Dimes Square lives to see another summer.
Below-ground reporting from last night's basement Community Board 3 meeting.
Hello everyone. This letter falls into the category of Feed Me After Dark, which is when I send Feed Me at night instead of in the morning. This happens for all different reasons, but today it was because I was working with a young journalist on a breaking report of the status of Dimes Square. And then I had a meeting with Substack. And then I had to return to my apartment in South Brooklyn to tie this whole thing up.
Today’s letter includes: Drinking a Miller High Life on Canal Street is probably in the cards again this summer, the 75-year-old New York City steakhouse coming to the Hamptons, an influencer opens a raw milk and raw soft-serve shop, and the hottest collab partner on every brand’s list is…. Justin Vernon.
Guest Lecture: Jake Sherman
Guest Lecture is a Feed Me series that captures the spirit of that (sometimes unhinged) guest lecturer who would come into your class on a Friday, drops more knowledge than you’ve heard all year, and then leaves forever. For our next Guest Lecture, we’ll be talking to Jake Sherman, the co-founder of Punchbowl News, a scoop-heavy, membership-based news community that covers Washington.
Paid readers can ask him anything — I suggest getting his thoughts on Phish at The Sphere, hot takes on venture-backed media companies, and where he likes to party in Washington.
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The below is a report from Feed Me reader and soon-to-be graduate of Columbia Journalism School, Cami Fateh. Yesterday, she emailed me asking if I was interested in a dispatch from the Community Board 3 meeting in the basement of Mt. Sinai Beth Israel on Rivington Street. Of course I, along with all my readers under-35, want to know the fate of the most electric neighborhood in New York. Below, Cami reports from inside the meeting.
If you read this newsletter, you’ve probably seen the above meme. If you haven’t seen it before, it’s claiming that the removal of outdoor seating at Le Dive is the final nail in the Dimes Square coffin. If you don’t know what Dimes Square is, congratulations. I bet you sleep soundly at night.
The sentiment that Dimes Square is cooked isn’t totally off-base. Whatever Dimes Square (“The two block stretch of Canal Street between Essex and Orchard” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue) was in the heady summer of 2020—when New York was half-shut, Aimé Leon Dore was a pilgrimage site, and Red Scare blasted out downtown windows — did, in fact, die. Killed off by collabs, TikToks, and the cruel churn of the culture cycle. Even
’s Alex Hartman has conceded that people stopped loitering outside ALD after his memes made it too cringe to be seen doing so.Last spring, Brock Colyar explained the neighborhood’s infamy concisely for New York Magazine. “During the pandemic, it was synonymous with a squad of smart if somewhat bratty young people with vaguely anti-woke artistic ambitions.”
The hot topic of the night: whether or not the city will, once again, close Dimes Square to car traffic this summer, and have the open dining of years past, through the city’s Open Street program.
But just when you thought the vibes had flatlined for good, a different kind of hero emerged: the amateur urbanists, high school students, and downtown romantics of Community Board 3. CB3, which covers the Lower East Side, East Village, Two Bridges, Alphabet City, and a good chunk of Chinatown, held its monthly meeting last night in the basement of Mt. Sinai Beth Israel on Rivington Street — a room with zero sunlight and excellent gossip. The hot topic of the night: whether or not the city will, once again, close Dimes Square to car traffic this summer, and have the open dining of years past, through the city’s Open Street program.
What’s on the line is a specific type of downtown summer: real-life, in-person hangouts with friends in a walkable part of a neighborhood, drinking icy Hugo Spritzes while finishing up Slack messages on Friday afternoons, private equity guys dressing with the intention to be mistaken for creative directors, and sunny kinetic energy in the streets.
The Open Streets program, launched in 2020 to keep restaurants afloat mid-pandemic, has stuck around by popular demand. But if this particular application—filed by the “Canal Street Merchants Association,” a loose coalition of sceney restaurants—is denied at the full board vote on April 22, it’s back inside for all of us.