Popular Corners
JULY 21, 2009
Where streets meet, you'll find a beat.
Five Points in Manhattan was a notorious downtown collection of corners said to have the highest murder rate in the world in the 1800s but popular city street corners often have a brighter side. When a neighborhood begins to "gentrify", new businesses tend to cluster around a well-traveled intersection like the cross-hairs of Roebling Street, Metropoltan Avenue and North 4th Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Though the neighborhood itself had long been colonized by hipness and strollers, the formerly un-spectacular block got a big hit of destination value with the addition of top BBQ spot Fette Sau, the chic Roebling Tea Room, popular salons, spas and coffee shops.
Corner establishments define blocks and serve as navigation points for visitors not familiar with the neighborhood–Macy's and Bloomingdale's department stores hold down their own legendary corners. In the Lower East Side, the iconic storefront of Schiller's Liquor Bar at the corner of Rivington and Suffolk Streets defined a certain kind of nightlife in the downtown neighborhood. Celebrities with a special place in city lore sometimes even get their very own memorial corners: Rappers Run DMC (205th Street and Hollis Avenue in Queens) and downtown rocker Joey Ramone (Second Street and Bowery in the East Village) have had corners in their former 'hoods renamed in celebration of their part in the city's cultural vitality.
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