Recently in Neighborhood Scenes Category

Highlights from some of my favorite bloggers' reactions to the news that we won the election:

Jeremiah Moss, from Jeremiah's Vanishing New York (my favorite anti-gentrification blog), has a great account of the spontaneous parades that could be heard roaming below 14th street until 3 am on the 5th. He was at Union Square for the sing-along I posted a video of the other day. From his post, composed around 2:30 in the morning:

In the streets of New York, crowds are still cheering, shouting "Yes, we can!" Cars honk their horns. People bang pots and pans. They cannot stop. Don't want to stop. When the announcement came over the television that he had been elected, cheers erupted from the streets. A crowd gathered on 8th Street and 1st Avenue, taking over the intersection. Police pushed them back here and there, but otherwise left the celebration alone.

People in cars stopped and the crowd rushed to shake their hands and kiss them through open windows.

Garbage men riding the backs of honking trucks waved and pumped their fists.

City bus drivers honked and slowed down so passengers could stick their hands from the windows and high-five the people on the street.



At Union Square, the park was packed. People climbed lamp posts and hoisted flags atop. We sang God Bless America. We chanted "U-S-A" and "Yes, We Can" and "O-Ba-Ma!" Strangers hugged and kissed strangers.

The celebration went on and on, a wave that rose and fell, then rose again, for hours and hours. Down side streets and avenues, in pockets of jubilant people.

For Jeremiah's photos of the night -- a fantastic set of images -- click here.

Alex at Flaming Pablum (which has its own recurring feature on NYC's Vanishing Downtown) has my favorite rubbing-it-in image:


Alex also has one of my favorite Obama/pop culture mashups as part of his GOTV post:






(Sidenote: As his penchant for Bowie imagery would suggest, Alex is a serious 70s rock aficionado, with a specialty in the NYC downtown scene. If you wander over to his site, don't miss his series of posts on NYC in rock videos and on album covers. I thought I'd throw that in since I know some of our readers share similar tastes.)

Gowanus Lounge collects accounts and photos of Obama celebrations in Brooklyn; Gothamist reports on arrests from one such street party in Williamsburg. (h/t to Jeremiah for the last two.)

Meanwhile, our friend MaNNaHaTTaMaMMa posts on intergenerational euphoria spilling over into other areas of life.

Are there other accounts from NYC blogs you think we should know about?

I know you're probably tempted to regard the McCain campaign as comedy, say in it attempts to paint Obama a socialist for supporting a graduated income tax -- the same sort of tax plan McCain himself has defended in the past. And certainly their campaign -- the moose-hunter in particular -- has provided fodder for humorists (including NY's finest -- well, this season at least).

In case you need a little more humor to fill those gaps between refreshing fivethirtyeight.com a dozen times a day, consider this terrific bit about Park Slope parents from my friend A White Bear:

I keep hearing parents around here making a new threat when their kids misbehave, and it's working. They don't threaten not to take them to Balthazar or not to buy them that Eames chair they so wanted. They threaten them with Barack Obama's disappointment in them.

"What would Barack Obama say if he saw you treating your brother that way?"
"If you don't stop hitting me, you won't get to watch the Barack Obama debate tonight."
"Do you think Malia and Sasha act like that? No, they don't."

The rest of the post here (and yes, that's me she references in the first paragraph).

For more Park Slope election oddities, check this out. I'd bet those houses don't get a lot of Halloween action this year: too scary for the kids!

Every weekday morning I give my younger daughter a ride to school on the back of my bike. She's about the same age her older sister was when she swore off this routine, but for now, the bike ride is still part of what we do.

We ride down the edge of Little Italy, cross Canal, pass Columbus Park (near the infamous "Mulberry Bend" of the nineteenth century) on one side and the Tombs on the other. This is the neighborhood of the old Five Points.

Once we've cut over through Chatham Square, we cut down a short little street called Oliver. Turns out this is the street Al Smith was born on; the housing projects at the end of the block bear his name. (Richard Price named them after Clara Lemlich for his thinly veiled setting in Lush Life.)

The school itself is nestled between the Smith Homes and Knickerbocker Village, a low-rent complex that takes up two city blocks on the north side of Catherine Street. All of this preamble is to get me around to the point of the post: Knickerbocker Village is also the name of a blog run by folks who grew up in KV, which was built using federal funds during the Depression. I like their blog very much; it's a serious New York history blog with a distinct, neighborhoody feel.

Recent scholarship on that part of lower Manhattan has emphasized its long history of interracial relations, even -- dare we say it? -- its cosmopolitanism and comingling of cultures. W. T. Lhamon, one of the most imaginative scholars (and inveterate defenders) of blackface minstrelsy sees the form, which he thinks originated at the end of Catherine Street down by the old Catherine Slip on the river, as inherently subversive, antiauthoritarian, and a product of cultural clashes on the old LES, an outpost of the Black Atlantic. It's part Irish, part African, and completely American.

Which brings us to the title of the post. Knickerbocker Village (the blog) recently featured this little ditty, a tongue-in-cheek tribute to Obama's Irish ancestry. I think it carries a little of the subversive edge of the old LES, home to Al Smith, and before him to TD Rice, Master Juba, and a host of other cosmopolitan entertainers.

There's no one as Irish as Barack O'Bama
You don't believe me, I hear you say
But Barack's as Irish as our own JFK
His granddaddy's granddaddy came from Moneygall
A village in Offaly, well known to you all.
His mam's daddy's granddaddy was one Falmuth Kearney
He's as Irish as any from the Lakes of Killarney
His mam's from a long line of great Irish Mamma's
There's no one as Irish as Barack O'Bama

   
Bonus: Barely Political had a fun time a while back with a similar premise.

Seems like all NY media are fixated on Banksy, NMTE. Suddenly every piece of street art downtown's being fixated on with attribution speculations abounding. The comments sections of blogs (regrettably not ours -- we need to have a lurker amnesty post soon!) bristle with debates about the more identifiable points of his style.

Gawker, Gothamist, and the Times report on the above mural, which went up earlier in the week in SoHo (Wooster and Grand). One of the painter's girlfriend (as reported on another blog) told a passerby that Jeffrey Deitch had something to do with it.

The super cool SuperTouch blog smells another rat a few blocks away, on Broadway just above Canal; they report that Banksy's gone legit, rented the wall space, and hired a painting crew to put these up:

 

Of course this has raised the eyebrows of the worldwide legion of the Banksy faithful that follow the Bristol Bad Boy's every clandestine move with baited breath. Has Sir Banks given up his usual M.O. in favor of going legit? Has he made so much money that it's safer to rent space and hire commercial painters than bomb? Is he qualified to run for Vice President of the USA?

Probably not. But if he were, we hope he'd be wise enough not to follow Cheney's Imperial Vice Presidency lead, unlike another candidate we could name ...

And speaking of street art and politics: The Times also has a piece this week about Shepard Fairey, of Obey Giant fame. (I've always thought it looked more like Nixon than like Andre the Giant, myself.) Mr. Fairey, of course, is responsible for the best political art of this presidential season, beating out even MBW's SuperObama:

Walking to the neighborhood theater last week (to watch Man on Wire a second time, which was even better than the first) we noticed a glut of superselfconscious Williamsburgy hipsters crowded at the corner of Bowery and Houston for what turned out to be an opening. The gallery space is only temporary; it's eventually going to be a pizza joint. But for now it's dedicated to the kind of wheat-paste pop-ups you typically see on plywood-covered construction sites and abandoned buildings. The Modesto Kid (our lonesome commentor) had tipped me off to the work on the building's exterior a couple weeks ago:



The piece, by the French street artist known as "Jr," announces that much of the show inside -- dubbed "The Outsiders" -- deals in forms more at home on the street, plastered in the middle of the night when no one's looking, than in a high-art gallery space, though we shouldn't miss the fact that we're talking about a group of street artists here who, as the glitz last week would suggest, have serious gallery representation. (You'll find another Jr piece currently on 12th St. between 1st and A.)

The show is organized by London's Lazarides gallery, and it's a shame they're not staying longer. (This feels more exciting than anything that's turned up yet at the New Museum down the street.) For the time being, though, the buzz seems to have generated an outburst of pop ups in the surrounding neighborhoods. The Sun speculated that they may be the work of Lazarides artist Banksy, who's not in the show but who has done up NY corners before; bloggers have discounted the claim and attribute the work to Mr. BrainWash (MBW) instead, which makes sense, given that his website currently sports the Warhol spray-soupcans that also dot the neighborhood at the moment. My favorite, SuperObama, makes me want to go buy a cordless jigsaw and take one of these babies home:



(Top photo from Lazarides site; bottom one from animalnewyork.com)

"The Outsiders" shows at 282 Bowery through 12 Oct.; the MBW pieces around the neighborhood are already starting to wear after last week's rain, so see them while you can.

Around my neighborhood, the fall sounds of buzz-saws and hammers on ply-wood herald the coming of the annual San Gennaro Festival. Deep-fried oreos and all-night repetitions of the Godfather theme by amateur brass bands are sure to follow shortly.

Something new this year on Mulberry Street, though: The opening of a relocated and expanded Italian American Museum. The Times reported yesterday that the museum's new digs, at 151-155 Mulberry, corner of Grand, originally housed the Banca Stabile, a neighborhood bank that operated from 1882 to 1932. The museum purchased the buildings from Stabile family descendants for over $9 million. The history of the bank itself will form the core of the inaugural exhibition:

The vault's contents revealed that the neighborhood elite also banked with the Stabiles. A ledger card shows that Antonio Ferrara, who in 1892 founded the pastry shop that is still in business across the street, closed his account on Jan. 31, 1931, taking his $211,131 fortune with him. Before that, a telegraphic receipt from April 3, 1920, shows that Mr. Ferrara wired 75,000 lire from Banca Stabile to the Hotel Londres in Naples to reserve a vacation room there. Two years later, Mr. Ferrara bought two first-class steamship tickets from New York to Naples for a total of $110.

"It was very rare that people traveled first class in those days," said Maria T. Fosco, a member of the museum's board who has been researching the history of Little Italy. "Obviously, Mr. Ferrara was doing quite well."

Ms. Fosco said that at its peak, the neighborhood was a cluster of enclaves within an enclave, with various streets representing various regions of the old country.

"Most people who lived on Mulberry Street were from Naples," she explained. "Those who lived on Elizabeth Street were from Sicily, those from Mott Street were from Calabria, and anyone north of Broome Street was from Bari.

"So if a boy from Mulberry Street married a girl from Elizabeth Street," Ms. Fosco said with a grin, "that was considered a mixed marriage."

Two other additions to immigrant history in the neighborhood to keep an eye out for: The Tenement Museum has just launched a new module focusing on the Moores, an Irish family who occupied the museum's building at 97 Orchard in the 1860s.

Another much-awaited expansion comes in December, when Museum of Chinese in America reopens in its new location at 211-215 Centre Street.

BY JESSIE MORGAN-OWENS
BROOKLYN CORRESPONDENT

This is my third post in a row to start out by reading the Sunday paper, but today I've got a little story we shot for the New York Times Magazine: "Hipster Replacement" (ha!), a map of the newest old scene in Brooklyn. (You can find it on page 110 of the Men's Fashion special issue of today's magazine.)

Allow me to introduce "B.E.L.T." to the readers of AHNY. The acronym stands for "below the elevated train" (the J/M/Z) in South Williamsburg. The neighborhood was "nameless" until the New York Times, the writer Cator Sparks, and Andy from Yoko Devereaux came along.  We weren't told what they were going to call the story or the neighborhood when they assigned us the piece for fear we might accidentally leak it or have it beaten out of us with vintage Air Jordans.

Frenchie of Frenchie's Gym on 303 Broadway, a 67-year old Puerto Rican body builder, deserves a story in the Times all his own.  You can see the old school, no nonsense, no a/c gym from the B.Q.E. He's been in there coaching and cajoling giant young men from the neighborhood to "Do it with Love!" since 1976.

Maybe you need to spend an afternoon with the "community organizers" down at Frenchie's, Mr. Rudy Giuliani.

Follow this link to an online version of the Magazine piece, featuring an interactive map of B.E.L.T.

I blogged this elsewhere last year, but this afternoon I'm leading an annual Sweets and Cheap Eats on the LES walking tour for students returning to the Residential College where I live as faculty in residence.

If you were to add something to this tour, what would it be?