City of Loss

I’ve been feeling the losses in the city again lately: a ramen spot I finally tried in the East Village on the 14th of this month shuttered suddenly two days ago. Rai Rai Ken had been in business for 24 years and closed “due to an unfortunate series of events.”

Something similar happened at the beginning of 2022. My parents visited for a few days in March to make up for the Christmas trip they were forced to postpone due to covid, and we went to dinner at Forlini’s, an old school Italian joint just south of Canal Street. We found out while we were sitting in our booth that the restaurant would be closing at the end of that month.

The city has been going through a continuous hailstorm of business closures the last few years thanks to both covid and astronomical rent hikes by greedy landlords. An old haunt of mine, Grassroots Tavern at 20 St. Marks Place, closed on the last day of 2018 due to an insane rent hike. The space has since been gutted (workers found some incredible murals while they were ripping out the bar), and has now, to my dismay, been turned into a doggy daycare.

These losses had me thinking about the truly unbelievable losses this city has faced and the organizations that are working so hard to make sure we don’t lose more irreplaceable historically significant buildings. The demolition of the original Penn Station was the catalyst for the creation of the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC). The LPC takes a long time and a lot of convincing to designate a landmark, as I’ve seen through the work of Village Preservation (Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation) (VP). I’ve been attending many of VP’s virtual programs and keep abreast of the various landmark designations they are working toward.

 

Original Pennsylvania Station ca. 1962 by Cervin Robinson, courtesy of the Library of Congress

During the last nearly nine years of my roaming project I have marveled at the gorgeous architecture of the past: Art Deco skyscrapers, Federal style townhouses, Gilded Age mansions, and more. I have simultaneously scoffed at the modern architecture popping up everywhere: soulless glass boxes, constructed quickly with cheap materials, that prioritize function over form.

Luckily, the LPC’s work will help to keep the city from being fully homogenized into a sheet glass nightmare, but I lament the loss of the craft and craftsmen that brought the most beautiful of these landmarks to life.