Potemkim Village
Standing on the corner of Avenue A and East Sixth Street, I couldn’t tell what was real and what was fakity-fake-FAKE. For Darren Aronofsky’s adaptation of a wrong-man crime thriller, a Hollywood film crew transformed the façades of vape-juice shops and Bitcoin ATM–equipped bodegas to approximate the literal-dollar-slice-pizza and cyber-café storefronts of the late 1990s. They’d done a good job: I lingered there questioning whether the bagel pieces scattered a little too perfectly around an empty tree bed were edible or actually foam chunks painted by a prop technician. A sliver of brick wall coated in wheat-paste posters had me googling if Cheap Trick’s band members were still alive (some are) and what day Halloween was (Thursday) to confirm whether a party in Tompkins Square Park had indeed been scheduled for Saturday, October 31. (Clearly not.) I chatted up an older woman loitering nearby, hopeful for a colorful quote from a skeptical local resident, when she pointed to a busted, rusty Nissan and said, “That’s my car!” And yet: “I mean, not my car. I’m an extra.” So, were all the other people in low-rise jeans and ball caps paid actors? Did they hail from other, more recently gentrified neighborhoods farther downtown or over a bridge?
I feel particularly taunted by the Kim’s Video sign hoisted above the block over which it used to reign; the defunct movie rental business did not actually return to its old location. Kim’s, once a hub for obscure film media ranging from the arthouse to artless, originated in 1986 as a nook inside a dry-cleaning shop at 99 Avenue A. It relocated to 85 Avenue A (and eventually expanded throughout Manhattan) until its collection of 55,000 DVDs and tapes was bizarrely shipped to Salemi, Italy. Back in its old building, its cinematic doppelgänger put sushi restaurant Takahachi temporarily and consensually out of business. When I peered between the vintage movie posters taped to the windows, I could see chairs stacked on tables. The camera must not have gotten too close.
“Not an architect, and not a New Yorker, but have fallen in love with NYRA.”
New Yorkers have bemoaned Kim’s demise since its closure in 2004. In the intervening years, Takahachi itself has grown into a neighborhood institution, one with first-name-basis, every-night regulars. I visited on one of my first trips to the city, before I could legally order sake or correctly pronounce Houston Street. When the landmarks of my New York life are gone, perhaps the auteurs of the future will prop up their replicas, and watching their movies onscreen I’ll experience queasy déjà vu remembering the days of being accosted by young men with mini microphones asking me what I’m listening to or, “Excuse me, are you two a couple?”
I know I sound like the most curmudgeonly twenty-seven-year-old there ever was, fretting the businesses and TikTok entrepreneurs that haven’t even died yet. But I’m in fair company. In Aronofsky’s source material, the 2004 novel Caught Stealing by Charlie Huston, the narrator (played by Austin Butler) is a former California transplant who rues the gentrification of the East Village, his adopted home: “There are still plenty of junkies and burned-out storefronts and a handful of hookers, but the Wild West feel the place had when I got here is gone. Condos, boutiques, and bistros are popping up like fungus.” The latest gentrifying growth may tend toward coworking spaces with Amazon lockers, pricey salad chains, and trash bins overflowing with Blank Street Coffee cups, but the bleached mohawk and studded biker jacket worn by Butler’s costar Matt Smith is enough to stop the clock, if only for a couple hours. That’s that movie magic.