The New Dimes Square

In a few weeks, Nine Orchard, a 14-story hotel, will open in the former Jarmulowsky Bank building with three restaurants by Ignacio Mattos d’Estela, Lodi and Altro Paradiso. According to the website: “The hotel is surrounded by cultural institutions, bustling neighborhood streets, and some of the city’s most exciting shops and restaurants.”

What really surrounds it is Dimes Square. So on the occasion of the hotel’s opening, we asked self-proclaimed historians and long-term residents – those who moved in before bead bag company Susan Alexandra opened up shop, but after the place went through a very thorough first wave of gentrification — for a Neighborhood State.

According to them, there is a very clearly defined Old Dimes Square and New Dimes Square. Meetka Otto, a 25-year-old Dimes waitress who has lived in the neighborhood for seven years and is known as the “Mayor of Dimes Square,” believes the Switch officially took place in June 2020, after the first few months of lockdown have given way to a cautious summer of COVID socializing. The “techno heads, Blazer Soundsystem boys, Kiki Kudo and Loft-adjacent thirtysomethings sitting in Seward Park” were entirely eclipsed, she says, by “students, rich kids and overly intellectual Internet incels.” She knew when she moved in that she was “walking in a shoe that was already broken, but very different from what it is now. The tone was similar, but the crowd was older and less self-aware. Mission Chinese was a diner vibe, and no one was walking around saying, “Not me having lunch at Dimes!” “Performer Annie Hamilton lived in the area from Feb 2021 to Feb 2022. the pandemic was raging and people were partying, and I loved it. But it was already a watered down freak show. I arrived late .

The neighborhood had been heading towards the inflection point that was the pandemic for years. An extremely abbreviated story might go like this: Dimes opened in 2013 on Division Street in a 200 square foot space named after its attractive customers. (“Because all of our customers are all pennies,” owner Alissa Wagner said at the time. Eater. “You know, like the movie ten.” New York described the scene as “overheated and clicky.”) The neighborhood was already popular with a certain kind of people – publishers and gallerists had long since congregated in Lower East Side bars like 169 Bar, the Clandestino, Forgtmenot and Beverly’s, all within a few blocks of the new restaurant. In two years, Dimes has tripled, opening a market and a delicatessen. The Greek restaurant Kiki’s opened its doors a stone’s throw from the market in a former Chinese incense paper shop. In 2017, tie designer Alexander Olch brought an art cinema, Metrograph, to Ludlow – Greta Gerwig, John Waters, Jim Jarmusch, Sofia Coppola and Willem Dafoe came to the party. The next slice seal has arrived at Scarr, with pet-nat bottles in the basement and popular Instagram products (“it’s just one of those places in New York that still feels like a neighborhood,” model Sarah Lundqvist said at the time); soon after, Nick Perkins’ Niall Fallon and Cervo’s moved into the former Pies ‘n’ Thighs spot (Bon Appétit editors followed). In 2019, Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan released an episode of their scared red podcast titled “Once Upon a Time in Dimes Square” (a two-part review Once upon a time in Hollywood). And in 2020, Helena Barquet and Fabiana Faria moved their beloved homeware shop Coming on the corner of Orchard and Canal. Next: the pandemic. The neighborhood mostly stayed and partied. Underground bartender Ivan Berko characterized the era as follows: “All of a sudden there was this Italian piazza type thing.”

By the time people started returning to the city in 2020, this Italian piazza type thing was under heavy surveillance. Influencer-scammer Caroline Calloway kind of got into the scene and broadcast her various Dimes Square events to hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers. The Drunken Channel releases its first issue. This magazine published his piece on The Drunken Channel. the Time to extinguish his piece on The Drunken Channel. Vintage dealer Chad Senzel started selling clothes off a shelf on the corner of Ludlow and Canal to his many gallery owner/editor/actor/model friends. Stores opened at a breakneck pace on Orchard Street to cater to tourists pouring in from Williamsburg and the West Village to see or partake in the spectacle that it all had become: Susan Alexandra, Colbo clothes-slash-record-shop, Desert Vintage. Viral underwear company Parade hosted a Dimes Square pop-up. In February 2022, there was a Dimes Square playwritten and directed by author Matthew Gasda.

All of this development leads to friction between Dimes Square’s original gentrifiers and its new gentrifiers. The neighborhood is now filled with “leather-clad girls Google-mapping how to get to Clandestino,” says Callan Malone, the founder of a sub-stack called The Real Housewives of Dimes Square. There’s an abundance of “Australians wearing big hats”, according to director Leila Jospé. “The clando and wine bar outside the seats have big greasers against social energy,” reads a recent Tweeter. Editor Nick Robins Early, who has lived above Clandestino for a decade, says a few years ago he and his friends were having a drink – at Clandestino – and laughed when they saw “this type of ‘NYU student sipping a Manhattan while holding a book aloft’. on film theory and looking around to see if anyone noticed. Now there are 50 almost every day of the week. (Not to mention the tension between those who lived in the neighborhood before the first wave of gentrification and everyone who came after. Asked about the New Dimes Square development, Scott, a creative director who lived in the same flat on Henry Street for 18 years, said: “You mean Wu Wonton Square? “)

And there’s more (and growing) to come. The lights come back on at 37 Canal Street and Ludlow for the opening of Le Dive, a natural wine bar from the team behind Acme and Le Crocodile. Suzie Kondi just opened her second store on Orchard (her first is in Amagansett) with $265 harem pants for sale. (A recent headline in Yahoo News reads: “Suzie Kondi opens Dimes Square store.”) And then there’s the hotel, which will have a grill, a tavern-style bar, a cocktail bar in the lobby and 116 rooms. . No one is exactly sure what effect this will have on the neighborhood. Michelle “Gutes” Guterman thinks it will mean more or less the same thing. “It’s just more of what’s happened since the beginning – a slow move to a more scholarly and wealthier social class. Although Malaysia Beef Jerky will probably be expelled. Joseph is worried that the hotel “will probably bring another wave of pieces from Dimes Square, from people who travel here because they think it’s something real. It’s not a real thing. It was a joke that journalists and people who don’t live here somehow turned into reality. At the best of times, the hotel is sick and brings great deals to local spots that have struggled to stay open during COVID, without completely diluting the area with disrespectful tourists and annoying people. That’s all we can hope for at this point.