*Everyday Chatter

A wilding gang is beating people in Tompkins Square Park. One 26-year-old woman, after being beaten with bottles and sticks, went home and died. If Lesia Pupshaw had been a banker, stumbling home to her condo drunk and high on coke, it would be called a murder, not an overdose. And you would have read about her by now in the New York Times. But she was a heroin user and a "crusty" kid. So you haven't. Thankfully, we have Bob Arihood. [NMNL]

image from Village Voice, 2000

The just-vanished Chelsea Court Meat Market is being replaced by another meat market. Amazingly, a new butcher shop is coming to this spot, Knickerbocker Meat of the Bronx. (Thanks to the tipsters for this one.):


The New Yorker visits the ever-vanishing Music Row to say goodbye to Manny's. [NYer]

Why I avoid my local F station like the plague between 5 and 7pm on weekdays. [EVG]

Get ready to have your heart warmed: A mother's lost diary from 1939 turns up at the Strand's bargain rack, and the good folks at Freebird Books Google its way back to the son it was intended for. [FBB]

Find out why Sinatra loved Patsy's restaurant. [CR]

In the New Yorker poem "Bleecker Street," Philip Schultz wonders if:
"Perhaps these three Chinese girls
giggling into cell phones, lavishly spending
each moment of their youth, truly believe
the mountain of self has no top
and each breath is a reckoning with fate?
Perhaps these shiny boutiques, each
so resolute, so eager to please, are weary
of decorating the illusions of another century..."