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

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. 

Students learn Gay-Lussac’s law in the science department and then head down seven flights of stairs, surrounded by their ’80s predecessors’ crude psychedelic murals. They change buildings and climb three more flights to the stifling English department, where they can experience for themselves the correlation between the temperature of a container and the pressure of its contents.

While the buildings are inadequate by almost all accounts, students past and present are nevertheless dismayed by Collegiate’s plan to move into a gleaming new building after the institution’s eviction from its longtime home. In 2016, the school’s 650 students across 13 grades will decamp for a modern, new campus on an oddly shaped block of Riverside Boulevard between 61st and 62nd Streets.

“It’s kind of a bummer they’re kicking us out,” said the filmmaker Whit Stillman, who attended the school as an elementary school student in the early ’60s and later made a movie, Metropolitan, lamenting the decline of the “urban haute bourgeoisie.”

“I think it was kind of academically great, the strange spaces in the old building,” he said. “My formative experience in third grade was to be in a remedial reading class with one other student and a teacher. We were almost in a closet. It was so cramped! But it focused attention.”

A rendering of the proposed Collegiate building.

The move was prompted by the school’s loss of its lease on 241 West 77th Street, its home since 1892. The “old building,” as it’s called, is crowded and lacks air conditioning, the steps on its narrow stairs worn down by generations of scampering.

The building is owned and partially occupied by the Collegiate Church, which in 2006 requested back the space it had been leasing to Collegiate, declining the school’s offer to buy the building. The school will also be vacating Platten Hall, built by the school in 1967, and West End Plaza, an apartment building built in 1912 and acquired by Collegiate in 1977.
Alumni have paid homage to the campus in films including House of D by David Duchovny (class of ’77) and The Talent Given Us by Andrew Wagner (’81), as well as the novel Heavy Metal and You by Chris Krovatin (’03). Former students who pride themselves on the school’s longevity can be resistant to change. In 2001, the administration painted the red gates on the school’s west side black. After protests, they were returned to their original color.

“I will always remember the school’s red door and the tumult of running up its narrow stairs to English class,” New York Times national editor Sam Sifton (’84) wrote in an email. “I still have nightmares where I awaken in one of those classrooms at the start of a test I didn’t know was coming.” On Facebook, another recent alum published a lyrical 800-word essay describing the campus as a “memory palace” (“I remember the slight temperature variation of each different water fountain in the school”) and spawning a thread of 170 comments.

“Facilities were a challenge,” headmaster Lee Levison told The Observer. “I realized before any action the church took that the community was concerned about the lack of space and the quality of space.”
Collegiate’s board of trustees considered redeveloping the school’s two adjoining properties but was stymied by their location in a historic district. The sale of a school-owned apartment building will cover part of the current plan’s costs, said by The New York Times to be around $130 million.

Collegiate's future, as seen from the outside.

Collegiate was started in 1628—making it the country’s oldest school. Its connection to the church is perhaps the only aspect of the school’s identity that can be traced back to its 17th-century founding, and even the most nostalgic must admit that the school as we know it—I graduated in 2008—bears little resemblance to its original incarnation.

As Jean Parker Waterbury wrote in A History of Collegiate School, “The stages of its growth are distinct: at first the only school in the colony, it became the city school when the British arrived in 1664; in the 1700s it was principally a charity school for children of the poor parishioners, although a small group of paying students was accepted; the next century saw it as wholly a charity grammar school; the present phase, as an outstanding private secondary school, began in 1887.”

“It had already lost pretty much everything,” a 2007 graduate remarked during an impromptu visit to the development site, which seemed notably less vibrant than its current coordinates. Though developers have been trying for years to remake the area into a community called Riverside South, it hasn’t quite gelled.

Collegiate has long been part of the ecosystem of uptown Manhattan; boys bus across on the M79 in the morning, flood Broadway for lunch, take gym in Riverside Park. But the neighborhood has been changing recently, as if anticipating the school’s relocation. New Pizza Town across Broadway, the after-school hangout immortalized in Gossip Girl’s pilot as the “little pizza joint on the corner,” closed last year; its rival Big Nick’s appears to be on its last legs.

Will a modern open campus diminish the school's scrappy urban elitism?

Headmaster Mr. Levison takes note of “a pride that most students feel about the school and its commitment to academic excellence and intensity,” but points out that Collegiate differs from similar schools “in that its facilities are modest. It’s not a community that has historically craved ostentatious facilities.”

The new building, while sleeker and larger than the current campus, is basically a humble cube. It will feature three open “hubs” stacked on top of each other: students will ascend from one to the next as they graduate from lower to middle to upper school. The drastic increase in space will not correspond to an increase in enrollment, Mr. Levison told The Observer.

Architect and alumnus Thomas Gluck has promised unobstructed 180-degree views of the Hudson River; the new lobby, like the current one, looks out upon a courtyard, but this one will be expressly built for the purpose of athletic play. (The small outdoor space between Collegiate’s three current buildings has long been used for handball, soccer and basketball games.) The school will carry totems of its history with it in its move: the plaques in the lobby listing the “head boy” of each graduating class since 1912, the grandfather clock in the library admonishing students to “improve the flying moments,” the red door at the school’s entrance.

Mr. Levison assured The Observer that the church will continue to host school events and that the school’s religion classes will continue under the current chaplain. (These classes are comparative rather than catechist; a good percentage of the student body is Jewish.)

Alumni, parents and even some with no immediate stake in a new campus crowded Alice Tully Hall when the school unveiled its plans. Seated onstage at Lincoln Center was the school’s former college guidance counselor, Bruce Breimer. He was soon joined by the headmaster, the head of the board of trustees, a team of architects, and Anna Quindlen, mother of Mr. Krovatin.

“This school that we all love so much was founded at a time when the ground on which it now stands was thick forest and the only part of New Amsterdam that was inhabited was the southernmost tip,” she reminded the audience. “But of course, our true feelings about Collegiate have nothing to do with location.”

Some are warming up to Collegiate’s evolution. “I was bummed and then I saw the pictures,” one current senior said of the proposed new space, following Mr. Gluck’s presentation. “Futuristic. Glass. Cool.”

There is talk of organizing a shuttle service to the new location, which will be at least a 10-minute walk from the Columbus Circle subway station. “If Collegiate was on 61st, I wouldn’t have gone there,” a former classmate, raised on the Upper East Side, told me.

But another alumnus noted that some might see the new neighborhood’s relative isolation as a plus. “Kids are gonna smoke weed for days,” he said.

editorial@observer.com

While New Yorkers have created a lot of great holiday meal traditions--that whole "Chinese food on Christmas Eve" thing was totally ours--Thanksgiving has always been sort of a hodgepodge. If New York is a melting pot of culture, we might need a little more salt when it comes to figuring out how to take the Thanksgiving meal from home and transport it here.

Or we can just give up and order a turkey from Trader Joe's.

Either way, the whole Middle Eastern-fusion TexMex Chesapeake Vegan Thanksgiving thing isn't going to cut the cranberry sauce this year. Meditate on some of these New York-inspired (or -created, or whatever) dishes and think about how you ... well, how all of us could be putting a little more effort into this whole holiday instead of annually fleeing the city and going home to mommy.

Looking at the three critics' first six months on the job side-by-side, The Daily Meal's executive editor Arthur Bovino found that Mssrs. Wells, Sifton, and Bruni all reviewed the same number of restaurants. During those heady and caloric early days, Mr. Wells gave out three more stars than Mr. Bruni and fourteen more than Mr. Sifton.

"Sifton was twice as likely as Wells and five times as likely as Bruni to drop a big fat zero. Both Sifton and Bruni were almost twice as likely as Wells to give a restaurant one star," Mr. Bovino wrote.

The Daily Meal, the two-year-old food site run by former Forbes.com CEO Jim Spanfeller, has also deemed Mr. Wells "the czar of the two-star review."

All told, Mr. Wells averaged 1.8 stars per restaurant while Mr. Bruni averaged 1.7 stars and Mr. Sifton averaged 1.3 stars.

Maybe the restaurants are just getting better?

For more detailed analysis—including by borough, neighborhood, and cuisine—click through to The Daily Meal.

via nytimes.com

The New York Times Thanksgiving Help Line, once a modest live blog manned by outgoing dining critic Sam Sifton, looks like a mission control center this year.

Due to the overwhelming volume of questions, the Dining section decided to kick off a week of aid with a print Q&A and keep the conversation going online, with the help of a new interactive template set up by Web producer Emily Weinstein.

"I guess we're overcompensating for having lost Sam," former dining editor Pete Wells wrote the Observer. (Mr. Wells, recently appointed restaurant critic, was replaced by Susan Edgerley.)

Having print and online space devoted to Thanksgiving questions helps the section touch on both the popular, perennial concerns (Will stuffing cooked inside the bird give my guests salmonella?) and the "utterly sui generis," Mr. Wells said, "like the person who asked for suggestions for incorporating smoked monkey meat into the meal."

The holiday hub includes a series of videos by "Good Appetite" columnist Melissa Clark, so there's no confusion about what she means when she says "stick the thermometer into the thickest part of the thigh."

"The funny thing about this project is that I can't figure out if it's web-first or print-first or really, what it is, period," Mr. Wells wrote.

We hope he's more decisive about Le Bernadin's paprika sauce!

News of the appointment to the post was first rumored last week by Dylan Byers at Politico; during the time between Sam Sifton's retirement and today's announcement, a number of candidates were rumored as being eyed for the job, especially the New Orleans Times-Picayune's Brett Anderson, who the Observer hears from a source familiar with the situation that he did not, in the end, want to leave New Orleans if offered the job. A spokesperson for the New York Times did not immediately confirm the rumor (The Observer will update if she does).

[UPDATE: Amanda Kludt at Eater has confirmed both appointments. She also notes: "It should be mentioned that Wells just changed his Twitter profile picture from a photo of himself to a photo of oysters and the Times removed his photo from their website." Meanwhile, the Times has filed their own post on the move, noting that Wells won't begin his duties officially until January.]

Mr. Wells has been the Times Dining editor since 2006, when he joined the paper from Details magazine, where he was an articles editor, prior to which, he was a columnist at Food & Wine for two years. In the weeks between Frank Bruni's retirement from the post in 2009 and Sam Sifton's first filing at the position, Mr. Wells filled in as dining critic for the paper, and was—infamously, gloriously—critically violent to the few restaurants he reviewed in that time. A sampling:

From a goose egg "FAIR" review of celebrated Greek chef Michael Psilakis Gus & Gabriel Gastropub: "A selection of offal and other oddities, it raises hopes that those dishes are exempt from the pub theme because they’re so delicious. Those hopes wither at the first bite of a sour chicken-liver mousse paired with a mushy terrine, and they die with a taste of tongue that seems to have passed through the flavor subtractor. (The tongue came with a dish of what the waiter said was the poaching liquid. It didn’t taste like anything, either. The only thing on that plate that did was the bread.)"

From his following filling, a goose egg "SATISFACTORY" review of Hotel Giffou, in which he found a table difficult to secure: "I was afraid that if I returned [to the host's stand] they would hit the one-hour mark and lead me to a produce crate by the dishwasher. So I stayed away."

From the filing after that, a one-star review of The Standard Grill: "We didn’t blame the overwhelmed waiter, but we did want to wrap him in a warm blanket and pack him into a cab with the names of a few restaurants that give the staff more than 30 seconds of training before sending them into battle."

Mr. Wells received some criticism for what was seen as being unduly harsh on these restaurants at the time (his final of the four filings was, indeed, a two-star review). Yet, if critical relentlessness is what Mr. Wells brings to the Times Dining table, it may not be undue: Even Mario Batali himself expressed surprised at what was perceived by some to be an overwrought and all too kind review of his big box operation in the Meatpacking District, Del Posto, to whom Sam Sifton awarded four stars (which hadn't happened for an Italian restaurant in New York City since the 70s), a restaurant whose cuisine Bloomberg critic Ryan Sutton derided as "mushy."

In other words, may Mr. Wells bring forth the critical hounds of hell on New York City's dining scene. This will likely be a great deal of fun.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Brett Anderson—the James Beard award-winning dining critic at The New Orleans Times-Picayune—is currently being floated by many a rumormonger as the leading candidate for the top Times dining spot. Earlier today, Eater noted "half a dozen" independent sources that Anderson was a "shoo-in" for the job.

Furthermore: Eater co-founder Ben Leventhal noted that Anderson hasn't filed anything at the Times-Picayune since September 20th. Anderson didn't deny speaking to the Times or if he had knowledge of being short-listed for the job to New Orleans alt-weekly Gambit, and as John Koblin reported for Women's Wear Daily in September, Anderson was a finalist for the job the last time it was open.

For what it's worth, Anderson is well-liked by many of his contemporaries; the comments section of Eater's post is filled with a few hopes on his appointment.

From Bloomberg critic Ryan Sutton:

Getting a New Orleans critic to take the reviewer job at the New York Times would be a seriously awesome development. Would help bring in a more national perspective (and readership) to NYC restaurant reviewing, one would think. And bringing in a critic from New Orleans, a city that represents one of America's greatest and most unique regional cuisines (and one of the birthplaces of America's cocktail culture), would hopefully result in some solid reviewing reflective of "outside the tri-state area" context and culture. The Tocqueville approach, of sorts (the French writer, not the Union Square restaurant). SUTTON approves.

From Time food writer Josh Ozersky:

I'm actually surprised that this came to pass. I said on the day Sifty left that this wouldn't surprise me. Great pick if it happens.

The other frontrunner for the job is supposedly Times dining editor Pete Wells. Wells filled in as a temporary critic between Frank Bruni and Sam Sifton, though Wells certainly earned his fair share of controversy over his short tenure of four reviews, which were mostly negative. Tough gig if you can get it.

Know anything more? We'd love to hear it.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Which New York Times section is responsible for this viral photo sensation, again?

In an era in which everyone’s becoming a critic, or at least a Yelper, one would think that fewer and fewer people would care what The New York Times says about a restaurant. Ruth Reichl said as much around the time it was announced that Frank Bruni was leaving the post.

“From the time of Craig Claiborne—who basically invented the genre—there has been a waning power among each Times restaurant critic,” she told The Observer.

But that didn’t stop Hugo Lindgren from getting much of the disempowered foodie gang together in this week’s Times Magazine. He enlisted former Times restaurant reviewers Sam Sifton, Mimi Sheraton and Ms. Reichl for the annual food issue, plus Amanda Hesser, who used to write Recipe Redux for the magazine. The package occasioned a specially designed web page.

“It’s not just about a restaurant,” Mr. Lindgren told Off the Record. “Food has cultural, political and policy implications for the whole world. It’s not contained to one human activity.”

Indeed, within the world of The Times, just the opposite is occurring: in the past decade, restaurant reviewing revealed itself to be one of the most opportune perches within the paper. Frank Bruni graduated to write for the Times Magazine and then took Frank Rich’s spot on the op-ed roster. Mr. Sifton will start as national editor later this month.

It’s probably true, as Ms. Reichl suggested, that a Times reviewer no longer makes or breaks a restaurant, but given food’s rising prominence within the national discourse (First Lady Hillary Clinton wrote a health care plan; First Lady Michelle Obama planted a vegetable garden), it may be more true that food coverage makes or breaks a newspaper. Any time the Minimalist Mark Bittman compiles a list (“101 Things to Grill”), it’s likely to top the Most Emailed charts for a week; Mr. Bittman was recently given a Sunday Review column.

“It hasn’t escaped the notice of anyone,” Times dining editor Pete Wells told Off the Record. “The list can be tricky to interpret, but in a crude measure it tells you people care about food stories.”

Mr. Wells agreed that the cultural significance of the restaurant reviewer has risen but said the trajectories of Mr. Sifton and Mr. Bruni are more likely reflections of their personal versatility.

Mr. Bruni’s reviews revealed his skills as a reporter, Mr. Wells explained. “He picked up on trends and noticed things about restaurants no one else did. Those reviews were great examples of criticism, but they were really well observed and reported.”

Mr. Sifton’s pop culture references reflected the democritization of fine dining.

“Sam’s reviews were loaded with super smart, plugged-in references to books, theater, TV, music and movies, and just a general sense of the common culture and the way that restaurants now belong to that culture,” Mr. Wells noted. (Although Mr. Sifton’s legacy may not be in food criticism, Off the Record believes his recent battle of the boroughs with his predecessor Ms. Sheraton will be a primary source in the history of Brooklyn-Manhattan culture wars.)

On the matter of who will become Mr. Sifton’s successor, Mr. Wells had no comment.

For those with money on the question, Mr. Wells, who may be a candidate, did say that invisibility is no longer a make-or-break job requirement. Mr. Bruni’s “unmasking” gave his memoir a boost of publicity, but having already promoted oneself in the occasional TimesCast or gratuitous Tumbling won’t disqualify any writers. Critical anonymity was instituted to replicate the treatment and experience of a normal diner, Mr. Wells explained, which is no longer the exclusive domain of The Times.

“If you want to know how a normal diner is treated, go to Yelp or other places and actually hear from them,” Mr. Wells suggested.

Miss Lily's

A week ago, The Observer took a look at Miss Lily's, a Jamaican jerk joint on Houston Street that's unleashed the anger of Anna Wintour. She lives next door, and she was worried it would become an all-night hotspot. And it sort of has. Too bad all the fashion models love the place!

But there's no mention of the Vogue editor's dissatisfaction in Sam Sifton's review of Miss Lily's in today's New York Times. Instead, the outgoing restaurant critic waxes eloquent on the model-heavy spot's resemblance to Florent, the beloved Meatpacking District greasy spoon diner that closed a few years back.

So, does it measure up? Let's see what Mr. Sifton has to say.

The restaurant draws a (mostly!) corresponding clientele that can spur memories of Fashion Week crowds at Florent. Nearly everyone in the place appears tall and casually elegant; friendly, but a little otherworldly, as if resident in a game preserve. Very few people on Earth can eat jerk chicken and look as the people at Miss Lily’s do.

Sounds familiar to us! But what about the food, Mr. Sifton?

Mr. Thompson’s smoked mackerel salad is also impressive: large moist flakes of the fish predominate, with a sweet bed of fresh greens and tangy pickled onions to bridge the two textures. If he served it to you in the main saloon of a yacht tied to a dock in Miami, you would be happy indeed, before pouring another glass of Sancerre and padding barefoot up to the flybridge to watch the stars. On Houston Street, served by what looks like a supermodel, you can achieve a similar state of mind.

But, in the end, he isn't too kind to the menu offerings, saying that "so much of the rest of the food falls short." We happened to like the spicy jerk dishes, but regardless, we don't think a negative review of Miss Lily's will alter the clientele too drastically. Hopefully you're attractive enough to "eat jerk chicken and look as the people at Miss Lily’s do." That's all we ask.

The New York Times

“I’m stepping down as restaurant critic to be the national editor of The Times. #checkplease," he wrote on Twitter.

In her official announcement posted on the paper's food blog, newbie Times executive editor Jill Abramson explained the move, acknowledging Mr. Sifton’s lack of hard news experience:

“From his star runs at Dining and Culture, we all know that Sam is a superb editor who brings infectious energy and a host of original ideas, digital and print, to everything he touches. Correspondents and critics adore him. So who better to fill the shoes of Rick Berke? Sam’s background here isn’t hard news, but we all saw the newsiness and urgency he brought to the Culture report.”

In the same statement, Ms. Abramson also named Adam Bryant, formerly deputy national editor, senior editor for features, tasked with reviving the How We Live group.

Retaliation ensued. Eddie took to his blog, and even his mother chimed in with advice for her son ("Trust me, you much keep your bar license active just in case you need it"). Relations between the two turned friendly -- Twitter love going on as we speak -- but perhaps the damage was done. Xiao Ye closed in November after its rep as a Four Loko den trumped any dumplings it had ever served. Eddie Huang returned to making sandwiches at Bauhous, is reportedly in talks to host a TV show and, um, writes for The New York Post.

But now it's a new year -- a Chinese New Year, that is, and such an event calls for a special treat from Huang: he's cooking up a three-course feast, drinks (Four Loko?) included, at Fort Greene mainstay No. 7. Sifton took it in last night.

The verdict? Compared to his visit to Xiao Ye, Sifton seemed slightly more enthused with the food, and more enamored of the atmosphere, which to him is defined by "the unrelenting coolness of youth."

People spoke to each other about shared experiences: Their first sandwich at No. 7 Sub, Mr. Kord’s shop in the Ace Hotel in Manhattan; their memories of the dumplings at Xiao Ye. Bloggers took photographs to post in the morning. It was as if the restaurant had been transformed into a rock club and Mr. Huang and Mr. Kord into a band.

And, naturally, he was sure to mention the "low-volume soundtrack of hip-hop." This time, though, he didn't have to ask where the food at.

Click for What Twitter Taught Us: Anderson Cooper Gets Clocked in the Face, Egypt-Style

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234