So I leave the Village for less than two months and the place falls apart!
One of my all-time favorite local spots and my personal best-slice-of-pizza joint Pizza Box closed up shop unceremoniously last Thursday. I saw this picture posted on Jeremiah's Vanishing New York and felt a Proustian-pang for yet another vestige of my NYC youth. It had been there 55 years and wondrously felt like it and the guys behind the counter were always friendly, especially to the locals like myself.
Though the pizza there was great and draft beer only 2$, what was truly special was the outdoor seating area which gave a glimpse into the priveleged backyards of the stately town homes on Macdougal and Sullivan which shared an impossibly lush garden space with suburban-sized trees more than 60 feet tall. This secret garden was one of the treasures of living in the neighborhood as you could retreat to the relative quiet of this leafy space and have a slice and a beer and maybe even a cigarette (if someone else had a pack!).
In the six weeks since I moved from the Village to Astoria, this has been the second notable retail death in the neighborhood--the first being Joe's Dairy on Sullivan. What's next...Once Upon A Tart? It makes me sad to see things changing like this but it also reinforces part of why I left in the first place--the Village is just not the homey local place I used to know anymore.
