Culinary Masterpieces

The weird thing about New York is that all of its well-known, well-loved foods are so agonizingly and stupidly simple. Bagels — they’re just bread! Pizza — just cheese and bread! Pickles — brined cucumbers! And who can forget hot dogs? Fortunately, The Times’ Ed Levine bursts at least one myth right off the bat:

You know those hot dogs that you know and love, and can’t wait to eat this time of year? The ones served at Katz’s Delicatessen, Gray’s Papaya, Papaya King, the legendary Dominick’s truck in Queens and the best “dirty water dog” carts?

They’re all the same dog, manufactured by Marathon Enterprises, of East Rutherford, N.J., the parent company of Sabrett. They may vary in size, preparation and condiment selection (and Papaya King has Marathon add a secret spice to its mixture), but they’re the same ol’ dog. In fact, until a few years ago, Marathon made Nathan’s hot dogs.

Still, he can’t help himself from waxing poetic about yet another totally pedestrian item. No wonder Europeans think we’re weird:

So what constitutes a great hot dog? To me, it’s a grilled, kosher-style frank served on a lightly toasted bun with slightly spicy mustard and a homemade onion or pickle relish that is neither too sweet nor too hot. The Old Town Bar on East 18th Street not only toasts the bun that encases its grilled natural-casing all-beef Sabrett dog, it butters it as well. Sublime! Sauerkraut is also fine atop my dogs, though every once in a while I crave one prepared Southern style, with cole slaw. My ideal dog should fit neatly into its bun, sticking out by at most an inch on each end.

The key is context, and if you’ve ever traipsed out to Coney Island to wait in line for a hot dog — a hot dog! — you probably understand what he means:

But when you are surrounded by screaming Mets fans at Shea or Cyclones fans at KeySpan Park in Coney Island, and the score is tied, and you bite into one of those less than exemplary franks slathered with mustard, you just might be having the peak hot dog experience of all.

Number 9

The manic rumbling of the hydra-headed skip-stop 1/9 is coming to an end, making sign makers happy:

The No. 9 train has six days left to live, but it has already begun to disappear.

Platform by platform, station by station, workers are erasing evidence of the line’s existence on hundreds of signs hanging above the tracks and at the entrances to the subway system. By Tuesday, the No. 9 line will officially and forever be no more.

(Sewell Chan — so serious sounding!)

“Skip-stop service on the 1 line is an idea which today doesn’t make sense for our operations or our customers,” said Lawrence G. Reuter, the president of New York City Transit. “By eliminating skip-stop service, the majority of riders along the 1 line will benefit from shorter travel times and will no longer have to stand on platforms as trains pass them by during rush hour.”

The No. 9, then, enters a graveyard of other route designations that have graced the subway map over the years. The No. 8, an elevated line, ran above Third Avenue in the Bronx until it was demolished in 1973. Double-letter designations – like the AA, GG and QB – were phased out in 1986. The JFK Express ran alongside the A train, from Midtown to Howard Beach, Queens, until 1990.

The No. 9’s death has been slow and painless. Over the last few weeks, workers have been placing black vinyl patches over 904 signs on platforms and entrances at 45 stations: 37 along the line itself and 8 transfer stations.

See also: “Number 9 . . . Number 9 . . .” Blog Entry (1/12/05)

The Latest Outrage

Parks Department plans to renovate Washington Square Park involve removing the concrete mounds in the southwest portion of the park. The New Yorker profiles a neighborhood group dedicated to preserving them, confirming that people in Greenwich Village have become no less loopy over the years:

Leonie Haimson, who lives just off Washington Square Park and heads a group of Village residents informally known as Save the Mounds, has been advised that, for public-relations reasons, it might be better to refer to the three asphalt bumps in the southwest corner of the park, threatened with demolition by the Parks Department’s renovation plans, by the term “hills.” “‘The Hills’ sounds less silly,” she said the other day, sitting on a bench with some fellow mounds defenders, not far from the objects of their attachment. In truth, the mounds, each of which is about six or eight feet high, are hills to about the same degree that Washington Square Park is square. But they are, as Haimson pointed out, all that the Village offers in the way of elevation; and they are sufficiently beloved for two thousand neighbors to have signed petitions protesting their destruction.

“Generations of children have played on these mounds—my daughter took her first running step on them,” Haimson said as her son, Nathaniel, who is six years old, frolicked on the mounds’ cracked and weedy surface. Another advocate, Suzanne Dickerson, said that her daughter Erin, now a junior at Yale, had played there avidly for years. “I credit her athletic ability to those mounds,” she said. “I really think it developed her calf muscles. She was a competitive track runner all through elementary school, until she switched to swimming.”

The piece notes the history of the mounds. And the fervent self-sacrificing nature of the mounds’ supporters:

The mounds were created in 1971, when, with the construction of two new children’s playgrounds, the park—which until the mid-sixties was a turnaround point for the Fifth Avenue bus line—was rededicated as a place for leisure. Robert Nichols, who was the project’s landscape designer, says that the mounds and the play area around them were inspired by the so-called “adventure playgrounds” that he had seen in Scandinavia. Although they were built for children, the mounds have been adopted by Villagers of all ages: hundreds of people mounted them this past winter with sleds in tow; and, until about five years ago, a theatre group used their valley as a natural amphitheatre for productions of Shakespeare and Sophocles. Over the years, however, the mounds fell into disrepair—an instance, Nichols believes, of malign neglect on the part of the Parks Department, inspired by the earlier thwarting by Village activists of Robert Moses’s hopes to bisect the park with an extension of Fifth Avenue. “I can’t imagine a park without a bunch of mounds, myself,” said Nichols, who now lives in Vermont but whose daughter, Eliza, has become one of the mounds’ chief protectors. (She told activist colleagues that she was prepared to lie down in the path of bulldozers.)

“I can’t imagine a park without a bunch of mounds, myself.” Are these people nuts? Fuck the stupid mounds!

Location Scout: Washington Square Park Mounds.

Busted Like An Underage Keg Party

Whole Foods got busted by the state for its landlocked wine store in the basement of the Time Warner Center. The Times explains:

Whole Foods Market has closed the wine shop in its store in the lower level of the Time Warner Center on Columbus Circle after pleading no contest to charges from state liquor officials that it was illegally operating it in a grocery store.

Citing state law that requires wine and liquor stores to have a separate entrance at street level and prohibits them from selling food, the Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control fined Whole Foods $5,000 on April 7 and gave it 30 days to sell off its stock. Whole Foods closed the shop on May 9 and surrendered its liquor license to the agency.

Keep in mind that other more sensible states allow grocery stores not only to sell wine but hard liquor as well! And don’t forget that New York State didn’t even have Sunday sales until last September.

Whole Foods plans to use their liquor license to open up a store (with a separate entrance) on Houston Street. Local merchants are unhappy:

David Lannon, Whole Foods’s Northeast regional president, said the company expected to transfer and use the surrendered license again for a wine shop occupying 4,000 to 5,000 square feet of space in the blocklong supermarket it planned to open on East Houston Street next year. State law also prohibits holders of retail liquor licenses from owning more than one store. The East Houston Street wine shop will be separate from the supermarket there, with an entrance on Chrystie Street.

Several owners of wine and liquor shops near the planned Whole Foods have asked Community Board 3 to oppose the shop before the alcohol agency. Alan Jay Gerson, the neighborhood’s City Council member, said he also opposed the shop.

But hey, I’m all for competition — just not this kind of competition:

Anthony White, an owner of Discovery Wines at 10 Avenue A, said Whole Foods’s buying power gave it an unfair advantage. “Competition is fine, but we’re not happy about the way they can underprice us,” Mr. White said. “We’re buying cases and they’re buying pallets.”

The Only Worthwhile Travel Guide

Frommer’s finally writes something useful — “Where to Stop Where to Go,” a guide to the city’s bathrooms sponsored by a pharmaceutical company marketing medication for overactive bladders. The Daily News notes the achievement:

Those with an urgent need for a rest room now have a guide for where to go when they need to go – thanks to seasoned travel writer Arthur Frommer, who has felt your pain.

“I experienced firsthand what traveling with an overactive bladder is like – needing to ask strangers about locating a rest room or trying to persuade a salesperson to give me access to those facilities,” Frommer writes in the 75-page travel-tip book “Where to Stop & Where to Go.”

Natives and tourists alike will appreciate the section devoted to New York’s sometimes hard-to-find public powder rooms.

Bonus Points: Where to Stop Where to Go; See also the original bathroom guide, Bathroom Diaries (Big Pharma should have gone there first!); Bathroom Diaries New York Page.