For a number of years, New York City’s largest concentration of “functionally extinct” American chestnut trees grew on the 16th-floor terrace of an apartment in Manhattan. Early each spring, Dale Travis cut the tops off orange juice cartons, filled them with potting soil, trimmed the corners for drainage, and planted 12 to 20 chestnuts from doomed trees across New York state.

Most American chestnut growers have acres; Travis had a few square feet. Still, his terrace had advantages. “This high up, there are no squirrels,” Travis says.

Nearly four billion American chestnuts died a century ago from blight. If they are lucky, Travis’ seedlings’ seedlings may be some of the first blight-resistant trees to grow in the wild.

Travis, 83, belongs to the New York chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation, which is working to bring chestnuts back to Eastern forests.

Once known as the redwoods of the East, American chestnuts were perfect lumber trees: quick growing, tall and fire-resistant. Their nuts fed squirrels in winter, fattened pigs, and became “shoe money” for farmers, who sold them to street vendors in New York City. Then, the blight came.

Chestnut blight, which was first discovered at the Bronx Zoo in 1904, is caused by a fungus native to Asia that likely arrived in the U.S. with imported trees. It spread quickly on the wind, making its way down the spine of the Appalachian Mountains. 

By the time Travis was born in 1937, billions of trees were dead—or at least, mostly dead. At first, shoots around stumps seemed to signal a comeback. Some lived long enough to produce nuts, which people can plant.

Within a few years, though, most chestnut shoots die of blight, even if the roots survive. Because the fungus can live in other trees, it eventually finds all but the most isolated chestnuts. American chestnuts are “functionally” extinct because they can no longer play their typical role in ecosystems. 

Travis studied forestry at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in the 1950s, when chestnuts were already fading into history. He graduated in 1959, went to work in paper and plywood sales, and eventually started his own sign company.

His firm, Dale Travis Associates, keeps history alive. It installed granite stripes in sidewalks commemorating each New York City ticker-tape parade since 1886. It also carved the World Trade Center cornerstone. “We’re very honored to have done that,” Travis says.

Three decades into his career, Travis learned that his upstate alma mater was also keeping history alive. The school hoped to bring chestnuts back with genetic engineering. Travis pulled an old textbook off his shelf and saw that as a college student, he had underlined the section about chestnuts and blight. “So that kind of made me smile,” he says. He decided to get involved.

Bill Powell, who leads SUNY’s chestnut research, says the enthusiasm of supporters like Travis has been key. “That’s kind of what we run on; enthusiasm most times,” Powell says. His team has been trying to make a blight-resistant chestnut since 1989. 

They hit plenty of dead ends before a breakthrough. If all goes smoothly, the “Darling” tree, named after early chestnut champion Herb Darling, will get all of the required federal agency approvals as soon as 2023. It would be the first transgenic tree approved for conservation in the United States.

Previous tree experiments were also named for early supporters, says Allen Nichols, who heads the New York chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation. “We had the Hinchee tree and the Henry tree,” Nichols adds. “The trouble with Dale is, if we named a tree after Dale, it would be the Travis-tree.” 

It’s a travesty of a dad joke. Still, it’s one that hits close to home in the chestnut community. Dictionary.com defines “travesty” as a grotesque likeness: for years, chestnut enthusiasts have been debating which is worse, transgenic chestnuts or hybrid ones.

Soon after the blight hit, scientists started to create hybrids, breeding American chestnuts with more blight-resistant Chinese chestnuts. Their goal was to add blight resistance while keeping the American tree’s prized characteristics, like its lumber quality and height.

“The American chestnut was a tall, stately tree,” says Travis. “It’s a very versatile species and deserves the effort to be restored.” Hybridization efforts seem to have failed, however. Due to the many genes involved, hybrids that look more American are consistently less blight resistant, according to 2019 genetic research.

While people still plant hybrids (“against my better judgement,” Travis says), Travis instead recommends planting pure American chestnuts. When Powell’s transgenic tree is approved, they can be pollinated with blight-resistant transgenic pollen to create blight-resistant seeds. 

The transgenic “Darling 58” tree is identical to the American chestnut with the addition of just two genes. Oxalate oxidase, an enzyme found in everything from wheat to bananas, renders the blight’s oxalic acid harmless. 

Years ago, Travis says, there actually was a “Travis tree”—an early experiment that never made it out of the lab. The Darling tree, in contrast, represents years of learning. Testing found that it did not harm native ecosystems, and the Sierra Club signaled its support earlier this year.

Still, some people remain opposed. First, opponents worry that mutations or negative effects could appear over the lifetime of the trees. From this perspective, though, Powell says hybrids have a higher risk: their genetic changes are greater, like “crossing a lion and a tiger.” 

Even if the trees are successful, opponents worry that transgenic pollen could blow into orchards or across tribal borders to contaminate wild trees or “non-GMO” hybrids. Those concerns echo decades of activism against companies like Monsanto (now Bayer). Monsanto’s transgenic seeds, activists say, contaminate nearby fields, force reliance on pesticides, and threaten seed diversity. 

The Darling tree is not intended for profit, and Powell decided not to patent it. He says contamination is preventable, since chestnuts only cross-pollinate within 1,000 feet. If approved, he hopes the tree will encourage similar conservation efforts.

“We need all the tools, including [genetic engineering], to maintain the health of our forests,” Powell says, citing growing threats from pests and pathogens, exacerbated by climate change. 

Opponents fear the transgenic chestnut could instead set a precedent for transgenic timber, not yet approved in the United States. Companies that supported the chestnut are also engineering timber trees to grow more efficiently in tree plantations.

From above, tree plantations look like forests, but they don’t support similar biodiversity—a true travesty. Activists expect that by making them more profitable, transgenic trees will help tree plantations expand. Ironically in this case, planting trees may actually speed deforestation.

The Darling tree is designed to withstand blight, not pesticides or life as a row crop. If this transgenic tree is approved, the plan is to breed it with natural American chestnuts to add blight resistance while maintaining genetic diversity. That’s where Travis’ seedlings come in.

Before Travis stopped growing trees (so that he could travel, though the pandemic foiled those plans) he gave seedlings to anyone who asked, from the woman who cleaned his building to the New York City Parks Department. He hopes these seedlings will eventually be crossed with the transgenics.

“It’s exciting to me,” Travis says, “to have people that call me because they want to get involved, they want to plant a chestnut.”

Now that Travis isn’t growing trees anymore, the largest concentration of American chestnuts in New York City is in a former horse barn at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. There, Herb Landmann is growing eight seedlings, each in a gallon pot, in front of a cracked window pane. 

Most surviving American chestnuts grow in suburban and rural areas. Nichols, of the American Chestnut Foundation’s New York chapter, estimates he’s mailed out 7,000 seeds this year. His orchard, near Oneonta, has hundreds of pure American chestnut trees. 

The Thain Forest at the New York Botanical Garden, one of the city’s largest urban forests, has just four American chestnuts. Three are transgenic, planted under strict pruning guidelines so they don’t spread transgenic pollen. 

The other is a pure American chestnut that Travis planted five years ago. It is one of two of his seedlings still growing in New York City; the other is on Randall’s Island.

“Reaching for the sky to get a share of the sunlight,” he wrote in an email. “The blight has yet to find it.”

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Last month, the projectors at Film Forum flickered back on for the first time in over a year, for a screening of Fellini’s carnivalesque tragedy La Strada. 

“I wanted a really famous art-house classic to open with,” said Bruce Goldstein, the 68-year-old repertory programmer who has been creating robust retrospective showcases and classic film revivals for Film Forum since 1986.

When the COVID-19 pandemic began spreading through New York City last year and Film Forum announced it would close on March 14, the non-profit theater had only screened half of Goldstein’s last big showcase. Titled “The Women Behind Hitchcock,” the series of over 30 films highlighted the underappreciated cinematic contributions of two female Hitchcock collaborators, his producer Joan Harrison and his wife and screenwriter Alma Reville. The last film screened of Goldstein’s series before it was abruptly canceled was Hitchock’s 1963 thriller, The Birds. The film stayed on the marquee during the year Film Forum was supposed to host a festival celebrating its 50th anniversary. 

“I thought it was funny because it was an apocalyptic movie,” said Goldstein.

During Film Forum’s hiatus, Goldstein kept busy preparing future series, working on documentary projects and taking care of the film distribution company he founded in 1997, Rialto Pictures, which specializes in rereleasing classic works in movie theaters.

“Bruce is an old-fashioned showman and a quintessential New Yorker,” said Andrienne Halpern, a former entertainment lawyer and co-president of Rialto Pictures. Halpern joined the company a year after it was founded and continues to secure the rights for Rialto’s vast catalogue of over a hundred films, many of them classics of European art cinema.

Since movie theaters were closed during the pandemic, the company instead booked drive-in screenings of films that were more lowbrow than its usual fare, such as Evil Dead 2, Terminator 2, and Escape from New York. Rialto’s latest release, the steamy French drama La Piscine, started running at Film Forum on May 14.

The seeds of cinephilia were planted in Goldstein during his childhood, as he watched old movies starring the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Mae West, and Humphrey Bogart—to name just a few—on channels 5 and 11. Born in Amityville, New York, and raised in Hicksville, Goldstein made journeys to New York City as a child and teenager, and fell in love with its repertory movie halls, particularly the New Yorker and the Thalia. Reminiscing on what hooked him about these now defunct cinemas, Goldstein said, “Feeling the atmosphere of the theater itself, combined with the 35mm print, it was kind of like a time capsule for me.”

In 1970, at 18, Goldstein opened his own repertory theater in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. It did not do well, and after just one season, he passed it on for others to run. Looking back, he said opening a venue for vintage movies probably wasn’t the best idea in a town where everyone was trying to get laid. A few years later, he moved to New York City to work and program at the Bleecker Street Cinema and Carnegie Hall Cinema, followed by two years of work in the fashion industry in London as a publicity manager before returning to the city again in 1981. He founded a successful film publicity company and began co-directing the Thalia, a post he held until 1984. 

The “pre-Bruce history of Film Forum,” as director Karen Cooper described it, began in 1970 when the newly opened theater consisted of a room full of folding chairs and a single projector on the Upper West Side. Cooper took charge in 1972, moved Film Forum to Soho in 1975 and then to Watts Street in 1980. By this point, Cooper had a second screening room and was trying to find a use for it. She rented it out over several years until she decided Film Forum should do all of its programming in-house.

According to Goldstein, longtime film critic J. Hoberman recommended him to Cooper to select films for her other screen. Neither Cooper nor Hoberman could recall if he advocated for Goldstein to get the job. However, Hoberman reviewed films that Goldstein screened at the Thalia for the Village Voice during the early eighties and knew him to be incredibly knowledgeable and energetic. “Anyway, I’m glad to take credit,” wrote Hoberman in an email. 

Other than one time when Cooper objected to Goldstein placing a picture of Bye Bye Birdie actress Ann-Margret on a calendar (she hates Ann-Margret), she can’t recall any major friction with her repertory programmer. For the over 30 years Goldstein has spent at Film Forum, Cooper has given him free reign over classic screenings and admires his deep, encyclopedic knowledge of film history. “It’s kind of foolish to interfere with someone who knows what they’re doing,” said Cooper. “Bruce knows what he’s doing, you know, better than I can begin to say.”

With time to spare during the pandemic, Goldstein explored the city on foot and took pictures of whatever caught his eye. He never used to take photos on his iPhone, but now there are thousands. He showed me manhole covers he found that date back over a hundred years, an easy-to-miss engraving of the Ten Commandments in Hebrew on the facade of a former synagogue on East 10th Street that’s now a Baptist church, and a woman sitting in a subway car with a bomber jacket whose back reads “LES STRONG.” After sharing some snapshots of faces carved onto the entranceways of apartment buildings, Goldstein said, “There are vestiges all over the city of things that don’t exist anymore, but you just have to look.”

Photographing obscure sightings in the city is an appropriate pastime for Goldstein. A NYC buff and proselytizer for his neighborhood of the Lower East Side, he also makes short documentaries on how movies succeed (or fail) to depict his cherished city. In 2010, Goldstein’s made-in-a-day tour of director Martin Scorsese’s childhood neighborhood, Les Rues de Mean Streets, appeared as a special feature in a French DVD. In the Footsteps of “Speedy” (2015) distinguishes the moments from Harold Lloyd’s 1928 silent comedy that were shot in NYC from those made in Los Angeles. In Uncovering “The Naked City” (2020), Goldstein educates viewers on the staggering amount of authentic filming locations in Jules Dassin’s groundbreaking 1948 police film. 

His most recent short, Pelham One Two Three: NYC Underground, which premiered on HBO Max on May 6 as a part of the TCM Classic Film Festival, introduces the 1974 crime film as an authentic subway thriller. After detailing how the film’s crew had to wear surgical masks while shooting in underground tunnels, Goldstein looks to the camera in faux surprise and asks, “Could you imagine?”

Goldstein has often been referred to as a showman, a descriptor he hopes he lives up to. It’s a reputation earned over decades of going the extra mile in delighting his audiences, whether presenting 3-D films from the ’50s with the projection techniques of the time, sending skeletons flying over heads as buzzers ring under seats for screenings of William Castle’s gimmicky horror movies, or making sure a pianist is present to accompany a silent film. “I’m kind of inspired by showmanship,” said Goldstein. “I don’t think you can just show movies. It’s not enough anymore—never was.” 

While a lover of the past, Goldstein has never been a stranger for embracing the new. His 2012 “This is DCP” series marked a celebration of the vivid quality that digital restorations and projection can bring to classic movies at a venue long known for screening rare 35mm prints on celluloid. In 2015, Goldstein hired Elspeth Carroll out of college. As she went from assistant to programmer, he gave her the wiggle room to create series that fell outside of his own expertise, such as a sweeping international slate of films entitled “THE HOUR OF LIBERATION: Decolonizing Cinema, 1966-1981.”

“He’s always been very good at recognizing and boosting good ideas, even when they’re out of his wheelhouse,” said Carroll. “He understands the audience better than anyone and has great instincts for how things will play and how to promote them.”

Film Forum reopened April 2, adhering to the 25% seating limit in New York City movie theaters (it has since been uncapped with the caveat being that moviegoers must be seated six feet apart). Goldstein doesn’t envision a full return to programming the large, exhaustive series that have characterized his tenure as Film Forum’s resident showman anytime soon. However, he is making plans for series that would accommodate more films as the number of people that can enter the theater continues to grow.

A Goldstein-crafted retrospective on 15 classic Humphrey Bogart films will screen at Film Forum from July 16 to August 5. The theater also has the unscreened film prints of the canceled half of “The Women Behind Hitchcock,” and Goldstein intends to finish what he started.        

The post For the Showman Behind Film Forum, It’s On With the Show appeared first on Bedford + Bowery.

It’s no secret that the East Village has become “an epicenter of Chinese and Taiwanese restaurants” in recent years, and eateries aren’t the only Asian businesses moving into what New York magazine has dubbed Chinatown North. Korean and Japanese supermarkets and department stores have also popped up on and around St. Marks Place, offering everything from cellulite rollers to $3.60 caviar. We visited one of the most recent additions, Tesolife, to find out what’s on the shelves and who’s in the aisles. 

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With the return of outdoor shopping season, there are big changes in Seward Park, where the Hester Street Fair held court for over a decade. Earlier this month, after an online petition garnering over 6,000 signatures failed to convince the Fair’s landlord to let it stay, the operators of the Brooklyn Flea and Smorgasburg markets took over the lot at Hester and Essex and launched Hester Flea, a pet-friendly affair that’s open every Saturday, rain or shine. We visited the flea on its opening day to check out the antiques, handmade items, and eats. Play our video to catch the vibes.  

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Anne Hamburger, the founder and artistic director of NYC-based theater company En Garde Arts, began envisioning the return of live performances one month into the pandemic. Over a year later, Downtown Live, the product of that planning, will take place over the course of two weekends this May. The free performing arts festival is sponsored by the Downtown Alliance for New York, and produced in collaboration with another nonprofit arts organization, The Tank.

“We envisioned it as a love letter to the New York that we were all longing for and missing in the past year,” said Meghan Finn, The Tank’s artistic director, over the phone.

The festival will feature almost 30 in-person shows at unusual outdoor locations: a covered loading dock (4 New York Plaza), a plaza near The Battery (1 Battery Park Plaza) and an arcade in the Stone Street Historic District (85 Broad Street). The roster was co-curated by Finn and Hamburger, and will include Obie and Pulitzer Prize winners alongside emerging artists. 

After an unimaginable year, the artists James Harrison Monaco and Jerome Ellis, who produce a literary, improvisational show called Piano Tales as the duo James & Jerome, expressed mutual excitement about the return of live performances. Like many of the artists performing at Downtown Live, their output during the pandemic was limited to virtual shows. The unique structure of Piano Tales — audience members are asked to choose three stories, from a selection of around 12, that they want to hear — represents the kind of engaging performance that Hamburger, Finn, and the artists believe audiences are craving. 

“I suspect that people are going to be so hungry for that kind of communal reflective mode after spending so much time sitting still or alone,” said Monaco. 

Despite shared artistic values and mutual respect, a collaboration between En Garde Arts and The Tank would have been unlikely before the pandemic, Hamburger said. Their union reflects a larger trend in the arts community: the formation of deep partnerships, which might have otherwise taken years to cultivate or would have never happened at all. Organizations shared everything from streaming tips — The Tank launched CyberTank during the pandemic, a “virtual gathering space” that has presented the work of over 2,555 artists — to financial advice. 

“We’re very much the little guy in the ecosystem, but we’ve been able to have a seat at the table in a different way because we’re all in the same boat,” said Finn. “We’ve had conversations with institutions much larger than ours, like, What are you doing? How are you streaming? What have you figured out? Because we’ve all sort of had to hack it through this.” 

Now that Mayor Bill de Blasio has set July 1 as the target date for the city to fully reopen, it seems theoretically possible that the arts are on the brink of a strong comeback. But the shape of that rebound is still mysterious, and a source of legitimate concern for arts presenters and festival organizers who rely on predictable audience behavior to plan shows and events. It’s possible that audiences will not feel comfortable sitting in packed theaters, even with the green light from the mayor’s office. Working from home has also been embraced by many businesses as a permanent policy, after realizing the financial benefits of shedding real estate — but this could mean that downtown areas, home to arts venues, will miss relied-upon foot traffic. 

“I don’t think there is a normal that’s going to bring us back to the way things were,” said Hamburger, musing on the long-term impacts of the pandemic. “A lot of local businesses that have struggled, I think, will continue to struggle.” 

But she also believes that events like Downtown Live, which use the city as a setting, will have special import going forward. Audiences who journey into neighborhoods will end up shopping at local business, and dining at restaurants before and after the show. This could deepen the symbiotic relationship between the arts and business communities, just as the pandemic-forged bonds between arts organizations grew stronger over the past year. 

“Culture is what makes it worthwhile to struggle through this city,” said Finn. “Culture is the why for so many people that chose to be here.”

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When opening New York shows, stand-up comedian Natalie Cuomo often cracks a one-liner in reference to her recognizable surname. “The only thing I have in common with the governor of New York is my last name and my body piercings,” she smirks, igniting the audience with laughter. 

A professionally trained actress who passionately leaped into stand-up three years ago, the 25-year-old comedian carries herself with an unapologetic authenticity that can even be felt through a Zoom screen. Her sharp-winged eyeliner, extensive tattoo collection, and brunette hair serve as decoration to what she holds within: a killer work ethic, pure talent, and a desire for authentic, intimate human connection through her comedy.  

Although she initially pursued acting after graduating from the Stella Adler Studio in 2017, the Queens-born performer began constantly attending open mics and found that comedy gave her more autonomy over her material. “I felt like I could be myself more,” Cuomo explained.  

What sets Natalie apart from other comedians is how intimately unique her material is. “I’m very personal with my material. I joke about my romantic relationships, the way I view the world, my anxiety, and growing up in New York City,” she explains. “I would definitely describe my comedy as dark humor with a lightness to it. I, myself, am a very light and tender person, but the subject matter close to my heart is that of adversity.”  

Fast forward a year: In the face of unprecedented adversity at the hands of the pandemic and government regulations around gatherings and venues, the entire industry has had to get creative in regaining a new normal. “I did a lot of Zoom shows. So many Zoom shows,” Cuomo said. “They’re cool, they’re a way to stay connected to the community and keep working that muscle, but it just isn’t the same.” She let out an exasperated laugh, reminiscing about her days of performing to squares on a laptop. “Some Zoom shows are really good. But they’re also really soul-crushing and embarrassing.” 

To Natalie, nothing can quite match the authenticity of live stand-up. “I did a show indoors in Jersey recently,” Cuomo grinned. “I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I can’t believe I used to do this every night! Like, this is a living, this is cool!” Comedy largely acts as a platform for perspectives. And when Natalie– a fan of comics like Sarah Silverman, Whitney Cummings, Nikki Glaser, and Ali Wong– got tired of hearing the same male perspective, she created a show where audiences can hear a new one: the female one. She launched That Time of the Month Comedy Show, at The People’s Improv Theater, in 2019. “It is a male-saturated industry. You’ll do a show and it’s six guys and one woman, and by the time you get up, the audience is like ‘Thank god! Anything other than a guy, like fuck!’”

As a female comedian in the male-dominated space, Cuomo is no stranger to hearing unwanted perspectives from others – just the other day, she went on Twitter and saw a thread ranking the funniest comedians. Except the list was based on how hot the women were, not their talent. Unfortunately, this experience is one of many similar ones for Cuomo and other female comedians. 

“It’s really annoying. I mean, literally a few days ago I went to a show and saw this comic that I respect. He’s just like, ‘Hey, what’s up, are you a comedian or a model?’” She smirked, physically reacting to the annoyance she felt recounting the situation. “I don’t think it’s a compliment. I don’t think someone would say that to a male. A lot of jokes are about how you look, and a lot of them are easy swings about using your sexuality to get somewhere. And I think it’s frustrating. You start to gauge quickly how to navigate people talking down to you … you have to have thick skin to be a woman in comedy, for sure.” 

Perhaps these men are simply jealous of a confident, successful woman in the industry. As her best friend, photographer Tim O’Keefe, puts it, “She magnetizes people. I feel she connects easily with people because of her ability to internalize her experiences. It’s not very often that I encounter someone who can be profoundly vulnerable yet still able to share the depth of the human condition.” 

The other kinds of stuff that makes Natalie uniquely herself? Her interest in the worlds of tattooing, motorcycling, and podcasting. She is the co-host of the comedy podcast Thirst Trap, and marries her various interests in her second podcast, Classy Trashy. Podcasting provides another avenue for the comedian to express herself, as Cuomo explains. “It helps us throw ideas back and forth and just gets our creative juices flowing.” Classy Trashy Podcast is an extension of Classy Trashy Magazine, which Cuomo co-founded, in which she dissects “the fascinating and expansive world of tattoo artistry and its various subcultures.” 

“I just interviewed the coolest woman,” Natalie said, thoughtfully. “Her name is Shanghai Kate and she is one of the first female tattoo artists and she is just so awesome. Talking to her, I realized the importance of womanhood and being a woman, and she talked about tattooing as a woman’s art.” While Natalie does not tattoo herself, she found herself connecting with Kate through her most consistent project for the past six years: an embroidery shop on Etsy. “I feel like it’s pretty similar to tattooing. It’s very detail-oriented tracing, it’s very specific in the same way and it is a woman’s work in that way and I’d say that’s one of my main intimate hobbies.” 

In juxtaposition to what many would describe as her more masculine interests, she has very much chosen to embrace her sexuality and femininity. “I strive to demonstrate the coexistence of being womanly and funny and intelligent,” she shares. “I think that sexuality is power… For a lot of time, men have been harnessing women’s sexuality for their power, and I want to take the power back in my sexuality. But, I also am a lot deeper than my sexuality and I work really hard as a comedian and a producer and what I have is because of my work ethic and because of my writing.” 

Despite being a self-proclaimed germaphobe, the lessening restrictions have allowed Natalie to get back to in-person shows, complete with masks, hand sanitizer, and even mic condoms for the comedians. In June, she started producing a show at QED Astoria, and then started producing a Saturday show at The Tiny Cupboard in Bushwick, for which she commutes from her home in Jersey City where she resides with her dog,  listening to whichever Spotify playlists best reflects her mood that day. 

“The first show we did at QED, we were so desperate to perform,” says Natalie, setting the scene. “It was pouring rain, okay, and the audience sat there with umbrellas and the comics had umbrellas and no microphone. It was ridiculously depressing and insane but people were really hungry to see comedy. Then The Tiny Cupboard totally blossomed into this beautiful thing.”  Founded by Amy Wong and Matt Rosenblum, the small, experimental space has evolved during the pandemic, first with Zoom shows and then, once outdoor gatherings became a possibility in September, with 20 shows a week on its spacious open rooftop.

While comedy clubs and venues continue to readjust and open as new regulations are set each day, the pandemic has inspired a new career goal for Natalie: self-releasing a comedy special. “I regretted not putting some sort of pandemic thing together… I feel like I have jokes I’m ready to put online and retire,” she laughs. “You just gotta do it, like anything else.” 

The post No, Comedian Natalie Cuomo Couldn’t Pull Any Strings During the Pandemic appeared first on Bedford + Bowery.

RuPaul’s Drag Race, the Hunger Games film franchise, Lady Gaga, and Blue Ivy. What do all of these things have in common? Boundary-pushing and outrageous style and design. They also have something else in common: Casey Caldwell. In the last 10 years, Caldwell worked with all of the aforementioned brands and styling teams, and he’s on a mission to continue to push the limits in the fashion industry.

Caldwell started designing for contestants on RuPaul’s Drag Race during season 9, and just recently designed a stunning costume for Rosé on season 13. The prompt for this particular outfit was “bag,” and Rosé, although based in New York City now, originally hails from Scotland. Naturally, Caldwell designed an entire outfit around a Scottish bagpipe. His innovative work has been featured in Posture magazine, Italian Vogue, and a handful of the most famous queens’ Instagram accounts. His most famous designs include zip ties, spikes, colorful neoprene, and lots of ruffles. As he says, “the bigger the better.”   

To start, how has RuPaul influenced your life? 

Well, it’s kind of funny because I feel like in a weird way, he’s like my boss, who I’ve never met. I’m not actually employed by VH1, I’m kind of like an independent contractor that’s hired by the queens themselves. It’s crazy how RuPaul has influenced the world and how someone like me, a costume designer, can pretty much be employed full time making drag queen costumes. That, 10 years ago, would never have been a thing someone would be doing. 

It’s just amazing that all these opportunities for queer people have come to the forefront because of what he’s created. I would love to meet RuPaul one day, we’ll see if it happens.

When did you first get into drag? 

When I was little, I was very lucky to have very supportive parents and family. When it was Halloween time, I was probably like four or five years old, my mom was like, what do you want to be for Halloween? I was obsessed with The Little Mermaid. So I obviously wanted to be a little mermaid. And my mom was down for me to be what I wanted, so she was like, ‘Yeah, okay, like, let’s do that. Let’s be a little mermaid.’ 

Amazing. 

Yeah! I like to call it baby drag. But the first time I really did, like, drag drag, and kind of knew what I was doing and actually exploring the art form, was in college. 

Where did you go to college?

I went to UC Santa Cruz in California, so I was pretty close to San Francisco. I had friends in the city that did drag and would perform. I would sneak into the bars before I was of age and dress up. And then that kind of turned into like, ‘Hey, do you want to do a number?’ I was learning costume design in school, and I kind of focused on making these crazy, crazy costumes and performance pieces. People started paying me to make them something. And what’s so nice about doing costume for drag is that most of the time the prompt is like, ‘Go crazy, the bigger the better.’ Things with movement and sparkle and just really like, design to your heart’s content. 

Where do you pull inspiration from? Do you have any design influences?

My purpose as an artist is simply to interact with the world around me and convey my experience. Inspiration really comes from everywhere, be it politics or love or relationships or even just small encounters with people on a day-to-day.

When I look at my collections in the past, my very first collection was inspired by my grandfather. That was an important moment in my life, when he passed away, I wanted to do something to kind of honor him and what I was experiencing at that time in my life. A collection I did a couple years ago, when Donald Trump was put in office was, I had a lot of friends messaging me, like, ‘Hey, we’re out here protesting, and I want to wear some things that keep me warm while I’m out here protesting and also things that are just going to garner attention.’ You know, crazy head masks and things. So I did a collection called Riot, where I basically made clothes that were tough and fierce and things that you could go protest in.

In many ways, drag is all about inclusivity and making people feel welcome. How do you show that or illuminate that through your designs?

I like to make things that are a bit more oversized and comfortable, and things that any body type and any person could wear. I like to bring that element of drag and acceptance into fashion because, honestly, the fashion world is so exclusive in a lot of ways. There’re a lot of brands out there where only if you’re this specific kind of person, like if you’re a female under 100 pounds, can you fit into our garments. I think that drag and its inclusivity and the kind of bodies and people that I’ve had to design for in the past have really influenced my more ready-to-wear stuff. I like to make things that anyone could feel good in.

How did COVID disrupt your workflow and income?

CC: Yeah, when it first started, there were a few weeks, a few months even, of a little bit of panic because I was unsure of when television production would come back and when performances out at bars or tours — my main gig was making things for performers. I luckily had just done a collection so I had new designs and things out and a lot of it was kind of loungewear pieces to wear around in the house. So yeah, that was kind of perfect. 

And then I started making masks: I was sitting at home on a lot of fabric and pretty much all the tools necessary to make them. I started working with this organization called Art Makes Masks. I would do a bunch of orders for them, and they would ship them out to hospitals or drop them off at local hospitals here in our city. It’s kind of strange the ways that artists have to find ways to make sense — I never would have thought I would be at home making masks for people in a pandemic and that that would be my source of income for a few months. So, yeah, that was crazy. 

It’s wild how fast things can change.

Yeah, I mean I oftentimes found myself sneaking into fabric stores that were open, but they weren’t open… like out the back door just trying to get some yardage of neoprene to be able to make something.

I love your neoprene stuff.

Oh, thanks. Yeah, I know, it’s funny how I started doing neoprene pieces — I was in Santa Cruz, and surf culture was a big thing. Everyone had wetsuits and I just kind of loved the feel of it. Then I realized there’s fashion neoprene that’s lighter, and it comes in all these fun colors. And still to this day, I use it all the time. People always come to me for the neoprene and the zip ties.   

Did the drag community take a big hit with the shutdowns and not being able to go to performances? Drag is such an in-person and community-oriented expression.

New York is so alive, it’s the city that never sleeps, like there’s so much to do here and you meet so many amazing people. So it’s hard when all of that shuts down and you’re forced to be alone. I think a lot of people either couldn’t afford to stay in the city, or they kind of thought the reasons that they came here are not accessible any longer. I know so many artists and friends who have left the city to move home.

Drag is such an art form that celebrates community and being around each other. So I know that so many drag artists have had to find other ways to make money in the meantime. But I mean, artists find a way is what I’ve found, at least thus far in my life. There’s been some really great online showcases on YouTube, or live Twitch shows. People still find a way to get out there and perform and create community; it’s just changed a lot with COVID.  

What does drag mean to you? And what do you hope to convey through your designs?

I mean, drag to me is just some sort of manifestation of the queer imagination. I think in the past, and even still, queer people are condemned for their creativity and their fears, and imagination, and drag really is a place where people can just be free and be who they are, and express themselves without judgment, and in a place of community where people are able to do the same and celebrate each other. 

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Last February, when the city shut down, Tazz Latifi chose to close her natural pet supply store in the Financial District. With Petropolis’ doors shut, Latifi, like many New York City small business owners, contemplated the future of her retail space. “I didn’t know if I could do retail, and my lease was coming up. At that moment, I thought, Okay, perfect time, I could just shut it all down,” she told me over the phone. “Then I started getting email, after email, after email from clients.” 

To put pet owners at ease and to make sure city pets were getting the care they needed, Latifi decided to return to her brick-and-mortar store. For two days each week, she walked downtown from her Midtown home to fill preorders from clients. And then something interesting happened: 

 New Yorkers who saw quarantine as the ideal opportunity to raise the pooch of their dreams began flocking to find animal shelters and available breeders. Between March and December, about 12.6 million homes took in pets, according to the American Pet Products Association (APPA). 

While the “puppy binge,” as Dogtopia CEO Neil Gill has called it, has meant a boost in business at Petropolis, it’s uncertain how long the gravy train will last. The ever-shifting vagaries of the pandemic has caught up to some of these pet owners, forcing them to surrender their animals.

“There’s so many people who did adopt and are doing great,” said Petropolis owner and founder Latifi. “With that said, there’s just as many people who shouldn’t have gotten pets, and we’ve seen it with the shelters filling back up.”

Raising a new pet can be difficult during the best of circumstances. But imagine trying to do it all during a pandemic. For many, household animals were seen as a solution to feelings of isolation and loneliness. “A lot of the shelters were cleared out because people wanted companionship,” said the Petropolis owner. “But they didn’t consider what it takes to care for an animal.”

With all the responsibilities that come with caring for an animal, pet nutrition is perhaps the most important, yet often overlooked, area of ownership. Founded 16 years ago, Petropolis specializes in animal wellness and is one of just two independent pet stores in Manhattan, along with Whiskers Holistic Pet Care in the East Village, that offers a holistic approach to animal health. 

Randy Klein, the owner of Whiskers, says the animal world is concerned with the repercussions of pet adoption during the pandemic. Many New Yorkers are still working from home and can take care of their pets. But as restrictions ease, people are already beginning to return to the workplace. As owners grapple with these new lifestyle changes, their animal’s well-being may be the most impacted.

“The animals who are used to having [owners] in their home, number one, might have some separation anxiety,” said Klein. “And number two, the owners might feel that it’s too much of a burden now. So that’s something to watch for in the future.”

The recent pet boom has also led the way for a boom in pet industry sales. Last month, the APPA announced that the national pet industry has generated over $100 billion in annual sales—the first time in industry history. This increase in business has trickled down to local pet stores as well. 

“The proliferation of people adopting and buying more dogs and cats over the last year certainly has caused an increase in the pet retail business,” said Klein. “I think overall, in the pet industry, sales were improved.” 

The APPA’s report also found that the pet care industry has sought to mirror current consumer trends such as “the desire for a healthier lifestyle” and “supplements for improved well-being.” Shops like Petropolis and Whiskers offer pet owners and their pets just that.

These days, Latifi’s store is open seven days a week to furry friends and their humans. Inside Petropolis, pet parents can find aisles of pet supplies, treats, toys, and specialized pet food in frozen, dry, raw, dehydrated raw, gourmet, and organic varieties.. As a child, Latifi was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. Her condition, she says, has given her a lifetime interest in proper holistic nutrition. “For me, if food is not managed, if I’m not eating the right foods, and if I don’t have the right diet, it affects everything,” Latifi said.

In March 2020, a bleak month amidst the pandemic in NYC, Latifi found a new way to offer pet parents some much-needed health support for their cat or dog. “It costs a lot to take care of an animal,” she said. “That’s part of why I did the podcast. To help people if they want to take initiative and learn about what’s going on, or how to hone in on their animals.”

Latifi says the pet food industry can be muddled and convoluted, with many pet food manufacturers fixed on marketing to animal owners rather than focusing on animal health. Over the course of 40 episodes, The Petropolist podcast has covered topics like feline kidney disease, “intolerance or allergies?” and the pet food recalls related to dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM). 

“It comes down to education, and what’s the best way to help others,” said former podcast guest Nicole Cammack, founder of NorthPoint Pets & Company.

For Brooklynite Claudia Gonzalez, pet nutrition became essential after her labradoodle mix, Bobby, was diagnosed with cancer in 2019. After a vet revealed that Bobby had only weeks left to live, Gonzalez visited Petropolis searching for a last hope. 

The alterations Latifi made to the dog’s diet extended Bobby’s life by a year and a half, Gonzalez believes. “I really thought that I was giving my dog the best food,” she said. “I’m very grateful for her, because I think her knowledge let the family have Bobby a little longer.”

Latifi’s goal now is to use The Petropolist podcast to support her consulting work, and one day soon, transition to full-time pet nutrition consulting. “What I love is talking to the consumers and helping to guide them,” she said.

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Walking through Bushwick for the first time, I don’t feel lost. Modesto Flako Jimenez, a Bushwick-raised actor, playwright, poet and educator, is my guide through the neighborhood as he sees it, text by text. He sends me photos of his friends hanging out on the corner, and of the way the storefronts used to look. He encourages me to stop walking, to slow down, to look at the outsides of homes and buildings. This narrated-by-text guided walk is just one part of his community-based, multimedia magnum opus on gentrification, Taxilandia. “This is literally like, let’s have a conversation,” he tells me from his car, in his non-stop, rapid-fire style, before I set out. “I am giving you an experience of engagement, and how to properly visit a neighborhood without feeling like your footprints don’t matter here. They do.” 

It’s fitting that he’s talking to me from his car. Flako spent nine years as a cab driver, watching gentrification change the scenery and, more importantly, the community. “The landscape is ever-changing, right? That’s a part of the reason why I’m making Taxilandia, but the biggest reason why I’m making it is the disconnect between each other.” 

When Flako describes the Bushwick of his childhood, he talks first, and most vividly, about the relationships between people. “The homeless person lived in my hallway, and made a house out of cardboard, and we gave them food from time to time, because we know that was the kid from the woman from the first floor. That was just an addict thing. Issues, but he still deserved food. So that, to me, was the Bushwick back then, right? We will still hold each other down no matter what we were facing in our landscape, right? Disconnects started happening– now the neighbors don’t say hi to each other.”

After moving back to Bushwick after college, Flako saw that disconnect between people grow as the demographics of the neighbourhood changed. “This influx of class and privilege moves in, that just erases all the history that was already here. It was painful, watching my college friends be in my neighborhood and act like they’ve been here longer than me and have more freedom than me.”

Taxilandia consists of four different phases: a series of salons for conversations about gentrification; five pop-up galleries in Bushwick businesses featuring local artists and poets; the $25 Taxilandia guided drive for up to three people in Flako’s car; and the COVID-safe Textilandia guided walk that, for $3, goes right to your phone.

“Everything I’m trying to do has an actionable item always connected to it,” Flako explains, noting that the manufactured, corporate responses to the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor convinced him that audiences needed educating, beyond passively watching theater. Whether that actionable item is providing a coloring book dedicated to informing about COVID with art from local artists, or highlighting businesses in Bushwick with the gallery spots, the purpose is education first. It’s an artistic manifesto for community organizing. With Taxilandia, Flako is providing a way for people to start doing the “real work” by giving back to the community and getting educated, either in his backseat or in the palm of their hands. 

Meghan Finn, artistic director of The Tank, a multi-disciplinary non-profit arts presenter and producer, welcomed the opportunity to work with Flako again. “Flako and I did a piece in a yellow cab [seven years ago]. It was maybe a proof of concept a little bit for Flako, but he really has jumped off with Taxilandia as its own incredible experience.” Flako previously co-founded Real People Theater, a company best known for reworking plays by combining some of the language of the original texts with street slang and Spanish, and wrote a show about gentrification based on his poetry collection titled Oye, Para Mi Querido Brooklyn (Listen, For My Dear Brooklyn) that premiered at the Abrons Art Center in New York in 2018.

Phase one: In the series of salons, artists and community members shared what they see in their own neighborhoods due to gentrification. Each salon focused on a different borough, with an artist invited to share photos of their own neighborhoods, and discuss them with Flako and four audience members, who brought photos of their own. Merlixse Ventura, a 25-year-old actress from Washington Heights who took part in the Manhattan salon, described her first time watching the Disney movie Tarzan on the ceiling of her community’s church on 184th and Wadsworth at summer camp as a child. When she came back from winter break at college, she said, “The church was gone…I was looking at this place and I was like ‘Damn, this is the beginning of the end.’” Six years later, as Merlixse showed, all that remains is an empty lot. 

Merlixse says that during the salon, discussing those kinds of experiences stirred up different feelings, “from anger, to sadness, to just revealing things to myself that I was saying out loud, that I don’t think I had said out loud, about my experience watching gentrification start to unfold in Washington Heights.” 

Phase two: The galleries. Featured businesses throughout Bushwick, like local restaurant Los Hermanos, showcase original poetry, video, and sound design from local artists. The galleries both provide an opportunity for capital for the businesses, and support for the poets themselves, Flako explains. “I’m paying poets to speak on gentrification: How do we bring awareness? How do we put capital somewhere, because it’s needed right now?”

Phase three: The guide itself. Walking through Bushwick with the Textilandia experience, I became hyper aware of my place in the community as a guest of Flako; the church he went to as a child and the afterschool program he fondly remembers. The grocery stores he’s seen disappear, creating a food desert for the locals. The bakery that’s been “giving diabetes since 1945.” 

Flako’s texts are tongue-in-cheek reminders that the neighborhood Vogue called “seventh coolest in the world” is actually where people worked each day, where they gossiped on the corners, where they took their children to school. Instead of just passing through an anonymous neighborhood, I became an active listener to the neighborhood itself. Through each text, Flako encouraged me to stop and listen: to peoplewatch in the neighborhood as it existed. Children, families, young men and women, old men and women; instead of viewing the neighborhood as possible real estate, or something defined by its place in the news, I was viewing it as a guest of someone that lived there, and loved it dearly. 

Over tacos at Los Hermanos, Flako’s final text reminded me to “Step in the concrete, peep the traces fighting to survive this GEGE beast!” The traces of storefronts, the previous history of the communities that passed through Bushwick before, even the woman selling pig intestines on the sidewalk Flako notes to say hi to in his texts: the fight to survive the gentrification beast looks different on each block, you just need to see it for yourself, or in Flako’s car with him.

Taxilandia isn’t just confined to Bushwick, or even New York. The Oye Group, Flako’s production company, now works with companies all over the country to develop local versions of the piece specific to each city. It’s already begun in San Diego, and the format is something that Flako wants to pass to other artists across the country. “We create that bigger conversation in that gallery of like, ‘Look, it’s everywhere,’ and all through local work. Because it’s everywhere. I don’t need to be the central voice.”

Through each phase of Taxilandia, Flako wants that hard conversation, the feeling of being uncomfortable in discussing something that too often people would rather just inactively experience through art. He wants you to do that real work, and to talk to him about it. “I yearn for that shit; to have a conversation that’s gonna make me grow. I learn through theater, I don’t learn any other way.” 

Taxilandia and Textilandia run until May 3; taxilandia.com.

Correction, April 29: The original version of this article was revised because a source misstated the date of the artist’s previous cab piece and because he doesn’t refer to the walking and driving experiences as tours. 

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On Saturday, April 24, Tompkins Square Park was in bloom and with so much spring in the air, even the pavement on Avenue B seemed to blossom.

By noon, the double yellow line at East 8th Street had uncurled into a sunburst. Crosswalk stripes at East 9th reached towards each other, merging into a pyramid of roots. In between, “20 MPH” road markings disappeared into a zebra pattern, and concentric squares and hexagons rippled out from beneath tables and chairs.

This ephemeral, block-long street mural was created with black, white, and colored tape on one of the city’s pedestrian-friendly “open streets” closed to through traffic during the pandemic. It’s the brainchild of tape artist Kuki, design collaborative OBJ and architecture group WXY Studio.

“I think for people to just come out and socialize and do something creative,” said Kuki, “that’s what we are trying to do.” Kuki, who has been making tape art since the ’90s, believes this is likely the largest tape art street mural ever made. He was excited for passersby to experience tape art for the first time.

“Look what I’m making!” said toddler Xavier Santos, who was smoothing white tape onto the pavement with help from Walter Santos and Martita Mumic Montanez. Mumic Montanez said they had just stumbled on the mural-in-progress. “It’s great,” she said, “I love it!” 

Around them, people with strollers, bikes, and dogs settled in at café tables. Skateboards and delivery bikes weaved through. A guitarist played bossa nova, and Charlotte Lily Gaspard, a member of community garden advocacy group LUNGS, invited children to make props for next week’s Spring Awakening parade. A bike rider popped a wheelie.

“We shouldn’t give our streets over to chunks of metal,” said Merica May Jensen, of OBJ. “Cars, I mean.” The city’s Open Streets program closed streets throughout the city to through traffic to make more space for pedestrians during the pandemic. Jensen hopes the mural will remind people that this is a street they are allowed to play in. 

The mural kicked off a series of Saturday arts programming planned for Avenue B that is funded by arts coalition FABnyc and organized by the East Village Community Coalition (EVCC) and Loisaida Open Streets Community Coalition (LOSCC), a volunteer group that has been keeping this stretch of Avenue B open for pedestrians.

LOSCC came into being last spring. Open Streets rely on temporary barricades, which are meant to go up at 8 a.m. and come down at 8 p.m. Initially, NYPD was setting up and monitoring the streets and barricades.

During the George Floyd protests, neighbors painted a few of the Avenue B police barricades with colorful slogans and flowers. “We woke up the next morning and an artist had done the rest of them,” said LOSCC leader Sophie Maerowitz.

They organized and got permission to take over the street’s staffing, and about 30 volunteers have been managing Avenue B ever since. Now, Maerowitz says they coordinate near-daily programing, including Zumba and fitness classes in addition to arts events. 

“It is beyond my wildest dreams the way all of this has come together,” Maerowitz said. Still, she said, the current solution is not sustainable. “I am putting in about 30 hours a week in addition to my job and grad school.” 

LOSCC is advocating to close an even longer stretch of Avenue B for good. To make that work, they are asking for the city to close the street 24/7 with permanent barriers and a 5-mile-per-hour speed limit for essential traffic.

LOSCC is also part of the Open Streets Coalition, led by advocacy group Transportation Alternatives, which is pushing for sustainable and equitable funding for the Open Streets program citywide.

Because of the community resources required, there are fewer Open Streets where they are most needed: in lower-income neighborhoods with less access to parks and green spaces. Avenue B, right next to a beloved park and draped in shade trees, underscores the point.

“There are miles and miles of Open Streets on the city’s maps,” said Cory Epstein from Transportation Alternatives, “but the ones that are really open and thriving have these community groups that are working really hard.” 

A Streetsblog analysis found that in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, there are more open streets in higher-income neighborhoods than in lower-income ones. 

“You have community groups that are having to do Gofundmes” to pay for open street expenses, said Epstein. “In Park Slope it’s working well, but Sunset Park, which is lower income than Park Slope, has not been able to hit their goal. We shouldn’t be resorting to that.” 

By late afternoon, the Avenue B tape mural’s tendrils had filled up the street. By nightfall, Kuki and his team pulled up the tape. The mural was temporary, as it was designed to be. If Open Streets Coalition succeeds, the Open Streets program will continue to grow.

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