Monday Bulletin: Subway Elegy, Retail Vacancies, Mourning a Manhole Cover

July 19, 2021 Weather: Cloudy, with a high of 82 degrees.

Notices:
Our calendar has lots of local events!

News:
“As New York returns, and the trains are running 24 hours a day again, let us pause to marvel at the convulsive wonder underneath our very feet,” writes David Margolick, in a New York Times essay inspired by a recent trip from the Upper West Side down to Chambers Street — and Wordsworth. “…just as I entered the old subway shelter on 72nd Street, the one with the elegant Dutch facade, the monitor over the turnstile reading “No. 3. New Lots Av” switched from solid chartreuse to pulsating amber: My train was pulling in. With that swift swipe New Yorkers have perfected and a burst down the stairs, I could make it.”

Manhattan retail vacancies have hit a record high, and, unfortunately, the Upper West Side is a major contributor, Crain’s reported. “Upper Madison Avenue had the most vacancies by a wide margin last quarter (55), followed by stretches of Broadway between Battery Park and Chambers Street (27) and from West 72nd Street to West 86th (25). The average asking rent fell to $615 per square foot, a 10.7% drop year over year and a 0.6% decline quarter over quarter, to hit the lowest mark in almost a decade. They fell most sharply on Spring Street in SoHo, going from $631 to $487 — a 22.9% decline.”

Reading about other people’s apartments can be fun, especially when they are apartments in which love flourished, such as that of the late Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller, on Riverside Drive between 83rd and 84th Streets. It is currently on the market, according to The New York Times. “‘It was our whole lives that happened there — everything from birthday parties, to Thanksgiving, Passover seders, and Christmas mornings and Hanukkah evenings,’ said Ben Stiller (their son), who has appeared in dozens of films, like ‘Night at the Museum,’ and is currently working on a documentary about his parents that will include his childhood home. ‘Living in the building was like a community of its own,’ he said.”

You probably don’t give much thought to manhole covers, unless they blow, but a woman discovered a pair of covers in Central Park at West 85th Street that she visited regularly for three years — until one was replaced. “I knew from the start that a manhole as old as this one (which was one of the oldest in the city, behind an 1862 cover also in Central Park) could not last forever,” she wrote in Untapped Cities. “I had braced myself for this day, and yet it was still a hard blow to see an unfamiliar face in place of the one I have known and loved.”

Finally, here are the first three winners of West Side Rag T-shirts for the most obvious and imaginative explanations for the footprints that appeared in wet cement on Columbus Avenue last week. Two more T-shirts are available. Read how to win one here.