Looking back, I can't honestly recall what the business on the southeast corner of 11th Street & University place was before it was a Dean & Deluca. My guess it that it was yet another antique store. As I mentioned in this post, there used to be a whole lot more of them. But when I moved to University Place from Yorkville on the Upper East Side in 1996, the corner had already been claimed by the upscale coffee house and business was always booming. Personally speaking, I always preferred the News Bar two blocks up, but Dean & Deluca was indeed a great spot for people-watching (and purportedly haunted, as I discovered). When it closed around this time last summer, I was quite surprised. Times were indeed hard (and still are, let's face it), but the place was always filled with people. It didn't make a lot of sense.
The site remained gutted and empty for months thereafter. People still sat on its storied stoop (often a distinctive-looking elder gentleman that my wife and I came to refer to as "The Professor," given his scholarly-if-unfortunately-disheveled appearance), but the once-busy corner was largely bereft of activity. In recent weeks, however, the windows got papered up and there was a flurry of construction. The interior has since been radically re-tooled and seems to owe precious little to the previous incarnations. The bright, stately, high-ceilinged room rife with the antiquated charm of a vanished age is gone for good, I fear. The space is now to host an outlet of the Argo Tea Cafe chain. I noticed the new, pea-green signage this morning.
I'm not going to suggest that the Dean & Deluca that used to stand there was any less the product of gentrification and the gradual mall-ification of the neighborhood, but the D&D at least looked less like something you'd find at your average food court. I suppose I should be grateful that the space wasn't snapped up by a bank.
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