June 11, 2014--Fracking the Frick

I prefer my Vermeers in intimate settings. Hushed rooms with velvet wall coverings such as those at the Frick Collection in New York City.

At the other end of the New York scale, I like my cheesecake unadorned in its pristine basicness at Junior's restaurant in downtown Brooklyn.

But this is, alas, all about to change.

Just the other day, Rona and I drove into Brooklyn to get a slice. We hadn't been there in years. Halfway across the Manhattan Bridge an array of glittering skyscrapers appeared, all surrounding what had until recently been a downtown overlooked in the city's real estate surge.

But no more.

During the past decade 33 new residential towers were built with a total of 5,300 apartments. There are another 11 under construction, and 16, as they say in the real estate business, are "in development." These in total will add another 12,500 housing units.

Brooklyn really is the new Manhattan. And this means that Junior's has got to go.

It sits on a clearly valuable site on Flatbush Avenue Extension right down the street from my old high school (Brooklyn Tech) and about four blocks north of the new Barclay Center where the Brooklyn Nets play and Jay-Z packs the house.

So Junior's has to be torn down and a 1,000 foot residential tower needs to take its place. No more cheesecake. No more place in the city where African-Americans and white folks can gather over great hamburgers, onion rings, buckets of pickles, and of course the cheesecake voted number one year-after-year by New York Magazine.

And there will no more Frick as we know it if museum officials can get the city's permission to add a six-storey wing to its current jewel-box galleries.

The claim is that they need the new space to better accommodate blockbuster shows like the recent one that featured a host of Vermeers, including the iconic Girl With Pearl Earring on loan from the Royal Picture Gallery in The Hague. People lined up around the corner hours in advance of opening hours and the Frick could barely squeeze through the exhibit the tens of thousands who showed up.

They also need the new space, the New York Times reports, so they can have a rooftop garden and, I assume, cafe. These days without coffee no one will show up. Even for a Vermeer.