No Other Path! No Other Way! No Day But Today!

And at the end of the day, not everyone who has a human interest feature written about them is able to have it begin like this:

Anne Hanavan arrived at her Lower East Side shop in a leopard-print shirt, tight jeans and a bad mood. “Look,” she said, tugging open the steel gate, “If all you want is a story about a prostitute, I’m not interested. Go talk to someone else, there are plenty of former prostitutes around here.”

The real story, she said, was her shop, a tiny clothing and novelty store on Ludlow St. called Lost Shoe Productions, and her burgeoning film and fashion career. Hanavan, a striking woman standing 5 foot 8 inches (before the heels) with straight blonde hair, heavy-lidded blue eyes and a hard, angular jaw, is not the kind of woman you’d want to challenge.

Which is to say, this paragraph will be followed by 26 others full of lurid details about what it is like to be an East Village prostitute! D’oh!

At Least It’s Good For Something

Amid misplaced concern that its mall-like atmosphere would not catch on in Manhattan, New York Magazine reports that the new Time Warner Center is establishing itself as a convenient cruising spot:

It seems gay men might be picking up more than just Cole Haan loafers at the Time Warner Center—especially in the third-floor restroom. Ryan Haase, who works nearby, recently detected an “air of ill repute” when he saw several men at the urinals. “They all turned and looked at me almost in unison,” he says. “I went to wash my hands. No one had moved.” A shopboy says rumors of the rendezvous spot have circulated for about a year — colleagues reported “uncomfortable sounds coming from the stalls” — and a blogger called spriteboy pinpointed it as “a cruising spot,” adding, “Ohhh nobody even needs to know the scandal my eyes witnessed today.” A former restaurant employee says, “It was a known thing. The security guard would tell me stories about it.”

What, My Grimy Hospitality Is Too Good For You?

Each day walking down West 43rd Street to work, Times employees pass by the Hotel Carter. One day, a young writer can no longer resist the urge, and feels compelled to write a human-interest feature about it that barely conceals outward disdain for and condescension towards the place:

People have been saying for years that the old Times Square – the seedy, lowbrow ancestor of what is now a largely sanitized, Disneyfied tourist haven – is dead. But those people have never spent a night at the Hotel Carter. The 615-room hotel at 250 West 43rd Street offers travelers a cheap room in an expensive city, and something more: an adventure. In the middle of Manhattan and at the neon-bright Crossroads of the World, the hotel has been a little-known source of grimy hospitality, low-budget accommodations and equal numbers of satisfied and dissatisfied customers from around the world.

As a guest of the Hotel Carter, you may or may not have your room cleaned. You may or may not find the multicolored, multipatterned carpet on the floor and the walls agreeable. You may or may not have a working television and telephone. You may or may not have a smooth check-in, since the front desk keeps track of reservations without the benefit of a computer system.

In short, you may or may not have an enjoyable stay. The answer depends on which room you get – the top floors have numerous large recently renovated rooms with splendid views – and on your answer to this question: What do you expect for $99.23 a night?

. . .

Room 1105 was not so much a room as it was a place to lie low. It took eight paces to walk from one wall to the next and 21 paces to get from the door to the window. The telephone was dead. It sat on an old desk, its drawer broken and placed on the stained carpet, a copy of the Manhattan white pages, 1994-5, among the contents inside. The room was lighted by a bare bulb on the ceiling, and the headboard of the bed was a rectangle of blue carpet nailed to the wall. There was a big moldy splotch on the ceiling above the bathtub.

Tuna Family Mourns Fulton Fish Market’s Demise

After months of legal wrangling, the Fulton Fish Market finally closed:

The Fulton Fish Market, a cultural touchstone in lower Manhattan for nearly 184 years, packed up its last box of porgies early yesterday.
Its cobblestone-paved streets survived Tammany Hall, the Great Depression, two World Wars, the replacement of push carts with Nissan hi-low forklifts and alleged mob control.

. . .

Taking a coffee break at 5 a.m., a brawny vet nicknamed “Joey Tuna” struggled to hold back tears.

“Big guys ain’t supposed to cry, but a part of old New York is dying today,” Joey Centrone of Douglaston, Queens, said. “I recognize this place is antiquated, but it’s a part of us.”

Meanwhile, over in the Times, Joey’s brother Bobby also lets his emotions get the better of him:

“The city is throwing away its history,” said a fillet man named Bobby DiGregorio, better known as Bobby Tuna. “One day, there’s going to be a Banana Republic where I’m standing.” He finished slicing the belly of a fish the size of a Great Dane and slowly shook his head.

The new fish market at Hunts Point in the Bronx opened Sunday to lukewarm reviews:

The Fulton Fish Market opened for business at its new digs in The Bronx yesterday — with some of the 38 wholesalers already complaining that security there is too tight.

“It’s strange because it’s just a different environment. I was in that first market for 30 years — this is completely different,” said Mike Rizzuto, 53, of Montes Seafood.

He was annoyed that the enclosed compound, complete with chain-link fences and barbed wire, has three security checkpoints.

And some truck drivers griped about the increased travel time.

Buyer Michael Serra said, “I miss Chinatown, the Brooklyn Bridge, the scenery. There’s nothing here.

See also: New Fulton Fish Market (shouldn’t they get a more current name?).

Boutiques Are No Match For San Gennaro’s Long Shaft

The Boutiquification of the neighborhood north of Little Italy (snappy abbreviation: “Nolita” — rhymes with “Lolita”!) once threatened that neighborhood’s diversity — if you’ll permit me some chest-thumping wonkery, I believe Jane Jacobs called it the “Self-Destruction of Diversity” (The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Chapter 13). But it seems the neighborhood has, for now at least, withstood what once seemed inevitable:

The first of Manhattan’s microneighborhoods to emerge in the mid-nineties, Nolita saw retail rents double by 1998, from $50 to $100 a square foot, as Italian butchers and hardware gave way almost overnight to tiny, precious boutiques. The place is such shorthand for cool that the eatery on Fox’s Kitchen Confidential is called Nolita.

Then why do more than two dozen storefronts now stand empty in its nine blocks? It’s pretty much always been the case: Nolita turnover is unusually brutal.

Somehow the Williamsburg-ish crowd hanging out in front of Café Habana doesn’t translate into sales of the sort of arty luxury goods the shops are peddling. Theresa Ma, whose skin-care line, SCO, had a storefront on Mulberry Street before decamping to Broadway last year, notes, “People who live in Soho will happily pay $4 for a cup of coffee or buy an expensive face cream like mine.” Not in tenement-filled Nolita. “Most buildings are falling apart, with regular water and toilet leaks from the apartments above,” [onetime boutiquist Hugh] Duthie notes.

And then there’s the nabe’s previous claim to fame: September’s spumoni-and-beer-fueled San Gennaro Festival. “It’s crushing,” says Lindsay Cain of Femmegems, a do-it-yourself jewelry lab on Mulberry. “Those two weekends in September are really important — everyone is back from the Hamptons and women are excited to get shopping again. We tried to stay open during the festival our first year, in 2002, and there were horrid sausages and rats outside our door every morning, so now we just close.”