The Fate of Diners in NYC

I love diners. Always have. I've dined at Per Se, Jean Georges, Nobu, and 11 Madison Park -- some of the fanciest restaurants in NYC -- but a good diner will always be my favorite place to eat in this town. If heaven had a restaurant, it would be a diner: phone book menus, big portions, refills, padded booths, you name it, I love everything about the taste and feel and vibe of diners. 

How can you not love a place that serves breakfast all day?

But like so many old-school institutions in NYC, places that provide comfort instead of glamour, diners are vanishing. They are being displaced, as is common now, by flashier "cafes" -- if they are being replaced at all (many are simply being closed down and replaced by retail stores). A great diner is like what NYC used to be -- affordable and inclusive -- and, as diners are pushed out by high rents and gentrification, they are replaced by what it's become -- expensive and exclusive. There are still some diners in NYC here and there but, more and more, they are becoming curiosities of the past, not stable parts of our present. As the current President might Tweet, "Sad!"

The withering of diners in NYC has not gone unnoticed. Grubstreet recently published an article and WNYC recently had a segment about the vanishing diners of NYC.  

And this is not a recent development. Back in 2007, in 2007, during the first months of this blog, I noted that the old Moondance Diner on lower 6th Avenue had been sold and literally moved out to a small town in Wyoming (this is the same diner where Jonathan Larson, creator of the musical Rent, used to work). I worked right near the Moondance in 2007 and I remember seeing this once thriving diner close, get uprooted out of the ground, and disappear. (Now some fancy building with an expensive restaurant exists there.) Anyway, I did a little research on what happened to the Moondance in its Western incarnation and it appears that it closed in 2012 and went up for sale. I can't find any more info about whether or not it was ever bought for the $300K asking price so, if you have any further info on the fate of this NYC institution, let me know! 

As for some of my favorite diner in NYC: the Neptune in Astoria. It's right on the corner of Astoria Boulevard, right after the Grand Central, next to the N/W train station. Everything about it's great: the location, the layout, you can always get a table, the service is great, the portions are big, and it's open 24 hours. It's still there and, for the ultimate NYC diner experience, the best place to go. 

Classic Mr NYC

Two years ago I blogged about how diners are rapidly vanishing from the face of NYC. Color me prophetic -- The New York Times only now has written a big article about how diners in this town are, bit by bit, disapearing.

The reasons are obvious (rising rents along with risings costs of doing business) but sometimes it's the case that the land the diner is on is so valuable that the owners can't help but give into temptation and sell it to developers (gas stations in NYC are suffering this particlar fate). 

Diners or "greasy spooons" are bastions of middle class NYC -- thick menus, fast service, open for long hours (sometimes 24/7); you can get a burger and fries or a BLT or a club sandwhich along with a milkshake and bottomless cup o'Joe and still have some cash left over. In an era of fast food and chain restaurants, diners were holdouts for homespun afforadble grub.

In my 2017 post, I sang the praises of the Neptune Diner in Astoria, one of the best in the whole city. Well, the land its on has been sold, its lease is up in August, and it's probably that it'll cloes by the end of the year. This makes me particularly sad because I have lots of great personal memories of this place. If and when it goes, a little piece of my heart will go with it. 

Mr NYC in Minnesota

As lockdown has gone on ... and on ... my mind has been wandering back to places I've traveled over the years. While I haven't gone to that many places, I've gone to enough that I don't always recall them. And, shockingly, it wasn't until last week when I read an article about the State of Minnesota that I even remember that, oh yeah, I spent two summers there in the early 1990s.

Minnesota has been in the news a lot lately. Its biggest city, Minneapolis, was the site of the terrible police murder of George Floyd last year that rocked American race relations and led to coast-to-coast protests. The writer of this article, someone who has traveled and vacationed a lot in the state, indicates that death of George Floyd emphasized that there really two Minnesotas in the same way there are two Americas -- there's the Minnesota of A Prairie Home Campanion, the land of lakes and picturesque small towns, canoe trips and hikes in the forest, highway diners and friendly Scandavian immigrants, pure Americana, pure American myth (white America). Then there's the other Minnesota, the other America, the dark side of this Americana, the one we don't eulogize, the one we try to ignore -- the land of poverty and violence and drugs, the land of racism and police brutality, the land of lives of quiet desperation. The Floyd murder forced Minnesota and white Minnesotans, those in love with the myth, to see this in the nearly 10 minutes that that police officer kept his knee on Mr. Floyd's neck, killing him. 

Americana laid bare.

My Minnesota ventures certainly fell into the myth bucket -- sorta. In the summers after my freshman and sophomore years of high school, I went to a French language camp in northern Minnesota. There are these massive language camps there, run by Concordia University, where American teenagers go, live, speak, and embrace the culture of other countries. The biggest of all the camps was the German camp but they also had French, Chinese, and others. Not only did I go and speak French at this camp for a few weeks each time but it was also my first time meeting kids from other parts of the country. They were so different from kids in NYC, in many ways nicer, in many ways weirder, and the fact that I was from NYC made me strange and exotic to them. It was the first time I realized that most of the people in the rest of the country were both mesmerized and curious about their nation's biggest city. They would ask me lots of questions about it that I, at that young tender age, was incapable of answering.

Otherwise, besides the language part, it was a standard summer camp. Lots of camp fires, lots of sing-alongs, lots of sports, some truth-or-dare games, the whole deal. Honestly, it was second and last summer camp I ever attended -- for the most part summer camp wasn't my thing. I made friends with some kids and we promised that we'd stay in touch and be friends forever -- and now I don't even remember their names. It was typical teenage stuff.

I'd like to go back to Minnesota one day, maybe even venture back to the northern part of the state, to rediscover the myth of the state while also understanding its reality.

P.S. On a short flight from Minneapolis to northern Minnesota I looked back and saw Chelsea Clinton sitting in a seat. She attended one of the other language camps and, needless to say, a lot of people made a fuss over her. Her dad had been president for about six months at that time and the Secret Service agents were around but inconspicous. I didn't talk to her but I did overhear her tell someone about how much effort her mom made in making sure she had packed everything she needed. I remember seeing her drive off from the airport with a scary-looking official car behind the bus.  

P.P.S. Minnesota has produced some brilliant artists, many of whome came to NYC. Bob Dylan. F. Scott Fitzegerald. The Coen Brothers. Something must be in the water there!

To Live and Eat in NYC

Walk down any street in our fair city and you'll find food options a plenty. Chinese, Indian, Italian, Mexican, seafood, fast food, diners, etc. etc. -- all the usual culinary suspects are present and accounted for ad infinitum all over town. Even some of the more obscure, off beat, less obvious choices -- like Korean Cajun or Afghani food -- can be found here as well. To live in NYC is to eat NYC, if you catch my drift. 

One thing that NYC does very well, even our city's biggest detractors would agree, is deli. This is a town where you can get all kinds of great soups, "sammiches", and other tasty Jewish inspired fair. Some delis, like Katz's, are world famous -- even infamous. (The food at Katz's is so good that it made someone have an orgasm in a movie.) Another revered deli is the Carnegie, also made famous in a movie (Woody Allen's Broadway Danny Rose). And yet, like so many old-school institutions in NYC these days, the Carnegie is fated to close. On December 31st it will shut its doors. 

Now this blog is nothing if not nostalgic. I harp on and on about how this town has become gutted by money, the old and wonderful being replaced by the new and cheesy. But I cannot include the Carnegie Deli on this list. First, the Carnegie is not a victim of gentrification and rising rents -- the owners simply wish to close it. Second, even its biggest fans agree, the Carnegie long ago stopped being a real grubby New York joint and became a complete tourist trap. Third, and this is just my humble opinion, the Carnegie was never really that good to begin with. Yes, it had NYC "cred" (for a while at least); yes, the great comics and writers and showbiz types hung out there; and yes, the sandwiches were huge. But really, it was overrated. The tables were cramped, the waiters were rude, and, while the meat in the sandwiches was first-class, the bread was bad and the lettuce was cheap. Even though the meat was good, there was so much of it that eating the sandwiches was more of an ordeal than a pleasure. Who in their right mind can or wants to each that much meat in one sitting? It was ridiculous and not charming. So while I'm sad, in theory, that the Carnegie is closing, it does not mark for me, at least, a great loss for the NYC culture.

That said, Rao's, the historic East Harlem Italian restaurant, is a great piece of the NYC food culture. The impossible-to-get-into "joint" serves some of the best Italian grub that I've ever had -- the lemon chicken, the meatballs, and the cheesecake are outstanding. The original NYC Rao's is 120 years old but now there are locations in LA and Las Vegas that are very popular, and you can also buy their sauces in grocery stores and their cookbooks online and in bookstores. Vanity Fair has a huge article this month about the history and lore of Rao's and it's worth checking out. I've eaten there twice (one of the lucky few) and it really is a fun place. If this place ever closes, I'll actually be sad.

Soul of a City Defined

It can become tiresome to hear New Yorkers, like yours truly, always moan and complain about how NYC is changing for the worse, how the "soul of New York" is being destroyed by money, how "this city ain't what it used to be" -- etc. etc., on and on, ad infinitum. But, as even paranoids sometimes have enemies, sometimes us complainers actually have a point.

Namely, the closure of neighborhood businesses.

Last week, Pearl Paint, the legendary Canal Street art supply store, closed. It had been in business for eighty years -- yes, 80 years! Eight-Oh! Actually, I'm wrong -- it had been in business 81 years, since it first opened in 1933.

To put that into historical perspective, when Pearl Paint opened, FDR was in his first year as president, Hitler was coming into power in Germany, Winston Churchill was still "in the wilderness", Fiorello LaGuardia had not yet been elected mayor, segregation was still legal in much of the country, and television was still two decades in the future. Countless numbers of NYC artists shopped there, including some legends like Julian Schnabel. Now its gone -- a piece of NYC history eradicated. We are a poorer city today because Pearl Paint is gone -- and the legendary downtown art scene has taken a big blow.

And this has happened as neighborhood restaurants have begun to disappear. In Manhattan, it's getting harder and harder to find a nice, funky, relative cheap restaurants with good foods that have a friendly neighborhood vibe. Places like Rocco's and El Faro's in Greenwich Village. Even diners are disappearing in Queens! Without neighborhood restaurants that regular people can afford, where are people in the neighborhood going to congregate? Not everyone wants to go to a bar. Our communities suffer as a result.

Cities aren't real places. 

Cities are neighborhoods -- a collection of neighborhoods, some different, some the same, but all unique. NYC is blessed to have 300 great neighborhoods. But, as local businesses close and are replaced by chain stores, expensive gourmet restaurants, and boutiques, they lose their identities. They stop being unique. There souls are gone. And our city suffers.

Bare Burger

A good burger is hard to find. The easiest to get, obviously, are fast food burgers but they are, well, gross. Diners have good burgers but they're really hit or miss in terms of tastiness. On the other end of the burger spectrum are those super-expensive burgers made from exotics meats that are served on silvers platter by white-gloved waiters in fancy restaurants.

Isn't there a place where you can get a superior burger at a reasonable price in this town?

Yes! In Astoria, Queens, a block or so down from the 30th Avenue N/W subway stop, is a little place that makes awesome burgers with amazing fries. It's called Bare Burger, an organic joint, and these are easily some of the best burgers I've had in NYC in a long, long time.

Bar Burger lets you design your burger from top to bottom. First, you can choose your own meat: Piedmontese beef, turkey, grilled chicken, veggie, Portabella mushroom, bison, ostrich, elk or lamb. Next, choose your bun: brioche, 7 grain or wrap or iceberg lettuce. Then you can select a type of burger from their wonderful menu and have it cooked to your preference.

My wife ordered a veggie burger in a brioche bun which she loved and I ordered a bacon cheeseburger with elk meat that was unbelievable good. Best of all: the fries. These are fresh cut served with the skin still on (my favorite) and they serve the fries with three different dipping sauces: spicy chipotle mayor, curry ketchup and a special sauce. These fries are so amazing you have to hold yourself back from gobbling them up.

Our very friendly waitress even told us "I work here because of the fries."

And talking about the service, it's excellent. We didn't wait long for our food and they were really on top of everything. We went there on a Saturday night and had to wait about fifteen minutes for a table (it's not huge) so on a regular weeknight you'll have no problem getting a table.

The restaurant has a friendly, relaxed decor with brick walls. If the weather's good, sitting outside is very nice (it's not too near the street). So, if you want a really good, affordable burger and can make a short trip out to Astoria, check out Bare Burger.

11 Madison Park

Recently the beloved wife and I hired a babysitter, got dressed to the nines, and headed out to 11 Madison Park. I'm still not sure how to write about this dinner since it was less of a meal and more an experience of sensory overload. I've gone to movies and seen shows that were less entertaining than this. And certainly not as delicious.

Located right off of Madison Square Park, the restaurant is situated on the ground floor of the grand art deco Metropolitan Life Building. The dining room is a yawning arch of marble with huge tables spaced far apart. Honestly though, we didn't have a lot time to look around and get a vibe for the place since, from the moment we got there, the wait staff pulled us into easily the most unique dining experience we've ever had.

11 Madison Park is a tasting menu restaurant so you don't order a thing. There are only about 80 tables and the diners are seated at different intervals across the evening so each table gets an enormous amount of attention. The first thing the waiter asked us to do was to open a small envelope -- they even provide a letter opener -- and to select a flavor. Our choices were, if I recall correctly, strawberry, celery, raspberry and coffee (I chose strawberry, my lady selected celery). Then we got the extensive booze list and ordered a couple of cocktails. Shortly thereafter, the first of MANY courses came out.

I could write a lot about each dish but, in the interest of time, will simply list them and provide some commentary where I feel its helps. The menu consisted of:  
 

Cheddar - Savory Black and White Cookie with Apple: a wonderful little treat that loosens the taste buds and preps you for the food to come.

Oyster - Baked Potato Ice Cream and Caviar

Morel - Custard with Maine Sea Trout Roe

English Peas - Warmed with Meyer Lemon and Egg Yolk

Beef - Pastrami with Ramps, Rye, Mustard, and Strawberry: this was really fun. It was served in a basket and designed to be a high-end picnic. Think a very, very, very high-end deli sandwich. Also, the flavor that we had selected earlier was the flavor for a cola that was served with the sandwich. Very cool. It even came with an fake artisanal paper plate!

Foie Gras - Cured with Orange Chamomile, White Asparagus and Bitter Almond

Apple - Waldorf Salad with Celery, Rhubarb and Walnuts: they prepare this right at the table and the ingredients are very finely sliced.

Lobster - Poached with Beets, Ginger and Nasturtium: if I recall correctly, this was a little soup served underneath the Waldorf salad.

Asparagus - Braised with Potato and Black Truffle: this was actually cooked in a bladder and they showed it to us as it was being cooked. Mmmmm ...

Duck - Broth with Cured Duck and Watercress Roasted with Rhubarb, Shallots and Scallions: this was the highlight of the night. It was a freshly prepared duck (again, they wheeled it out to show us during its preparation) that was very carefully seasoned and amazingly tender.

Fresh Cheese - Pretzel, Parsley and Strawberries: a nice palette cleanser.

Whey - Sorbet with Caramelized Milk and Milk Foam

Almond - Baked Alaska with Rum, Caramel and Strawberry

Pretzel - Chocolate Covered with Sea Salt

Chocolate - Sweet Black and White Cookie with Mint

But wait - 'dere's more!

After the meal, we were given a bag containing two huge jars of fresh granola with dried fruit. This was a small present to take with us and, for the next week, I ate it for breakfast each morning (my wife took it to her office as a snack).

Then the most fun part: we were given a tour of the kitchen. It is a huge beautiful modern factory run with Swiss efficiency. Best of all, we were taken to a special place of honor, where they cut up some apple, used an old-time ice grinder, and created delicious natural frozen ices for us. Again, delicious. The wait staff was beyond polite, kind, and considerate. It's almost like they mad us part of the 11 Madison Park family. This is a place that truly views food and service as an art. At the end of the evening, we left the restaurant in a daze. It was an amazing, dare I say almost sensual, experience.

Besides the great food, wonderful service, and fun experience, 11 Madison Park isn't just another fancy restaurant: it's a New York-inspired restaurant through-and-through. Our waiter told us that 11 Madison Park is celebration of the city, and its food reflects this: the beef pastrami, the oysters, the Waldorf salad, the pretzel and the ices all have a literal and figurative NYC flavor.

This isn't a "brand" restaurant that can be franchised. This is a unique place, the food and experience found in only one place -- and one city.

11 Madison Park is the peak of excellence and a reminder of how eating great food in NYC can make for a memorable time. If you want a meal of a lifetime, you should definitely go there.

The Plaza in Winter

It's now old news that the sale, a couple of years back, of the Plaza Hotel to an Israeli investor has turned out to be a disaster. Vanity Fair wrote about this in December 2008 and I did a small post about it then.

Now things have only gotten worse.

This classic hotel -- a New York institution immortalized in film and literature (including The Great Gatsby, the single greatest American novel of the 20th century), a place where manners and taste still mattered, the epitome of Old New York charm and all that is classy and cosmopolitan in this city and world -- the Plaza was turned into a bunch of badly constructed, ugly condos, most of which were sold at outrageous prices and that lead to immediate, collective buyer's remorse. Now these buyers are selling them at huge losses, embarrassed at having been snookered by the idea of "owning" some of the Plaza.

One of the "brilliant" ideas of the new owners was to open a shopping center in the basement, mostly a bunch of luxury retail stores. That's right: these new owners took one of the most beautiful buildings in New York City and turned it into ... a mall ...

And why would anyone shop at these luxury boutiques when the Plaza is just blocks away from Fifth Avenue, the single greatest shopping district in the entire world?

Stupid. Nowadays when I see the Plaza I feel a twinge of sadness. A great New York institution has been wrecked. Needless to say the real estate crash and economic crises have done their share of damage to the place as well.

Oh yes, as this article in today's Times indicates, the rich and famous still eat and drink at the Oak Room and the Oak Bar. The Grand Ballroom is booked almost every weekend. "'The Plaza is the Plaza'" someone is quoted as saying. But the Palm Court is closed, the Edwardian Room is closed, and everyone who goes to the Plaza these days agrees that it just isn't the same anymore. It's lost something, some degree of cache, and it's probably gone forever.

Along with the closings of Cafe des Artistes and Tavern on the Green -- as well the loss of things like rent stabilization, corner delis, neighborhood diners, and several subway lines (or so it is threatened) -- it feels like more and more of the city that so many of us grew up in and love is slipping away before our very eyes.

And even though places like the Plaza are for the rich, when it goes into decline, it makes all us New Yorkers just a little poorer.

Review: "Wolfs" & the NYC Night Movie

They don't make movies like this anymore -- well, okay, they do, but they don't play in movie theaters anymore; instead, they pop up on streaming.

But it's always great to see a fast-paced, character-centered flick with great movie stars -- especially when it involves them running around NYC.

Wolves stars George Clooney and Brad Pitt -- thirty-years removed from their starmaking roles on the TV show ER and in the movie Interview With the Vampire, respectively -- as two "cleaners" or "wolves" (like the one Harvey Keitel played in that other 194 classic Pulp Fiction), whose job is to mop up crime scenes, dispose of bodies and evidence, and make sure that the guilty get away with it and justice is denied to the victim. In Wolves, this crime scene involves a dead kid, a backpack full of drugs, and a hysterical female District Attorney (played by the wonderful Amy Ryan) who is running for reelection and needs this problem solved pronto. 

The twist in this movie is that these two now middle-aged wolves are called to clean up the same crime scene unbenowst two each other. And when they clean up the scene and get the dead kid's body out of the downtown Manhattan hotel they were called to -- well, it all goes sideways and mayhem ensues when it turns out the kid really isn't dead.

Wolves then turns into a very fun, almost two hour yarn of car chases, shootouts, sleazy nightclubs, oddball characters, snappy dialogue, chowing down in diners, and everything that makes a good pulpy story. Most of all, it's great to see Clooney and Pitt act their hearts out, their chemistry palpable, in an original story not based on IP. It's just an entertaining movie. Remember those?

But other big thing I love about Wolves, as you might guess, its that it's a real NYC and a real NYC night movie. The story starts downtown but before you know it our heroes are zooming around Chinatown and Lower Manhattan, then they're out in the wilds of Queens. It's a movie that gives you a sense of the whole city. 

And the whole thing takes place at night, when the city falls into a sense of sexy mystery, a place of danger and excitement, a whole other NYC. I think it's fair to say that Wolves joins the company of other brilliant NYC night movies like After Hours, Taxi Driver, Night on Earth, While the City Sleeps, the Whit Stillman classics Metropolitan and The Last Days of Disco, The Warriors, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist -- heck, I'll even throw in Eyes Wide Shut. 

If You Can't Make It Here ... Move to LaBarge, Wyoming

The Moondance Diner on Grand Street and 6th Avenue closed a few weeks ago. It's always sad when little pieces of New York like this fade away. (Mr NYC will do a future post on great diners in NYC, past and present.) However, this little piece is getting a new life: some people from a tiny town called La Barge are going to literally dig it out of the ground, put it on a truck and haul the mother to Wyoming.

If you know your diner-speak, then you know that this particular diner is famous, not only for the yellow half crescent spinning on top, but also because 1) it was featured on "Sex and the City" and one of the Spiderman movies; 2) it's where "Rent" creator Jonathan Larson worked for nine years before his musical hit it big (and he sadly died). I've never gone to the Moondance and I'am sad that I won't ever get to (unless I find myself in Wyoming sometime). However, I'm thankful to these people from the country's least populated state that they, unlike so many of the developers and landlords and politicians in this town, are willing to keep a part of this city alive ... 2000 thousand miles away.

One question: will the people of this presumably conservative town want to frequent a formerly gay-friendly chow hall from Soho? One can only ponder.

Downtown Diner is Moving to Wyoming, Lock, Stock and Original Stools

New York on the Move

When Diners Pick Up Stakes, and Vintage New York Is Lost

It's not just New Yorkers who are leaving town -- the city itself is literally being exported.

Remember the Moondance Diner? It used to be on 6th Avenue and Grand Street until last year it was sold off and hauled out to La Barge, Wyoming (I actually blogged extensively extensively about this in 2007).

Now another diner, the Cheyenne on Ninth Avenue and 33rd street, is moving to Alabama! And the same folks who are buying and moving it now want to buy a closed movie theater in Queens! On top of that, the guy who used to run the now defunct Kim's Video Stores has sold off his entire collection to someone in Sicily. And that's not the end of it.

This isn't the first time something like this has happened. London Bridge was torn down and re-assembled in Arizona. The Cloisters here in NYC are made up of several old cathedrals and buildings from France. The Temple of Dendur at the Met was excavated in Egypt and rebuilt here. And if art collections, furniture, and other precious assets can be moved from place to place, why not real estate? So this is really nothing new.

I guess we can look at all of this as a kind of cultural exchange. If NYC has nothing else, its got a great culture. If people around the country and around the world want a piece of it, and can pay for it, who 's to blame them? But like our middle class, let's just try to preserve as much of it here as we can so that we continue to have a great culture. Let's hope it's not all for sale.

A President in Springtime

President Obama has to have the most fascinating upbringing of any of the forty-three men who've served in that great office. 

Born in Hawaii (yes, he was born there), his mother was a white woman from Kansas and his dad a black guy from Kenya. The president has lived all over the country and the world: Hawaii, Indonesia, Los Angeles, and, more recently, Chicago and Washington, DC. Obama has to be one of the only presidents who has lived on both coasts, in the American Midwest, and one of our country's two non-contiguous states. Unlike the morons who say he's not an American, Obama has probably lived in, and knows more about, our country than any of them.

And one of the places that Obama has lived was NYC.

He came here in the early 1980s when he transferred to Columbia University. After graduation, he worked for a time at a company near the United Nations. He lived on the upper west side (in my old neighborhood actually) and enjoyed eating in local diners, including the famous Tom's, as well as going to dinner parties. For a time, he had a very serious girlfriend and contemplated life as a New Yorker. Eventually, he would decide to head to Chicago where he would start his career, meet his future wife, and eventually forge a path to his historic presidency. 

But once upon a time, about a quarter of a century ago, he lived here and it shaped the identity of the man who know is the most powerful person in the world.

The TWA Hotel Lands at JFK

The 1950s and '60s are romanticized as the Mad Men era -- the "great America" that so many people want to somehow, spiritually and socio-economically return to; a time when people knew their place i.e. white men in power, blacks at the back of the bus, gays in the closet, and women either in the kitchen or only working as secretaries, nurses, and teachers.

'Dose were da' days!

It was a time when it was great to be a "mad man" -- oh yes, you could have three martini lunches, smoke everywhere, and bang your secretaries with abandon (no annoying sexual harassment laws or HR rules or hashtags to kill the fun).

It was white male nirvana.

Then there was the architecture. Lots of gorgeous but decaying buildings were being torn down at this time and replaced by boring Bauhaus inspired-monstrosities. Function, not beauty, dictated architectural style. And brand new diners (remember those?) and airport terminals were opening and they looked weird -- lots of curves and arched ceilings and warped roofs -- like spaceships out of Forbidden Planet.

One such prime NYC example was the TWA Terminal at JFK airport that opened in 1962.

It was a huge, hulking sweep of curves and open spaces, blindingly white, and it feels very 1960s post-modernesque. It was a functioning terminal for decades until TWA went out of business and the terminal closed in the early 2000s. It sat empty, ready to be bulldozed, until some developers bought and decided to turn it into a hotel.

And now the hottest new hotel in town is far from midtown Manhattan -- it's in southeast Queens!

Today the new TWA Hotel opens to much fanfare. It's obviously a massive, expensive undertaking ($300+ million) with a myriad of rooms starting at $250 a night. There are expensive restaurant (Jean-Georges has one there) plus luxury retail stores, and a 150 person bar inside an airplane tethered to the hotel. Everything is luxury and luxuriously kitschy -- taking something that was once plebian and turning it into something grand. Apparently the owners of this new hotel have huge ambitions for it, they think it'll have nonstop full capacity, and that travellers to and from JFK will want to pony up that much money to spend the night before either flying out or after having landed. 

Either the new TWA hotel will be a huge success or a colossal failure. I'll be watching its fate with keen interest.

Sidenote: I almost exclusively flew on TWA to and from college back in the 1990s. As I mentioned yesterday, I just passed the 20th anniversary of my college graduation so this nostalgia-themed hotel opening today is somehow -- le sigh -- appropriate.

It's just reminder that the present becomes the past quickly, today's ordinary stuff becomes tomorrow's cherished relics, today's noise becomes tomorrow's history, today's frustrations becomes tomorrow's nostalgia.

It was ever thus and forever shall be.