Little Italy

The Italian American Museum will move into its new headquarters on the corner of Grand and Mulberry streets in Little Italy “in a matter of weeks,” Museum president Joseph V. Scelsa announced on Tuesday, providing the neighborhood with a venue to “showcase the Italian-American experience for decades to come.”

Little Italy would certainly benefit from some evidence of its ethnic roots aside from Italian restaurants and the San Gennaro Festival each fall, though we hope the museum doesn’t bring more tourists to the shrinking neighborhood.

The museum has closed on three adjacent, former 19th-century tenement buildings at 185-189 Grand Street (a significant chunk of the Little Italy that exists today) for $9.4 million. Ultimately it plans to double the size of the 10,000-square-foot parcel and add two additional floors to the trio of three-story buildings.  read more »

On Wednesday, The Observer reported that the late Washington Post publisher Kay Graham had sold her U.N. Plaza apartment for $2.3 million. (The newspaper icon died six and a half years ago, so the apartment, near her friend Truman Capote's, was sold by her estate.)

City records show that one more long-gone Washington, D.C., hero, the late National Gallery of Art director J. Carter Brown, just made a New York deal too. In October, a trust in his name bought a three-bedroom apartment at 123 Baxter Street, the new Little Italy condo.

The price was $2.505 million.  read more »

The cost of the average drink in New York City has soared 7.3 percent to $10.12, according to the 2007/2008 Zagat Survey New York City Nightlife, released Wednesday.

Perhaps not coincidentally, New Yorkers are cutting back slightly on nights out per week (2.0) and on their nightly drink intake (3.2), compared to years past, the new survey finds.

Also, meatpacking is still hot. And yet not. Read survey gurus Tim and Nina Zagat's comments on the new trends here.

More survey highlights after the jump.  read more »

It's official. Sting, David Bowie and club owner Ivan Kane have finally gone to contract to bring Kane's burlesque show Forty Deuce to New York. Late yesterday, the trio signed on with New York Commercial Realty's James Famularo to open Kane's Las Vegas-based show at 19 Kenmare Street in the space that currently houses Little Charlie's Clam House. The contract is for approximately 5,500 square feet on the basement and first floor.
 read more »

The future of Little Charlie's Clam House, a Little Italy mainstay, may be in question after the building that houses it was recently sold.  read more »

The Italian American Museum has made concrete plans to move downtown.

In a Tuesday press conference, the museum announced that it has purchased three buildings near the corner of Grand and Mulberry streets in the hopes of moving to Little Italy over the next three years.  read more »