Another NYC 1950’s landmark is being scooped up by Southern architectural preservationists.

The Daily News reports today that Jay Dee owner Amnir Yelizarov has not only closed the historic Jay Dee bakery, but is selling off the architecturally-significant components to preservationist entrepeneurs Pat Miller and Joel Owens.

Rego-Forest Preservation Council’s leader, Micheal Perlman, met with Mr. Yelizarov, but could not convice him to save any of the features intact.

Miller and Owens bought the venerable Cheyenne Diner and will add Jay Dee to their dream of recreating a back-in-time town in the south.

Whatever your opinion about Jay Dee’s products or the closure, I’ll miss the plaster cakes, colors faded by the sun, and the tiny plastic ballerinas that I always coveted as a child.

(Photo from Etsy)

Check out this fun, social and yummy event coming to our neighborhood! Green Drinks is coming to Queens. And Queens Green Drinkers get amazing 2-for-1 specials on the full array of organic wines and beers at Tierra Sana!

6:00pm - 9:00pm
at Tierra Sana in Forest Hills
100-17 Queens Blvd at 67th Road

In case you don’t know, Green Drinks is a pro-environment drinking club. Or maybe it’s a pro-drinking environmental club? Either way, it’s an informal networking group for folks that are environmentally minded.

From their Facebook page: “Come and we’ll introduce you to some of the other like minded folks in and around Queens. If we’re lucky (which is likely) we’ll cross pollinate make new friends, catch up with old ones, and maybe even sprout an idea or three. Since this is a new little experiment for our borough, please help get the word out and tell your friends about it! Heck, why don’t you bring them?”

Here’s their Facebook Page. You can send them an email here to get their newsletter.

Queens Green Drinks has planned four more get-togethers so far in 2009. This edition of Queens Green Drinks is sponsored by Green Phoenix Permaculture.

Green Phoenix Permaculture is a non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of and application of regenerative ecological design into our every day lives and the world around us. We’ve been rocking the Hudson River Valley with classes, workshops, and a full demonstration site featuring two forest gardens and a naturally built timber frame strawbale farm house since 2005. We work with a garden in Brooklyn and host a sustainable living action-learning group and meetups in Manhattan. Now we’re riding the green wave into Queens! Now forming local groups to learn and practice living well with each other and the earth, even in the big city.

Hmmm, would that make this a “phlog?”

Not much color - foliage or otherwise - to photograph this week. Most pics here are simply confirmations of the new stores popping up around the area, plus some intriguing bits of scenery around the nabe.

Halloween fun in front of Renegade salon. I hope your haircut doesn’t come out scary!

Pink Tree in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month

The Tap Room (the old “Cafe Moda”) - open for business, just in time for football!

Overheard: “That’s cool, but I can live without one more sports bar in my life.”

Site of new Fro-Yo competitor, OKO (where ColdStone Creamery used to be.)

Dollar Chic on chic Austin Street. Gimme LotLess anytime…

“This has nothing to do with the bailout! Really.” - TD Waterhouse buys Commerce Bank

New and improved Broadway Bakery on 71 Road! Still great coffee and cleaner equipment!

коли под наемThe new GameStop location on QB and 63rd Road, next to gas station, north side.

Menorah on top of T-Bone diner. Was this ALWAYS there, and I just never noticed it?

If you’d like to participate in the Willets Point hearing, here are the details:

City Planning Commission
Wednesday August 13th
*NYU *Tishman Auditorium in Vanderbilt Hall
(south side of Washington Square South (West 4th Street), just east of
MacDougal Street).

The hearing should begin about 12 noon and each speaker will have 3 minutes

More information here:
http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/subcats/cpc_notice.shtml

Wow, I am shocked, shocked that this is being allowed to happen!

OK, enough sarcasm. The New York Times has an article about Bukharans building McMansions in the Cord Meyer area. Thank you to Sarah on our forum for posting the link.

In typical New York Times fashion, by the time the story is covered, it is usually about 3 years too late, the issue is usually over, not trendy anymore or there’s nothing that can be done about it.

A sign of the times at the corner of Church Street and Warren Street in Tribeca, Manhattan.

“Would you like a large Slurpee, Mr. DeNiro?”

A report from the field, otherwise known as “my work neighborhood.”

This large commercial space has been empty since before Sept. 11, 2001. For a while, it housed a closeouts store and a temporary Chirstmas decorations store. Otherwise, this juicy piece of property right above a major subway station laid dormant for over eight years, in one of the hottest, trendiest, most popular neighborhoods in all of NYC.

During those intervening years, in addition to ever-increasing numbers of tourists, the neighborhood has experienced tremendous residential growth (mostly via the conversion of office buildings into luxury rentals), including a massive baby-boom enough to make the sole elementary school in the nabe dangerously overcrowded.

Now that Robert DeNiro’s brainchild, the Tribeca Film Festival, is “Tribeca” in name only, and the WTC site (sorry, “Ground Zero”) is considered “boring” by tourists because it is just a construction site, perhaps the “riff raff” felt they could finally move in. There goes the neighborhood!

Looks like somethin’s cookin’!!

According to an interesting-if-dubiously-sourced post on the forums, all the retail on the ground floor of NOVO 64 has been sold (leased?), an impressive feat considering the development’s not-quite-central location. The biggest news, of course, is that Starbucks, Starbucks, Starbucks may be moving in, which would be the–let’s see–four, five, carry the two–sixth Forest Hills location? I think it’d be the sixth Forest Hills location. Take that, everywhere else! The other prospective tenants are a “couple of medical offices” and a bakery. Whether that bakery will be hip or Russian is TBD.

If true, I find this fascinating considering that the Windsor, with its much better location, has been up for something like two years and still has most of its retail spaces vacant. The tanning salon that also has a location like three blocks away is there, and purportedly Cheeburger Cheeburger will open soon, though I’m starting to wonder when exactly that’s going to happen. Why did NOVO 64 do so much better? Probably rent that’s about a million times lower. Yeah, that sounds like it.

I considered the possibility that the post is from an undercover NOVO employee looking to stir up positive buzz, but somehow I feel like “killbyinches” wouldn’t be that agent’s screen name of choice.

Oh, hey there. How has your month been?

So. I’m not happy. As seldom as I’ve been posting here lately, I have continued to submit regular columns to the Forum West–but of course, you knew that. This week’s column, just out today, is about the upcoming Roger Staubach edifice at the corner of 70th Road and Austin, which will replace several stores you don’t care about but also Restaurant Row mainstays Rouge and Narita. Rouge–which I thought was overrated anyway–is already gone. Fearing the end of FoHi’s restaurant mecca, I implored NFL legend Staubach:

The future tenants of the new building should be businesses that will make us proud, and on 70th Road, they must be restaurants that will keep the street the attraction that it is.

Well, I finally went by today, and guess what’s in the window of Rouge? A bunch of for-rent signs, most of which clearly and brutally specify: “NO FOOD.”

Gotta love how the only type of business I want just happens to be the only type of business Roger doesn’t. Quelle coïncidence!

In other news, as first reported on the forums–which have been busier than ever in my absence, by the way; I love you guys–long, long, longtime 70th Road fave UJ’s Luncheonette has closed as well, despite not being threatened by the Staubach development. They simply ran out of cash. There’s a really nice sign in the window thanking customers and asking them to visit eatatujs.com, where they can sign the guestbook and even recommend potential smaller, cheaper locations. (Lousy old Brothers Coffee Shop in AQUA on QB and 77th strikes me as a great possibility.) You know, I never thought I’d really miss UJ’s, but looking in the window and seeing all the kitschy bric-a-brac, I’m reminded that it was a great neighborhood place. And I don’t think many would argue that it was the best diner in town.

You know what’d be nice? If the brand-new building housing Trader Joe’s wasn’t an architectural disaster.