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Jonah Wolf

By Jonah Wolf 4/23 7:05pm

Higher Education

The soon-to-be-former home of Collegiate School.

Kickin’ Out Old School: Puffed Up Prepsters Warily Eye Collegiate’s Modern Move

Collegiate School is defined on Urban Dictionary as “a haughty, arrogant school.” When the Upper West Side boys’ academy is trailing in a basketball game and rivals start chanting “score board,” the Collegiate heckling squad has been known to chant “college board” in response.

The academy regularly lands toward the top of various publications’ rankings of secondary schools by college matriculation, and it boasts a distinguished alumni list including Cesar Romero, Peter Bogdanovich, Edgar Bronfman Jr. and John F. Kennedy Jr.

Significantly less distinguished has been its campus, a clumsy architectural hodepodge of three buildings around the intersection of Broadway and 78th Street, patched together by time and improvisation.  Read More

By Jonah Wolf 10/15/12 3:11pm

The sweet science

Storobin and Salita.

On Brighton Boardwalk, Brooklyn Boxer Builds up Barclays Bout

It was a warm seventy degrees Sunday on the Brighton Beach boardwalk, where white tents extended from the façade of Tatiana’s restaurant. Inside, Igor Maltsev of Transport Workers Union Local 100, in a tuxedo and red bowtie, prepared for a Russian-American Heritage Day celebration.  A restaurant employee explained to Bill Caplan, of Golden Boy Promotions, and Javan “Sugar” Hill, of Detroit’s Kronk Gym, that they were in the wrong place.

The press conference for their client, the Ukraine-born, Flatbush-raised boxer Dmitriy Salita, was being held at Tatiana’s Grill Café, approximately twenty yards down the boardwalk.

There, families dined on herring and borscht under a sea-blue awning. In front, a man kneeled before a round table with a roll of Scotch tape and a box of posters promoting this Saturday’s fight between Danny Garcia and Erik Morales, who would headline the first night of boxing at the Barclays Center. Another table supported a Sony mini-disc player, a microphone, a mixer and a speaker playing what sounded like Israeli pop music. Mr. Caplan danced with a sixty-ish man whose blue t-shirt read “Sweet Science” in mock-Hebraic font. On the back was the name “Salita” in all-caps, with a six-pointed star over the i. Read More

By Jonah Wolf 10/09/12 7:51pm

Shindigger

Susan Benedetto and Tony Bennett. (Eugene Mim/Patrick McMullan)

Let Him Sing Forever More: Tony Bennett Explores the Arts

Tony Bennett’s wasn’t the only gala dinner in Manhattan last Thursday, but that’s where Shindigger was, arriving at Cipriani 42nd Street for cocktail hour, just in time to catch a glimpse of Alec Baldwin. “Oh my God, he’s lost so much weight—I didn’t even recognize him!” we heard one guest whisper to another, eyeing the star who would kick off 30 Rock’s final season later that night. Mr. Baldwin’s wife, Hilaria Thomas, flaunted her Hebrew for the night’s honoree, entertainment lawyer Allen Grubman, before the couple headed off to the Norman Mailer Center benefit at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel.

Mr. Bennett, whose nonprofit Exploring the Arts operates in New York public schools, apparently lacked Ms. Thomas’s linguistic talent. Or so we learned when we asked the 86-year-old crooner, whose third Duets album pairs him with the likes of Marc Anthony and Gloria Estefan, about his Spanish. “No habla Español,” answered his 46-year-old wife, co-host and translator, Susan Benedetto. We changed the subject to Mr. Bennett’s next album, a recently announced full-length collaboration with Lady Gaga. “I know that she’s one of the great singers of all time, but people don’t know that,” Mr. Bennett explained. “They just see another, you know, big new star coming up, but she is one hell of a singer. She can improvise as great as Ella Fitzgerald.”

We stopped at the bar to take in the student artwork, alongside photographs of Mr. Bennett (himself a talented painter) with young dancers and musicians. A disembodied voice urged us to our table, where pink paintbrushes matched the flower arrangement.  Read More

By Jonah Wolf 9/28/12 7:16pm

Affordable Housing or Lack Thereof

4 Photos

Livonia Living

East New York’s Livonia Commons: Affordable Housing Vision Gets Visual Aids

Usually, living down by the tracks is bad thing, but after looking at the renderings of an affordable apartment complex in East New York, all we could think was, “how can we sign up?”

Dunn Development Corp. will develop four buildings in East New York, the department of Housing Preservation and Development recently announced, an announcement that came with some lovely colored renderings of the project. The developments, collectively known as Livonia Commons, will include 270 new units of low-income housing as well as 11,000 square-feet of ground floor retail space. Read More

By Jonah Wolf 9/27/12 3:08pm

In the Rezone

SPURA springs eternal. (NYC EDC)

Hip Hip SPURA! Land-Use Committee Approves LES Development After 40-Year Slog

It took 40 years, but the transformation of the Seward Park urban Renewal Area, better known as SPURA, may finally be here. While everyone seemed excited at the prospect of this finally happening, the opinions were far from unanimous about what the city came up with for its plan for the seven undeveloped acres south of Delancy Street on four forlorn parking lots.

But there was unanimity today, when the City Council’s land-use committee approved the 1.65 million-square-foot plan for SPURA by a vote of 16-0. Attendees of last week’s public hearing on the development south of the Williamsburg Bridge will be relieved to hear that 50 additional affordable housing units (offset by another 50 at market rate prices) have been added to the project, for a total of 1,000 units, half of which will be affordable, half not. The administration also agreed to that now de rigueur piece of rezoning negotiations, a new public school.

Read More

By Jonah Wolf 9/13/12 12:15pm

books

Caption TK

Emily Books Turns One, Boxed Wine and 2 Live Crew References Abound

Last night, Word Books in Greenpoint hosted the first anniversary party for Emily Books, the “online indie bookstore” that functions like a book of the month club, run by Emily Gould and Ruth Curry. As guests sipped boxed wine, Ms. Gould switched the official Emily Books mixtape (some choice selections: Dinosaur Jr.’s “Puke and Cry,” Tegan and Sara’s “Burn Your Life Down”) to a more upbeat playlist featuring L’Trimm and Peaches. At 7:30, Word events manager Jenn Northington took the stage to apologize for the delay, and to point out the free condoms whose wrappers bore the cover design of Emily Books’ September pick, Maidenhead by Tamara Faith Berger. Read More

By Jonah Wolf 9/04/12 7:21pm

Shindigger

Cindy Sherman. (Adriel Reboh/Patrick McMullan)

Guests of Cindy Sherman: The Azuero Earth Project Benefit at the Artist’s East Hampton Spread

“Look who it is: it’s Edwina, the Edwina,” Isaac Mizrahi exclaimed to The Observer this past Saturday, as he approached Edwina von Gal, the designer who, Ross Bleckner told us, “did the landscaping at my house in Sagaponack.”

We were at Cindy Sherman’s new East Hampton home at a benefit for the Azuero Earth Project, the Panama-based ecological nonprofit of which Ms. von Gal is president. It was a cozy beginning-of-the-end to the Hamptons summer season. Guests sat on benches under a white tent to eat empanadas and watch performances by Suzanne Vega, Rufus Wainwright, Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed. Children climbed into pendulous bamboo cocoons, stuffed with pillows, that swayed from the trees. Read More

By Jonah Wolf 8/29/12 5:08pm

On His Jacques

A page of Our Show.

The Punk GQ: Elliot Aronow Shows Off His Zine at the Soho Grand

“I guess that’s kind of my shtick in general is like punk rock gentleman. You can sound-bite that.” The Observer was chatting with talk show host, entrepreneur, and editor Elliot Aronow, who had just released the second issue of his zine, Our Show with Elliot Aronow, and was celebrating with a party in the Yard at the Soho Grand. DJs Cosmo Baker and Prince Language were spinning classic funk and hip hop. The Observer spotted MTV’s Sway, Princeton “punkademic” Samuel Goldman and about half of Das Racist’s Greedhead labelmates.

Our Show takes its name from the variety show Mr. Aronow used to host at Santos Party House with guests like James Murphy and Andrew W.K., what he calls “my weird pothead version of Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party meets Charlie Rose.” For the zine, “My idea for it was to make it a punk GQ, take all the stuff that was supposed to be kind of bourgeois and bring it down from the mountain and say, ‘Ayo, you can do this.’” Both issues contain fashion advice from Brooklyn Tailors, whose Danny Lewis was at the party and told The Observer, “It’s like Elliot’s whole world. He spreads the word. You’ll probably see some of our stuff floating around.” Indeed, Mr. Aronow was sporting bespoke pants from the Williamsburg haberdasher, plus a green-on-white paisley Thom Browne for Brooks Brothers jacket and a white t-shirt from Uniqlo, “’cause I don’t care,” he said. Read More

By Jonah Wolf 8/27/12 11:37am

Memorials

TK caption.

An All-Day Tribute (and an Anonymous Shrine) for Deceased Filmmaker Chris Marker at Light Industry

Visitors arriving at Greenpoint cinematheque Light Industry yesterday were greeted outside by a shrine to the late French director Chris Marker consisting of candles, flowers, words and images from his films, a VHS cassette of Hitchcock’s Vertigo and waving plastic cats of the sort seen at the Japanese temple in Mr. Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983). The subject of Sunday’s day-long retrospective, Mr. Marker, who died on his 91st birthday this July, was clearly for this anonymous shrine-building fan what he was for Light Industry co-founder Thomas Beard: a “model of poetic insight and moral intelligence and restless, searching political imagination.” Read More