#Essex Street Market block party

[jmarksthespots]

[#POPUPSHOP] Essex Street Market #BlockParty!  Presented by Essex Street Market  Live Music by Nikhil P. Yerawadekar & Low Mentality, Yotoco + DJ Mickey Perez Saturday, May 20 | 12–5PM  120 Essex Street New York, NY 10002  Admission: FREE  To RSVP, visit eventbrite.com/e/essex-street-market-block-party-tickets-33023785030

After 77 years in our historic building, we're coming up on our final year at 120 Essex Street before we move across Delancey Street to the new Essex Crossing location. To celebrate all those years of business -- and many more to come in our new home! -- we're psyched to announce our Annual Birthday Block Party on Saturday, May 20th from 12pm-5pm!

Our big Block Party brings the best of Essex Street Market combined with Lower East Side favorites like Ice & Vice, The Bao Shoppe, and Petee's Pies for a feast you won't forget. We're rolling out the pushcarts and popping open the umbrellas, and truly tapping into our Market's iconic history -- May is Lower East Side History Month, after all!

Get a taste of this authentic food destination, including everything from fresh cut coconuts, to homemade tamales, to Japanese street fare. You can find us partying out on Essex Street (directly in front of the Market) swinging to live groovy tunes, too. We're also getting crazy with face-painting, temporary tattoos, and balloon-making -- perfect for families and kids-at-heart, too.

Join us on May 20th from 12pm-5pm for the Essex Street Market Block Party -- this event is FREE but we appreciate an RSVP!

NEW: PARTICIPATING VENDORS!

Osaka Grub Puebla Mexican Saxelby Cheesemongers Luna Brothers Viva Fruit & Vegetables Ni Deli Tra La La Arancini Bros. Pain D'Avignon Cuchifrito's Gallery Ice & Vice Petee's Pie Cafe Katja The Bao Shoppe Grey Lady Patacon Pisao River Coyote

[cloverorgan83-blog]

Whatever Happened to Jack Kirby's Downtown New York City Birthplace? - Bleeding Cool News

Jack Kirby was born on August 28th, 1917 in a tenement building on the Lower East Side of New York City. His birth name was Jacob Kurtzberg. His parents were Jewish Austrians and his father worked at a garment factory as many immigrants did to put bread on the table. Jacob would anglicize his name to “Jack Kirby” when he entered the job market as a comics artist and illustrator at the age of 19 in 1936. He wanted to get out of the neighbourhood, away from the poverty, the crime and the violence as soon as he had a chance.

Kirby drew a semiautobiographical short story called “Street Code” in 1983 that was published in Argosy in 1990 as one of his last works. He took from his memories of the squalor and violence of the Lower East Side he grew up in.

Street Code by Jack Kirby

As he told Gary Groth in a 1983 interview from the Comics Journal, “I hated the place because I… Well, it was the atmosphere itself. It was the way people behaved. I got sick of chasing people all over rooftops and having them chase me over rooftops. I knew that there was something better.”

Street Code by Jack Kirby

Once Kirby moved out of the Lower East Side, he did not want to come back, not even to visit.

Street Code by Jack Kirby

The address of Kirby’s birthplace was 147 Essex Street, and I wondered what happened to it. On a blistery winter afternoon, I decided to head downtown to take a look.

Short answer: it’s still there.

©Adi Tantimedh

I looked it up. It’s still the same building Kirby was born in. 147 Essex was built in 1900 and hasn’t been demolished to make way for a condominium or fancy overpriced hotel as many buildings on the Lower East Side have been in the last ten years. The five-story walk-up has been renovated several times and probably changed ownership a few times in the last 100 years or so.

©Adi Tantimedh

Now painted a pretty red and nestled between another renovated tenement building on its left with a Chinese tea shop on the ground floor, 147 is home to Lazar Air conditioning and Heating, with a modern condominium on its right.

©Adi Tantimedh

The Lower East Side can still be a tough neighbourhood, but nowhere as tough or chaotic as Kirby’s time. As recently as the 1970s and 1980s, the area was so dangerous that it was considered a no-go zone after 7pm. The Lower East, the East Village and Alphabet City were drugs-ridden, crime-ridden and full of homeless people, but also a place of cheap rent so many members of New York’s artistic community lived here for a long time. That began to change in the 1980s when gentrification began to transform Downtown New York. Gentrification only began to hit the Lower East side south of Houston Street in the early 2000s and now it’s truly transforming the neighbourhood with condominums, hipster bars, hotels, boutique restaurants, art galleries, a Trader Joe’s opening, and the new Essex Crossing shopping and apartment complex scheduled to launch in 2019.

Marvel Comics

Kirby continued to draw on his memories of the Lower East Side in his most famous work for Marvel Comics. The Yancy Street Gang was a reference to Delancey Street and the street gangs he used to be part of during his youth. In fact, Downtown New York plays a crucial part in the history of American comic books – many of the most renowned artists were the children of immigrants who grew up there and formed gangs to protect themselves from the others. By the time they grew up and became professional artists in the comics industry in the 1930s and 1940s, they already knew each other from the times they ran around beating each other up on the Lower East Side.

Marvel Comics

147 Essex Street is right smack in the middle of what locals currently call Hell Square, a nine-block party zone bordered by East Houston Street, Allan Street, Delancey Street and Essex Street. The zone is filled with hipster bars, boutique restaurants and clubs, drawing in hipsters, tourists and partygoers from out of town, resulting in a sharp rise in muggings, rapes and violent assaults at night. The high number of bars and liquor licenses granted in the area have directly contributed to the rise in crime. Many of the perpetrators are muggers and gang members from outside the neighbourhood, usually from the Bronx or Brooklyn and drinkers in the Bridge & Tunnel Crowd.

First Issue Special © DC Comics

This just goes to show that in many ways, the Lower East Side hasn’t changed that much, but it’s probably nowhere as hellish or depraved as Jack Kirby’s time from 100 years ago.

(Last Updated December 30, 2018 1:47 pm )

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Source: https://www.bleedingcool.com/2018/12/30/jack-kirby-birthplace/

[nicheretailstrategies]

03/2017 | Secrets From the Highest-Grossing Restaurant in New York

BLOOMBERG | KATE KRADER | MARCH 21, 2017

An empire built on Tao-tinis and sea bass satay.

If there’s a venture with a projected shelf life of five minutes, it’s a nightlife restaurant in New York’s Meatpacking District. The exception? Tao Downtown. Since it opened in 2013, with heavy wooden doors that look like they were airlifted in from an ancient Chinese fort, the temple to Pan-Asian-style food and drinks has been a prime Manhattan destination for athletes, celebrities, and businessmen and women waving corporate cards to out-of-town families.

Alcohol makes up more than 50 percent of sales at Tao Downtown, an astounding number compared with the typical 20-plus percent elsewhere.  Source: TAO Downtown

Each night, some 1,200 people stream through the David Rockwell-designed, 22,000-square-foot, bilevel maze of dark wood-paneled rooms decorated with candles and giant Buddhas. The 300-seat dining room is massive by New York standards; the new Union Square Cafe, also designed by Rockwell, seats about 90. Tao Downtown estimates it did more than 220,000 covers (aka customers) in 2016—significantly more than the population of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood. There’s almost always a line to get into the adjoining nightclub.

When you're in Vegas: Marquee is a profitable piece of Tao's empire. Source: Tao Group

According to an annual survey by Restaurant Business, Tao posted almost $34 million in food and beverage sales in 2016. That’s the highest-ranking spot for a non-chain restaurant in New York, and the third-highest in the U.S. What’s in first place? Tao Asian Bistro in Las Vegas, where total sales were just shy of $48 million. Third place is actually a decline for Tao Downtown; in 2015 the club claimed the list’s No. 2 spot with $38 million in sales. (This year, second place went to the venerable Joe’s Stone Crab in Miami.) Even so, Tao Group dominates the 2016 list; another of its New York restaurants, Lavo, came in sixth with sales of $27.5 million. Tao Uptown, with $23 million in sales, came in 11th.

In February, Tao Group announced a partnership with the Madison Square Garden Co., which acquired a 62.5 percent stake in the company for $181 million. This month, industry insiders say Tao will also be taking over the space on the second floor of 130 E. 57th St. that housed Frederick Lesort’s restaurant lounge Opia. Meanwhile, Tao itself is expanding: In April it will open its first locations in Los Angeles, a complex adjacent to the Dream Hotel in Hollywood. The group has plans for additional U.S. cities and Asia, as well.

How does Tao stay ahead of the game and keep making money? Rich Wolf, one of Tao Group’s co-founders (along with Marc Packer, and partners Noah Tepperberg and Jason Strauss), gave me a behind-the-scenes tour of the place. He was joined by Tao Downtown’s general manager, Tony Oswain, and chef/partner Ralph Scamardella. Here are their secrets.

Be a One-Stop Shop

Rule No. 1 at Tao: Don’t give guests a reason to leave. Most people will spend at least a drink’s worth of time at the softly lit, brick-walled Ink Bar in what’s called the Eastern Mezzanine before heading down the grand staircase to a dining room, where a DJ spins in the background. Then they can move to the perennially packed club, where the roster of acts includes Tiësto, Lorde, Kanye West, Swizz Beatz, and the ubiquitous Questlove. It’s easier to gain entrance if you’re coming from dinner, the team confirms. Tao’s kitchen is open until 2 a.m.; the club closes at 4.

The group will stay true to the formula at its coming Los Angeles home. The Dream Hotel will include Tao Asian Bistro, Beauty & Essex (another of its empire builders), and a brand-new concept, Luchini Pizzeria & Bar. Here’s how Wolf sees it: “We’ve built several concepts on one block—two restaurants, plus the Highlight Room on the roof with a club and a pool. You can take an Uber over in the afternoon, then roll from the pool to the restaurant to the club. And stay in the hotel if you don’t feel like going home.”

Create a Dining Destination

“The beauty of Tao is that you can order two sushi rolls or go all out and have an $800 live crab,” says Oswain. Most people don’t order that live crab: The average check is $75. Still, there’s an audience for pricier entrees, like a recent surf-and-turf special of Japanese wagyu with African prawns the size of lobsters. They sell for $150 each, and the restaurant usually processes 25 orders of the dish per night.

One fact that doubters overlook: The food at Tao is good. Scamardella makes regular trips to Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo in search of inspiration. “People don’t come here for basic fried rice,” the chef says. (He adds barbecue duck and lobster with kimchi to his.) Scamardella calls his food “as chopstick-friendly as possible,” which makes diners more inclined to share and invariably pushes up check averages. The one dish you’ll find on almost every table is the $23 miso-glazed Chilean sea bass satay. “It’s the dish that built the empire,” says Wolf. Chef Scamardella estimates Tao Downtown sells 700 orders a night and goes through about 2,500 pounds of sea bass per week.

Embrace Convention

You won’t find a daily changing special at Tao; instead, Scamardella plans his menus ahead. “We don’t do specials based on what’s at the market or what we have left over,” he says. Rather, he orders ingredients such as Japanese beef way ahead to run as an off-the-menu. Conventions have a big effect on his calendars of specials. “In January they release the convention schedule,” Scamardella says. “If one of the big conventions is in town—the construction and concrete guys spend a lot of money—I know we’ll be having some big-ticket specials, and I order accordingly.”

Some 1,200 guests dine at Tao Downtown each night. Source: TAO

Crowd Control

The Tao Group knows its audience, and it knows their schedules. Mondays and Tuesdays, the Tao Downtown crowd can comprise up to 80 percent people with corporate cards, according to Wolf. “But it changes by the hour,” he notes. “As it gets later, the suits and ties disappear.” The biggest spending days are Wednesday and Thursday; Saturdays and Sundays are the lightest. “That’s the bridge-and-tunnel crowd,” says chef Scamardella. “People come in to celebrate, but they spend less money.”

Drinking Up

Alcohol makes up a little more than 50 percent of Tao’s sales, a huge number compared with percentages in the 20s at most other places. Ryan Arnold, wine director of the Chicago-based Lettuce Entertain You restaurant group, puts it into perspective: “Tao’s drinks numbers are insane. They’re the stuff of legend in the restaurant world. At our places, I’m happy when I see alcohol percentage in the mid-20s. I dream about a number like 32 percent.” Drinks in Tao’s bar and restaurant, like the best-selling vodka-based Ruby Red Dragon or the Tao-tini, cost $17—not an outrageous price, at least by the standards of New York cocktail lounges. How are they hitting their mark? The sheer volume helps—these are crowd-pleasing, guzzler-style beverages—as do club sales: Drinks are closer to $20 there, and bottle service ranges from about $250 to $290 a person.

Avoid Undesirable Associations

Wolf is adamant about one thing: Tao Downtown is not technically in the Meatpacking District, where the official northern boundary is 14th Street. (Tao is on 16th, just off Ninth Avenue.) Tao benefits from first-time visitors who are headed to the neighborhood to party, as well as from regulars who know it’s easy to get to. “The Meatpacking District is a quagmire,” says Wolf. “You get stuck in it, and you say, ‘I’m not going back there.’ Tao is easy in and easy out.’”

Tao is bringing the party to Los Angeles.  Source: TAO

The Celebrity Factor

“Capital didn’t have a lot to do with it,” Wolf says about the recent deal with Madison Square Garden. “A lot of our venues are driven by celebrities.  If someone has a concert at MSG, they’ll come here to party. Plus there’s synergy. MSG has venues all over the place. They’re building an arena in Vegas near the Sands. Imagine what can happen at Marquee.” Following the L.A. opening, Tao has deals in place at the Sands in Singapore, where the group will open a nightclub and a couple of restaurants in 18 months. And the co-founders are employing their hub strategy elsewhere in the U.S. In early 2018 they’ll open a Tao and a new concept in Chicago. Further into the future? “Miami is probably the only other U.S. city we’d look at,” says Wolf.  

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-21/secrets-from-the-highest-grossing-restaurant-in-new-york

@NICHE_RETAIL

[rupertacton]

FUCK MY LONDON

Hermit's Cave. Sniff in the bogs. Fucking stinks in here. Camberwell Road. Corrib Bar. Watching football. Landlady said we were welcome back but not to bring any black people with us. Not in those words. Never went back. Walking past venues I played in that are no longer there. Rhythm Factory. Whitechapel Road. Round the corner. Used to be able to buy hash. Private member's club. Pool table. Foreign students. Building gone. Pint in the Castle. One end of Brick Lane. £2 in my pocket. Other end. Got food. Zoot. Beer. Still had some change. In my day this was all fields. Stewart Home. This is my home. I want to leave. Leave home. Chemical Brothers. Prodigy. Brixton Academy. No drugs. 13. Wouldn't go to see either of them now. Fuck them. Tried to get into the 4 Aces. Dalston used to scare the shit out of me. Me and Andrew went to buy an ounce and got robbed. Clapton Square. Got away with the weed but Andrew got his phone and ring nicked. Andrew convinced it was a set up. I'm still not sure. Arrested for criminal damage and possession at Caledonian Road & Barnsbury Station. The free line. Graf everywhere. Me and Mark. He was already on doing more serious stuff. Getting banged up for writing would've been silly. Bumped into him on Cambridge Heath Road. Years later. He was in an X5. Little gaff out in Essex. Kid. Still moving food but not touching it if you get what I mean. Born in Walworth. First wave gentrification. Sitting out in the garden at 6am sharing a joint with one of the Birmingham Six. Reading Ballard. Under the Westway. Subterranea. Black Star and Company Flow. MCD and Scratch Perverts supporting. Mainly crushing fucking boredom though. Africa Centre. Hour of jungle at the end of Funkin' Pussy. Listening to Rudimentary Peni. Carcass. Blak Twang. Rodney P. Heartless Crew. Upfront FM. Fuck it. Listing stuff. I'm sitting in the Barbican. Working. Listening in to an American man having a conversation with an English woman. I sort of hate them. They are probably alright. Vacuous pricks. The lot of us. St James' C of E primary school. Bermondsey. Jamaica Road. Everyone white. Almost. Everyone racist. Almost. What the fuck happened there? Used to play out on the Arnold Estate near the community centre my mum helped found. Found a load of porn out back. Awakenings. You can get a St John Bakery custard donut there now. Arches used to be full of garages. Cut and shut. Dennis was a ticket tout. Got us tickets to the '93 Semi-Final. In the fucking Spurs end. I was in an Arsenal shellsuit. Scarf. Cap. Got let in the Arsenal end. Grew up watching Palace. Everyone at school was Millwall or Liverpool. Why the fuck do I support Arsenal? Questions. Didn't grow up but I got old. Long nightwalks. Getting robbed in broad daylight on my own street. Kids from Kid's Company. Wallet full of cash I couldn't really tell anyone about. My sister wanted to go down there with a kitchen knife. In the end they apologised. Sent a cheque. We all make mistakes. Always carry a glass Lucozade bottle. Middle class grunger to middle class wannabe badman but I never wanted to be anything. Books. So many books. Art was everywhere. Went to Sensation. Load of shit obviously but exciting. Southbank. Mid to late 90's. Never skated. Legendary names. Benjobe. Tom Penny. Hardcore. Hip-hop. Rapping. Kope was working at A1 Stores on Wooly. Bag full of spraypaint. I never painted. Different sort of writing. Exploration. I'm not an urban explorer. Follow the Thames. Richmond to Teddington. Tower Bridge to East India Dock. Trinity Buoy Wharf. Sitting in a lighthouse all day. Hungover. Got chased through Broadway Market. Years before the farmers showed up. London is tiny if your postcode limits your movement. Escape. Fiction is liberating. The truth won't set you free. George Davis is innocent. Frankie Fraser on the 12 bus with his little dog. Chatting to my mum. Richardson's club house and torture chamber on a quaint little square just off Camberwell Road. Pet shop that used to stink of skunk. Dangerous dogs out front. This is what you're moving into. The ghosts will catch up with you. The past is never really the past. I'm past it. Read too many conspiracy theories. Canary Wharf as a beacon of occult energy. Hawksmoor Churches. All mainstream. Pick up the info in Waterstones in the London section. Make up your own myths. Smoking DMT in Blythe Hill Fields. London breathing. Viewpoints. Greenwich Park. Primrose Hill. Parliament Hill. Lunchtime. Out of the stockroom. Packing records all day. Enough to make you hate music. Where's the glamour? Guestlist is standard. Why the fuck would you pay to watch music? I still love it. Astoria. Gone. Plastic People. Gone. We went downstairs and when we went back out everything was covered in snow. Walking back. D Double E and Footsie. Legends. Tubby on decks. I think. All blends into one. But the snow. That happened. Stayed in Hackney. Walked back along a white carpet. These moments we live for. Put up with all the shit. I never really took photos. Stopping traffic at Elephant & Castle roundabout after getting run over. Black cab driver wanting to make sure I was alright. Asked what football team I support. Told him. Said he'd leave me in the road if it was up to him. Banter. Fucked up my Helly Hansen. Driver had no insurance. I told him to drive off but everyone made him stay. Writing is alchemy. You don't have to believe me. Planning is alchemy. London is being remixed. New block of flats named after the pie and mash shop on Westmoreland Road. Some attempt at continuity. Don't worry about me. It's everyone else. The search for authenticity is futile. Tayyabs. Lahore. Needoo. The holy trinity. But don't kid yourself. You can't eat your way to an understanding of lived experience. I'm sitting across the road from Madame Tussauds. This is authentic London even if you think it isn't. Some of my best friends are northerners. GO HOME. Get out while you can. I grew out of the fear of other areas. I moved. I walk from Lesnes Abbey to Grove Park on the Green Chain with my uncle. I walk from Finsbury Park to Alexandra Palace on the Parkland Walk with my girlfriend. I walk from Limehouse Basin to Island Gardens to Greenwich to Southwark Park with my mate. I walk from my flat to Walthamstow Marshes via the Olympic Park with myself. Memories shadowing every step. An egret and a heron near Stratford Westfield. I'm convinced we're all going to die in a shopping centre. Kingdom Come. Every witness appeal tells a story. Pain. Tragedy. I was watching Therapy? at Brixton Academy when the second riot happened. A venue full of pale faced teenagers insulated from an outpouring of justified anger. I performed with the guy who is supposed to have started the first Brixton riot. When the whole city rioted I walked up the back of Walworth Road watching kids hide stuff in bins. No one even noticed me. This is England. Wembley. Norway. Such a terrible match. The people behind me and my dad making monkey noises whenever Paul Ince touched the ball. Turned me off England for life. I couldn't even enjoy Euro '96. Arch contrarian. Of course I disagree. Got my bank account emptied and lost about £140 of other people's money getting robbed on Churchill Estate. Never trust someone who has just come out of prison for kidnap who says they can get some good food for a good price. Lesson learned. Two kids on the N68 tried to move me up. This was much later. I was wearing a Stone Island. I think they thought I was balling. I'd spent the night doing other people's sniff. I had a shit phone and an Ipod. I explained. We left on good terms. Lesson learned. Even where I used to sign on is gone. RIP Camberwell Job Centre. I fucking hated you but I miss you. Monday night football at the Petchey Academy saved my life. Made me a better person. The Shacklewell before it was cool. When it was cool. Saw Rodigan out back. Felt like a proper shubs. The Haggerston when it was Uncle Sam's. Live jazz. Terrible pints. Sitting in a Polo. UKG. Smoking draw. Just driving around. My room in the attic full of smoke. Entire house stinking. So many lost years. Round to Len's after a night out. Get the chop out. Staggering home. 8am. Mouth so dry. Lying in bed. Zoot in the ashtray. Bottle of water. Normal weekend. The Gramaphone. Commerical Street. Gone. Rushing. Hudson Mohawke and Rustie. Insanely strong pills. Up to the tubes for a weird after party. Everywhere will go soon. Corsica Studios. Summer of ket. Spangled in the smoking area. That rave in Hackney Wick. Bouncer wearing a bally. I was sick into a ballon. I was falling in love. Never wanted a relationship before that. Football. Drugs. Music. Books. Art. Masturbation. Very occasional sex. That was enough for me. I was kidding myself. Obviously. You pick and choose memories. You order the moments. You try to create a coherent picture. There is no coherent picture. Nothing to see here. Move along. First football match. Palace. Millwall. Punch ups in the family enclosure. Scary as fuck. LOVED IT. Grown men screaming cunt. Just got a text saying Whitechapel Bell Foundry is closing. My London is over. Fucked. Done. You can keep it. Do what you want with it. I don't care. If I don't care then why am I crying?

THE CUNTS, FREAKS, CRIMINALS, BOHEMIANS, NAZIS, NUTCASES, IMMIGRANTS, COMMIES, TRAMPS, ARTISTS, VANDALS, MUSICIANS, SHOTTERS, MIDDLE CLASSES, WHITES, BLACKS, WORKING CLASSES, TOFFS, GAYS, CHANCERS, BANKERS, BARROW BOYS, STALLHOLDERS, STAKEHOLDERS, LADS, CASUALS, RUDEBOYS, ANARCHISTS, BELL MAKERS, DRUGGIES, BARISTAS, RAVENS, BEEFEATERS, TOURISTS ETC. ARE ALL GONE. DONE. FUCK MY LONDON.

[mastcomm]

To Tame Coronavirus, Mao-Style Social Control Blankets China

SHANGHAI — China has flooded cities and villages with battalions of neighborhood busybodies, uniformed volunteers and Communist Party representatives to carry out one of the biggest social control campaigns in history.

The goal: to keep hundreds of millions of people away from everyone but their closest kin.

The nation is battling the coronavirus outbreak with a grass-roots mobilization reminiscent of Mao-style mass crusades not seen in China in decades, essentially entrusting front line epidemic prevention to a supercharged version of a neighborhood watch.

Housing complexes in some cities have issued the equivalents of paper hall passes to regulate how often residents leave their homes. Apartment buildings have turned away their own tenants if they have come from out of town. Train stations block people from entering cities if they cannot prove they live or work there. In the countryside, villages have been gated off with vehicles, tents and other improvised barriers.

Despite China’s arsenal of high-tech surveillance tools, the controls are mainly enforced by hundreds of thousands of workers and volunteers, who check residents’ temperature, log their movements, oversee quarantines and — most important — keep away outsiders who might carry the virus.

Residential lockdowns of varying strictness — from checkpoints at building entrances to hard limits on going outdoors — now cover at least 760 million people in China, or more than half the country’s population, according to a New York Times analysis of government announcements in provinces and major cities. Many of these people live far from the city of Wuhan, where the virus was first reported and which the government sealed off last month.

Throughout China, neighborhoods and localities have issued their own rules about residents’ comings and goings, which means the total number of affected people may be even higher. Policies vary widely, leaving some places in a virtual freeze and others with few strictures.

China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, has called for an all-out “people’s war” to tame the outbreak. But the restrictions have prevented workers from returning to factories and businesses, straining China’s giant economy. And with local officials exercising such direct authority over people’s movements, it is no surprise that some have taken enforcement to extremes.

Li Jing, 40, an associate professor of sociology at Zhejiang University in the eastern city of Hangzhou, was almost barred from taking her husband to a hospital recently after he choked on a fish bone during dinner. The reason? Her neighborhood allows only one person per family to leave the house, every other day.

“Once the epidemic was disclosed, the central government put huge pressure on local officials,” Professor Li said. “That triggered competition between regions, and local governments turned from overly conservative to radical.”

Updated Feb. 10, 2020

What is a Coronavirus? It is a novel virus named for the crown-like spikes that protrude from its surface. The coronavirus can infect both animals and people, and can cause a range of respiratory illnesses from the common cold to more dangerous conditions like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS.

How contagious is the virus? According to preliminary research, it seems moderately infectious, similar to SARS, and is possibly transmitted through the air. Scientists have estimated that each infected person could spread it to somewhere between 1.5 and 3.5 people without effective containment measures.

How worried should I be? While the virus is a serious public health concern, the risk to most people outside China remains very low, and seasonal flu is a more immediate threat.

Who is working to contain the virus? World Health Organization officials have praised China’s aggressive response to the virus by closing transportation, schools and markets. This week, a team of experts from the W.H.O. arrived in Beijing to offer assistance.

What if I’m traveling? The United States and Australia are temporarily denying entry to noncitizens who recently traveled to China and several airlines have canceled flights.

How do I keep myself and others safe? Washing your hands frequently is the most important thing you can do, along with staying at home when you’re sick.

“Even when the situation is relieved or if the mortality rate turns out not to be high, the government machine is unable to change direction or tune down,” she added.

China’s prevention efforts are being led by its myriad neighborhood committees, which typically serve as a go-between for residents and the local authorities. Supporting them is the government’s “grid management” system, which divides the country into tiny sections and assigns people to watch over each, ensuring a tight grip over a large population.

Zhejiang Province, on China’s southeastern seaboard, has a population of nearly 60 million and has enlisted 330,000 “grid workers.” Hubei Province, whose capital is Wuhan, has deployed 170,000. The southern province of Guangdong has called upon 177,000, landlocked Sichuan has 308,000 and the megacity of Chongqing has 118,000

The authorities are also combining enormous manpower with mobile technology to track people who may have been exposed to the virus. China’s state-run cellular providers allow subscribers to send text messages to a hotline that generates a list of provinces they have recently visited.

At a high-speed rail station in the eastern city of Yiwu this past week, workers in hazmat suits demanded that passengers send the text messages that show their location data before being allowed to leave.

An app developed by a state-run maker of military electronics lets Chinese citizens enter their name and national ID number and be told whether they may have come in contact, on a plane, train or bus, with a carrier of the virus.

It is too early to say whether China’s strategy has contained the outbreak. With large numbers of new infections being reported every day, the government has clear reasons for minimizing human contact and domestic travel. But experts say that in epidemics, overbearing measures can backfire, scaring infected people into hiding and making the outbreak harder to control.

“Public health relies on public trust,” said Alexandra L. Phelan, a specialist in global health law at Georgetown University. “These community-level quarantines and the arbitrary nature in which they’re being imposed and tied up with the police and other officials is essentially making them into punitive actions — a coercive action rather than a public health action.”

In Zhejiang, one of China’s most developed provinces and home to Alibaba and other technology companies, people have written on social media about being denied entry to their own apartments in Hangzhou, the provincial capital. Coming home from out of town, they say, they were asked to produce documents from landlords and employers or be left on the street.

For Nada Sun, who was visiting family in Wenzhou, a coastal city in Zhejiang, a health scare turned into a mandatory quarantine.

When Ms. Sun, 29, complained of tightness in her chest this month, her mother told her to go to the hospital. She did not have a high fever, yet the hospital gave her a battery of checks. All came back negative for the virus.

Even so, when she returned to her apartment, she was told that she would be quarantined for two weeks. She was also added to a group on the WeChat messaging app with a local Communist Party secretary and other volunteers in which she has to submit her temperature and location twice a day.

“I’m worried they have too much information,” Ms. Sun said.

The lockdowns are not necessarily oppressive. Many people in China have been happy to wall themselves off, ordering groceries online and working from home if they can. Some neighborhood officials act with a humane touch.

Bob Huang, a Chinese-born American living in northern Zhejiang, said the volunteers at his complex had helped chase down a man who stayed out overnight to drink, in violation of rules about how often people can step outside. Yet they also delivered food from McDonald’s to a quarantined family.

Mr. Huang, 50, has been able to dodge the restrictions by using a special pass from the property manager, and he has been driving around delivering protective face masks to friends. Some building complexes don’t let him in. Others take down his information.

A nearby village took a less orthodox approach.

“They always start asking questions in the local dialect, and if you can respond in the local dialect, you are allowed to go in,” Mr. Huang said. Unable to speak the dialect, he had to wait, though the villagers were friendly. They gave him a folding chair, offered him a cigarette and didn’t ask for an ID.

Some parts of China have imposed other, often severe policies for fending off the epidemic.

Hangzhou has barred pharmacies from selling analgesics to force people with symptoms to seek treatment at hospitals. The eastern city of Nanjing requires anybody who takes a cab to show ID and leave contact information. Yunnan Province wants all public places to display QR codes that people must scan with their phones whenever they enter or exit.

Many places have banned large gatherings. The police in Hunan Province this month destroyed a mahjong parlor where they found more than 20 people playing the tile game.

With local governments deciding such policies largely on their own, China has become a vast patchwork of fiefs.

“It can be quite haphazard,” said Zhou Xun, a historian of modern China at the University of Essex in England. “A perfect plan on paper often turns into makeshift solutions locally.”

Officials seem to recognize that some local authorities have gone too far. This month, Chen Guangsheng, the deputy secretary general of Zhejiang’s provincial government, called it “inappropriate” that some places had employed “simple and crude practices,” like locking people into their homes to enforce quarantines.

National officials on Saturday urged towns and villages to remove unnecessary roadblocks and ensure the smooth transport of food and supplies.

Zhang Yingzi’s apartment complex in Hangzhou initially forbade anybody who had been out of town from entering. Later, the ban was adjusted to cover only people coming from Hubei Province and the Zhejiang cities of Wenzhou and Taizhou, both of which have had many cases of the new virus.

“Banning everyone from out of town wasn’t realistic,” said Ms. Zhang, 29, an accountant. “There are so many of them, after all. Some needed to come back for work.”

Still, many in China are uneasy about loosening up virus controls too quickly.

Zhang Shu, 27, worries that her parents and neighbors are becoming cavalier about the virus, even as workers drive around her village near Wenzhou with loudspeakers telling people to stay home.

“Ordinary people are slowly starting to feel that the situation isn’t so horrible anymore,” Ms. Zhang said. “They are restless.”

Alexandra Stevenson contributed reporting from Hong Kong. Wang Yiwei and Lin Qiqing contributed research.

from WordPress https://mastcomm.com/tech/to-tame-coronavirus-mao-style-social-control-blankets-china-2/

[saltsale1-blog]

Celebrating its 79th Birthday, Essex Street Market Move Delayed Yet Again

The Essex Street Market celebrated its 79th birthday this week. A bittersweet milestone, for sure, as its home of eight decades will soon be demolished.

Though, not as fast as previously thought.

In due course, as reported, all vendors in the current warehouse block will relocate across Delancey Street to the marquee building of Essex Crossing. Said move was supposed to have transpired last September; then “ fall 2018“; then subsequently pushed to “early 2019.”

The latest estimate, however, according to Essex Crossing PR, is this spring.

While the official party line remains rather ambiguous, at least three different merchants inside the market told us that the move will probably happen sometime in March.

So, you have just a couple more months to roam the floor before the historic building is pulverized.

The row of Market buildings was erected along Essex Street (between Broome and Stanton) in January 1940 by order of Mayor LaGuardia as a means of moving the Lower East Side pushcart industry inside.

Source: https://www.boweryboogie.com/2019/01/celebrating-its-79th-birthday-essex-street-market-move-delayed-yet-again/

[nyasbestosviolations-blog]

New York Asbestos Violations

Food Festivals in NYC

Did you know that those who worked in food processing plants prior to the 90s were unwittingly exposed to asbestos? Check out information on mesothelioma and learn which companies have asbestos control program violations at the New York Asbestos Violations website. Interested parties may also claim their mesothelioma information packet from Belluck & Fox, LLP, Belluck & Fox. The law firm is active in causing awareness about the early symptoms of mesothelioma. They also help clients with acute symptoms of asbestos exposure file a lawsuit and get financial compensation for mesothelioma. Schedule a consultation with the mesothelioma top lawyers at 546 5th Ave, 4th Floor New York, NY 10036.

Food lovers will love to join the food festivals in New York, New York. There’s the annual Brisket King NYC that pays homage to ethnic traditions in New York, New York. Enjoy all-you-can-eat barbeques, beef-carving demonstration and other riffs on brisket by butchers and pitmasters. Join the Bronx Week and enjoy a food and arts festival, a parade, neighborhood tours, breakfast and the Bronx Ball. The Festival of Colors allows festival goers to throw bright colored cornstarch in the air, shop from select artists, buy delicious food and drinks and dance to live music. Take note that the festival is only for those 18+ years old. If you have kids, join the family-friendly Essex Street Market- Block Party. Taste new dishes from several food vendors and pushcarts. There will also be activities for kids and live music. East Arlem’s Ethnic Festival or World block party offers an array of ethnic food, music, dance, children’s activities and arts and crafts for free. The New York City Multicultural Festival also offers food, cultural music, fashion, dance and a kids’ area on St. Nicholas Avenue. Sample food from 60 different restaurants at the Taste of Queens at the New York Hall of Science. Join the International food fest on 9th Avenue or the NYC Vegetarian Food Festival at the Metropolitan Pavilion. Most of these food festivals in New York, New York happen in May.

Learn More:

Belluck & Fox, LLP, Belluck & Fox

My Map:

https://goo.gl/maps/e8chieAaPBr

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Art Movements

Arthur Szyk, “Murder Incorporated: Hirohito, Hitlerhito, Benito” (December 1941), watercolor and gouache on paper, Harlan Crow Library, Dallas, Texas (courtesy New-York Historical Society)

Art Movements is a weekly collection of news, developments, and stirrings in the art world. Subscribe to receive these posts as a weekly newsletter.

Charlottesville’s city council voted to shroud its statues of Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson in black fabric following the murder of anti-fascist campaigner Heather Heyer at the Unite the Right rally. Confederate memorials were recently removed from the University of Texas, Woodlawn Cemetery at West Palm Beach, a public park in Helena, Montana, and various locations throughout New York City. The Beauvoir, the Jefferson Davis Home and Presidential Library, announced its willingness to take any Confederate memorials removed by “any city or jurisdiction” across the US.

President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump declined to attend the upcoming annual Kennedy Center Honors in “order to allow the honorees to celebrate without any political distraction,” according to a press statement from the White House. Honorees Carmen de Lavallade and Norman Lear both stated that they planned to boycott the event.

Lonnie G. Bunch III, the founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, published a statement in the wake of the deadly clashes at Charlottesville, reiterating the museum’s mission “of bringing history — with all of its pain and its promise — front and center.” “It is not surprising … to find that the dedication of Confederate monuments spiked in two distinct time periods,” Bunch’s statement reads. “The first encompassed the years when states were passing Jim Crow laws disenfranchising African Americans and the second corresponds to the modern civil rights movement. These monuments are symbols that tell us less about the actual Civil War but more about the uncivil peace that followed.”

All 17 private members of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities resigned, condemning Trump’s “support of the hate groups and terrorists who killed and injured fellow Americans in Charlottesville.”

The Village Voice announced that it will end its print publication.

The New-York Historical Society announced an exhibition of over 40 works by illustrator and miniaturist Arthur Szyk (1894–1951). The Polish-Jewish artist is best known for his caricatures of the Nazis and the other Axis power leaders, many of which were commissioned as posters and pamphlets during World War II.

A visitor stepped on a horizontal pigment sculpture by Yves Klein at Theatre of the Void, an exhibition of the artist’s work at the BOZAR/Centre for Fine Arts, Belgium. A similar incident took place at Nice’s Musée d’art moderne et d’art contemporain in April.

(via Twitter/@Bromtommig)

Islamic extremist Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi was held liable for €2.7 million (~$3.2 million) in damages by the International Criminal Court for the destruction of nine centuries-old mausoleums and the Sidi Yahia mosque in Timbuktu — the first such ruling by the court for an act of cultural destruction.

Kassel city councilman Thomas Materner, a member of the far-right party AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), threatened to organize protests should the city acquire Olu Oguibe’s Documenta 14 art work, “Das Fremdlinge und Flüchtlinge” (“Monument for Strangers and Refugees”), an obelisk dedicated to refugees. Materner described the sculpture as “degenerate art,” a term used by the Nazis to characterize modernist art.

Cambridge University Press came under intense criticism for complying with a request from China to block access to over 300 articles from The China Quarterly. Access to the articles has since been reinstated according to an announcement by the Quarterly‘s editor, Tim Pringle.

Over 40 Portuguese photographers pledged to reject exhibition opportunities or funding from the Israeli state until the country “complies with international law and respects the human rights of Palestinians.”

The International Foundation for Art Research identified four fake Jackson Pollock paintings, each of which was attributed to the collection of the likely fictitious James Brennerman — an “insane recluse” who supposedly gave his collection away to his servants.

Richard Pearson, a con artist who forged works in the style of Norman Cornish (1919–2014), was sentenced to three years and seven months in prison. Pearson was ordered to pay a nominal sum of £1, a penalty that will increase should he come into possession of any new assets.

Two specialists verified a work by John Constable for the BBC’s Fake or Fortune? program. The show’s co-presenter, art dealer Philip Mould, previously owned the painting — then dismissed as a fake —  but was unable to authenticate the work at the time.

A family damaged an 800-year-old coffin at the Prittlewell Priory Museum in Southend, Essex, after lifting their child over it in order to pose for a photograph. According to the Guardian, the family left the museum without reporting the damage.

Transactions

Wifredo Lam, “Pleniluna” (undated), lithograph (courtesy Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum FIU)

Univision Communications Inc. donated 57 artworks by 40 artists from Latin America and the United States to the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum. The gift includes works by Cundo Bermudez, Coqui Calderon, Humberto Calzada, Antonia Guzman, Wifredo Lam, Rafael Soriano, and Fernando De Szyszlo.

The Walton Family Charitable Support Foundation donated $120 million to establish a school of art at the University of Arkansas.

The Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) exceeded its $200,000 fundraising goal to match a challenge grant for the PAMM Fund for African American Art, a fund dedicated to the purchase of contemporary art by African American artists.

The National Gallery in London acquired Bernardo Bellotto’s “The Fortress of Königstein from the North” (ca 1756–58) after an appeal raised £11.7 million (~$15 million) to save it from export.

Bernardo Bellotto, “The Fortress of Königstein from the North” (ca 1756–58), oil on canvas, 132.1 x 236.2 cm (© The National Gallery, London)

Transitions

The Baltimore Museum of Art appointed seven new members to its board of trustees: Heidi Berghuis, Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, Brooke Lierman, David H. Milton, Adam Pendleton, Scott Schelle, and Wilma Bulkin Siegel.

Viviana Bianchi was appointed executive director of the Bronx Council on the Arts.

Ruba Katrib was appointed curator of MoMA PS1.

June Yap was appointed director of curatorial, programs, and publications at the Singapore Art Museum.

Allegra Pesenti was appointed associate director and senior curator of the UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts.

Jo Widoff and Lars Bang Larsen were appointed to Moderna Museet’s curatorial team.

The Museum of Modern Art appointed Rob Baker as director of marketing and creative strategy and Leah Dickerman as director of editorial and content strategy.

Jagdip Jagpal will succeed Neha Kirpal as director of the India Art fair.

The Main Museum in Downtown Los Angeles implemented bilingual exhibition labels, materials, and programming in English and Spanish.

Moniker International Art Fair will open its first New York edition in May 2018.

The world’s first Partition Museum opened in Amritsar, India.

The Equal Justice Initiative announced the construction of a museum in Montgomery dedicated to charting slavery, racial terror, segregation, and mass incarceration.

Gallery 1957 opened a second space in Accra, Ghana.

Poster House, an institution dedicated to showcasing posters from around the world, will open at 119 West 23rd Street in New York — the former home of TekServe — late next year. A pop-up exhibition will open at the space on September 20.

Michael Halsband, poster for “Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat: Paintings” (1985) (courtesy Poster House)

Accolades

Seitu Jones received the 2017 McKnight Distinguished Artist Award.

Obituaries

John Abercrombie (1944–2017), jazz guitarist.

Brian Aldiss (1925–2017), writer. Best known for his science-fiction work such as Super-Toys Last All Summer Long (1969).

Sonny Burgess (1929–2017), rockabilly singer.

Chiara Fumai (1978–2017), artist.

Janusz Glowacki (1938–2017), playwright.

Karl Otto Götz (1914–2017), artist.

Dick Gregory (1932–2017), satirist and activist.

Leo Hershkowitz (1924–2017), archivist and historian.

Masatoyo Kishi (1924–2017), abstract painter and sculptor.

Jerry Lewis (1926–2017), comedian, actor, and filmmaker.

M.T. Liggett (1930–2017), folk artist.

Ramon Boixados Malé (1927–2017), president of the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation.

Thomas Meehan (1929–2017), Broadway writer.

Stuart J. Thompson (1955-2017), Broadway producer and manager.

Gordon Williams (1934–2017), writer. Best known for The Siege of Trencher’s Farm (1971) and The Duellists (1977).

Sculptures by M.T. Liggett, Mullinville, Kansas (via Wikipedia)

The post Art Movements appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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[pinkarcadecandy]

The Death and Life of Atlantic City

SEPTEMBER 5, 2017 ISSUE

Zeno’s paradox down the shore.

By Nick Paumgarten

If not for zany schemes, Atlantic City would be a sand dune. Revel was supposed to be the most opulent casino the place had ever seen.

Mike Hauke opened a pizza and sub shop in Atlantic City in 2009, but only after he had failed in nine tries to rent the space to somebody else. He had bought the building three years earlier on the advice of his father, an accountant who considered distressed real estate a smart long-term bet. This piece of real estate seemed to test the proposition. It was a bedraggled three-story clapboard house that years of neighborhood demolition and neglect had stranded at the edge of several mostly vacant blocks, which together formed an urban badlands reaching all the way to the dunes. This was the South Inlet, a once thriving part of town and now more or less a desolate slum at the northeastern end of Absecon Island, the landmass that is home to Atlantic City and three other municipalities. People from “offshore,” as locals like to call the mainland, tend to think of the island’s Inlet end as north, because it’s upcoast, but locals call it east. Atlantic City has a Bermuda Triangle effect; it can confound a compass.

Three blocks west of Hauke’s place, an immense slab of steel and glass was rising over the badlands: a hotel and casino to be called Revel, destined to be bigger and more opulent than anything Atlantic City had ever seen—two towers, reaching almost fifty stories, nearly four thousand rooms, and parking for more than seven thousand cars. Morgan Stanley, the investment bank, had bought the land in 2006, for seventy million dollars, and sunk about $1.2 billion into the project. (Revel, as some have noted, is “lever” spelled backward.) By the end, the cost of building Revel reached more than $2.4 billion, making it the most expensive private construction project in the history of New Jersey.

Hauke went after the crumbs. Unable to find a commercial tenant for his house’s ground floor (the apartments upstairs were designated Section 8, for low-income tenants), he started selling rudimentary takeout to Revel’s construction crews. Their rush-hour bulk orders overwhelmed his staff, but off hours the place was dead: a trickle of casino workers and, in Hauke’s words, “shitbags, crackheads, hustlers, and pimps.”

Hauke, a recent graduate of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, had spent a couple of years in Hoboken and Manhattan working in marketing, but he had no restaurant experience. One of his first customers was a neighborhood junkie known as V8 Man (“All the white kids are junkies,” Hauke said. “The Inlet does it to everybody”), who, on opening night, picked a fight at the counter with a male prostitute and another customer; Hauke smashed a pizza paddle on the counter and used the sharp end to scare him off. More than once, a guy came in trying to unload stolen merchandise as the victimized storekeeper came running up the street in pursuit. One morning, a neighborhood kid rode by on a bicycle and threw a crude pipe bomb through the window; Hauke chased him in his car and, after cornering him briefly in an abandoned house, hounded him on foot across a vacant tract called Pauline’s Prairie, named after Pauline Hill, a city planner in the sixties who’d had this stretch of the neighborhood bulldozed for urban renewal, which never came. The kid, looking over his shoulder, ran into the side of a parked box truck. The police appeared and put him in cuffs. His grievance was that cops had been patronizing Hauke’s shop and that sheriffs had evicted his cousins, Hauke’s Section 8 tenants, from one of the apartments upstairs. The tenants, according to Hauke, had been running a welfare scam. They’d also been throwing dirty diapers on his customers and fishing for pigeons from the roof.

Hauke hoped that, in spite of such annoyances, Revel would either provide him with an income stream or else buy him out. A few neighborhood property owners said that it would never happen. They’d been holding on for years themselves, in the hope of selling to a big casino, and in the interim they’d been gutted by rising property taxes and ongoing decay. The problem was that the area was zoned for big casino-hotels. You couldn’t build a house, and the few houses left in the neighborhood—most had been demolished or had burned down, accidentally or not—were old and badly battered by the salt air. One of them, down near the beach, across the street from a run-down low-income housing complex called the Waterside, belonged to a teacher Hauke had got to know named Tony Zarych, who’d moved to Atlantic City as a teen-ager forty years earlier, when his family was buying up property around town. He’d worked as a baccarat dealer at the Sands, until it closed (it was demolished in 2007), and now taught English as a second language at an elementary school. He liked to hunt wild turkey offshore and sometimes had carcasses hanging outside. His property taxes had risen sharply, as the city contended with a steep drop in tax revenues from the casinos. “Get out while you can,” Zarych told Hauke.

Sure enough, in 2009, amid the financial meltdown, Revel, only half built, ran out of money. In April, 2010, Morgan Stanley quit the project, booking a loss of almost a billion dollars. Construction stopped. Hauke’s business withered. “There were no more tourists or construction workers,” he recalled. “Mostly just cops. And crackheads wanting free shit.” But something about the city, and about the Inlet’s seaside squalor, made him want to stay on. Maybe it was the fact that his great-grandmother had attended shul in the Inlet. Or that he’d simply got sand in his shoes, as the locals say about those who take to the place.

After grinding along for another year, Hauke shut down the shop, spiffed it up, and rechristened it Tony Boloney’s. He bought a food truck, which he named the Mustache Mobile, and developed a line of pizzas and novelty subs that he marketed as “indigenous Atlantic City grub,” as though he’d revived an obscure provincial cuisine. Soon, Tony Boloney’s began winning foodie awards and luring in not just gamblers, night-clubbers, food-truck connoisseurs, politicians, and cops but also a procession of casino magnates and real-estate speculators who were visiting the neighborhood, often on the sly, to size up the distressed property next door.

At the beginning of 2011, Governor Chris Christie pledged tax incentives to Revel worth more than a quarter of a billion dollars. (The incentives were tied to certain revenue targets, which, in the end, Revel failed to meet.) Christie had evidently decided that Revel’s success was essential to the survival of Atlantic City, and therefore his gubernatorial track record. His pledge helped Revel secure new financing from an array of hedge funds, including Chatham Asset Management and Canyon Capital, which manage hundreds of millions of dollars in New Jersey state pension funds.

Construction resumed, and Christie came to town. After a photo op at a famous sub shop called the White House and a visit to the Revel site, he dropped in at Tony Boloney’s and urged Hauke to keep the place going. “Listen, you gotta stick around,” Christie told him. The Revel executives were emphatic as well: “It’ll look bad if you close. Please don’t go anywhere.” The head of Chatham Asset Management hired Hauke to cater his annual Halloween party, up in Essex County.

“I understand you’ve spent the summer on someone’s ass. Can you tell us what that was like?”

Revel opened in the spring of 2012, with Beyoncé performing a series of concerts in its auditorium. (She also took over the Presidential Suite, relegating Michelle Obama and her daughters to another suite.) The plan had been scaled back—just fourteen hundred rooms, and one tower instead of two. The tower’s midsection had a half-dozen stories not yet built out; you could see clear through it. Still, it was an impressive building, with sleek, airy marbled atriums and lobbies that had little in common with the smoky, windowless, carpeted caverns of the older mega-casinos down the boardwalk. Unlike all the rest, it directed one’s attention to the ocean and had ample outdoor space, a two-acre terrace with firepits and cabanas. Even from the outside, Revel had an ethereal appeal. The reflective glass took on the sky’s hue and became almost invisible at dusk, a stealth casino guarding the edge of town.

If only. During construction, a tower crane collapsed. Lightning struck a worker’s cement bucket and killed him. Three top Revel executives died in a plane crash. A guest plunged from one of several escalators that climbed vertiginously through the heart of the lobby. A couple were found dead of an apparent drug overdose in a suite. The N.F.L. player Ray Rice punched out his fiancée in an elevator, and the surveillance video went viral.

The casino wasn’t making nearly as much money as the developers had anticipated. Some observers blamed the layout—the hotel-room elevators didn’t access the casino floor, and a long, tortuous trip from the entrance to the check-in desk didn’t take you through it, either—or the fact that Revel prohibited smoking, or that its slot machines didn’t seem to pay out, or that it was stingy with the comps. Even though occupancy was decent and the night clubs and restaurants were busy, the tables and slots weren’t taking in enough to offset the cost of operating the place—the burden of debt service, high property taxes, bad leases with the tenants, and an expensive arrangement for power and light. Within a year of opening, Revel filed for bankruptcy. It restructured and emerged from Chapter 11 a few months later, but the economics still didn’t make sense, and so, in the spring of 2014, it went bankrupt once again. Finally, last September, unable to find a buyer, it closed.

From the time Morgan Stanley began searching in vain for equity partners, Revel had been in play, and all along Tony Boloney’s had served as an informal commissary for would-be investors and buyers. Among those whom Hauke and his staff said they’d seen were Steve Wynn, who had sold the Golden Nugget in 1987 and vowed never to come back; various hedge-funders from New York; and a group of Chinese men—the Export-Import Bank of China was at one point in talks to buy a piece—who took over Hauke’s tables and held meetings for hours, without ordering anything.

A mysterious character in tattered clothing and a handlebar mustache had been showing up a few times a year, engaging the staff in conversation about space travel and Elon Musk. He claimed to represent someone who was going to buy Revel. Hauke and his team were skeptical, but one day last summer, just before the casino closed, the man rolled up in a baby-blue Bentley convertible. Maybe he was for real. “My guy’s going to offer ninety million,” he said. His guy, he went on, was from Florida and intended to erect a “Tower of Geniuses” on the Revel site, a high-rise think tank, which would draw on nasa and the federal government’s aviation-research facility at Atlantic City Airport, just offshore.

If not for zany schemes, Atlantic City would still be a sand dune. Within weeks, news broke that a little-known Florida developer named Glenn Straub, the owner of Palm Beach Polo Golf and Country Club, had offered ninety million dollars to buy Revel. Straub wanted to put up the aborted second tower and fill it with academics and scientists charged with solving the world’s problems: your Tower of Geniuses. Few in town took this seriously, but, as far as the bankruptcy was concerned, he’d established a baseline. Everything has a clearing price. The bad news was that Straub’s offer was less than four cents on the dollar—a chilling signal of how far Atlantic City had fallen and may yet fall. The good news was that the building—and you might even say the town—was worth anything at all.

Most cities exist as a consequence of commercial or strategic utility. Atlantic City is more of a proposition and a ploy. The town fathers of Cape May, the first American seaside resort, weren’t interested in a railway, or perhaps the class of people who’d ride in on one—the well-to-do arrived from Philadelphia by boat—so a group of investors built, in 1854, what became known as a “railroad to nowhere,” to a spot a little way up the coast that was more or less the shortest possible distance from Philadelphia to the sea. Over the decades, and with the industrial-era advent of leisure time and disposable income, this forsaken wedge of salt marsh and sand became “the world’s playground”—a crucible of conspicuous consumption and a stage for the aspirations and masquerades of visitors and entrepreneurs. In some respects, Atlantic City was where America learned how to turn idle entertainment into big business. For a while, it was home to some of the world’s grandest hotels (the Marlborough-Blenheim was the largest reinforced-concrete building in the world, and was later imploded in the music video for Bruce Springsteen’s “Atlantic City”), as well as some of its more ardent iniquities and diversions. The night clubs were as often as not fronts for backroom gambling halls, intermittently tolerated by the authorities.

The city, like so many, has its racial demons. At the turn of the twentieth century, Atlantic City had one of the highest African-American populations of any city north of the Mason-Dixon Line, owing to the abundance of jobs in the hotels. The archetypal amusement was that of white working-class visitors kicking back in the boardwalk’s famous wicker rolling chairs while black people did the pushing—a “public performance of racial dominance,” notes the historian Bryant Simon, in “Boardwalk of Dreams.” Though the Northside, traditionally a black neighborhood, had been a thriving district, the decline in tourism to the city, after the Second World War, hit it hard. With the rise of affordable air travel, people started going to Florida and the Caribbean instead. The city desegregated. Disneyland opened.

Legalized gambling was supposed to rescue the city from its obsolescence as a resort and convention town, a condition that came to national attention during the 1964 Democratic Convention there and grew more conspicuous as the decade wore on. A dozen years later, the state passed the Casino Control Act, which was, at least ostensibly, an attempt to reverse the decline. But, perhaps predictably, a lot of the money that flowed in flowed right back out—to the casino operators and their financing schemes (“I made a lot of money in Atlantic City,” Donald Trump said at the recent Republican debate. “And I’m very proud of it”) and to their subsequent efforts to lobby for the approval of casino gambling in other states. New Jersey, which taxes the casinos to fund a seniors’ prescription-drug program, among other things, always got its piece.

Neglect of the city has been attributed to a bloated municipal payroll—a budget nearly double what it was ten years ago—and the years of corruption and mismanagement in city government. Some blame the suffocating effect of the casinos, which are boxed off from the city and are designed to keep patrons inside losing money rather than outside spending it. Others point to the thorny old problem of race or the dreary question of the structure of municipal government statewide.

“He’s very self-loathing, but not enough.”

The dividing line between south and north, and between white and black, used to be Atlantic Avenue, the main commercial street, which runs parallel to the sea. It was where South Jersey shopped for wedding dresses and jewelry; now it’s a gantlet of shabby storefronts and fast-food joints, running toward and away from the New Jersey Transit bus terminal. In the streets that run from the boardwalk, dilapidation and squalor are not hard to find. Wood’s Loan Office, a pawnshop established in 1927, is owned and operated by Martin Wood, a seventy-nine-year-old Atlantic City native. Wood, who is white (his grandfather, a metallurgist, came to town from Lithuania at the end of the nineteenth century and used to scavenge for junk on the beach with a horse-drawn wagon), has noticed an uptick in the number of shopping bags from the outlet mall, a few blocks away. In his opinion, the sixties were worse. “It’s not that bad here. Yet.” Twenty years ago, the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority moved the pawnshop a few blocks, in an effort to remedy the city’s oft-lamented lack of a supermarket. “But they opened a discount liquor store next door to the new supermarket,” Wood said. “That was not a good move. They wound up with winos hanging around. People were scared to go to the supermarket. So it closed up.”

“Atlantic City turned its back on the boardwalk,” Paul Steelman, a prominent casino architect who grew up nearby, said. “It’s the most prominent pedestrian walkway in the world. It’s got everything going for it except the buildings that are on it.” His solution: “Cut holes in the casinos and let out all those people, all that capital.”

In order to prevent monopolies, the Casino Control Act stipulated that no one could own more than three casinos. In the eighties, Donald Trump became the first to hit that limit. Eventually, the provision was scrapped, and by 2014 Caesars owned four. Carl Icahn now effectively controls a quarter of the market with just two casinos, the Tropicana and the Taj Mahal.

Does Atlantic City need more gambling, or less? There are proponents on both sides. Some favor alternative entertainments (concerts, water parks, polo, legalized marijuana) or the panacean potential of higher education (Stockton University, a state college headquartered offshore, has long wanted an Atlantic City campus). A few push for smaller boutique casinos, and others swear by the existing big-box regimen, just done better. In Las Vegas the ratio of revenue is two-thirds non-gaming to one-third gaming. In Atlantic City the situation is reversed. Since 2006, gaming revenue has dropped by half, from a peak of $5.2 billion to $2.7 billion. As that stream dries up, logic suggests tapping others. And yet the casinos remain lucrative. Divided among eight casinos—that’s how many are left—$2.7 billion isn’t bad. This may be the locals’ most commonly stated reassurance. The city has a higher concentration of casinos than anywhere outside Nevada. It gets twenty-five million visitors a year.

I asked Steve Perskie, who wrote the Casino Control Act as a state legislator representing Atlantic City, if casinos, in the final accounting, had been good for the town. “Compared to what?” he replied. “Imagine Atlantic City without them.”

When word gets out that a city is on the skids, people seem eager to imagine post-apocalyptic desolation, a rusting ruin at Ozymandian remove from the glory days. But American cities don’t seem to die that way. They keep sopping up tax dollars and risk capital, thwarting big ideas and emergency relief, chewing up opportunists and champions.

Two weeks after the shuttering of Revel, Trump Plaza closed—the fourth casino to do so in 2014. The first was the Atlantic Club, né the Golden Nugget, built in 1980 by Steve Wynn, with financing by Michael Milken and one of the earliest iterations of the junk bond, and then owned (and rechristened), in succession, by Bally’s, Hilton, and Resorts International. Two competitors, Tropicana (owned by Icahn) and Caesars (controlled by the private-equity firms Apollo Management and TPG Capital), bought out the bankrupt Atlantic Club, closed it, and divvied up the scraps. Next came the Showboat. It was profitable, but its owner, Caesars, hobbled by debt, needed to consolidate. (The amputation failed: in January, Caesars declared bankruptcy; another of its holdings, the Bally’s casino, has been rumored to be the next to go.) Meanwhile, Trump Entertainment Resorts declared bankruptcy (its fourth), and Icahn, who’d bought up Trump’s debt, played a game of chicken with the casino workers’ union and the state. (Donald Trump himself no longer runs the company or the casinos, and he has sued to have his name removed.) In December, the Trump Taj Mahal was about to close; Icahn, having squeezed the state and the union for concessions on taxes and benefits, found twenty million dollars to keep it open, and since then it has limped along, a zombie casbah.

It’s not all the big shots’ fault. There’s just been less money to go around. Atlantic City has lost its monopoly on legalized gambling on the East Coast. First came the casinos on Indian reservations in Connecticut, in the nineties, and then, in recent years, the advance of gaming across state lines, in Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and upstate New York. (Some industry experts will tell you that Manhattan is destined to have tables, too.) Now there’s talk of casinos in North Jersey, which, along with video-slot parlors at the racetracks (“racinos”), would cannibalize the action in Atlantic City.

Neighboring states approved legalized gambling in the hope that it would do for their economies and state treasuries what it once did for New Jersey’s. Perhaps they should hope instead that it does not. The casino closures in Atlantic City have contributed to the loss of nearly ten thousand jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and who knows how many associated income streams, reputable or not. The city has fewer than forty thousand permanent residents; the majority of Atlantic City’s workers live offshore, in the townships of Atlantic County, which, in the first quarter of this year, led the nation in foreclosures. Property taxes in the city have doubled since 2008 and were up twenty-nine per cent in 2014, to make up for the drop in tax revenue from the casinos and in the taxable value of the property. The city is around four hundred million dollars in debt. Earlier this year, its credit rating was downgraded to junk-bond status.

After convening a few summits on the predicament in Atlantic City, which resulted in a dire report, Governor Christie, in January, appointed two emergency managers, Kevin Lavin and Kevyn Orr, to oversee the city’s finances, wresting control from the mayor and the city council. The fact that Orr had previously served as Detroit’s emergency manager, steering Detroit into and out of bankruptcy, led observers to predict that he’d been hired to do the same for Atlantic City. Perhaps mercifully, the mayor, Don Guardian, was relieved of some of the hardest decisions, about who and how many to fire and what services to deprive the citizens of. “A good manager welcomes a good auditor,” he told me. The mess was now Christie’s. Presiding over the first bankruptcy for a New Jersey municipality since the Great Depression would not help his Presidential ambitions, and, perhaps more important, it would raise the already high costs of borrowing across a state whose finances are very grim. Christie staked a lot on his rescue of Atlantic City, and so far the bet’s not looking so good.

In May, the city submitted a plan to lay off two hundred city workers, about a fifth of the municipal workforce. Orr returned to private practice, having been paid seventy thousand dollars for three months of part-time work. (He’d billed the state nine hundred and fifty dollars an hour.)

Abandonment, and the spectre of bankruptcy, intensified the bleakness of the winter in Atlantic City. At one end of the boardwalk, Revel loomed dark. At night, the blare of piped-in pop warped in the wind, and floodlight spilled out over the dunes, which, post-Sandy, were just a layer of sand atop an armature of giant sandbags. The obituarists who came to gawk didn’t have to bother going so far. On the façade of the first casino that one saw after pulling off the expressway there was the ghost lettering of the immense sign that once spelled out “Trump Plaza” and, beneath it, a billboard that read “The Center of It All.” (The small print read “Gambling Problem? Call 1-800-gambler”—advice, maybe, for the city itself.) Visitors regularly stopped to photograph this, to add to their portfolio of what some locals, resenting the attention, considered ruin porn.

The greatest ruin was to the lives of the thousands who’d lost their jobs. One morning, I met Dawn Inglin, who had gone to work as a cocktail waitress at the Plaza when it first opened, in 1984. She’d come to town three years before, when a friend got her a role in a dinner-theatre company down shore, in Ocean City, and then she found herself auditioning at Harrah’s, which, in those days, used cocktail waitresses as dancers in its TV commercials. “The choreography was difficult,” she recalled.

When she applied for a job at the Plaza, she auditioned for Donald Trump at Trump Tower, in Manhattan. She remembers a weigh-in, and an interview in a bathing suit, and she and the others were required to wear two-and-a-half-inch heels. (When I met her, she had her hair up and was wearing a smart lavender suit.) “I very much enjoyed working for Donald Trump,” Inglin said. “When he was there, it was tip-top. You’d’ve thought he was the Messiah.”

Inglin’s generation of casino workers, whose professional primes track the birth and decline of the industry in Atlantic City, speak wistfully of the abundance and camaraderie of the halcyon days. “Back in the eighties and nineties, the money flowed. It was glamorous,” Inglin said. “Then the attention and the business was diverted from the Plaza to the Taj. Things started closing. Restaurants, room service. For four or five years, there were constant rumors that this or that person was going to buy us. I don’t have enough fingers and toes to count the number of people who were going to save us. The last few years were so stressful. You watched people lose their jobs. They were taking away severance, the machines disappearing, equipment rolling past you.”

After thirty years, she was fourth in seniority among cocktail waitresses at the Plaza and was making $8.99 an hour, plus benefits. It ended last September. “When we found out we were closing, we were standing at the bar—the last bar in the casino. We saw it on the six-o’clock news. We were frantic.”

Despite coming up empty in a search for another job, Inglin felt that she was going to be all right. Since the Plaza closed, she has been attending classes at the community college in pursuit of a degree in human services—a growth field in these parts. “We have an addiction problem here,” she said.

I met a bus driver named Kip Brown, who worked the Port Authority route, up and back each morning, for Academy Bus Lines. He had been at Academy for fifteen years and was No. 3 in seniority, out of seventy drivers in the region. As ridership has fallen, Academy has been cutting back on its schedule. The number of visitors arriving by bus is an eighth of what it was a quarter century ago. In the spring, Brown, just forty-seven, retired.

Now he was looking for work as a livery driver. Brown also used to work in the casinos, at the Showboat, bussing tables, and at Trump’s Castle, stripping and waxing floors. “When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor,” he said. “It was the eighties, I was a teen-ager, but I remember it: they put us all in the back.”

He lives in the Northside, on Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard, in a house that, like many in town, was inundated during Hurricane Sandy. “Sandy: that was the beginning of the fall of Atlantic City,” he said. Because of the rise in property taxes, the value of the house is well below the value of the mortgage, so he is stuck with it. “If I could get out of my house, I would. I don’t want to live in Atlantic City, to be honest with you.” Recently, one of the employees at his cousin’s corner store had been killed in an armed robbery.

Atlantic City has had three great bosses, political or otherwise. In the decades prior to the First World War, Louis Kuehnle, a transplanted New Yorker and powerful Republican known to all as the Commodore, turned the resort into a bustling metropolis and the state party into a patron and beneficiary of the evolving local aptitude for vice. Enoch (Nucky) Johnson, his successor and the basis for the Steve Buscemi character in “Boardwalk Empire,” continued this work and presided over Atlantic City’s glory years, during Prohibition, which, largely thanks to his efforts, never really pertained. The third was Hap Farley, a Republican legislator and master puller of wires, whose political swan song was his support, behind the scenes, for the second (and successful) attempt, in 1976, to pass the state bill to legalize gambling in Atlantic City.

Since then, there have been party bosses, governors, and mayors with varying degrees of power and venality, but no kingfish of the stature of the Commodore, Nucky, or Hap. “I’ll give you Atlantic City,” the mayor of Camden said, to F.B.I. agents disguised as Arabs during the Abscam sting. “Without me, you do nothing.” But by then such an offer was beyond the reach of any one man. In city politics, the Democrats held sway. (The electorate is now thirty per cent Hispanic and forty per cent black; Democrats outnumber Republicans nine to one.) The only Republican elected to* City Hall in the casino era was James Usry, the city’s first black mayor, who got caught up in a corruption investigation that cost him the 1990 election—until 2013, when, to the great surprise of the city’s political establishment, Don Guardian, a gay white Republican, beat Lorenzo (Rennie) Langford, an African-American, by fewer than four hundred votes.

Langford, out of the public eye since then, has been writing a memoir and working as a substitute teacher. He lives in the same modest split-level that he’s been in for twenty-eight years (“In two years it’ll be paid for”), on a street in the Northside that has been renamed L. T. Langford Lane. We talked in his “man lair,” a furnished subfloor with jazz paraphernalia and a wall of fame: his wife, Nynell, with him and Jay Z and Beyoncé; Stevie Wonder; Janet Jackson; Michael Vick; and Lionel Richie. He had on a Champion sweatshirt, jeans, and Nikes. His grandfather had come to town in the twenties, bought some trucks, and won trash-removal contracts at the big hotels. Langford’s father dropped out of high school and worked in a factory. Langford went to college, then dealer school at the Casino Career Institute, on the Black Horse Pike, one of the old Atlantic City arteries, and started at Caesars when it opened, in 1979. He spent fourteen years in the industry—as a floor supervisor at the Playboy and a pit boss at the Atlantis and the Taj Mahal. In 1992, he ran for city council.

People dish a lot of dirt about Rennie—how he’d put his extended family on the payroll; how he had sued the city and, after becoming mayor, got a settlement of more than four hundred thousand dollars (a judge later ordered him to repay it); how his wife’s goddaughter, the pop singer Ashanti, got paid twenty thousand dollars for spending a day at the Atlantic City high school—but it’s hard, when you’re in his home, hearing his side, not to admire his cheek, in the hurly-burly of Chris Christie’s New Jersey, or not to credit his assessment that in the end what has befallen Atlantic City could not have been prevented by any mere satrap.

“You can’t take a solo after every serve.”

“For the last four years, everything was my fault,” he said. “No matter how many times I talked about neighboring jurisdictions or the national economy, it was ‘Langford, it’s your fault.’ ” As for the Revel project, he says that from the start he’d considered it “extremely risky” in a saturated market, and that it got such extravagant support from Christie and the state because it was a way to steer the support of the construction unions to the Governor and his party. Langford said, “What Christie thought would be his shining achievement will be the albatross around his neck.”

His successor, Guardian, is sixty-two and from North Jersey. He is a former Boy Scouts of America executive. (“I couldn’t have gotten out at a better time,” he told me; he left just before the Scouts’ policy regarding homosexuality became a national controversy.) Guardian made his name, locally, as the head of the city’s Special Improvement District. He was a keen advocate and errand man for the tourist precincts, the guy out on the boardwalk on his bicycle at dawn, picking up the plastic cups. He was not a part of any machine, but he worked tirelessly to round up votes, and Langford, having survived a bruising, expensive primary and confident of the black vote, apparently got complacent. Guardian also picked up the support of the state’s Republican establishment and of the unions, in light of his promises to put “cranes in the sky.”

Guardian has been frank about the city’s predicament yet optimistic about its prospects. He has a jolly goofball air and a tireless enthusiasm for particulars. He wears bow ties and has trouble pronouncing his “r”s and “l”s. His partner of twenty-one years, Louis Fatato, whom he married last summer, runs a spa at the Borgata. Guardian is routinely unpunctual and speaks off the cuff with enough dash that Chris Filiciello, his chief of staff, usually sticks close to keep watch. At City Hall, a dreary D.M.V.-like cube of concrete and glass, they share an office on the seventh floor, with sweeping views toward Revel and the South Inlet. When I visited, Filiciello looked on coolly from his desk, dipping into a tub of animal crackers, while Guardian enumerated some of the intractable financial problems the city faces. “If I can take eighty million out of the budget, that’s sustainable, but that’s not feasible right now, not if we want to provide public safety and public works. I can get forty out.”

In public, he projects a no-bullshit boosterism reminiscent of Ed Koch. He was the keynote speaker at this year’s annual luncheon of the Metropolitan Business and Citizens Association, a kind of super-charged chamber of commerce. The luncheon was at Caesars Palace, on the day, as it happens, that Caesars, the parent company, declared bankruptcy. The Palladium Ballroom was filled with glad-handers, as the casino’s employees—employed for now—poker-facedly delivered pats of butter molded into the profile of Augustus.

“You think you had a bad day?” Guardian began. “I woke up this morning, Caesars filed bankruptcy, all three elevators are broken in City Hall, and there’s a major water leak at public works.” He went on, “Hey, at least we’re not Detroit!”

“Last year, I promised you a root canal,” Guardian told the crowd. “I just forgot the Novocain.” But the good news was that “the root canal is over and the healing is about to begin.” Or, as he said at the end, “2015’s got to be better than 2014. 2014 sucked!”

The hosts of the luncheon, and the founders of the M.B.C.A., were the local philanthropists Gary Hill and John Schultz. Schultz, an Atlantic City native and three-term city councilman, and Hill, from Reading, Pennsylvania, made their money operating night clubs (Studio Six, Club Tru) in a forlorn stretch of town where the Sands used to be. Eventually, the casinos figured out the night-club business, so Schultz and Hill got out, and started giving their money away. Twenty years ago, they bought an old building near the clubs, next door to a porn shop, and converted the top three floors into a triplex they called Casa Del Cielo, where they live together and preside as ambassadors, of a kind, over various gaudy but charitable entertainments. In a way, they are avatars of the town’s long-dormant gay scene, which has reawakened in recent years.

The night of the luncheon, they had me up for a drink. Past a suite of paintings by Ringo Starr and a library shelved with scrapbooks chronicling Hill and Schultz’s twenty-seven years together, a loggia led to a heated pool, which they once filled with wine corks. Here and there were garish furnishings salvaged from the casinos: headboards from Trump Plaza, smokestacks and banquettes from the Showboat, chandeliers from the Sands. Last summer, they hosted Mayor Guardian’s wedding; Schultz officiated. The event was catered by Hauke and Tony Boloney’s.

It was hard to find a building or enterprise in the city limits that was not in some way touched by crisis and folly. But none was more conspicuous, and of greater likely consequence to the city in the long run, than Revel. Last September, with Glenn Straub’s ninety-million-dollar offer as the stalking horse, the bankruptcy court held an auction to sell it. The winner, at a hundred and ten million dollars, was Brookfield Property Partners, based in Toronto. Brookfield owned the Atlantis in Nassau and the Hard Rock in Las Vegas, and so saw some synergy here, but it couldn’t make a deal with the owners of Revel’s adjacent power plant, which had been built solely for Revel and was charging Revel three million dollars a month for utilities. (The power plant was a separate, independently owned entity, called ACR Energy Partners—an arrangement that has proved poisonous.) In November, Brookfield decided to forfeit its deposit, of eleven million dollars, and walk away. The only bid left, apparently, was the one predicated on a Tower of Geniuses.

Straub began unfurling his plans. He said he’d spend three hundred million dollars building the second tower and another half billion to buy up derelict property around town. He’d refurbish Bader Field, the defunct downtown airport, and establish an equestrian center for two thousand horses, polo fields, high-speed ferries to Manhattan, a life-extension university, and the world’s biggest indoor water park.

Whenever I called Straub, he answered his own phone and seemed not to have assistants or gatekeepers, or any kind of filter at all. The first time he picked up, at his club, he told me, through bites of an apple, that he had just finished playing a polo match, that he lived and worked on a yacht, that he was debt-free, and that he had two brilliant adult daughters with whom he had failed to spend enough time. Once, he answered his phone as he was getting fingerprinted by the Casino Control Commission, for his gambling-license application. Another time, he announced that he was at a urinal. With bankruptcy-court procedures in mind, I asked, “So what comes next?” and he replied, “I wash my hands.”

Straub invited me to meet him at Revel one day in February, on one of his trips to town. He tended to fly up on Spirit Airways, to save money. When I arrived, he was still busy trying to buy Bader Field. (The city, the Mayor had told me, wanted far more for it than Straub was willing to pay.) Straub also talked of buying the racetrack, Trump Plaza, the Showboat, and several large tracts of undeveloped land in various parts of the city. At times, he talked as though he’d bought some of these things already.

“Have ye seen a whale that matches this swatch?”

In the all but abandoned Revel corporate offices, overlooking a slatey winter sea, two of the remaining Revel employees were waiting for Straub to arrive. They didn’t work for him yet, but, given that he was the putative buyer, they allowed him to use the space and they were inclined to be deferential.

“It’s kind of hard to believe Glenn Straub might be our white knight, but here we are,” one said.

“Just a tip,” the other said. “He likes to be called Mr. Straub.”

Straub arrived alone, wearing a zip-up hoodie under a blazer. He had a Florida tan and hair that was brushed back and reddish-brown. He’s trim, at sixty-eight, and he had the bent gait of an aging country-club athlete. In a kitchenette, he made a sandwich for himself and sat down in a conference room with a view down the boardwalk: in the foreground, the empty lot that would one day, he hoped, be home to his water park, and then, stretching south, the casino cordillera—Showboat, Taj, Resorts, Bally’s, Caesars, Trump, Trop.

“It’ll be done the right way,” Straub said. “I’ll actually wash the windows here. It’ll cost a couple of dollars. There must be ten million windows in this frigging place. That’s the first thing we’ll do. Get the laser light shows and wash the windows and hire four thousand employees. That way, I’ll get the politicians. ‘Oh, Straub, I know him. I want to do business with one of his marinas,’ or whatever. . . . Get their attention. ‘Guys, I got a high-speed ferry. . . . Midtown Manhattan, what do you got there for a pier?’ Politicians can get you into that place that you can’t get into.”

Straub’s way of talking in a stream-of-consciousness rush, in the manner of an Appalachian Don King, often made his big plans seem scattershot and his tactical explanations disjointed, at least to someone not adept in vulture finance. “He has a learning disability,” his daughter Kim, a branding consultant in New York, told me. “When he was a kid, when it was time to read aloud in class, he’d count the people who were supposed to read before him and then, just before his turn, go to the rest room. He’s a bit of a savant.”

Straub comes from Wheeling, West Virginia, where his father had a business providing transportation to the Texas Eastern pipeline and later owned auto-leasing franchises and taxi fleets. “So you worked, and if you didn’t work Dad got the belt out and beat your butt,” Straub said. “Anyway, he died, just when I got my driver’s license.” After high school, Straub and a brother helped run the businesses. In time, they owned a network of sand and gravel quarries and concrete and asphalt plants; highway- and airport-construction contracts made them rich. (In recent years, those long-moribund quarries, in the upper Ohio River Valley, have been found to sit atop vast reserves of oil and gas, extractable by horizontal drill, making Straub even richer.)

Straub retired at forty, moving his family (his wife, from whom he divorced in 2007, and two daughters) to Florida. “I lasted six months,” he said. He started investing in distressed and bankrupt properties. It was a good time to have cash on hand. In the wake of the savings-and-loan crisis, at a Resolution Trust Corporation auction, he bought a twenty-two-hundred-acre golf and polo club in Wellington, for $27.1 million. It was called Palm Beach Polo. “All of a sudden, people were giving me a half a million dollars for an acre,” he said. “I sold two or three hundred million dollars’ worth, and we still have another thousand acres down there.” A big driver was the equestrian center: “Never once thought it would turn out to be a gold mine, but it did turn out to be a gold mine, because then the Bloombergs of the world and their daughters, and all the movie stars’ daughters, they would go down there, and they would have the big Olympic stars do the show jumping, and there was this thing called polo. I didn’t know what a polo game looked like. They put you on a horse. And I thought, This isn’t that hard. I was good in sports, amateur sports. I can hit things. I can pick a fly out of the air.”

Straub has been called “the dictator of Palm Beach polo.” His reign has been contentious. In numerous lawsuits, he has been accused of neglecting his residents, as well as the grounds, and charging undue fees. In 2010, he was tried, and ultimately acquitted, on criminal charges of polluting protected wetlands. He was once convicted of contempt, after interfering with a federal marshal who’d come to seize a yacht at a marina Straub owned. He tried to appeal the verdict all the way to the Supreme Court, without success. Through the years, he has been proudly litigious. “If you check me out, I’m pretty good at protecting our rights in the court system,” Straub told me.

In the conference room, he told me about his idea for an ocean liner. “An old ocean liner, like the QE2. I’m gonna buy it,” he said. He squeezed mayonnaise from a packet. “Bring this ocean liner in, and I don’t know if you’ve been around Ripley’s down in Orlando, the whole building shaking and everything else. I’m gonna teach my kids, or my kids’ kids, what World War II was all about, and the Holocaust, and Zeros coming in from Japan, and so when you go inside this thing, this ship, it’s gonna make you feel like you’re being bombed, like Pearl Harbor when the damned Zeros came in, took out our whole fleet in the Pacific. The ship’s suites where the crew used to be will be for my construction workers, because if we’re gonna spend this kind of money up here I need to get cheap housing for them, so instead of shipping them back to Philadelphia and bringing them here every day I’ll let them store themselves in the bottom of the ship. It’ll be like the back lots at M-G-M.”

Throughout the winter, Straub made regular trips to Atlantic City and to the federal bankruptcy court in Camden, where he pressed his attempt to have his bid approved. Amid innumerable motions, hearings, and rulings, attorneys representing bank lenders, unsecured creditors, jilted tenants, other prospective buyers, the power company, and the gutted estate argued for and against his offer, sometimes changing sides as the circumstances evolved. Other bidders waded in and wandered off. The power company remained a sticking point. The lawyers racked up their fees and did their pressers on the courthouse steps.

One cold morning in February, Straub arrived at the courthouse in a gray suit, with a trenchcoat slung over his shoulders. He said he’d left his cell phone in a bathroom at the airport, and someone had retrieved it and was sending it back. He looked at the pairs of lawyers filing in through the door. “A few more guys and we’ll get a soccer game going here,” he said. “I wish I was getting paid a thousand bucks an hour.” Straub’s lawyer, Stuart Moskovitz, of Freehold, not normally a bankruptcy attorney, called them the “bankruptcy cabal.” It was essentially the deadline on Straub’s bid, now at ninety-five million dollars, but he had failed to close, owing to some unresolved questions about his obligation to old leaseholders and to the power plant.

“We need to know what we’re buying,” Moskovitz said.

Revel’s lawyer told the judge, “We’re ready to move on to another buyer.”

“Can I get back to you when there’s someone to overhear me?”

Problem was there didn’t seem to be one. With this in mind, Straub and Moskovitz had been threatening to put in a much lower bid if their offer fell through. At one point, Straub stood and handed his lawyer a piece of paper. Moskovitz read aloud, “Sometimes the judge has to protect the debtor from himself.”

In the back of the courtroom, a lanky man in a yellow sweater, his graying hair perfectly in place and his eyes darting around, fidgeted with his fingers as though he were handling invisible chopsticks. His name was Vincent Crandon. He was a low-profile Jersey dealmaker from Mahwah, and he had been circling various properties in Atlantic City for years, to no avail. He’d failed in attempts to buy Trump Plaza and the Atlantic Club. Early on, he’d been after a bricks-and-mortar property to go with an Internet-gaming company. But his quest had morphed into something else, and so now he just lurked, waiting for the court, or perhaps the entropy of Atlantic City, to scuttle Straub’s bid. Quietly casting himself as the new white knight, he’d submitted an offer, but so far it had gone unacknowledged.

“Straub is done,” Crandon told me later. “We’ve put in a better offer. We’re sitting back, taking our time.” He added, “Straub thinks he’s the only guy in town.”

The town, and the sellers, seemed to think so, too. After the ninety-five-million-dollar offer fell apart, Straub put in a lower bid, for eighty-two million, and lawyers for Revel and the lenders, increasingly desperate, supported it in court. At the beginning of April, the presiding judge, Gloria Burns, who said she would not let the case delay her impending retirement, abruptly ruled in favor of Straub. The questions of the tenants and power plant remained unresolved. For a few days, anyway, the town experienced something like hope.

Atlantic City, formerly a breeding ground for big ideas, was now a tar pit—trapping financial mastodons and big-eyed dreamers, whether or not their intentions were pure, as the capricious gods of commerce looked on. Revel kept luring in new ones. In April, the day after Straub took ownership of Revel, he called Crandon and—according to Crandon, anyway; Straub denies it—offered to flip the property to him for a hundred million dollars. A couple of days later, Crandon drove down to Atlantic City. With Revel blacked out (owing to the inevitable dispute between Straub and ACR, the power company), the only people allowed inside were security officers from the Casino Control Commission. They stood in darkness guarding acres of idled slot machines, which Straub wasn’t technically authorized to own, since he had no gaming license. So, according to Crandon, the two men who would decide Revel’s fate met in one of its parking garages. Crandon had along one of his partners, Don Marrandino, an Atlantic City native known as Rockin’ Don, for his music-industry connections. He had been the president of Hard Rock in Las Vegas and of Caesars East Coast operations. Straub was accompanied by Tara Lordi, his adviser and “toxic-asset manager,” a horsewoman and former banker. Crandon says Straub told them he wanted much more than a hundred million for Revel, but at least he now had a possible out, and Crandon had an in. (Straub says the meeting never happened.)

Crandon had been eying Revel for a year. Crandon, who is fifty-three, grew up in Delaware, but his parents were from New Jersey, and as a kid he worked at a service station his grandfather owned on the Black Horse Pike. His surname used to be Ceccola; Crandon is an adaptation of Cranendonk. His father-in-law is Theodor Cranendonk, a wealthy Dutch oil trader who was once imprisoned in Italy on charges of delivering thirty bazookas to the Mafia. (“It was all made up,” Crandon says. According to Crandon, Dutch commandoes sprung Cranendonk from a prison hospital and brought him back to the Netherlands.) One of Crandon’s investment vehicles is called MidOil, but Cranendonk was not involved in the Revel bid. “He doesn’t do gambling,” Crandon said.

Crandon said his group—“We’re Jersey guys”—planned to spend hundreds of millions reconfiguring the space. The new name would be Rebel. Crandon said they were planning a forty-night Bon Jovi residency. Rockin’ Don had the pull.

The money wasn’t from Jersey guys. Crandon says he spent a marathon weekend in town and in New York wooing representatives from a Chinese real-estate firm that had been buying up properties around the United States. Crandon’s group and the Chinese were betting that Macau, the Asian gambling mecca, was tapped out, amid a Chinese government crackdown on corruption and gambling, and that travellers from mainland China would soon be including South Jersey on their U.S. itineraries. The Atlantic City airport would be the hub for jumbo-jet charters from Asia. The margins are better if you can lure a plane from Hong Kong than a bus from Port Authority. Atlantic City, born in proximity to the population and early industrial wealth of Philadelphia, would now reach halfway around the world for money and the guests from whom to separate it.

Crandon believed that Straub was planning to demolish Revel. A consultant had told him you could net a hundred million dollars if you sold it off as spare parts. There was a precedent: In 2004, Straub bought Miami Arena for twenty-eight million dollars, half what the city had paid to build it. He promised to turn it into a venue for horse shows, conventions, and minor-league sports, to help revive downtown Miami. “Tearing it down serves nobody’s purpose,” Straub said at the time. Four years later, he tore it down.

Events on the ground in Atlantic City seemed to be pushing Straub in that direction. As soon as he bought Revel, he found himself, not unexpectedly, in a war with ACR, the power plant, and thus, in short order, with the city. The maneuverings often seemed frivolous and petty, except that a city was at stake. Straub refused to pay ACR the three million a month for power, and ACR refused to provide it for free. And so Revel remained dark: no light, heat, air, or water, no sprinklers or alarms. The city’s fire marshal deemed the building unsafe, and the city rescinded Straub’s certificate of occupancy and began fining him five thousand dollars a day. Observers wondered about catastrophic fire and debilitating mold.

Straub dug in. He told reporters, as he unsuccessfully challenged the plant’s owners in court, “We’ll erase them off the map.” He brought in a fleet of diesel generators and parked them outside the casino. But he had no permits, and ACR owned much of the connecting infrastructure. Back to court they went. Straub, the loser again, sent the generators away. He told me, referring to city and state officials, “If they won’t work with me, I’ll just go back to Miami.” Publicly, he made the threat explicit: “I’ll tear the building down.”

To circumvent ACR, Straub had set about trying to buy the empty casino next door, the Showboat, and tap into its power plant instead. The Showboat’s owner, at the moment, was Stockton University, the state college, which, a few months earlier, had bought it to establish a long-desired Atlantic City campus. The university had paid just ten dollars a square foot. “You can’t even buy tile at Home Depot for ten dollars a square foot!” Herman Saatkamp, Stockton’s president, told me.

“Seltzer . . . seltzer!”

But the campus plan had suddenly fallen apart, when Trump Entertainment, owners of the Taj Mahal, next door, unexpectedly opted to enforce an old covenant mandating that the Showboat be a casino-hotel, and nothing else. Icahn, who controls Trump, didn’t want a college campus next door. “Who is this guy?” Bob McDevitt, the president of Local 54, the casino workers’ union, said of Icahn, with whom he has been feuding for a year. “How does he get to decide everything? He’s disembowelling the city.”

Icahn blames the unions. “I saved the Tropicana, which was bankrupt, and made it into one of the only vibrant and surviving casinos in Atlantic City,” he told me. “I have also saved the Taj Mahal and have saved six thousand jobs. Bob McDevitt has caused three casinos to close and the loss of thousands of jobs. Ask yourself: Who is the villain of this story?” Capital or labor? Germany or Greece? Depends on whom you talk to. In July, Taj workers, having lost many of their benefits, voted to authorize a strike.

At any rate, now Stockton was stuck with a vacated casino on its balance sheet and monthly maintenance costs of four hundred thousand dollars. That’ll buy you a lot of tile. And so Saatkamp, the university’s president, who is also a leading scholar of George Santayana (“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”), rushed into a provisional agreement to flip the Showboat to Straub. At the end of April, Saatkamp, out of his depth in these sharky waters, resigned as Stockton’s president, his tenure scuttled by the Showboat and Revel mess. Santayana: “Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon.”

Throughout the spring, Crandon pressed for a deal while Straub held out for more. Straub told me, “Everyone says, ‘Oh, you’re so fucking smart, Mr. Straub.’ And I’m saying, ‘I’m not smart. I can just outlast everybody.’ ” Tara Lordi e-mailed Crandon one afternoon in early April:

Can you kindly by the place so I can get back to the warm weather I’m freezing my ass off here.

In early May, according to Crandon, the two men met aboard Straub’s yacht, the Triumphant Lady, which he’d brought north to Atlantic City and docked at the Golden Nugget. Crandon says they actually shook on a deal, for a hundred and thirty-two million dollars. (Straub denies this meeting took place and in general was dismissive when I asked him about Crandon, referring to him as “Kramden.”)

But they continued to haggle over terms and timing as Crandon worked out his arrangement with the Chinese. There were stories of Straub stiffing a local law firm, and of his filling a truck with Revel fixtures and tools, bound for Florida. (He denies wrongdoing in both cases.) His deal to buy the Showboat foundered, and a court gave Stockton the go-ahead to seek another buyer. As weeks passed, Crandon made promises that he’d soon hold the keys to Revel, and then the deal would recede again: Zeno’s paradox down the shore.

At the end of June, Crandon texted me to say that his deal with Straub was off. “Greed and evil have destroyed A.C.” He explained, “What happened is we got circumvented.” Straub, apparently, had cut him out of the loop and gone directly to the Chinese. He had come to see the potential of junkets from overseas. Crandon sent photos of Tara Lordi in Shanghai with a Chinese man, whom he still, vestigially, called “my partner”: “2 days after that photo, Chinese canceled our deal.” Crandon vowed revenge: “We will keep it in litigation for years. No one will get Revel.”

If Straub was really planning to sell to the Chinese, he wasn’t saying. Lordi says she went to Shanghai to play polo. Straub said he was looking for groups to help manage the hotel and the casino. All the while, Revel remained closed. Still no light shows or clean windows, to say nothing of the four thousand new jobs the city so desperately needed. Revel’s remaining employees were let go. There was no one left, really, except for the security guards overlooking the slots, in the sweltering heat of an un-air-conditioned glass box in high summer.

“No word on Revel, Showboat, or any of these things,” Mike Hauke said, down at Tony Boloney’s. “It’s frustrating.” Weekends were busy, weekdays were soft. It was hard to make decisions or plans. “Sometimes, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, you drive around town and see four or five cars.” The talk at the shop was mostly about water parks, or the recent news about the mysterious disappearance of three million dollars, which the Langford administration had given to a Bronx businessman in 2013, for a community-loan program that seems to have never made a loan. ♦

[yeahthatswhatshesaidnyc]

Block partying outside at the Essex Street Market painted by #ytwss homegrrl & ultra talented @geraluz 🌿 http://ift.tt/2qITEYI

[alexander40wong]

David Bowie’s London, Berlin and New York

Following his death in January 2016, tributes to David Bowie sprung up all around the world, showing that he was truly an international icon.

Although his lyrics were often cryptic, with fans and critics puzzling over the deeper meanings to both his biggest hits and bootlegged obscurities, the influence of cities in Bowie’s work was clear to see – from the Philadelphia soul sound of the Young Americans LP to his brief (but memorable) stint in LA, which resulted in both the album Station to Station and the film The Man Who Fell to Earth, both key works in Bowie’s catalogue.

However, there are three cities that played a particularly important part in his life – London, Berlin and New York. Here’s our guide to the sights and neighbourhoods in these cities that shaped Bowie’s life and music.

London

Bowie street art, Brixton

South London

Brixton High Street

Born in Brixton on 8th January 1947, David Robert Jones spent the first six years of his life in the area, living at 40 Stansfield Road, and attending the nearby Stockwell Primary School.

His family then moved even further into the South London suburbs, to Bromley, living at first on Cannon Road, then Clarence Road and Plaistow Grove. Bowie attended Bromley Technical High School, now Ravens Wood School, and studied the saxophone with musician Ronnie Ross, at his house at 6 Irvine Way in nearby Orpington.

Although Bowie’s time in Brixton was relatively brief, the town centre was the centre of London’s tribute events to him after he died, and you can still see the mural of him at Tunstall Road, near Brixton Station.

Soho

Denmark Street, Soho

While growing up in the suburbs, Bowie had his sights set on central London – and Soho in particular – which was just starting to swing. Several of his early songs focus on the London scene, which he had first hand experience of, from playing gigs in his early groups at the rock venues that were springing up around the city, and there are plenty of Bowie-related sights to explore in the area.

Denmark Street was the heart of Britain’s music industry in the 1960s, and Bowie spent much of the time when he was starting out at the Giaconda Cafe at number 9.

The Giaconda closed down in 2015, but you can still visit another of Bowie’s regular watering holes – The Ship on Wardour Street -which was one of his favourite spots to meet journalists for interviews.

Just off Regent Street, you’ll find Heddon Street, where the front cover image of the Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was photographed – there’s a plaque on number 15 marking the exact spot.

Beckenham

Inspired by cutting-edge London venues like the Drury Lane Arts Lab, Bowie moved back to South London, and set up his own equivalent – the Beckenham Arts Lab, at the Three Tun Pub at 157 Beckenham High Street.

Initially Bowie lived in a flat at 24 Foxgrove Road, near Beckenham Junction Station, before moving to an apartment in Haddon Hall, Southend Road with his then girlfriend, Angie, who he married at Bromley Registry Office on May 19th 1970.

Both Haddon Hall and the Three Tun Pub are now gone (the latter is now home to a Zizzi restaurant, but its place in rock ‘n roll history was marked with a plaque in 2010), but you can still visit the Croydon Road Recreation Ground, where Bowie organised a festival in August 1969 – an event he commemorated in his 1970 single, Memory of a Free Festival.

Aylesbury

Hop on a train from Marylebone Station, and head about 30 miles north to Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire. The pretty market town might seem to be a long way from swinging London, but it plays a major role in some of Bowie’s key works from the period.

In 1971, Bowie played a low-key gig at the town’s Friars’ Club, debuting some of the songs off his much-anticipated album Hunky Dory.

The show went so well that he kept his backing band from the night, later renaming them the Spiders From Mars for Hunky Dory’s follow up – Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

The market square mentioned in the Ziggy Stardust’s opening track, Five Years, is believed to be Aylesbury’s, and the square will soon have a statue of Bowie as a tribute, after a successful fund-raising campaign from fans.

And that’s not the only link Aylesbury has to Bowie’s career – he also played the Friars Club twice on the Ziggy Stardust tour, including the opening night of the tour. For the second show, Bowie transported some of the world’s most influential rock critics to the small market town, as well as art icon Andy Warhol.

The Friars Club itself closed and reopened a number of times, but, following its 40th anniversary celebrations in 2009, it remains open for good, and still stages gigs at the town’s Waterside Theatre.

Eventim Apollo, Hammersmith

Eventim Apollo, Hammersmith

The Ziggy Stardust story came to an end in West London, at the Hammersmith Odeon. At the final date of the album’s tour – captured on film as Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars: The Motion Picture – Bowie killed off his creation, announcing to the crowd that this was the last gig that he’d ever play (needless to say, it wasn’t), before launching into Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide.

Still one of London’s most famous concert venues, the now Eventim Apollo also hosted fellow Bromley-native Kate Bush’s record-breaking live return in 2014.

Berlin

Schöneberg

After a brief, but troubled (and drug-addled) period living in LA. Bowie moved to Berlin in 1976, along with his friend, former Stooges-frontman Iggy Pop.

Inspired by its architecture and history (as well as the famous interwar novels of writer Christopher Isherwood, who Bowie had met earlier in the decade) Bowie had a long-standing fascination with the city. He was also attracted to Berlin as it was a very cheap place to live at the time, and despite already being one of the most famous musicians in the world, it was also a place where he could live a fairly ordinary life, undisturbed by the locals.

The period Bowie spent in the city became one of the most productive in his career, inspiring not just his own “Berlin Trilogy” – the classic albums Low, Heroes and Lodger – but also Pop’s The Idiot and Lust for Life, which Bowie co-wrote and produced.

Bowie and Pop rented a flat at 155 Haupstrausse in Schöneberg. The area was, and still is, the centre of Berlin’s gay district, and Bowie was attracted to the vibrant scene.

He regularly hung out in the Anderes Ufer cafe, just a couple of doors down from the apartment. Now known as Neues Ufer, the cafe hasn’t changed too much since then – although there are now a few portraits of Bowie on its walls.

Neukölln

He might not have got its name quite right when he wrote about it on the Heroes record, but the district of Neukölln played an important part in Bowie’s stay in the city.

He first arrived in town at the district’s Tempelhof airport, and filmed scenes for Just a Gigalo in the imposing Stadtbad Neukölln on Ganghoferstrasse. Dating back to 1914, the swimming baths are still open – and just as impressive – today.

During the 1970s, the area was particularly deprived, and its housing blocks were the childhood home of Christiane F. a young drug addict whose autobiography became a sensation, later turned into a film soundtracked by and featuring Bowie.

Today, however, it’s one of Berlin’s trendiest areas, close to vibrant Kreuzberg, while the former Tempelhof airport site is now the city’s largest park, which hosts sporting events and music festivals.

Hansa Tonstudio

Hansa Tonstudio

Bowie, Pop and producers Tony Visconti and Brian Eno created some of their most famous works at the grand Hansa studios – including all of the Heroes and Lust for Life LPs.

Found at the edge of West Berlin, the studio’s view of the Berlin Wall inspired the lyrics to Heroes’ title track. Bowie watched Visconti’s secret rendezvous with his then-girlfriend outside the studio and transformed it into the story of two lovers who had been separated by the Wall.

Hansa studios are still in use today, and there are often tours around the complex, so you can explore the famous building and its impressive decor.

Potsdamer Platz to KaDeWe

Potsdamer Platz

During the period that Bowie lived in the city, Berlin was still very much a run-down, divided and even dangerous city.

For his comeback single in 2013, Where Are We Now, Bowie reflected on how much the city had changed, documenting a journey from Potsdamer Platz, to the Dschungel disco and the KaDeWe department store.

During his time in the city, at the height of the Cold War, the less-than-3km trip was a difficult journey, crossing the divide of the then-desolate wall-side surroundings of Potsdamer Platz to the relative opulence of Dshungel (known as Berlin’s answer to Studio 54) and KaDeWe. Now, in 2013, it was as simple as jumping on a train (you can do so too – just take the U2 line from Potsdamer Platz Bahnhof and hop off at Wittenbergplatz).

Today, Potsdamer Platz is a bustling area, surrounded by shops and offices. Dschungel closed down, but you can stay in its former home – which is now the Ellington Hotel (inspired by the club’s previous life as a jazz venue).

SO36

One of Bowie and Pop’s regular haunts that hasn’t changed much today (relatively speaking) is the SO36 club, in Kreuzberg. Bowie and Pop spent many nights at the club, which was the centre of the city’s punk scene. It still regularly hosts gigs by both local and international rock acts, as well as parties, gay nights and a monthly roller disco.

For a rather more refined night on the town, head to the Paris Bar at 152 Kantsrasse in Charlottenburg – an elegant French restaurant, whose steak frites Bowie was particularly fond of.

New York

Bowie street art, New York

Essex House

Essex House, Manhattan

 After spending much of the 1980s living in Switzerland, Bowie married the supermodel Iman in the early 1990s and moved to New York soon afterwards.

Settling in an apartment in the art deco landmark Essex House at 160 Central Park South, New York reinspired Bowie. Records like 1.Outside and Reality contained references to the city’s life, creative scene, and architecture and earned Bowie some of his best reviews in years.

The Essex House apartment recently went on sale, with an asking price of $6.5 million (although, as it comes with Bowie’s old grand piano, and amazing views of Central Park, that seems like a bit of a bargain).

Even if you can’t afford that, you can still get an experience of staying at Essex House, as the building is also home to the JW Marriott Essex House hotel.

Greenwich Village

Washington Square Park

Greenwich Village has shaped Bowie’s work in several ways. Its folk scene in the 1960s both inspired the young Bowie at the start of his career and was directly referenced in songs like Hunky Dory’s Song for Bob Dylan, and The Next Day’s (You Will) Set the World on Fire, which mentions the famous folk venues Gaslight and The Bitter End (which you can still find today at 147 Bleecker Street).

Bowie recorded the Young Americans album at Electric Lady Studios at 52 West Eighth Street. Founded by Jimi Hendrix, the studio is also still open today – recently hosting Lana Del Rey and Frank Ocean.

Greenwich Village is also home to Washington Square Park, which Bowie named his favourite place in the city.

Lafayette Street, Soho

After Essex House, Bowie and Iman moved to an apartment at 285 Lafayette Street, where he spent the rest of his life.

He was often spotted in the neighbourhood, record shopping on Bleecker Street or browsing the shelves at the Mcnally Jackson bookshop at 52 Prince Street.

The area also plays an earlier part in Bowie’s story. During the 1980s, he met Chic’s Nile Rodgers at the Continental – a bar well-known by musicians, and still in the same place by the Astor Place subway. The two went on to work together on several records, including Let’s Dance – which became Bowie’s best-selling album.

Galleries

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Bowie was a passionate art collector, and you can find some of the city’s best galleries within walking distance of his New York apartments. Lafayette Street is close to a number of private galleries, as well as the innovative New Gallery, which showcases upcoming talent. From Essex House, take a leisurely stroll through central park to some of the city’s most famous galleries, including the Guggenheim – with a world beating collection of modern art, with works by the likes of Andy Warhol, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Also known as the Met, the museum has one of the world’s greatest collections of art, including works by Tintoretto, one of Bowie’s favourite painters (he named his publishing company after the Italian old master).

Theatres

No visit to New York is complete without a trip to its world-famous Theater District, and two of the city’s theatres have a strong Bowie connection.

At the Booth Theater in 1980, Bowie took over the lead role in the hit production of The Elephant Man, and won rave reviews. In 2014, Bradley Cooper also took on the role on the Booth Theater’s stage.

The New York Theatre Workshop, at 79 East 4th Street, just around the Lafayette Street apartment, is where Bowie created one of his final works, the musical Lazarus, which premiered just a month before his death.

Where next?

Why stop there? Bowie was known for his love of traveling, with the subject inspiring several of his songs.

If you’re looking to extend your own Bowie tour, you could head to Blonay, Lausanne or Montreux in Switzerland, where Bowie lived and worked during the late 1970s and 80s, or the Caribbean island of Mustique, where he and Iman had a holiday home.

The V&A Museum’s hit David Bowie Is… exhibition also continues to travel the world, and can be seen at Barcelona’s Museu del Disseny from 25th May, and the Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (MAMbo) in Italy, from 14th July – 13th November.

The post David Bowie’s London, Berlin and New York appeared first on lastminute.com Blog.

from lastminute.com Blog http://www.lastminute.com/blog/david-bowies-london-berlin-new-york/

[touristguidebuzz]

7 Hospitality Lessons From the New York Restaurant That’s a Tourist Attraction

Tao Downtown's dining room, pictured here and located in New York City, estimates it served more than 220,000 customers in 2016. Tao Group

Skift Take: The Tao Group knows its clientele very well and it understands how to be the destination for tourists, locals looking to party and businessmen and women using their corporate cards for its notable hospitality and cuisine.

— Dan Peltier

If there’s a venture with a projected shelf life of five minutes, it’s a nightlife restaurant in New York’s Meatpacking District. The exception? Tao Downtown.

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Since it opened in 2013, with heavy wooden doors that look like they were airlifted in from an ancient Chinese fort, the temple to Pan-Asian-style food and drinks has been a prime Manhattan destination for athletes, celebrities, and businessmen and women waving corporate cards to out-of-town families.

Each night, some 1,200 people stream through the David Rockwell-designed, 22,000-square-foot, bilevel maze of dark wood-paneled rooms decorated with candles and giant Buddhas. The 300-seat dining room is massive by New York standards; the new Union Square Cafe, also designed by Rockwell, seats about 90.

Tao Downtown estimates it did more than 220,000 covers (aka customers) in 2016—significantly more than the population of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood. There’s almost always a line to get into the adjoining nightclub.

According to an annual survey by Restaurant Business, Tao posted almost $34 million in food and beverage sales in 2016. That’s the highest-ranking spot for a non-chain restaurant in New York, and the third-highest in the U.S.

What’s in first place?

Tao Asian Bistro in Las Vegas, where total sales were just shy of $48 million. Third place is actually a decline for Tao Downtown; in 2015 the club claimed the list’s No. 2 spot with $38 million in sales. (This year, second place went to the venerable Joe’s Stone Crab in Miami.) Even so, Tao Group dominates the 2016 list; another of its New York restaurants, Lavo, came in sixth with sales of $27.5 million. Tao Uptown, with $23 million in sales, came in 11th.

In February, Tao Group announced a partnership with the Madison Square Garden Co., which acquired a 62.5 percent stake in the company for $181 million. This month, industry insiders say Tao will also be taking over the space on the second floor of 130 E. 57th St. that housed Frederick Lesort’s restaurant lounge Opia. Meanwhile, Tao itself is expanding: In April it will open its first locations in Los Angeles, a complex in the Dream Hotel in Hollywood. The group has plans for additional U.S. cities and Asia, as well.

How does Tao stay ahead of the game and keep making money? Rich Wolf, one of Tao Group’s co-founders (along with Marc Packer, Noah Tepperberg, and Jason Strauss), gave me a behind-the-scenes tour of the place. He was joined by Tao Downtown’s general manager, Tony Oswain, and chef/partner Ralph Scamardella. Here are their secrets.

Be a One-Stop Shop

Rule No. 1 at Tao: Don’t give guests a reason to leave. Most people will spend at least a drink’s worth of time at the softly lit, brick-walled Ink Bar in what’s called the Eastern Mezzanine before heading down the grand staircase to a dining room, where a DJ spins in the background. Then they can move to the perennially packed club, where the roster of acts includes Tiësto, Lorde, Kanye West, Swizz Beatz, and the ubiquitous Questlove. It’s easier to gain entrance if you’re coming from dinner, the team confirms. Tao’s kitchen is open until 2 a.m.; the club closes at 4.

The group will stay true to the formula at its coming Los Angeles home. The Dream Hotel will include Tao Asian Bistro, Beauty & Essex (another of its empire builders), and a brand-new concept, Luchini Pizzeria & Bar. Here’s how Wolf sees it: “We’ve built several concepts on one block—two restaurants, plus the Highlight Room on the roof with a club and a pool. You can take an Uber over in the afternoon, then roll from the pool to the restaurant to the club. And stay in the hotel if you don’t feel like going home.”

Create a Dining Destination

“The beauty of Tao is that you can order two sushi rolls or go all out and have an $800 live crab,” says Oswain. Most people don’t order that live crab: The average check is $75. Still, there’s an audience for pricier entrees, like a recent surf-and-turf special of Japanese wagyu with African prawns the size of lobsters. They sell for $150 each, and the restaurant usually processes 25 orders of the dish per night.

One fact that doubters overlook: The food at Tao is good. Scamardella makes regular trips to Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo in search of inspiration. “People don’t come here for basic fried rice,” the chef says. (He adds barbecue duck and lobster with kimchi to his.) Scamardella calls his food “as chopstick-friendly as possible,” which makes diners more inclined to share and invariably pushes up check averages.

The one dish you’ll find on almost every table is the $23 miso-glazed Chilean sea bass satay. “It’s the dish that built the empire,” says Wolf. Chef Scamardella estimates Tao Downtown sells 700 orders a night and goes through about 2,500 pounds of sea bass per week.

Embrace Convention

You won’t find a daily changing special at Tao; instead, Scamardella plans his menus ahead. “We don’t do specials based on what’s at the market or what we have left over,” he says.

Rather, he orders ingredients such as Japanese beef way ahead to run as an off-the-menu. Conventions have a big effect on his calendars of specials. “In January they release the convention schedule,” Scamardella says. “If one of the big conventions is in town—the construction and concrete guys spend a lot of money—I know we’ll be having some big-ticket specials, and I order accordingly.”

Crowd Control

The Tao Group knows its audience, and it knows their schedules. Mondays and Tuesdays, the Tao Downtown crowd can comprise up to 80 percent people with corporate cards, according to Wolf. “But it changes by the hour,” he notes. “As it gets later, the suits and ties disappear.”

The biggest spending days are Wednesday and Thursday; Saturdays and Sundays are the lightest. “That’s the bridge-and-tunnel crowd,” says chef Scamardella. “People come in to celebrate, but they spend less money.”

Drinking Up

Alcohol makes up a little more than 50 percent of Tao’s sales, a huge number compared with percentages in the 20s at most other places.

Ryan Arnold, wine director of the Chicago-based Lettuce Entertain You restaurant group, puts it into perspective: “Tao’s drinks numbers are insane. They’re the stuff of legend in the restaurant world. At our places, I’m happy when I see alcohol percentage in the mid-20s. I dream about a number like 32 percent.” Drinks in Tao’s bar and restaurant, like the best-selling vodka-based Ruby Red Dragon or the Tao-tini, cost $17—not an outrageous price, at least by the standards of New York cocktail lounges.

How are they hitting their mark? The sheer volume helps—these are crowd-pleasing, guzzler-style beverages—as do club sales: Drinks are closer to $20 there, and bottle service ranges from about $250 to $290 a person.

Avoid Undesirable Associations

Wolf is adamant about one thing: Tao Downtown is not technically in the Meatpacking District, where the official northern boundary is 14th Street. (Tao is on 16th, just off Ninth Avenue.) Tao benefits from first-time visitors who are headed to the neighborhood to party, as well as from regulars who know it’s easy to get to. “The Meatpacking District is a quagmire,” says Wolf. “You get stuck in it, and you say, ‘I’m not going back there.’ Tao is easy in and easy out.’”

The Celebrity Factor

“Capital didn’t have a lot to do with it,” Wolf says about the recent deal with Madison Square Garden. “A lot of our venues are driven by celebrities.  If someone has a concert at MSG, they’ll come here to party. Plus there’s synergy. MSG has venues all over the place. They’re building an arena in Vegas near the Sands. Imagine what can happen at Marquee.”

Following the L.A. opening, Tao has deals in place at the Sands in Singapore, where the group will open a nightclub and a couple of restaurants in 18 months. And the co-founders are employing their hub strategy elsewhere in the U.S. In early 2018 they’ll open a Tao and a new concept in Chicago. Further into the future? “Miami is probably the only other U.S. city we’d look at,” says Wolf.

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This article was written by Kate Krader from Bloomberg and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@newscred.com.

[mastcomm]

To Tame Coronavirus, Mao-Style Social Control Blankets China

SHANGHAI — China has flooded cities and villages with battalions of neighborhood busybodies, uniformed volunteers and Communist Party representatives to carry out one of the biggest social control campaigns in history.

The goal: to keep hundreds of millions of people away from everyone but their closest kin.

The nation is battling the coronavirus outbreak with a grass-roots mobilization reminiscent of Mao-style mass crusades not seen in China in decades, essentially entrusting front line epidemic prevention to a supercharged version of a neighborhood watch.

Housing complexes in some cities have issued the equivalents of paper hall passes to regulate how often residents leave their homes. Apartment buildings have turned away their own tenants if they have come from out of town. Train stations block people from entering cities if they cannot prove they live or work there. In the countryside, villages have been gated off with vehicles, tents and other improvised barriers.

Despite China’s arsenal of high-tech surveillance tools, the controls are mainly enforced by hundreds of thousands of workers and volunteers, who check residents’ temperature, log their movements, oversee quarantines and — most important — keep away outsiders who might carry the virus.

Residential lockdowns of varying strictness — from checkpoints at building entrances to hard limits on going outdoors — now cover at least 760 million people in China, or more than half the country’s population, according to a New York Times analysis of government announcements in provinces and major cities. Many of these people live far from the city of Wuhan, where the virus was first reported and which the government sealed off last month.

Throughout China, neighborhoods and localities have issued their own rules about residents’ comings and goings, which means the total number of affected people may be even higher. Policies vary widely, leaving some places in a virtual freeze and others with few strictures.

China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, has called for an all-out “people’s war” to tame the outbreak. But the restrictions have prevented workers from returning to factories and businesses, straining China’s giant economy. And with local officials exercising such direct authority over people’s movements, it is no surprise that some have taken enforcement to extremes.

Li Jing, 40, an associate professor of sociology at Zhejiang University in the eastern city of Hangzhou, was almost barred from taking her husband to a hospital recently after he choked on a fish bone during dinner. The reason? Her neighborhood allows only one person per family to leave the house, every other day.

“Once the epidemic was disclosed, the central government put huge pressure on local officials,” Professor Li said. “That triggered competition between regions, and local governments turned from overly conservative to radical.”

Updated Feb. 10, 2020

What is a Coronavirus? It is a novel virus named for the crown-like spikes that protrude from its surface. The coronavirus can infect both animals and people, and can cause a range of respiratory illnesses from the common cold to more dangerous conditions like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS.

How contagious is the virus? According to preliminary research, it seems moderately infectious, similar to SARS, and is possibly transmitted through the air. Scientists have estimated that each infected person could spread it to somewhere between 1.5 and 3.5 people without effective containment measures.

How worried should I be? While the virus is a serious public health concern, the risk to most people outside China remains very low, and seasonal flu is a more immediate threat.

Who is working to contain the virus? World Health Organization officials have praised China’s aggressive response to the virus by closing transportation, schools and markets. This week, a team of experts from the W.H.O. arrived in Beijing to offer assistance.

What if I’m traveling? The United States and Australia are temporarily denying entry to noncitizens who recently traveled to China and several airlines have canceled flights.

How do I keep myself and others safe? Washing your hands frequently is the most important thing you can do, along with staying at home when you’re sick.

“Even when the situation is relieved or if the mortality rate turns out not to be high, the government machine is unable to change direction or tune down,” she added.

China’s prevention efforts are being led by its myriad neighborhood committees, which typically serve as a go-between for residents and the local authorities. Supporting them is the government’s “grid management” system, which divides the country into tiny sections and assigns people to watch over each, ensuring a tight grip over a large population.

Zhejiang Province, on China’s southeastern seaboard, has a population of nearly 60 million and has enlisted 330,000 “grid workers.” Hubei Province, whose capital is Wuhan, has deployed 170,000. The southern province of Guangdong has called upon 177,000, landlocked Sichuan has 308,000 and the megacity of Chongqing has 118,000

The authorities are also combining enormous manpower with mobile technology to track people who may have been exposed to the virus. China’s state-run cellular providers allow subscribers to send text messages to a hotline that generates a list of provinces they have recently visited.

At a high-speed rail station in the eastern city of Yiwu this past week, workers in hazmat suits demanded that passengers send the text messages that show their location data before being allowed to leave.

An app developed by a state-run maker of military electronics lets Chinese citizens enter their name and national ID number and be told whether they may have come in contact, on a plane, train or bus, with a carrier of the virus.

It is too early to say whether China’s strategy has contained the outbreak. With large numbers of new infections being reported every day, the government has clear reasons for minimizing human contact and domestic travel. But experts say that in epidemics, overbearing measures can backfire, scaring infected people into hiding and making the outbreak harder to control.

“Public health relies on public trust,” said Alexandra L. Phelan, a specialist in global health law at Georgetown University. “These community-level quarantines and the arbitrary nature in which they’re being imposed and tied up with the police and other officials is essentially making them into punitive actions — a coercive action rather than a public health action.”

In Zhejiang, one of China’s most developed provinces and home to Alibaba and other technology companies, people have written on social media about being denied entry to their own apartments in Hangzhou, the provincial capital. Coming home from out of town, they say, they were asked to produce documents from landlords and employers or be left on the street.

For Nada Sun, who was visiting family in Wenzhou, a coastal city in Zhejiang, a health scare turned into a mandatory quarantine.

When Ms. Sun, 29, complained of tightness in her chest this month, her mother told her to go to the hospital. She did not have a high fever, yet the hospital gave her a battery of checks. All came back negative for the virus.

Even so, when she returned to her apartment, she was told that she would be quarantined for two weeks. She was also added to a group on the WeChat messaging app with a local Communist Party secretary and other volunteers in which she has to submit her temperature and location twice a day.

“I’m worried they have too much information,” Ms. Sun said.

The lockdowns are not necessarily oppressive. Many people in China have been happy to wall themselves off, ordering groceries online and working from home if they can. Some neighborhood officials act with a humane touch.

Bob Huang, a Chinese-born American living in northern Zhejiang, said the volunteers at his complex had helped chase down a man who stayed out overnight to drink, in violation of rules about how often people can step outside. Yet they also delivered food from McDonald’s to a quarantined family.

Mr. Huang, 50, has been able to dodge the restrictions by using a special pass from the property manager, and he has been driving around delivering protective face masks to friends. Some building complexes don’t let him in. Others take down his information.

A nearby village took a less orthodox approach.

“They always start asking questions in the local dialect, and if you can respond in the local dialect, you are allowed to go in,” Mr. Huang said. Unable to speak the dialect, he had to wait, though the villagers were friendly. They gave him a folding chair, offered him a cigarette and didn’t ask for an ID.

Some parts of China have imposed other, often severe policies for fending off the epidemic.

Hangzhou has barred pharmacies from selling analgesics to force people with symptoms to seek treatment at hospitals. The eastern city of Nanjing requires anybody who takes a cab to show ID and leave contact information. Yunnan Province wants all public places to display QR codes that people must scan with their phones whenever they enter or exit.

Many places have banned large gatherings. The police in Hunan Province this month destroyed a mahjong parlor where they found more than 20 people playing the tile game.

With local governments deciding such policies largely on their own, China has become a vast patchwork of fiefs.

“It can be quite haphazard,” said Zhou Xun, a historian of modern China at the University of Essex in England. “A perfect plan on paper often turns into makeshift solutions locally.”

Officials seem to recognize that some local authorities have gone too far. This month, Chen Guangsheng, the deputy secretary general of Zhejiang’s provincial government, called it “inappropriate” that some places had employed “simple and crude practices,” like locking people into their homes to enforce quarantines.

Zhang Yingzi’s apartment complex in Hangzhou initially forbade anybody who had been out of town from entering. Later, the ban was adjusted to cover only people coming from Hubei Province and the Zhejiang cities of Wenzhou and Taizhou, both of which have had many cases of the new virus.

“Banning everyone from out of town wasn’t realistic,” said Ms. Zhang, 29, an accountant. “There are so many of them, after all. Some needed to come back for work.”

Still, many in China are uneasy about loosening up virus controls too quickly.

Zhang Shu, 27, worries that her parents and neighbors are becoming cavalier about the virus, even as workers drive around her village near Wenzhou with loudspeakers telling people to stay home.

“Ordinary people are slowly starting to feel that the situation isn’t so horrible anymore,” Ms. Zhang said. “They are restless.”

Alexandra Stevenson contributed reporting from Hong Kong. Wang Yiwei and Lin Qiqing contributed research.

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