Ta-ta, Tatalah!

Sadly, the news on Friday of the legendary Carnegie Deli closing at the end of this year, another institutional nail in the coffin of what used to be Gotham, left me with a lingering sense of indigestion, bordering on despair. This town has become so beige and quotidian, it's barely itself. 9/11 really changed its soul, irreparably. The recovery was as radical as a sex change. The intervening years have seen it purged, amputated, dislodged, extracted and erased of every kind of idiomatic chiaroscuro, whether of temperament, rhythm, patina or silhouette; scrubbed of every delicious, scabrous contour and characteristic; devoid of vexation, serendipity and surprise. It's Stepford. Worse, it's the remake of Stepford. Only it's where New York used to be. I'm so tired of mourning it. Bored stiff by how predictably colorless it's become. I just want to move.