Choi Garden - A Chinese Restaurant Worth Raving About

Our family loves chinese food. On my father's birthday, I reserved this special chinese restaurant -- Choi Garden in Annapolis Greenhills. It is seldom that you hear a buzz on Chinese restaurants. Most people rave about Choi Garden because of the food prepared by their Hongkong Chef and the interesting interiors.

Choi Garden occupies the hole left by Country Waffles in Greenhills. It has two floors -- the first floor is for shabu shabu, while the second floor is for fine dining. For special occasions, better reserve the rooms on the 2nd floor. The first floor is for casual meetings and romantic dates. Better reserve to get the best seats in the house. I love the dramatic tunnel entrance, and the interesting chandelier lighting effects. The word "opium den" comes to mind (I don't know why) when I entered the first floor because of its bloody motif.

The specialties of the house are usually not found in the menu. Choi Garden is famous for their Pigeons (which you have to order in advance) and 3-way Lapu Lapu.

Ying Ying, the new "President" in Binondo

Until now, I can't believe that the President Restaurant in Binondo closed down. It was a foodie institution and President was THE Chinese restaurant in Chinatown. The rumor in the foodie community is that the head chef of President transferred to Ying Ying Tea House Restaurant. (Can anybody confirm this?) Ying Ying Restaurant is now becoming the new "President" in Binondo.

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*Everyday Chatter

Schrager vs. Balazs--who will win the right to evict everyone from the Chelsea Hotel and turn it into an inaccessible boutique? [Curbed]

Check out Last New Yorker director Harvey Wang's latest short. [13]

Watch Matt Silver (man in white dress) under the J train. [BBK]

Then visit High Bridge in the City Concealed. [13]

More video? See Jerry Rio, the man on the street in the 1990s. [COS]

A Flickr photographer captures the many cornerstones of New York:


Old-timey street vendors. [ENY]

On the Bowery returns to IFC in April. [BB]

Urban loneliness. Edward Hopper. [P&W]

Houston Wall gets security cammed--you are being watched. [EVG]

Subway rat on man's face goes viral. [Gothamist]

O Joe's!

As discussed earlier this month, the Village's beloved lost diner Joe Jr's is becoming O Cafe, a green venture between a South American coffee connoisseur and a real estate developer named Sitt.

The brown paper is now down from the windows and the name is on the glass.



Through the winter steam, a bleary peek inside. Green plants, squiggly lamps, big coffee cups. No greasy burgers or onion rings worthy of being smuggled into a coffin. As far as I can tell.

Wortman's NY

If you haven't come across it yet, check out the book Denys Wortman's New York, and then get up to the Museum of the City of New York to see the work of this incredible artist and chronicler of the New York scene of the 1930s and 40s. The show runs until March.



Denys Wortman sketched the city for The New York World-Telegram and Sun from the 1920s until the 1950s. His images, long forgotten, were rediscovered by cartoonist James Sturm who got in touch with Wortman's son and found his way to a 5,000-piece collection of incredible ephemera. The book and museum show followed.

As the Times recently wrote, Wortman's drawings are "beautifully composed and finely worked, a legacy of his art school years, when he studied alongside future Ashcan school painters like Edward Hopper and George Bellows, and with their guru Robert Henri." The Ashcan style is alive in these pieces, but on a more intimate scale.


Wortman, detail

The drawings are richly detailed scenes, slices of life featuring the poor and working class citizens of the city in mid-century. The Lower East Side is a tangle of signage and laundry lines, its stoops and fire escapes crowded with people who call out to each other, telling the stories of their days.

On the factory floors and in the offices of the Garment District, seamstresses and bosses talk of vacations and business dealings. In Times Square and Coney Island, sailors strut and girls flirt. Burlesque dancers and chorines stretch their gams backstage.


Wortman, detail

In bread lines, unemployment offices, and luncheonettes, men in fedoras count their pennies and kill time. Women sunbathe on Tar Beach rooftops. Bums stroll like royalty on the Bowery. Aspiring actresses and authors find rejection in the offices of talent agents and pulp publishers.


Wortman, detail

Also featured in the show are the street photographs of Wortman's wife, Hilda--priceless images largely of a lost Lower East Side. Many of Wortman's scenes were taken from her photos and from the lines she overheard on the streets and in the shops. The whole thing is a kind of early "Overheard New York," filled with the dialect of lost accents and expressions. Don't miss it.

*Everyday Chatter

The importance of human continuity in a neighborhood. [NYT]

Yet another boutique hotel for the Bowery, this one on the corpse of the Salvation Army building. It has become boring. [Curbed]

Greenwich Village then and now, when a Master of the Universe knows the city waits for him with "legs spread, naked in furs, with lines of coke on the coffee table and a music video playing on the wall-sized TV." [Restless]

LES bar irks the neighbors. [BB]

Lesbians suing David Barton gyms for discrimination. Sexual harassment from the people who brought us the line, "No pecs, no sex"? [Gothamist]

Dash Snow tag discovered. [EVG]

"Long gone are McSweeney's days as a magazine for brilliant rejects." [NYO]

Brooklyn foodie culture is apparently "oversold, overblogged." [Grub]

Bobby Robinson

A reader sent in the sad news that Harlem legend Bobby Robinson passed away last Friday. "He was 93," reported the Daily News, "and had been ill for several years--though he regularly went to work at his shop until it was forced to close in January 2008."


Daily News

That shop was Bobby's Happy House. It closed, ironically, on Martin Luther King's birthday in 2008. It was quickly stripped and boarded up, readied to be razed, along with its neighbors, to create a new shopping mall.



The Happy House had been going strong for more than 60 years before it was felled. As the Times reported in Mr. Robinson's obituary, the shop "became a treasured Harlem institution for a half century. The store spawned a remarkable recording business that helped launch artists from rhythm and blues giants like Gladys Knight and the Pips to the rap stars Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five."

It was also "one of the last old-time stores to battle the neighborhood’s relentless gentrification, albeit unsuccessfully."

When I visited the store soon before its closure, after the neighborhood rallies and petitions could not save it, I found a place with a window full of memories--trophies, awards, autographed photos--with a television playing a 1980s video of Michael Jackson to a group of men who had gathered out front to dance, mirroring Michael's moves on the sidewalk, moonwalking and leaping to their toes. The place was alive.



I don't know what's there now. If the shop is still standing, boarded up, waiting for the economy to change, or if it's been demolished and replaced already with a big, glass box. Either way, the aliveness of the place is gone.

Places matter in people's lives. I think of elderly couples--how, oftentimes, when one dies the other soon follows, as if they cannot bear to be in the world without that person. And I wonder if this happens with people and the places where they have spent much of their lives, if the loss of these places accelerates sickness, hastens death.

Of course, Mr. Robinson's life goes on in the music and musicians he discovered, produced, and promoted. The shopping mall people can't take that away.



To pay your respects, Stupefaction gives us the details: "A memorial service for the legendary Harlem music entrepreneur Bobby Robinson will take place this Thursday, January 13, at the United House of Prayer for All People, 2320 Frederick Douglass Boulevard (Eighth Avenue) @ 125th Street. The viewing is from 3:00 - 6:00 pm, with the service to follow."

*Everyday Chatter

Max Fish to stay alive--just for one more year. [Paper] via Curbed

Zig Zag Records of Brooklyn closes after 35 years. [SB]

Looking back at the corner of 6th Ave and 24th St., where bagels replaced dancing girls. [FNY]

Knockdown drama at the CB3 meeting: Said one committee member, "If douchebags are a race, then I'm a racist." [EVG]

More and more bedbugs. [Curbed]

The history and future of 250 Bowery. [BB]

WalMart keeps trying to tell New York it loves WalMart. [Racked]

A little old Times Square from Jerry Rio. [youtube]

Bike lanes--also good for riding horses (if you're a cop):

Oscar & Fedora

When I posted this photo in my Faux-Dora post this summer, a couple of readers weighed in on the origins of the sugar bowl marked with the name Oscar's and how it ended up at Fedora's.



Mark said, "The bowls are seconds from Oscar's Salt of the Sea, a wonderful restaurant on Third Avenue and 63rd Street, long gone. Barbra Streisand lived in the tenement above the restaurant before she made it on Broadway. It was a great place, with Irish waitresses in uniform and Oscar himself, dressed all in black, greeting his customers and sharing a drink with them."

But Anonymous disagreed, saying, "The sugar bowls are from Delmonico's as are the plates on the wall. Fedora was Mary Tucci's closest friend since birth...they are both from Montecatini...and both Henry and Fedora worked at Delmonico's. Oscar Tucci owned Delmonico's and the Oscar referred to is him. Mary used to give Fedora the china when Delmonico's changed theirs. You could eat off of Delmonico's plates at Fedora but, alas, most are broken."



A Dorato family member confirmed that the bowl came from Delmonico's, but "Oscar's Salt of the Sea" made me curious. So I hunted around and found an old menu on Ebay, complete with a Trafalgar phone exchange and a drawing of the restaurant beneath the El's shadows.



Aside from the Barbra Streisand lore that Mark shared, there is more history there.

According to Sesame Street Unpaved, "The character of Oscar was inspired by a nasty waiter" from Oscar's. "Jim Henson and Jon Stone were waited on by a man who was so rude and grouchy that he surpassed annoying and started to actually amuse... their waiter forever became immortalized as the world's most famous Grouch."

Some of the original muppet designs are drawn on Oscar's paper placemats.



Oscar's was around a long time (anyone know how long?), and much like Fedora's had become a beloved relic by the 1980s after Oscar Karp retired.

The New York Times in 1982 wrote: "Oscar's handsome, modern dining rooms, with their natural wood paneling and photographs of fishing schooners, still attract older couples who eat lunch out or have an early dinner. They order the $6.95 lunch specials and the dinners from $10.95 to $13.95 or the early-bird specials served from 4 to 6 P.M. for $8.95... Waiters and waitresses are friendly and willing, but they are careless and forgetful."

By 1988, Oscar's had been replaced by Le Laurier, "a posh all-seafood restaurant of burnished teak, polished service and often precious food: this is about as different from Oscar's Salt of the Sea as Donald Trump's yacht is from the Circle Line...It has the same warm, corporate look with a coffered ceiling, inset lights, well-separated tables and soft leather banquettes." New York described Le Laurier as serving haute French cuisine, with a prix fixe of $46--a far cry from Oscar's early birdies.

As far as I can tell, Le Laurier didn't last very long.

Fedora Before:

photo: New York Magazine

Just opened, the new restaurant in the old Fedora space is also posh and burnished, as polished as a yacht, with a long leather banquette--a far cry from what used to be. As for the sugar bowls with Oscar's name on them--is there a vortex where such lost artifacts end up? If we look hard, we might find them there.

Fedora After:

photo: Daniel Krieger for Eater (see more)

*Everyday Chatter

Help out our buddy--and brilliant author--Charles Bock by going to his rent party or making a donation. Read more here.

For Gonzalez y Gonzalez fans, the official shutter signage:


Andre Balazs Wants Hotel Chelsea for Chateau Marmont East? [Curbed]

Introducing the 2011 EV Survival Kit. [NYS]

Greenpoint's WORD bookshop: "Older, more settled; not so many girls teetering on booties or bearded guys in giant headphones." [CNY]

Wal-Mart trying really, really hard to take NYC. [CR]

Et tu, Chloe? [EVG]

"The cupcake craze is getting crazier." [NYT]

Love the dummies in 7th Ave's windows. [Restless]

Bedbugs: Extreme Infestation! on Animal Planet. Not for the faint of heart. [AP]

Ferrara on NYC

Anthology Film Archives is hosting a series of Abel Ferrara films from January 7 - 18. Camera in the Sun talked with Ferrara and he had some things to say about Mulberry Street, the Chelsea Hotel, and New York City. Here are some excerpts.


photo: Derin Thorpe for Paper

On Mulberry St:

"It’s a street I was living on. It’s a street that I knew. It’s something I wanted to capture. And it’s a place now that’s different than when I shot that film, but still it’s a traditional Italian neighborhood that’s becoming a commercial restaurant district crossed with the yuppie very-wealthy downtown New York vibe. You know, super-high rents, super-successful people. All these apartments and cold water flats from the turn-of-the-century — they’re right now high-priced pads, and every square inch is battled over. And it’s basically a block within a Chinese neighborhood."

On the Chelsea Hotel:

"I grew up outside the city, so we used to come to Greenwich Village to get ripped off in pot deals. We never went to the Chelsea Hotel. I remember the first time I was there, but then, you know, it’s funny--some people, from Janis Joplin on down, these guys, they would just come and sit in the lobby. I mean, I don’t know what they expected to get out of it."

On the changes to Manhattan in recent years:

"The difference is that every square inch is taken. Every square inch is fought over. Every square inch, everyone is sucking the life out of anybody who’s renting and taking whatever. New York, it’s been kind of the mecca of the world, but now it’s super-duper mecca. And that’s where it’s at. I mean, I came to seek my fortune in Manhattan. You can only come to Manhattan if you have a fortune, or you’ve got some kind of hustle where you’ve got a rent-controlled apartment or you’re living with your mother. You’re not gonna come to Manhattan and start from scratch. It ain’t happening. It was more possible in 1975. I think it was all gone by the early ’90s. But it’s definitely long-gone now. I mean if you’re living in Manhattan, you’d better have a job, ’cause you’re definitely paying rent."

*Everyday Chatter

Stulman "groupies" flocked to Fedora: "Plaid prints were de rigeur on these well-heeled hipsters, as were scarves (worn indoors), expensive but well-worn loafers, carefully coiffed bed head and glasses that we suspect were worn only for vanity’s sake. We also saw more than one mustache in the house." [Zagat]

New Fedora's place in "Little Wisco" cemented by featured Black Squirrel cocktail, an homage to the bartender's "small, little humble town," Reedsburg, Wisconsin. [Feast]

Look inside the New Fedora here and here and here.

Next to crumble in Coney, the Henderson Building--once lovely, former home of the weird and wonderful World in Wax Musee--now unceremoniously annihilated by Thor Equities' wreckers. [ATZ]

All over town, local frame-shop chain selling Warhol print series with vapid quotes curated for the walls of today's New York college students:


Astor Place to become a massive, Midwesty-looking pedestrian mall. Heaven help us. [Curbed]

Creepy things still happen sometimes in the East Village. [EVG]

Tonight: Don't miss Abel Ferrara in person at Anthology after the screenings of Mary and Go-Go Tales, which the Times just called "a touching and tender valentine to a lost New York, a city that now exists only as a hallucination." [AFA]

Cabo Rojo

VANISHED

A reader writes in, "Passed by Cabo Rojo--Puerto Rican joint on 10th Ave--shuttered. Owner said lost lease."


from Don Juan Tenorio's flickr

Restaurant critic Sam Sifton was a fan of this 51-year-old Chelsea spot. He wrote a lengthy, adoring review in The Times in 2002 and provided an atmospheric snippet of the place:

"They sit at the counter with their sunglasses pushed up on their heads, baggy shirts covering guns, radios, handcuffs. They eat rice, beans, pork chops, sliced avocado. They sit at the tables shoveling it in, tall uniformed men in shiny boots and the creased caps of the highway patrol or mutt-faced beat walkers in rumpled blue.

They come to Cabo Rojo from nearby galleries, pale-faced young women with tangled artist hair, for succulent roast pork, and they walk in on their way to the estimable Chelsea Commons down the street, bartenders taking a preshift meal: roast chicken, yellow rice, red beans, sweet plantains, a Coke.

They are neighborhood types, office workers, family -- a quick portrait of western Chelsea, with sound: New York-inflected Spanish, English with a Puerto Rican twang."


from toonvb's flickr

Cabo Rojo lasted for half a century. But the "neighborhood types" have lately become more gallery girls and condo boys than cops and Latino families. The New High Line is stretching further northward, bringing the destructive force of "renewal" in its wake. This block (and this end of Chelsea) is undergoing change. It will be swift, and it will be total.

Between pizza shop and check-cashing joint, the block already has Danny Emerman's "art-world hotspot" Bottino and the Swiss brasserie Trestle on Tenth. The block's bricks are daily suntanned by the reflection blazing off the "shimmering architecture" of the newish 245 10th Avenue condo directly across the street. And someday, the melancholy, crusty neon of Joe's Tavern on the northern corner will be gone; another wine bar will go in.

How could a place like Cabo Rojo continue to exist in an environment that is becoming increasingly hostile to anything not hotspotty?

*Everyday Chatter

Looking back at the infestation: "bedbugs began to look like foot soldiers in a class war, soldiers who struck New York in its suburbanized, gentrified heart." [N+1]

January 18 and 19: Rosie Mendez sponsors bedbugs forum on the LES. [TLD]

"It's just like a real like nice like kind of like luxury building, which is kind of hard like in this area. It's not like, there's not like a lot of them, anyway." via via via... [EVG]

At the Soho Doc Martens store: "A man with a fully tattooed face and gauges in his ears was being let down gently: 'We don’t carry a lot of the industrial boots because of the neighborhood,' a salesclerk told him." via [Racked]

Mannequins gazing at other mannequins--at the 50-year-old Rootstein:


"Her family came from Sicily to the East Village a long time ago. This was before it was the East Village..." [HNY]

Gonzalez y Gonzalez, the Mexican joint with the neon sombrero, to close after 21 years. [Eater]

Great reminiscence about the old New Yorker magazine and its goings on. [NYT]

(The last?) New Year's Eve at Mars Bar. [Gog]

Doomsday is upon us--can the Manhattan Apocalypse be far behind? [Gothamist]

Purple's Eden

January 8, 2011 is the 25th anniversary of the destruction of Adam Purple's monumental "earthwork" The Garden of Eden. Memorializing the occasion, photos of the artwork and the artist by acclaimed photographer Harvey Wang (also director of The Last New Yorker) will be displayed for the first time at the FusionArts Museum on Stanton Street, from February 1 - 20.


Garden of Eden, by Harvey Wang

Constructed and maintained from 1978 to 1985, the Garden of Eden was a massive green artwork on the Lower East Side, thriving amidst the rubble of a burning and collapsing neighborhood. "As the buildings around fell," wrote New York Magazine in 1991, "the garden grew. Soon its concentric circles of tomatoes, corn, and flowers covered five lots and fed its neighbors."

According to the press release, by the time of its destruction in 1986 the garden "had grown to 15,000 square feet. Among the many crops and flowers were 100 rose bushes and 45 fruit and nut trees. Adam 'zenvisioned' the Garden expanding until it replaced the skyscrapers of New York." But that was not to be.


After the destruction, by Harvey Wang

In the 1980s, the city stepped in with an urban renewal plan for the Lower East Side, and a lengthy battled ensued. Purple and his neighbors lost, the city won. Chris Flash reported in The Shadow, "By 1985, Adam says, the city considered The Garden of Eden a threat: 'They couldn't just say go away, so they found a HUD project and got all the local poverty pimps to jump up and down and say we need housing, we don't need flowers. They divide the community, conquer it, and everybody loses.'"

Wrote Flash, "Rudolph Giuliani, as US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, oversaw the legal effort to destroy The Garden of Eden."


Adam Purple, by Harvey Wang

Adam Purple, wrote the New York Times, is "one of New York City's living treasures, an ornery gadfly, a freelance anarchist." One of a vanishing breed. He recently said, looking back on what was lost, "I still feel that it would have been better to kill me and leave the garden."

Watch a slideshow and listen to the story of the Garden's life and death here--then support the exhibit by making a donation, and getting a photo print, at Kickstarter:

Donut Pub Wins

In 2007, when a Dunkin Donuts moved a few doors down from the Donut Pub on 14th Street, some of the Pub's customers were worried that it would spell doom for the 43-year-old mom and pop. Well, those worries are over--the interloping Dunkie's has closed, and the Pub (now 46) still stands.



I'm not sure when, exactly, this store closed, but it has vanished without even a tearful note goodbye. As we recently learned, Dunkin Donuts is the biggest chain in New York City, with "77 more stores than Subway and 210 more than Starbucks." It is undeniably a force to be reckoned with. Is it too much to say that the little Donut Pub defeated this seemingly unstoppable Goliath?

How did the Pub do it? I'd like to think it has to do with loyal customers, people like Josephine Motto who told The Villager in 2007 that, after trying a free sample from Dunkin Donuts, “I got sick on them... [The Donut Pub’s] doughnuts are much better.”

Agreed.



More Donuts:
The Donut Pub
Peter Pan Donut Shop
Donuts Coffee Shop
Disco Donut

*Everyday Chatter

LES to die another death as Wal-Mart sets its sights on Delancey Street. [Curbed]

Enjoy Jerry Rio's amazing 1995 time-capsule of the city in the beginning of hyper-gentrification and major change. (He actually finds articulate people at Astor Place--even one with a baby stroller.) [COS]

Murray's Cheeses spreads "artisanal" across the country. [GD]

What's going into the shuttered Rum House of Times Square? [Eater]

Park Slope Pavilion looking shabby these days. [HPS]

The Victory Cafe, "a tiny hole-in-the-wall coffee shop in Boerum Hill" since 1999, is being evicted. [CR]

The East Village is burning. Again. [EVG]

More closing on West 8th. [FP]

Hipster vs. Bohemian

In 1955, the New School hosted a panel discussion tackling the question "Are There Any True Bohemians?" Today we're asking similar questions about hipsters. On The Grumbler...

*Everyday Chatter

...and we take one giant step closer to the Idiocracy, in which the only novels will consist of Snooki sentences like: "I love food. I love drinking, boys, dancing until my feet swell. I love my family, my friends, my job, my boss. And I love my body, especially the badonk." [RS]

New Fedora to open Thursday--see inside here. [Feast]

Don Everett Pearce returns to the Nighthawks mystery, looking at Blast of Silence for evidence of the missing Hopper diner. [DEP]

A round-up of Coney news from 2010. [ATZ]

Go inside the Henderson Music Hall with Coney historian Charles Denson's video tribute. [ATZ]

Blizzard memories from Romy. [WIC]

Laundry and our relationship to washing machines. [HNY]

Check out this cool collection of paperbacks with maps of the city on them. [DTDB]

The lost comic book stores of Sheepshead Bay. [GNYC]

An homage to the city's lost bars of 2010. [GAF]

An in-depth look back at the Bloomberg Era. [NKP]

Exploring the world beneath the city. [NYT]

Hawk life in an EV air shaft. [EVG]

Auster's Joe Jr.'s

As we lose bits and pieces of the city, they sometimes resurrect unexpectedly in movies and books. It's always a thrill to be so taken by surprise. Enjoying Paul Auster's new novel, Sunset Park, I was happy to find Joe Jr.'s, the diner on the corner of 12th St and 6th Ave that closed in July 2009 after a passionate neighborhood battle to keep it alive.



As his character Morris Heller sits in the diner, Auster writes:

"Joe Junior's is a small place, a simple, down-at-the-heels neighborhood joint featuring a curved Formica counter with chrome trim, eight swivel stools, three tables by the window in front, and four booths along the northern wall. The food is ordinary at best, the standard greasy-spoon fare of two dozen breakfast combinations, grilled ham-and-cheese sandwiches, tuna fish salads, hamburgers, hot open turkey sandwiches, and fried onion rings.

He has never sampled the onion rings, but legend has it that one of the old regulars, Carlton Rabb, now deceased, was so enamored of them that he added a clause to his will stipulating that an order of Joe Junior's fried onion rings be smuggled into his coffin before his body was laid to rest.

Morris is fully aware of Joe Junior's shortcomings as a dining establishment, but among its advantages are the total absence of music, the chance to eavesdrop on stimulating, often hilarious conversations, the broad spectrum of its clientele (from homeless beggars to wealthy home owners), and, most important, the role it plays in his memory."



Recent news tells us that South American "coffee connoisseur" Fernando Aciar is moving into the Joe Jr.'s space with something called O Café. Grub Street describes it as "more green than greasy spoon, incorporating reclaimed materials, recycled lamps, and LED lights."

The cafe is co-owned by real-estate developer Jeffrey Sitt. According to Sitt's site, the partners were "Determined to bring the authentic taste of South America to the states," so "they engendered an unprecedented line of branded coffee, organically grown and imported from Brazil. An expert in the field, Aciar hand selected the superior grade beans from each unique region of the country, while Jeffrey secured financing and space for the premier O Café shop."

Sitt is known for, in his bio's words, "gutting, renovating and ultimately condoing and renting residential spaces from Staten Island to Hoboken and various localities in between." Projects he's involved with include The Bridges and 99 Gold in Vinegar Hill, Brooklyn, and some controversial, historically significant warehouses in Wallabout.



All of this is to say that things in the city just keep changing in one direction--toward the upscale, the gourmet and artisanal, to cups of coffee that have been "hand selected" and bites of chocolate that have been "sourced" (prepared especially for the premier flocks of mavens and fiends in the know), away from onion rings that a greasy-spoon regular would want smuggled into his coffin. (Did they ever make it there? Does anyone know Mr. Rabb outside of Auster's imagination?)

That "broad spectrum of clientele" that Auster writes about in his novel--it's vanishing. The spectrum is getting narrower and narrower, wherever you go. I often wonder: In my old age, will I even find a single place like Joe Jr's, where there is no throbbing music overhead, where I can eavesdrop on stimulating conversations while enjoying a plate of ordinary food? Or will it all be gone? And if so, what then?

Said John Waters of Joe Jr's to Gothamist, "It was my favorite neighborhood coffee shop and I'm mad that it's gone and I put a curse on the owner." In the future, such curses may be all we will have.


Read more on Joe Jr's:
Joe Jr's
Save Joe Jr's
Last Supper at Joe's

Join the Friends of Joe Jr's on Facebook