The Local

In the spring of 1976, Joni Mitchell trekked out to the North Shore of Staten Island to the Mandolin Brothers, a vintage American guitar dealership that had opened five years earlier and had already become a well-trodden pit stop for musicians, guitar buffs, and fretted-instrument collectors.

Ms. Mitchell bought a 1915 Gibson Mandocello and a Martin herringbone guitar, Mandolin Brothers President Stan Jay recalled on a recent Friday afternoon. On the ferry back to Manhattan, she penned “Song for Sharon,” beginning with the lyrics: “I went to Staten Island, Sharon, to buy myself a mandolin.”

“Something must have set off an autobiographical memory for her so she wrote this highly personal song… which is the story of her life and the story of her friend Sharon’s life, who she knew in Canada,” Mr.  read more »

Mike Fleming, a 29-year-old Ohio native who has been living on the streets since 2003, had his 15 minutes of fame a few months ago when he discovered the building schematics for the Freedom Tower while sifting through a trashcan on Houston Street.

A couple months later, Mr. Fleming again finds himself facing the same grim realities he did before his brush with notoriety.

“I was on the front page of the New York Post the week the pope came to town,” Mr. Fleming said, pulling a poster board of the story clip from his bright orange messenger bag as evidence.  read more »

The third and final public hearing this year of the Rent Guidelines Board, the body that sets rents for the city’s more than 1 million stabilized apartments, was theater as usual last night, with both tenants and landlords hewing to a familiar script.

“These proceedings have become a predictable demonstration,” said City Councilman Dan Garodnick in his testimony.

At the very least they give tenants and landlords an opportunity to vent for three minutes and shout, like only New Yorkers can, until RGB Chairman Marvin Markus gruffly tells them to “shut up.”

Though a few people in local government show up and plead, in vain, for a rent freeze, no one in the auditorium has any doubt about how the story will end.  read more »

After trudging back and forth around a 30-block stretch of the Upper East Side on Sunday afternoon and talking to a handful of the estimated two million revelers who turned out for the Puerto Rican Day Parade, I ducked inside one of the few open stores on Madison Avenue for a break from the grimy, suffocating heat. As the suited guard standing sentry at the entrance of the upscale shoe boutique closed the door behind me, a woman decked out in denim and Puerto Rican flag garb, carrying a small child, shouted: “Any chance we can get in there for a second for some cold air, man?”

The guard shook his head and shut the door.

And so Manhattan’s annual Puerto Rican Day Parade came and went over the weekend much as it has on the second Sunday in June for 51 years. The parade often ignites controversy—as it did via a 1998 episode of Seinfeld where Kramer accidentally burns a Puerto Rican flag; in 2000, when dozens of girls claimed they were sexually harassed; and last year when the NYPD arrested more than 200 parade attendees, provoking criticism from civil liberties advocates. This year the event was tame, but, as always, threw New York City’s socioeconomic and linguistic divides into sharp relief.  read more »

After months of uncertainty, one of the Upper East Side’s most popular street vendors, Tony Dragonas, settled a suit with the Health Department over violations that had threatened his license and livelihood, allowing him to continue operating his famed food cart on 62nd Street and Madison Avenue.

Once a deal was reached, Mr. Dragonas, his 19-year-old son, Dana, and a dozen of his regular customers who had trekked to the Financial District to testify on his behalf hurried uptown to the same spot he has occupied for 23 years to celebrate, just in time to serve the hungry hordes lined up every day during the lunchtime rush.

Over a year ago, one of Mr. Dragonas’ neighbors filed a complaint about excessive smoke from the cart, and the Health Department began making inspections about three times a month, he said. Between Nov. 29, 2006, and Oct. 31, 2007, Mr. Dragonas was cited for 19 health code violations, many of which stemmed from minor infractions like failing to wear a hat, vending too close to the crosswalk, or putting a cooler on the ground.  read more »

The first few days after the biggest U.S. building sale ever was inked, things at the GM Building were “pretty much routine” in the words of one doorman, save for the presence of a few unofficial, four-legged tenants seen scampering among the stuffed animals at FAO Schwartz.

Not many people who work at the GM Building appeared to notice that Harry Macklowe had hammered out a deal with Mort Zuckerman and partners on Saturday to sell the jewel in his real estate crown for about $2.8 billion. By now, longtime GM tenants have surely grown accustomed to a changing of the guard every so often. Manhattan's most expensive office tower has had four different owners since 1991—five if you count Sheldon Solow—some of whom have shaken things up, and others less so.  read more »

Coke Anne and Jarvis Wilcox wanted to sell their East Hampton inn, the Maidstone Arms, all along. During the summer season, the famed, 1850’s inn is fully booked, but the winter dry spell sends year-round occupancy rates plunging to around 40 percent.

When no acceptable offers came in, the Wilcoxes decided to begin what was ultimately an “arduous” and unfruitful condo-conversion process. Mrs. Wilcox, a trained architect and mother of three grown children, was planning to convert Maidstone’s 19 rooms and three cottages into 12 separate condos and keep one four-bedroom unit for the family.  read more »

North Williamsburg does not have any major grocery chains. What it does have, in increasing abundance, is health food stores and small, family-run markets that blend Whole Foods with your neighborhood deli. We’ll call them yuppie bodegas.

There are four such shops on Bedford Avenue between North Seventh and North Ninth streets, with another on the way, and they have much more in common then the organic, vegan fare and Ramen Noodles stocked on the shelves.

They are each owned by Palestinians, mainly from the town of al-Beireh in the West Bank region of Ramallah. Some of Williamsburg’s Palestinian grocers were strangers before they each opened shops on the same two-block stretch of Bedford Avenue. Others are related.  read more »

“If we do not have [a Business Improvement District], we’ll be like Cinderella stuck downstairs while the rest of the city is having a party, and we will still be filthy and stinking,” said the executive director of the Chinatown Partnership, Wellington Chen.

A Chinatown BID is not a new idea. The proposal has been around for about 20 years, said Mr. Chen, and he has been promoting the BID since well before the Partnership even came into existence after Sept. 11.

But with Chinatown’s economy still in tatters since then and the specter of gentrification looming larger than ever, the BID is gaining urgency for advocates and becoming a target for opponents.  read more »

Signs of change in Chelsea's flower district are as abundant as the plants blooming on 28th Street. An apartment building will soon rise from the vacant lot at the corner of Sixth Avenue, the eastern boundary of the district that once stretched from 26th through 28th streets, between Sixth and Seventh avenues. Moving closer to Seventh, a blue construction barrier demarcates another building site; across the street a Holiday Garden Inn and a residential building flank three, squat silk flower shops.

But for a century-old single-trade district that has supposedly been withering away for nearly two decades, the area appeared remarkably vibrant this Wednesday.

Wholesalers were busy filling their final orders of the day at lunchtime—traditionally the closing bell rings in the early afternoon there since distributors open at dawn to cater to the city’s retail florists. None of the three remaining distributors on Sixth Avenue had time to chat. Stems and branches were strewn across the floors, and workers hurriedly loaded bundles into waiting trucks.  read more »

No one knows what Manhattan’s Garment District will look like in 10 years, let alone whether the dwindling economy of designers, factories, and suppliers who make up New York’s fashion industry will still be there.

The media has been covering the Garment District’s demise for decades, and lately the chorus of real estate developers lobbying for it to be rezoned for mixed usage, including less manufacturing space, has gotten louder.

No one disputes the gradual hemorrhage of clothing factories, suppliers, and wholesalers from the district under pressure from cheaper imports. But the scale and causes of the industrial decline are less cut and dry, and attitudes within the apparel industry toward a possible rezoning range from staunch opposition to reluctant acceptance.  read more »

Watts Street does not have a sign at the moment, but residents of the edgy, untrammeled, Tribeca block cut-off by the Holland Tunnel probably prefer it that way.

At the crossroads of SoHo, Tribeca, and the West Village, the two-block strip of Watts below Canal Street had been passed over during the downtown development boom until recently. It remains the same gritty, inaccessible no-man's land today as it did 10 years ago; but the residential construction flanking Watts at Canal on one end and West Street on the other suggest that the tide may be turning for Tribeca’s last holdout.  read more »

Most children dream of moving to New York City, L.A., or another big city when they grow up. Some manage a post-college stint in the Big Apple before they pack it in and move back to the home they know. A few even stick around long enough to earn the right to call themselves New Yorkers.

But what if you grew up in New York, say, in the insulated, quaint little bubble that is the Upper East Side? Twenty-somethings born and bred on the Upper East Side used to flee to the city’s grittier environs for their ephemeral, post-collegiate rebellion, but now such neighborhoods are few and far between on the island; and a subconscious, often suppressed, aversion to crossing the bridge is deeply imbedded in the psyche of most Upper East Siders from birth.  read more »

Ridgewood, Queens, lies to the east of the up-and-coming Brooklyn neighborhood du jour, Bushwick, and is perhaps best known for suffering an identity crisis in the late 1970’s. Until then Ridgewood shared a border and zip code with Bushwick--which was even called Ridgewood, Brooklyn, at one point, lumping the neighborhoods together both practically and in the popular imagination. Much like the realtors who tried to rebrand Bushwick as “East Williamsburg” in the ‘90’s, Ridgewood residents tried to distance themselves from Bushwick when its reputation took a nosedive after widespread looting and riots there during the 1977 blackout.  read more »

Once upon a time, before Williamsburg was a neighborhood of self-conscious hipsters and cookie-cutter condo conversions, it was a haven for the city’s artists.

As loft space in Manhattan became increasingly scarce and inexpensive throughout the 1990’s, artists flocked to commercial buildings in Williamsburg and DUMBO that were not certified for occupancy, but nonetheless provided ample space to live and work in.

One of the few de-facto artists’ colonies that had been able to resist the wave of condo conversion sweeping the neighborhood over the past few years was 475 Kent Avenue.  read more »

There are few places left in Manhattan where one encounters a genuine language barrier, and fewer still where the ability to speak the Senegalese dialect, Wolof, is an advantage and, in some cases, a necessity.

The block of West 116th Street between Frederick Douglass and Malcom X boulevards, dubbed “little West Africa" by some, is one.

“You speak Wolof or French?,” asked the owner of the Darou Market Salam, when I tried to talk to him. He greeted an incoming customer (who also spoke only Wolof) with “As-Salaamu alaikum,” the Muslim greeting meaning "peace be with you." A few shops down the street at the Dibiterie Sheikh restaurant, a Senegalese woman and resident of Harlem grated carrots in the kitchen as she supervised two new young, male employees who arrived from Burkina Faso nine months ago.  read more »

In the three years since Prospect-Lefferts Garden was dubbed a neighborhood “on the cusp,” life in the African-Caribbean enclave has changed markedly for long-time residents. The eastward migration of middle-class house hunters priced out of Park Slope has stretched the boundaries of gentrified Brooklyn, and pushed the cost of living in neighborhoods like Prospect-Lefferts Gardens up.

The six-block stretch of Flatbush Avenue between Parkside Avenue and Beekman Place bears few signs of the neighborhood’s reorientation toward a more upmarket (and often white) clientele.  read more »

Editor's Note: Every week, Observer reporter Lysandra Ohrstrom will detail a New York City neighborhood in a new feature called The Local.

Koreatown’s answer to Bungalow 8 is hidden on the third floor of a shabby commercial building amid the BBQ and karaoke joints lining 32nd Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues.

On a recent Saturday night (verging on Sunday morning), I passed through two layers of doormen and rode a rickety freight elevator up to a futuristic, bi-level, all-white lounge, with translucent glass floors, a two-story waterfall, and thumping techno.

The scene was straight out of a Brett Easton Ellis book by way of Seoul. Twenty-something Korean hipsters sipped martinis from white-leather banquettes in the tunnel-shaped bar, while people sang karaoke from private, plasma-TV equipped rooms upstairs.  read more »