My old hood

My wife and I lived on the upper west side until a year or so ago, and there are MANY things that we miss about the neighborhood. We really like having all the room that we now have in Harlem, but we our new neighborhood still needs more restaurants, bars, coffee shops...

The NYTimes has a piece about Fairway and the changes to the UWS over the last 30 years. A very entertaining article.

By DAVID W. DUNLAP
Published: December 17, 2008
Calling Broadway the main street of the Upper West Side, Paul Goldberger wrote in “The City Observed: New York” (1978) that it was “like a child’s room that is permitted to remain in disorder by parents who feel that children should be permitted to have their own mess.”

“If you doubt the economic wisdom of letting a street be that way,” he continued, “count the empty storefronts: there are virtually none from Lincoln Center to Morningside Heights.”
The best single block to illustrate this jumbled vitality for Mr. Goldberger’s guidebook was between 74th and 75th Streets. In a 213-foot stretch were a celebrated fishmonger (Citarella), a well-known greengrocer (Fairway), a supermarket (D’Agostino), a clothing store (Pandemonium), a coffee shop and a popular bingo parlor called Broadway Hall.
Revisiting the block 30 years later, one finds Fairway and Citarella. Period.
The competing markets, which long ago expanded beyond their original specialties, now occupy all the street-level retail space.

This is a tribute to the West Side’s enduring character as a neighborhood where homegrown food businesses can thrive, cheek by jowl. But it also underscores the growing big-box monotony on Broadway, even when the boxes are, happily, one of a kind.

Fairway was founded in the early 1930s by Nathan Glickberg as the 74th Street Market, a fruit and vegetable stand. In the early ’50s, the Glickberg family turned it into a supermarket called Fairway, adding groceries, meat, dairy products and frozen food. After the business changed hands several times, Howard Glickberg, one of the founder’s grandsons, recreated it as a high-end produce shop in 1974. Fairway expanded into the coffee shop in 1997. Two years later, it took over D’Agostino’s space and the former bingo hall upstairs, which had more recently been a Bally’s Jack LaLanne Fitness Center. There, Fairway runs a cafe and steakhouse.
And there, Fairway’s irresistible force meets the immovable object of Citarella, which expanded into the Pandemonium space in 1993. The competitors are abutters, too.

Imagine a passer-by from the 1978 photograph — perhaps the man in the vest, flared trousers and mustard-colored shirt (just a guess) with four-inch collar points — propelled forward 30 years.

The time traveler recognizes Fairway and Citarella, of course, but the crowd looks younger, more prosperous and less diverse, and there are more children underfoot. The device in the woman’s right hand could be described to him as being akin to a Dick Tracy two-way wrist radio with a full keyboard and a computer monitor. But it might take all day to explain the phrase “www.fairwaymarket.com” on the awning, where it used to say “Farm Fresh.”