vip in the city

Washington Square Park in progress

After years of protests led by the Open Washington Square Park Coalition, Justice Joan A. Madden of State Supreme Court in Manhattan approved Washington Square Park’s renovation plan in early December.

The work includes moving the park’s fountain, shrinking the central plaza and raising it to street level grade — transforming the park into a garden-style pass-through mall, surrounded by a four-foot fence, which critics claim will make the park less hospitable to spontaneous gatherings.

I remember a time when the “spontaneous gatherings” were mostly drug dealers, pouncing upon and offering their wares to every junior high schooler who happened to cut through the park.

Tags: gentrification, Greenwich Village, Washington Square Park

Hot chocolate weather

The City Bakery, which opened on West 18th Street in 1990 and entered the pop culture pantheon with the Season 5 “Critical Condition” episode of “Sex and the City,” has been credited with introducing the city’s first designer hot chocolate. The über-rich, molten concoction — available by the cup ($4.50) or the shot ($2)… add another 50¢ for a homemade marshmallow — is made from a combination of milk, cream, and mostly European melted bar chocolate. No powdered cocoa here: it’s the drink that eats like a meal. The gourmet recipe has been named consistently among the city’s best — earning “four stars” from New York magazine and a mention in the recent New York Times piece on the city’s hot chocolate fetish.

During the entire month of February, as it had for the past 16 years, City Bakery held its own Hot Chocolate Festival, with a different flavored hot chocolate offered daily, in addition to the bakery’s signature blend.

Today’s flavor was “Darkest Dark Hot Chocolate.” Other offerings have ranged from the standard to the intriguing/pause-inducing, including Caramel, Cinnamon, Vanilla Bean, Ginger, Mango Tea, Banana Peel, Tropical, Lemon Licorice and Beer. There’s also a Chili Pepper — though for that flavor combination I like the new-to-my-neighborhood Jacques Torres’ “Wicked” hot chocolate, spiced with allspice, cinnamon, and ground ancho and chipotle chili peppers.

Then on to Aspen on 22nd Street for the Grand Marnier Après-Ski event.

I couldn’t have envisioned a more apropos venue than this Flatiron district restaurant-lounge cum retro ski lodge. Snowy forest photomurals — check! Lucite deer heads and white porcelain antlers mounted on wood paneling — double check! Central fire pit — you know it! Sexy snow bunnies wandered among the guests as a fake snow/foam machine whirred in the corner. I noticed bison sliders being passed around on trays, but in the spirit of après-ski, I made my way to the back bar where steaming cups of Grand Marnier-spiked hot chocolate were being ladled out.

As the boozy warmth spread through me, I wondered how well Aspen’s winter wonderland theme works the rest of the year.

Tags: Aspen, City Bakery, Grand Marnier, hot chocolate, ski

New England Symphonic Ensemble

At Carnegie Hall – not Lincoln Center, ahem! — for the New England Symphonic Ensemble program. It was an all choral line-up tonight, featuring Mozart’s Requiem, K. 626 as the highlight finale.

We had seats in the second tier center box, which was a perfect perch from which to take in the entire stage with its orchestra and hundreds of chorus members from five states. To start things off: George Frideric Handel’s “Sing Unto God” from his Judas Maccabeus, an oratorio written in 1746 — five years after Messiah. And then before the intermission break, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Serenade to Music, which culls its lines from Act V of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice:

The man that hath no music in himself,/ Nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds,/ Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;/ The motions of his spirit are dull as night,/ And his affections darks as Erebus:/ Let no such man be trusted.

One distraction: although the program clearly requested that audience members hold their applause until after the final movement, we would invariably have to pause for the smatterings of claps at every break. Eh, whaddaya gonna do?

For the Requiem in D minor, a new set of choruses took the stage, many clad in navy choir robes. Mozart’s last composition is one of his most widely recognized works, not only for its music (which HYB posited as the only proof of the existence of God), but also for the mysterious circumstances surrounding the Requiem‘s commission, the debate over how much of the score is attributable to Mozart, and how much was later composed by his colleague Franz Xaver Süssmayr after Mozart’s death.

My first exposure to the score was in Amadeus. (Years later, though, my high school chorus learned excerpts of it for performance, including the rousing “Dies Irae“. And as I recall, the “Lacrimosa” was one of SS’s all-time favorite pieces of music.) That film went on to win eight Academy Awards, including best picture, and is responsible for cementing in many people’s minds several of the myths surrounding the Requiem (and of Mozart’s life, generally.) Foremost among these is the role of rival composer Antonio Salieri in commissioning the work, and ultimately hastening Mozart’s death.

As I sat listening to the eminently moving music, it occurred to me that Amadeus, which recently played in New York as part of the Milos Forman retrospective at the MoMA, was released in 1984 — which is to say: before most of the members of these high school and college chorus members were even born.

Falco’s “Rock Me Amadeus” was released the following year, in 1985.

Tags: Carnegie Hall, Chorus, Mozart, Requiem