Thursday’s Headlines: Vanderbilt to Last Edition

Well, that’s rich!

Yesterday’s NY Magazine piece about the closure of several high-end eateries on Vanderbilt Avenue was thinner than an intern’s resume. Yes, it’s true that Greg Baxtrom is closing the decade-old Olmsted. And it’s true that LaLou and Faun closed previously. And it’s true that this weekend, so is the high-end grocer and sandwich shop R&D Foods.

Yet Chris Crowley’s story didn’t bother to connect the dots — many of them he himself has inked in the past.

For starters, the Adams administration’s failure to make outdoor dining a year-round program basically ruined what had been the prior administration’s greatest achievement, boosting restaurant revenues during the pandemic and after. No mention in Crowley’s piece.

Also, you can’t ignore the role that the Vanderbilt Open Street — itself a triumph of the previous administration — had in turning the roadway into the kind of destination that boosts business like Faun, Olmsted and the exceptional R&D.

But the Vanderbilt Open Street has been scaled back from a Friday-night-through-Sunday-night party into a one-night-only event. So that regional destination isn’t drawing as many people. Again, no mention of that in Crowley’s piece.

Reaction to the omissions was swift online.

“By killing the open street on Vanderbilt, it became less of a destination and the neighborhood can’t support restaurants like that if it’s not a destination,” Cooper Lund posted on Bluesky.

“I bet restaurants paid premiums for leases based on the fact it was on a pedestrianized street with high foot traffic. No clue why NYC didn’t make this a permanent pedestrian plaza,” added Matt de Silva.

And “War on Cars” co-host Doug Gordon added, “N of 1, but I only go to restaurants on Vanderbilt because of the open street. Without it, I can go to similar restaurants near me.”

Also left out of Crowley’s piece? The Department of Transportation did a detailed analysis of open streets that showed — clearly — how beneficial they are for business, especially bars and restaurants. It said:

• Open Streets corridors significantly outperformed nearby control corridors on three key metrics (sales growth, growth in the number of restaurants and bars, and keeping businesses open).
• Sales growth at restaurants and bars on Open Streets corridors significantly outpaced sales growth in the boroughs that the corridors are in.
• On Open Streets corridors, a higher percentage of restaurants and bars were able to stay in business during the pandemic than across the rest of the same borough.

So if the city wants to foster business — and avoid having New York Magazine write about how said businesses are in decline — it just has to follow its own playbook.

In other news:

• The New York Times continued its absolutely bizarre coverage of the mayor’s race. On Wednesday, the Gray Lady was completely credulous about the new Donald Trump-Andrew Cuomo alliance to defeat Zohran Mamdani (come for the horrible Times spin, but stay for the great Stu Loeser put-down of Trump). Earlier in the week, the so-called Paper of Record gave credence to the concerns of extremely far right Hindus who oppose Mamdani because (checks notes) he opposes the authoritarianism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The Times’s slanted coverage is really only one degree of separation from the Post’s at this point (I mean, isn’t standing up to would-be dictators like Trump and Modi an American value?). The Daily News could jump into this vacuum of coverage to do a story about all the normal, every day, mainstream New Yorkers who despise both Trump and Cuomo — except, um, is there even a Daily News left anymore?
• Speaking of the Post, could the Tabloid of Wreckage have possibly gotten something wrong? (amNY)
• Despite our best efforts to show the human toll of this project, New Jersey is moving forward with its Turnpike expansion. (ENR)
• Williamsburg 365 won the Battle of the Bedford Bike Lane, but it still can’t see that the drivers of Hasidic school buses are the main safety threat, given how they drop off kids in the middle of the street.
• The Atlantic Yards project is a boondoggle’s boondoggle. Happy to see I was on the right side of that history back in my Brooklyn Paper days. (Gothamist)
• It’s the PATH’s turn for a Summer of Hell. (Gothamist)
• Hell Gate took a look at Mayor Adams’s housing record.
• Dave Colon’s exclusive story on the revival of the 34th Street busway earned him a shout-out from Mayor-in-Waiting Zohran Mamdani on Twitter. Other outlets got around to covering it, too. (Gothamist, amNY)
• And speaking of the busway, the Man vs. Machine contest pitting a person against the crosstown bus on 34th Street has become a celebration, thanks to the City Council and Mayor Adams agreeing to restart the 34th Street busway project that the mayor had killed. The fun starts at 4:30 p.m. at First Avenue and 34th Street. Mamdani is expected to attend. Info here.