Young Cleaners: New On University Place
Another dry cleaning option has arrived. Young Cleaners is located on University Place between 12th and 13th St.
Karaoke Boho has struggled to open at the old Crunch location on East 13th St. for six months. Now a slight change: in addition to karaoke, the store is offering a full Korean restaurant, some competition for the adorable Do Sirak on our block.
Glaze teriyaki bowls will soon arrive at 110 University Place. It’s the fourth location for this growing chain.
Comfort food joint Chat ‘n Chew shut its doors this week after 22 years in the neighborhood, but the owner plans to reopen it as an Italian restaurant.
The diner-style eatery at 10 E. 16th St. near Fifth Avenue will relaunch in two weeks as Little Sal’s, said Ethan Silverman, son of owner Andrew Silverman.
“[Chat ‘n Chew] lost some of it’s energy, and now we’re getting it back,” Ethan Silverman said. “It’s going to be a Chat ‘n Chew on steroids. It’ll have traditional Italian food like chicken parm, eggplant parm and pastas.”
Silverman compared the concept of Little Sal’s to New York City restaurants like Sauce and Parm, where it’s “casual and family oriented — selling wine by the glass and not the bottle,” he said.
Andrew Silverman also co-owns Flatiron’s City Crab and Barbounia restaurants.
Little Sal’s will open as a pop-up in two weeks for a test run, and may remain open permanently depending on how well it does, Silverman said.
As for Chat ‘n Chew’s abrupt closure, Silverman said the team had known that they would be closing for a while, but hadn’t made it public.
“If people took a look at the place recently, they’d see that the staff was slowly kind of diminishing,” Silverman said.
“We’ve been in Union Square for a while, and we’re going to come back with energy,” he continued. “But [the concept] will be [in] keeping with the people who work and live in the neighborhood.”
The original branch of Crunch Fitness on East 13th St., which closed three years ago and has been vacant since, will become a new branch of Revolve Fitness, a spinning studio.
In case you missed it on Friday, protesters invaded and occupied the New School buidling on our block for about 6 hours on Friday morning. Unlike the previous demonstration in December, this one was summarily shut down by a powerful NYPD push at the request of the university, and around 20 occupiers, some of whom appear to have been troublemakers as opposed to students, were arrested. The real losers in all this were the businesses on our block, who were prevented from opening until Friday afternoon.
How do you feel about all those artists who take up quite a bit of space selling their art at the southwest corner of Union Square Park. Here’s an article that says they may soon be squeezed into a smaller area:
The Parks Department claims the rules will decrease congestion, but critics accuse the city of pushing out independent street artists in order to replace them with more lucrative vendors.
The Parks Department declined to answer questions submitted by the NY Destinations Examiner .
A Parks Department spokesperson provided an email statement, much of which was excerpted from the Parks Department’s March 24 notice in The City Record .
” The dramatic increase in the number of expressive matter vendors on parkland has prompted the Parks Department to develop these rules in an effort to strike a balance between these vendors and other park users, and address other concerns related to maintaining and operating open space in an urban environment, ” reads the statement.