Nitwit, Now You’ve Got Us Feeling Bad For Developers!

As a renter, you know your landlord-tenant dispute is flimsy when even the Village Voice makes you seem unsympathetic:

Two years ago, his landlord, Larry Tauber — by accounts, neither a sleazy slumlord nor a chummy pushover — offered Peckham $75,000 to leave his $1,007-a-month West 21st Street one-bedroom, so that he could begin a gut renovation of the building to convert it to swanky rentals. Peckham’s refusals led Tauber to up the offer; by this summer, he’d tried to tempt the tenant with an $800-a-month lease governed by rent-stabilized guidelines on a renovated one-bedroom on West 69th Street between Columbus Avenue and Broadway, a five-minute walk away from the apartments of Steven Spielberg and Bruce Willis.

. . .

“It’s your business,” one of Peckham’s West 20th Street neighbors in a Tauber-owned building told him when they ran into each other the other day, “but if I were you, I wouldn’t be holding out for any southern exposure. If you can get an apartment at a decent rent in a decent building, take it.” Had the neighbor known of the apartment Peckham has refused to take — at a rent less than half what its previous tenant paid — he surely would have shared his shock at Peckham’s seeming greed.

Dude, for the benefit of every other renter in this city, take the fucking deal!

A Shock That Unkinked James Levine’s Hair

Fine, Peter Gelb, you win — that little Times Square opera stunt seems to have worked:

The gaudy lights still doused the streets, and nothing could stop a waiter from the Bubba Gump Company from loudly trying to lure in customers — but the honks took a break, and those rushing home from the towers of Midtown stood to the side, taking in the opening night of “Madame Butterfly” on three giant screens. The opera was also broadcast on a screen outside Lincoln Center, though the crowd there was more black-tie than the spectrum of New Yorkers at 42nd Street.

“I think I’ll stay a little while,” a nurse at New York Hospital, Rose Chin, said. She had run into the sleek set-up — an array of more than 1,000 pure red and black chairs set up on the asphalt of Broadway — on her way from the bus to the subway. She said she had seen her share of musicals and movies, but never an opera.

A carpenter at New York University, Jean Demesmin, came across the broadcast on his way back to his home in Spring Valley, N.Y.

“It’s my first opera,” he said, leaning against a telephone booth with his arms crossed. “I’m going to stay for the whole thing.”

. .

The free broadcasts on the opening night of the Metropolitan Opera’s season are part of an effort led by the new general manager, Peter Gelb, to increase the appeal and access of the art form. Last night Mr. Gelb estimated that the opera was seen by more than 8,000 people, compared to the about 3,000 who ordinarily fill the opera house. The company gave out thousands of free tickets to the opera’s dress rehearsal last week.

. . .

A warehouse worker from Ashland, N.J., Don Mackle, stared up at the screen and said, “Never in my life.” By taking a seat he was delaying his commute across the Hudson for several hours, but it was a worthy diversion, he said. “I would never go to opera if it wasn’t free,” he said. “Who knows? I might like it.”

St. Mark’s Place T-Shirts To The Contrary, Punk’s Probably Dead By This Point

Punk rock comes full circle as a former East Village club actually becomes a “dive bar”:

After a 15-year run on Third Ave. near St. Mark’s Pl., Continental celebrated its last night as a punk rock club on Sunday night. Trigger, its owner, plans to convert it into a dive bar, offering acoustic folk music on Sunday nights.

But for Continental’s punk finale, the volume was definitely higher than acoustic. Way, earsplittingly higher.

The final performers included such legendary acts as the Bullys, Lenny Kaye, Handsome Dick Manitoba with most of the Dictators, and C.J. Ramone.

. . .

Throughout the evening, the musicians made references to the neighborhood’s demise and the spread of New York University.

“Can you imagine in 40 years — this will be happening in Bushwick?” Kaye mused, envisioning the end of a future music venue on the current edge of gentrification.

C.J. Ramone, sans Ramones black mop of hair but with a clean-shaven head, blasted through Ramones favorites like “Blitzkrieg Bop” and “Chinese Rock” with Daniel Rey on guitar. As the familiar Ramones songs blared, young punkers in jeans and black T-shirts started diving off ledges into the crowd and surfing on top of the packed sea of punk fans’ hands.

“N.Y.U. just f—ked the whole area up,” Ramone said in between splashing the crowd in front with beer. “No offense to you guys paying a lot of money to go there — but this sucks.”

Not to ruin the mood, but it doesn’t seem like its NYU’s fault more than it’s just the fact that punk’s not as lucrative as it once was:

After the club’s last show ever ended, Trigger said what killed Continental wasn’t just the neighborhood’s change.

“A punk rock club in this neighborhood — so much has moved out to Brooklyn,” he said. But he also added, “There’s not such a strong scene as there was. I used to get 400 demos a week. Now I get five or 10. Kids are into hip-hop and electronica. S–t happens.”

And not to put too fine a point on it, but isn’t Dick Manitoba like 52 years old?

Backstory: No Local Bands From New Jersey But Boy That Plasma Television Has A Great Picture!

Repaid 88 Times Over

Manhattan’s last free-standing residence is for sale:

A cosmetic surgeon seeking a comfortable space for his patients to convalesce, a national foundation looking to relocate its headquarters, and a house-hunting Modern artist are among the prospective owners of the marble mansion on Riverside Drive at 107th Street.

The free-standing landmark, purchased by a Columbia University law professor for $325,000 in 1979, is on the market for $29 million. If it goes for that asking price, which was recently reduced from $31 million, the townhouse will be far-and-away Manhattan’s most expensive residence to be sold above 96th Street, real estate brokers say.

. . .

The Schinasi mansion, as it is still known, is one of Manhattan’s few remaining non-attached homes, architectural historians say. While the building’s exterior is French Renaissance in style, the interior reflects European and Oriental influences. It boasts wood and plaster wall and door embellishments, stained-glass windows, marble mosaics, and ceiling carvings and murals. One recurring design element is the pineapple, a symbol of hospitality for centuries. Pineapple ornaments adorn the banister of the grand, five-foot-wide sculpted oak staircase, the molding in the front parlor room, and the metal hearth of the ground-floor fireplace.

“It is a rare survivor on Riverside Drive, which was once built up with mansions and townhouses,” an architectural historian, Charles Lockwood, said. “What’s ironic is that these grand houses lasted only a generation, and then they were down.” Mr. Lockwood, the author of “Bricks and Brownstone,” a book about New York City townhouses, said these turn-of-the-century homes, started being demolished in the 1910s and 1920s. They were supplanted by larger, multi-family apartment buildings that are now staples of Riverside Drive.

There are 12 bedrooms, eight bathrooms, five kitchens, a light-infused fourth-floor studio apartment, a 3,500 square-foot garden, and even a closed-off tunnel that provided the Schinasi family access to Riverside Park across the street.

. . .

The 12,000-square-foot home on Riverside Drive retains most of its original details, in addition to more recent accents like frosted-glass interior doors, marquis lights around the bathroom mirror, a ping-pong table, and a framed poster celebrating the rapper Eminem.

Visions Of Meryl Danced In Our Heads

The fashion industry isn’t happy about losing Bryant Park:

The landlord-tenant dispute between Bryant Park and IMG, the owner of New York Fashion Week, looks increasingly likely to end with the eviction of the event from its Midtown home. The likelihood has left the fashion business grappling with the reality of a move to smaller quarters for the fall 2007 shows in February.

Lincoln Center is one replacement that has been explored, with disappointing results: tents on opposite sides of the New York State Theater with a winding corridor between would require guests to walk the equivalent of a city block between shows.

And looking at a conceptual drawing of what the runway shows would be like at Lincoln Center, as opposed to Bryant Park, is like comparing a studio apartment with a classic six. Even on paper, the layout is cramped, weirdly shaped, lacking closet space and hardly conducive to an ambience of luxury.

“Nothing else is as good,” said Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, who said she has written to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg asking him to intervene to keep the shows in Bryant Park, at least until a viable alternative can be identified. “The fashion industry should be taken seriously. The mayor should give us the respect we deserve.”

Location Scout: Bryant Park.