Joanna Walters
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From Times Online
February 16, 2008
New York's new cultural quarter
New York's Lower East Side is growing from faded bohemian seediness into a blossoming centre of culture
OK, WAIT. Tell me that's not a chimpanzee in denim shorts leading a blonde Bavarian milkmaid-type across a busy New York street.
“What's going on?”
“We're filming Germany's Next Top Model,” said a bored movie-minion.
With an ape as an accoutrement? No time to ask more, I'm dashing between the Tenement Museum and The New Museum on a cultural odyssey in one of New York's most fascinating but overlooked neighbourhoods - the Lower East Side.
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Even if you have “done” New York several times, you probably still stay in Midtown near all the most famous sights, museums and venues, where battling through swarming Times Square is a rite of passage and visiting Lower Manhattan is a trek.
But there is so much going on Downtown that there is an exciting argument for turning your next visit on its head and basing yourself in the blossoming Lower East Side - provided you are into the contemporary and the hip as well as the historic, and you won't feel agoraphobic if you are not hemmed in by skyscrapers.
From my floor-to-ceiling windows on the 17th floor close to the top of the Lower East Side's designer pioneer - the Hotel on Rivington - I had seen the rising sun illuminate giant, shimmering glass and metal boxes piled unevenly towards the sky.
This is one of the only other relatively high buildings on the Lower East Side (LES) - the New Museum of Contemporary Art that opened two months ago on the Bowery.
“Da Bowery, dat's da downtown enda Toid Avenoo ” I had overheard a native New Yorker say to visiting friends that morning about the street that is being transformed from faded bohemian seediness to très trendy.
The museum's art buffet ranges from murals and installations, including a piece by “YBA” Sarah Lucas and the original Silence=Death AIDS activism neon sculpture, to predictably puerile nonsense, all within a startling architectural beacon.
Next door is the Bowery Mission, serving the homeless since 1789, where men with non-designer stubble are loitering outside.
“On a Sunday morning the queue waiting for us to open and the queue waiting for them to open would make a photography project in itself,” chirped a museum staffer.
She handed me a map marking many of the tiny galleries that continue to multiply across the LES, a handy accompaniment to the exhaustive list of the coolest restaurants, bars and shops issued by the hotel. I took myself on a tour.
A few blocks away, here it was again. This compelling juxtaposition. Next to one of the old-time grocery stores, a frightening dog is tied up to a piece of street art. His thick lead is knotted around twists of spray-painted ironwork fronting a tiny apartment-cum-gallery with an abstract installation in the window.
The dog's thick-set owner, wearing a black pea coat and beanie hat, is standing near by waiting for a friend to come out of the grocery store.
“What kind of dog is that?” I ask.
“Amassipit.”
“Pardon?”
“Amassipit.... A. Massive. Pit.”
The slavering, muscled, mutant terrier tries to break free.
“Do you like art?” I ask.
“Yeah, I like art. The guy who did this [jerks thumb at sculpture] has been doing it for years round here. He owns the grocery store, too. At least he hasn't sold up yet. They're buying a lot of places up,” he says, introducing himself as Miguel.
“Who're they'?”
“The designers. Y'know, gentrification. In two or three years it'll be as commercialised as SoHo,” he says.
Blocks where tiny boutiques and handbag shops with names such as Plum and Pear are cheek-by-jowl with dollar stores, old Jewish knitwear and pickles shops or delicatessens. And all dotted with a new generation of hip bars and eateries and a handful of exclusive hotels.
The Hotel on Rivington opened three years ago, and with its glass exterior and retro-plush interior, the bar, restaurant and nightclub are still at the heart of a see-and-be-seen scene. The hip-hop star P.Diddy has stayed here and singer Fergie and her Black Eyed Peas. Along with magazines called Preen and Surface on my hotel room's mohair pouffe is Time Out, crammed with listings for indy gigs.
Even more intriguing is the nightclub novelty The Box, an edgy throwback to New York's wilder times. It was considered early when I rocked up there at 12.30am, to catch a witty mix of Eighties dance music, polysexual erotic acts, vaudeville and cabaret on a retro stage that was wowing a cash-splashing young clientele.
Gone are the old LES downsides - crack dens of the Eighties, tubercular slums from Victorian times to the Great Depression when it was dubbed the Garment District and its sweatshops clothed half of America.
The Tenement Museum brilliantly encapsulates the defining early era. Founded in 1988 in a tenement building uninhabited for 50 years, this partly restored time capsule powerfully connects you to the lives of the first German, Italian, Irish and later predominantly Jewish immigrants who teemed off the boats. “It was more densely populated than Calcutta,” explained our guide, Gerry Lemmon, whose Catholic father fled to New York from Belfast's sectarian violence in 1921.
Amid the tourists were two New Yorkers learning about their own heritage, a friend of mine whose Russian-Jewish grandfather had worked in a local hat factory, and one whose French great-uncle helped to build the base for the Statue of Liberty “with his bare hands”.
After the history lesson, it was time for designer tea in an arty café, then off to a chic tapas place, next door to a shabby little bar where a live band was playing Bulgarian folk music, just down from several places to eat where hip New Yorkers make a beeline for weekend brunch.
The Tenement Museum and the New Museum make perfect intellectual bookends for all the anthropological vignettes, music, gastronomic moments and the arts fest crammed into the Lower East Side.
As different as it is quintessential, this often-neglected neighbourhood offers such a new take on New York that this may well be the visit where you truly do never sleep.
Need to know
Staying The Hotel on Rivington (001 212 475 2600, www.hotelonrivington.com), 107 Rivington Street, has doubles from about £240, including breakfast.
Eating Suba tapas bar (982 5714, www.subanyc.com), 109 Ludlow Street; Inoteca restaurant (614 0473, www.inotecanyc.com), 98 Rivington Street.
Museums
The New Museum (219 1222, www.new museum.org), 235 Bowery, about £6 ($12).
Lower East Side Tenement Museum (431 0233, www.tenement.org), 97 Orchard Street; guided tours only, about £8.50 ($17).
Nightlife
The Box (982 9301, www.theboxnyc.com), 189 Chrystie Street; nightclub with dining and theatre, entry by reserving a table (bottle service only).
Uptown, Downtown — what’s new in NYC
Hotels
Robert De Niro’s Greenwich Hotel is due to open to coincide with the annual Tribeca Film Festival from April 24 to May 4. The hotel will be decorated in Tibetan silk rugs and Moroccan tiles. Details: 001 212 941 8900, www.greenwichhotelny.com; 377 Greenwich Street.
The Plaza Hotel is expected to reopen next month with many of its 1907 founding features and its grand ballroom restored in a £175 million makeover. Details: 001 212 759 3000, www.fairmont.com/thePlaza; Fifth Avenue at Central Park South.
Museums
The Sports Museum of America (www.thesportsmuseum.com) opens in spring at 26 Broadway as a hall of fame for sports including American football, basketball, baseball and athletics, with treasured memorabilia and interactive displays.
The Metropolitan Museum (www.metmuseum.org) has launched a new wing and renovated key galleries. The New Greek and Roman Galleries house classical sculpture while the Met has compiled its most comprehensive display of 19th and early 20th-century European art.
Outdoor attractions
The Waterfalls public art display is a series of 90ft-high waterfalls on the East River between Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. The project will be the work of Danish artist Olafur Eliasson. Cascading from mid-July until mid-October. Free.
The High Line (www.thehighline.org) is a 1½-mile section of a former elevated railway line between the Meatpacking District and Chelsea that will be turned into a park. The local community has persuaded the city to transform the strip, derelict since 1980, into an overhead “greenway”.
