I took a rare trip into Manhattan yesterday. After years of taking the train to various stops off of the F, Q and L lines for work, I now say “I’m going into The City” in this tone that surprises me. Like I wasn’t ready to become this Brooklyncentric even though I’ve lived here for half of my life. Manhattan never felt like a destination and now it sort of does. Yesterday was my first time going there since last fall. That’s nuts. It’s a scenario I never in my wildest dreams saw playing out, but I tried to capitalize on it, on that dueling feeling of familiarity and feeling a bit like a tourist. It is one that I hope goes away eventually and I start making it into Manhattan more. But in the meantime, I got to reflect. Mostly about space. Specifically about the corner of the northwest corner of St. Mark’s and Second Avenue. If you know your geography, you know that’s the one across from where the Gem Spa used to be, kitty-corner from the Dallas BBQ that I’m certain will outlast us all. The particular spot in question is something now, a Taiwanese spot that I’d like to check out. The thing is that I’d also rather not get too attached because I know that space, and I know it’s haunted. That piece of real estate is like a chunk of acreage that’s just rock, but somebody always thinks they can be the one to turn it into thriving farmland. That’s what got me thinking about this:

I don’t know where you are or if you have lived in NYC or not, but likey you know about New York City and real estate being a thing. It is such a sick obsession that sometimes you don’t even realize just how much real estate thinking about space in this city takes up in your mind. Everything is real estate here, from the place you live that will never be big enough, to trying to get space on a crowded train to that second or two in a day you might not see anybody or hear anything. Something you love will close, then something you say you hate will move in where the place you loved once was. You’ll form some sort of relationship with the new place, either you’ll start to like it or you’ll continue an unhealthy relationship with a place. Then, one day, that place is gone. A new place goes in, and you miss the last place. The most recent new place sucks. You hate it. The cycle continues.
So I asked Twitter about other spots like it. What spots do other people feel are “haunted” in the sense that nothing will ever work there for whatever reason. And if you wonder what I mean by “whatever reason,” I mean it could be anything from it’s just too far off the beaten path to it’s too expensive to there’s a kingdom of rats living underneath the space and there’s no way to get rid of them unless you explode a small nuclear object underground. That sounds crazy, but live here long enough and it sounds plausible. The answers were pretty interesting.

This one from Hannah Orenstein was especially interesting to me. Old pizza spots seem to suffer a fate worse than death for reasons I’ve never quite been able to understand. If a pizza spot is good then it will most likely survive. But with the dollar slice becoming a thing of the past, it’s difficult for the meh slice joints to keep their doors open.

I’m also interested in this. The real estate “Bermuda Triangle concept. Sometimes it’s not just one place, but several. You’d think 2nd Ave. and 10th Street could pull it together given that’s not too far from a number of iconic spots, but nope.

I like this one. Mostly because I like the idea of somebody cursing a spot, especially whatever goes into the space that once housed Roebling Tea Room. I can’t even imagine what sort of horrible company can afford that rent. I’m guessing that’s the reason it has stayed empty since 2017, but you never know in this city. Landlords will just let spaces sit and sit and sit. It’s really pathetic.

This one actually made me laugh. “They just got new awnings.”
Of course, then there are the spots you maybe didn’t love but still had some weird attachment to. Like the haunted-ass Astor Place Kmart, which now has a sign that a Wegmans will be taking its place. I say godspeed to all that.
This whole thing got me thinking about Nora Ephron. I mean, everything gets me thinking of her, but this line from her own ode to the city’s real estate, “Moving On, a Love Story,” seemed very right: “Most people who don’t live in New York have no idea that New Yorkers have exactly the same sense of neighborhood that supposedly exists in small-town America.” It’s such a funny thing because New York City is this massive, sprawling place. I understand what some people don’t “get” about it. I mean, I don’t, but I also do. But what I think people on the outside don’t understand is how natural it all becomes once you’ve lived here long enough. There are always surprises—from gargoyles on a building you’ve passed a thousand times but never looked up at to blocks you didn’t know exsisted—but the landscape has this way of blending together. New York makes sense to people who live here, that’s the only way I can put it. Places go up and they usually go down. That’s the rhythm you become accustomed to no matter what part you live in. I think that’s why New Yorkers are constantly obsessed with the “back in the day” idea, that things were better before than they are now. They likely weren’t. I mean, some things certainly were, but there’s a lot of strange concessions you make living here, and one of them is that you have to accept things will always be in flux. Something is always leaving your life in NYC. The thing with real estate, as opposed to people or businesses you love, is that the space is still there, and it will haunt you whenever you pass by.
Other little bits:
Speaking of real estate, Andres Serrano’s Greenwich Village home is wild.
And I guess this is also real estate in a sense, but I’m obsessed with the Chinatown Sound videos that Gary Suarez wrote about at Cabbages. They have this beautiful, sort of Edward Hopper feel to them. One of the best parts of the city feels empty as some rapper does a freestyle without a beat. Really great stuff.
Alana Pockros looks into something I’ve been wondering: Why do some writers get a branded look for their book covers?
Isabel Slone on designers trying to make slow fashion in a fast-moving world is a good read.