," but apparently he and the landlord couldn't come to terms, and a few weeks ago they took down the sign. Now he's talking about "maybe" reopening somewhere else, but not necessarily with the same staff, many of whom have been there for more than 20 years, and whose unusual style of service was a trademark of the place.
Click here for some sad photos...
I only ate there once - never have been much for deli food - but Steve once lived in the neighborhood and was addicted to their matzoh brei. He remembers Abe Lebewohl with fondness, as do so many others.
More goodbyes
A restaurant named Riverrun, that used to be on Franklin Street in Tribeca, just up the street from Robert DeNiro’s much more famous (and more expensive) place. When Riverrun closed, the owners left a sign that said, in part, “Tribeca is gone, and so are we.” Tribeca, once the home of artists living in huge, sometimes illegal lofts, is now a fashionable place to live, full of expensive condos. And Riverrun, where we used to go for a champagne brunch every New Year’s Day, is gone.
Little Italy used to be Italian. Now it’s mostly Chinese, though the couple of remaining blocks, full of pasta restaurants with murals and hanging plants, are fun places to eat, especially out of doors in the summer. We like Paesano’s, though a lot of people swear by Melo’s. (Go with an appetite, though.) If you’re a fan of Robert Tanenbaum’s books, Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral is at the top end of Mulberry Street (??).
A restaurant named Harry and Me, in a basement on East 71st Street a long time ago. The kind of food you’d make yourself if you were a really, really, good cook. The graffiti in the bathroom said, among other things, “Don’t tell anybody about this place, or it will be overrun.” I guess no-one did, and they closed.
Brew’s restaurant on 34th Street – popular with the after-work drinking crowd, but they had great fresh, melt-in-your-mouth calamari!
Gimbels. Damn it, I miss Gimbels! And Gimbel’s East. And Altman’s.
Crazy Eddie’s. The first bargain electronics store, with what’s-his-name screaming from the commercials!
Eddie Moran’s and Platypus. See “Memories…” Eddie Moran's was a huge restaurant down at the marina of the World Financial Center, and Platypus was a great home decor store, also fronting the marina. Both closed after September 11, and didn't come back.
Movie theaters. Grand, old movie theaters, before they became multiplexes or Duane Reade drugstores.
Everybody has places they miss in New York. Click here to
|
||||||||||||
|
|
|||
