UPPER EAST SIDE

Woody Allen lives on the UES. Elaine’s, (88th Street & 2nd avenue) a restaurant in Yorkville is one of Woody Allen’s favorites. The venue stands on a block that is typical of this region, being both shabby and genteel in appearance.

Once the UES had a sizable merchant German, Hungarian and Czechoslovakian immigrant population. Echoes of this ethnic and economic past can be found in restaurants and stores such as Heidelberg Restaurant (1648 Second Avenue at 86th Street) and grocery stores such as Shaller & Weber (2nd Avenue & 86th St.) and in the Neo-Grecian, Queen Anne or Romanesque Revival architecture, which were primarily built for the merchant classes.

A few blocks up from Elaine’s is the 92nd Street “Y” or YMHA. In 1899 philanthropist Jacob Schiff, impressed with the social efforts of the YMHA organization, purchased property at 92nd Street and donated it to them. Today the “Y” serves the local community as a gym, an after-school programs facility and a forum for lectures, dance and music.

The UES is also home to some of Manhattan’s finest museums: the Guggenheim, the Whitney, the Frick Collection, the Cooper Hewitt and the Jewish Museum. But if you’re simply after a good stroll visit the Carl Schurz Park (East End Avenue 84th - 90th Streets). It has a leafy promenade overlooking the East River, a dog run, a play area and free jazz every Wednesday evening during the summer. Plus Gracie Mansion is a stone’s throw away.

For those interested in the more important things in life such as sugary delights, I recommend a trip to Dylan's Candy Bar (1011 3rd Avenue & 60th Street). It has the awesome reputation of being Manhattan's largest confectionary shop.

Why not celebrate the Upper East Side with a t-shirt?

UPPER WEST SIDE

Brownstones, culture and restaurants characterize this friendly neighborhood. If the UWS feels like a sprawling village, maybe that’s because it once was. Formerly known as the “Bloomingdale District” this section ran from Chelsea to Harlem. The name ‘Bloomingdale’ is still used in reference to the location of the old Bloomingdale Village, situated on what is now 96th Street-110th Street and from Riverside Park east to Amsterdam Avenue.

The UWS has wonderful tree lined streets and hosts some of the most impressive brownstones in Manhattan. Before the 1830's most of New York City’s row houses (houses built side by side) were either made from brick or wood. Parallel to the rise of Manhattan’s middle-class came the need for more permanent and ornate housing. Brownstone is a type of sandstone locally quarried from New Jersey and Connecticut.

In terms of culture the UWS boasts the Lincoln Center (62nd - 65th Streets & Columbus -Amsterdam Avenues), The Museum of Natural History (Central Park West at 79th Street), the Children’s Museum of Manhattan (212 West 83rd Street), the Cloisters (799 Fort Washington Avenue), and the Historical Society (170 Central Park West & 77 Street). Food for the eye and soul can be got at the Riverside Church (490 Riverside Drive & 120/122nd Street) and The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine (1047 Amsterdam Avenue).

For real food try a bagel from H&H Bagels (2239 Broadway at 80th Street). Close by is the famous produce store Fairway Market (2127 Broadway near 74th Street) selling cheeses, pickles, and breads. Out of the hundreds of eateries on the UWS my personal favorites are EJ's Luncheonette (447 Amsterdam Ave near 81st St), Docks, (2427 Broadway & 89th/90th Street) and Carmine's (2450 Broadway & 90th/91st Street).

Happy Thanksgiving !!

At BABY DOES NYC we are grateful to be living in this great City at this point of time in history. We wish you all a wonderful Thanksgiving tomorrow.

CENTRAL PARK

Central Park is Manhattan’s garden and although it appears natural it is for the most part man-made. Before the park could be developed “…the area had to be cleared of its inhabitants...” These ‘undesirables’ were African-Americans and new immigrants (German or Irish origin) but their communities were hardly shanty-towns, rather they were well-established communities bearing names such as: Seneca Village, Harsenville, the Piggery District or the Convent of the Sisters of Charity. Here is a direct quote :

As a community of free black property owners, Seneca Village was unique in its day. It was located in the hilly, rock-strewn woods between 82nd and 89th Streets and 7th and 8th Avenues. At that time it was a long walk to the crowded city. The village grew steadily from 1825, when Andrew Williams first bought three lots for $125. By 1832, about 25 more lots were sold to African Americans. And by the early 1850s, the village boasted three churches, a school, and a population of some 300 people. Over the years, German and Irish immigrants joined the community. This diverse community lived in peace, attending the All Angel’s Church together and sharing the services of one midwife.

But as the city pushed north, the media began to paint a different picture of the little village, calling it a “shantytown” and calling the property owners “squatters” who were “wretched and debased.” Many people in the city, including Mayor Fernando Wood, wanted the land for a great new park. In 1855, the mayor used the power of eminent domain to claim the land. Then he sent the police to clear it. For two years the residents resisted the police as they petitioned the courts to save their homes, churches, and schools. In 1857, they were finally removed. As one newspaper put it, the raid upon Seneca Village would “not be forgotten…[as] many a brilliant and stirring fight was had during the campaign. But the supremacy of the law was upheld by the policeman’s bludgeons.”

quote: http://maap.columbia.edu/place/32.html

Approximately 1,600 blue-collar citizens were forcibly evicted under the rule of eminent domain during 1857, and Seneca Village and sections of other neighborhoods were demolished to make way for Central Park. Not a good start for a park that would later become associated with community.  In time, however, Central Park was redeemed through her unique landscaping: the lake, the rock formations, the meadow; her architecture: 36 bridges and engineering that allowed the free-flow of pedestrians, horseback riders, trucks, buses and cars.

A woman’s touch came in 1868 when sculptor: Emma Stebbins created the bronze fountain or Angel of the Waters Fountain. When I think of Central Park I think of free classical concerts, of lolling around in the grass, of lining up to watch Shakespeare’s plays performed, I think of great art like The Gates: 1979-2005 by Christo and Jeanne-Claude;

I think of boat rides, the buskers, the carousel and dog walkers. I also think of the TV series: Angels in America,

which brings me nicely back to my image: The Bethesda Angel in Central Park.

Enjoy and celebrate Central Park with a baby t-shirt. Designed by local artisans using US products, with a % of sales going to a NYC Children's Charity: http://www.stockingswithcare.org. Buy at http://www.babydoesnyc.com

HELL'S KITCHEN

Hell's Kitchen has been my neighborhood since 2002. It’s a great place to live – a few blocks uptown Central Park begins, 5 stops downtown on the A train is Greenwich Village, Broadway is walking distance and every possible cuisine can be got on 9th avenue. Hell's Kitchen is the area’s historic name. ‘Clinton’ is the fashionable real estate term. But I’m disinterested in the sterile, towering condominiums that strangle the old tenement blocks. New money, shee-shee restaurants and trendy bars spin a bland yarn.

The redbrick blocks tell a different story – one of iron-works, coal furnaces, abattoirs, of an elevated railroad network, a tavern on every corner and of gangs. The most famous gang of all: the Gophers operated from seventh to eleventh avenues and fourteenth to forty-second street. The Gophers like gangs before them plundered the freight cars and depots of the New York Central Railroad along Eleventh Avenue. Their favorite watering hole was a saloon in Battle Row (West 39th street between 10 & 11th avenue) kept by Mallet Murphy.

Here and there, one can still see the Irish influence in the names of local bars. The only indicator left of  Hell's Kitchen can be found at “Hell’s KitchenPark” – which is far from hellish but is at least a namesake.

CHELSEA

CHELSEA has bloomed within the past twenty years or so into the Art epicenter of Manhattan. Before then it was associated with taut male darlings who looked as though they’d stepped right out of a Jean Genet novel.

It seems natural then that so much queer art has worked its way into the new galleries. Only this community lovingly lingered and found use for an area that, past Ninth Avenue, was a wasteland.  Painfully, over years those austere warehouses and dingy streets were transformed.

Small galleries took root in low rentals beginning on Twenty-Second Street off Tenth Avenue. Now the area is bustling with Galleries: Gagosian Gallery, Mary Boone Gallery, Metro Pictures and Barbara Gladstone Gallery are a few examples. Yet the area is about more than Art, Eighth Avenue is lined from 14th – 28th streets with interesting stores, adventurous restaurants, exotic bars, cafes and bistros.

Which brings me to Mare the restaurant featured on this shirt. The décor is rustic-aquatic calling the ocean to Eighth Avenue. The colors are vibrant without being gaudy. It is an excellent example of a CHELSEA restaurant. Eighth Avenue’s main drag is lined with many brightly adorned commercial fronts giving it a distinct ‘rainbow’ affect that is – oh so – gay!

TIMES SQUARE

At the day’s end I take the “E” train from Tribeca, getting off at 50th Street and 8th Avenue. On winter nights by 6pm the Broadway lights of Times Square are winking. I nod but seldom venture down. Once a year like a lemming I am inextricably drawn there. 

 

 

Thanks to that superlative historian Peter Hamill, I now know about the great Adolph S. Ochs. In 1904, on New Year’s Eve, Ochs (Owner and Editor) launched his newspaper The New York Times from its uptown location: the Times Tower. The custom of fireworks, bell-ringing singing and the dropping of an illuminated globe to herald in a new year originated with him. Ochs was a marketing genius but his tradition outlived him and his newspaper. 

 

 

On August 14th 1945, VJ day the American people claimed Times Square for their rejoicing. 

 

 

It was simply the place to be.  Times Square is more than a New Year’s Eve – she is larger than great Theater. She is the mapping of Manhattan’s last Square. Times Square began as a section of the wide Indian trail known as Broadway; she blossomed in her early days as “Longacre Square”. She matured into the entertainment region, but her iconic status arrived in 1945. Times Square is America’s Square – she is the place to be.

GREENWICH VILLAGE

 

In the summer of 1949 E.B. White wrote:

“In Greenwich Village the light is thinning: big apartments have come in, bordering the Square, and the bars are mirrored and chromed. But there is still in the Village the lingering traces of poesy..” 

White was, like every observer of Manhattan before him, lamenting the pace of change with its attendant cultural decay and vacuum of bricks and cash. He was recalling the spirit of true Bohemia that set the artistic tone of Greenwich Village.

Yet, unbeknownst to White, a mere decade or two later ‘the Village’ as it was simply known, would rise from the ashes and emerge with a richer heritage of art and ‘poesy’. Peter Hamill in his book “Downtown” recalls an evening stroll west along Ninth Street towards a Village in the early 60’s. Greenwich Village was then populated with “artists in paint-spattered jeans”, “bearded poets”,  “transvestites”, “sailors” and was “…a sensual festival of unlimited possibility...”

Waverly Place (formerly known as “Factory Street”) was renamed in 1832 to commemorate Sir Walter Scott’s novel “Waverley”. It is an apt demonstration of the artistic and literary pulse of old that beats through GREENWICH VILLAGE. It will survive all developments – commercial or otherwise. Her light shall never thin.

THE EAST VILLAGE

My friend Ruby took me on my first tour of the EAST VILLAGE back in 2000. It was part of my general education into the Lower East Side where so many families from Europe had created - with their customs, food and languages - Downtown. We ate at the 2nd Avenue Deli where I had an epiphany of some long-ago life in Gotham City. We walked along the side streets, I stared at the stoops, (I love New York City stoops) and Ruby tugged my sleeve ‘keep movin’ she muttered. We had coffee opposite Tompkins Square Park but we didn’t venture further than the entrance benches. The faded graffiti was the only indicator of a not-so-distant past when the EAST VILLAGE was a tough place. But I knew nothing about that.

I held my first art exhibition at the Cooper Brooke: A Tea House in a Gallery, on East 4th St. between Bowery and Second Ave in January 2004. It was one of the coldest nights of that year and I packed the house out (mostly with relatives and friends). I felt as though I’d arrived. Cooper Square (after whom the gallery was named) was itself named after Peter Cooper, inventor and industrialist, who benevolently founded the Cooper Union to provide free education in the arts, science and engineering. The arts have continued to thrive in the EAST VILLAGE – with the likes of Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jeff Koons debuting here.

TRIBECA

Staple Street is the secret street belonging to a certain Miss Frankel. According to my little friend – “everyone has a secret street and this one is mine”. The kid certainly has taste, Staple Street is a magical backstreet, and like so many in Tribeca, it is undeniably ‘Manhattan’. The antiquated elevated walkway, the uneven cobbled street, a drooping iron lamp and the facades produce an atmosphere of timelessness. Not too far away from Staple Street was once the Tribeca Bakery where a starving artist or office worker on a lunch break could lounge and while away the hours. An upscale restaurant has since replaced it. It was rumored that Robert De Niro owned the Tribeca Bakery and this was another reason for me to ‘hang’ over one coffee all afternoon.

I never saw Mr. De Niro but I have annually encountered his Tribeca Film Festival and eaten free popcorn. Started in 2002 in response to the world trade attacks the Tribeca Film Festival was the joint project of Robert De Niro and June Rosenthal. It has bought back the big film companies – one cannot move sometimes for movie sets – it has re-flocked the tourists and it has re-juiced a slammed neighborhood. I don’t have a secret street – it’s already been taken – but if I could I’d have a secret café where artists could while away the hours in peace. It would be the Tribeca Bakery and I’d get served by Robert De Niro a LARGE COFFEE.

SOHO

1968 was a good year for SOHO. Six years previously the City Club of New York had published a report on the city's underused commercial areas. The report’s title was “The Wastelands of New York” and in it SOHO was designated as a ‘commercial slum’. After the reports issue Robert Moses proposed an expressway through SOHO. The roadway would have gutted SOHO’S artistic community, her small businesses and the largest collection of 19th century cast iron architecture in the world. The community rallied behind urbanologist Jane Jacobs, and in 1968, the Board of Estimates rejected the proposal. SOHO society breathed a sigh of relief.

The majority of the iron facades were constructed from 1840 to 1880. High art was not the motive behind the decorous fronts rather it was sheer American expediency. Iron was a cheaper material to use than bricks or stone plus the frames could be molded elsewhere and welded together within four months.  SOHO’S industrial appearance reminds the astute visitor of a time when the area was dominated by import/export houses, wholesale textile warehouses, and the "rag trade.

Wander off the main streets and look closely at the cast iron buildings and tightly knit, cobbled streets. It is here that SOHO evokes an era that was firmly rooted in unadulterated commerce.

THE BOWERY

SOURCE:CBGB Photo ©Spencer Drate
http://www.cbgb.com/shrine/shriners/hillykristal.htm

n 1974 Hilly Krystal was fixing up his BOWERY club called CBGB-OMFUG (Country, Bluegrass, Blues, and Other Music for Uplifting Gourmandizers) when Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd approached him.  Verlaine and Lloyd had formed a band called “Television” the year before and were looking for a regular venue to play. Unbeknownst to Krystal “Television” was to become the US founders of the art punk and post-punk scene.

SOURCE:CBGB Photo ©Spencer Drate
http://www.cbgb.com/shrine/shriners/hillykristal.htm

CBGBs soon became a testing ground for other new groups like the Stillettoes/Blondie, the Ramones, the Dictators, the Heartbreakers, Suicide, Rocket From the Tombs/Peru Ubu, the Dead Boys, Blondie and the Talking Heads. When CBGBs hosted the first of its festivals of unsigned bands in July 1975, The Ramones drew the attention of The New York Times, The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, The Aquarian, The SoHo Weekly News, and the NME and Melody Maker from England. CBGBs was on the map.

32 years later the club closed down (October 13, 2006). The same day this (above) photograph was taken. RIP - CBGBs. Long live the BOWERY!

CHINATOWN

 

The first ‘American’ opium den was opened in Mott Street in the 1880’s where Bohemians would dream on divans alongside the criminal classes. George Appo the infamous conman and pickpocket squandered a fortune there. Around this time Tommy Lee ruled the dominant ‘On Leong’ gang thus controlling all activities (commercial, gambling, dives and dens) in the vicinity. He also wielded the powerful Chinese vote. Subsequently Mr. Lee was dubbed “The Mayor of Chinatown”. But the region’s true villains sprang from the Five Points (intersection of Mosco, Worth, Baxter Sts.), a diabolical section that spawned the legendary gangs: the Pug Uglies, the Dead Rabbits and the Shirt Tails.

 

In contrast to CHINATOWN’S unsavory past I have chosen the Mahayan Buddhist Temple located on Canal Street before the Manhattan Bridge. A true oasis of calm exists inside. The temple’s interior is lavishly decorated in vivacious magentas and gold trim with paintings of various bodhisattvas on the walls. Center-stage, a huge golden Buddha sits in a lotus position. Pick up a fortune scroll or simply enjoy the serenity before heading off towards the markets.