Everyone knows about the flower district and the garment district, but it comes as a surprise that other Midtown crossstreets are still so dominated by specific industries. For example my yoga studio is located in the wholesale accessory/ knockoff handbag/Obama souvenir district, which is located between 27th and 31st streets between 5th and 6th Avenues. If you need a few hundred beaded plastic hairclips or a commemorative Valentine’s Day poster of the First Couple embracing, look no further. Also, tiaras. Also, this is one of the many areas in Manhattan where it is unusual to hear anyone having a conversation in English, which might explain some of the signage. An accessory business named “DECENT” (with a big splashy awning) is probably not owned by native English speakers.
Anyway yesterday I found myself in the fur district (31st St between 6th and 8th Avenues) on my way to the offices of the place you get Russian visas. Storefront after ancient-looking storefront — one sign bragged about the furriers’ former association with Gimbels, which closed in 1987 — was filled with colorfully dyed and trimmed sable and fox and shearling. I didn’t see a single person in any of these stores, but then, a fur is a big-ticket item, so probably these places don’t have to move much inventory in order to stay afloat.
At the visa office I learned that the photos I’d brought with me were too little for the form, so I was sent to the one hour photo place around the corner to take new ones. When was the last time you were in a one hour photo place? The smell of developing chemicals is the same and so is the wall of cute snapshots — snagged, probably, from envelopes of never-collected prints — decorating the area around the cash register. In fact these snapshots all seemed to date from the last time I was in a one hour photo place, which was in the late 90s. On the rack behind the counter where envelopes wait for pickup I counted four envelopes. In the late 90s that rack would have been full.
It took exactly five minutes, as the lady had promised, and then I left with my little $9 envelope of visa portraits. On the way back to the visa office I passed the fur stores again and thought about that song that goes “I still love the old world … I want to keep my place in the old world.”
The old world isn’t really mine to love — I grew up, now it’s becoming clear, during an ending time. It’s sort of like when I started my first job and had to learn a computer system and then they changed over to a different system two weeks later and I had to unlearn all this useless knowledge. I feel like the first part of my life was like those first two weeks. From now on, it’s becoming clear, the world will be different. The vestigial things that have been taking their time to die off will die for good, and I’ll be glad I remember them because soon memory is the only place these things will exist.
(this photo is of Steuben St. between Myrtle and Park, near the big new glass condo which, good luck selling those, guys).
so well said. the 60 minute photo shop is the most perfect example of this widespread, strange transition.
ah, my chiropractor is in that district – never knew it had a name.
The districts come as a surprise? Really?
Back in the “Logan’s Run” era, there was a guy named Toffler who wrote a book that “argues that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a “super-industrial society”. This change will overwhelm people, the accelerated rate of technological and social change leaving them disconnected and suffering from “shattering stress and disorientation” – future shocked.” Blah, blah and more blah
Boring.
I like the way you tell it. I can feel what you’re writing about.
this post prompted a disquieted sigh for me, though i don’t disagree.
is it?: The future looks bleak.
either I’m seeing qualities that are not intentional and you’re photos are snapshots or they’re also art (latter seems more likely than not)
I want to go to Russia and take a spy as a lover. We would have rough, passionate sex in his safe house in St. Petersburg.
I would help him smuggle information through Finland to the Free West.
We would bring Putin down. And then we would become THE Moscow power couple, and move into Stalin’s apartment in the Kremlin.
I shop for garments in Manhattan’s Yoga District which begins on OWS near Filenes Basement, gerrymanders down Broadway to The Time Warner Center and ends at Exhale Spa on CPS.
I liked this very much – especially the anecdote about having to relearn the computer system. I’ve also felt the bewildering sensation of life resetting.
Oh my… As long as there are bimbos+foot-job$, there will always be potential condo buyers. They’re glass, too, so if the tragically bourgie don’t want to buy them, the Russians’ll be more than happy to. To stay on topic, even without those “big backyards” people are so concerned about.
(Travel safe.)
I’ve known for a while that I straddle two worlds, that I’m one of the last few of the generation that grew up before computers and the internet. I didn’t get a computer until I was 13, and the internet a year later–and it wasn’t until college that I started IMing people. My “lateness” in terms of adapting to these technologies has formed a good portion of my life and how I relate to others, as when I started there were so many people miles ahead of me. My adolescence sounds so strange to people, yet I can only imagine how horrific it would have been if MySpace was around when I was 13.
There’s always a sense of sadness in moving on.
Look around you, take in everything and remember, for the day will come when your memories are all that remain.
Just wait, it only gets worse.
My incoming class of college freshman this year were born in 1990 and 1991. BORN in those years. They were 7 or 8 when the one hour photo places began going into decline. Remember how much you thought you knew about everything when you were a freshman in college?
One of the things we (at my place of employment) are constantly trained on is the difference between us and our students and I think the divide between the even slightly old (like me, not old, just 41) and the newly minted adults only gets wider and wider (and more difficult to bridge) all the time.
Oh, and I love my hubby and my boring (hee hee) suburban life, but I sometimes wish I was an author living in NYC with a boyfriend in Russia and the funds to travel. You are still young. ENJOY!
I grew up in dumpy urban wastelands similar to the photo you’ve posted. Yeah I know what you mean about the “Old World”
Oh, I’m sorry, you are referring to the district due west of what must be called Little Lagos (officially Broadway between 25th and 30th Street). Your Obama Knockoff-Hairclip District is, in my mind, usually referred to as Forgotten Resale-Number-ville.
@ Jean-Pierre Ha well, “some call it slums some call it nice,” as Billie Joe Armstrong and the realtors who are trying to sell the condos in the corner of the picture for $549/square foot would say.
So do you understand it now? Well try standin’ over — seven box sets, reppin’ sixteen years. This rap career ain’t work, it’s the life in between bedtime ’til the next said time and date.