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More Potemkin Village, as Greenwich Village “has become like a theme park of the past, as these restored standards offer a vision of a lost bohemian New York albeit with a well-heeled clientele and prices to match.” [NYT]

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In the April issue of Playboy magazine, Professor Sharon Zukin, author of Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places, published an essay in the Forum section entitled How the City Lost Its Soul. An editor from Playboy asked me to write a response to that essay, and they published my letter in the June issue.

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Remembering when the Upper West Side was all “decaying tenements packed with poor Puerto Rican and Negro families and the gathering place of drunks, narcotics addicts and sexual perverts.” [NYT]

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People are clamoring to get into the Brooklyn (nee Vermont) Farmacy, that “curious old tomb” in Carroll Gardens that was rescued by a green-loving guy from Maine and refurbished by a reality TV show, then splashed and hyped like crazy across the blogosphere and youtube, juicing the excitement.

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1883 mural endangered by Chelsea Hotel demolition. [LWL]

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A random survey of romantically unattached local bargoers.