In tribute to the never-ending construction on Fulton...

“New York will be a great place when they finish it.”

- Anonymous

Sums up life on Fulton Street perfectly.

A Local Landmark: The Paris

The bar at the Paris, lit up for the holidays

When you walk in, The Paris looks like an average bar. Eleven flat-screen TVs line the walls, each displaying a different game. But a closer look reveals intricately carved dark-wood molding, creeping out from beneath the sleek black screens.

It’s a juxtaposition of styles: technology of the 21st century next to a holdover from the original Paris Café, established in 1873.

Traces of the past are common at The Paris, located at 119 South St. Even the name lingers on. Though owners John Ronaghan and Peter O’Connell changed the name to The Paris Bar when they bought the restaurant in 2000, locals still refer to the place as the Paris Café. One hundred and twenty years of history is hard to ignore.

Black-and-white photographs of old New York hang on the exposed brick walls, alongside framed reprints of recent newspaper articles lauding the Paris’s success. The wine list is scribbled messily on a chalkboard, but few customers even glance at it. With 18 beers on tap, no one’s drinking wine.

Locals flock to the restaurant’s candle-lit tables and mahogany bar. A couple clad in jeans sits next to a group of men in suits, Blackberries in hand. It was pretty full on the Monday night I went, but waitress Annette Jackman worried that the ongoing financial crisis will slow business.

“We get lots of Wall Street people, especially from AIG,” Jackman said. “Are they still going to show up? We don’t know.”

While the Paris’s traditional demographic is declining, the changing face of the neighborhood is bringing in a new sort of patron: the resident.

“We never saw people walking their dogs before,” bartender Bob Grant said. “The neighbors are mixing with Wall Street.”

New clients are ordering differently too. Though the bar has always been known for its beer, vodka has become popular recently, Grant said.

“They’re like sheep,” Grant said. “If there’s one brand in fashion at the moment – that’s what’s big.”

Even the menu contrasts old and new. Traditional bar favorites are popular, especially the fish and chips ($13). A cod fillet the size of a pint glass is coated in a rich beer batter, cushioned on the plate by a mound of thick-cut fries. It’s old-school Irish pub grub, comparable to any in Dublin.

But the kitchen also serves up more fashionable fare: farfalle with shrimp and sun-dried tomatoes ($15), sesame-crusted tuna salad ($15), and blackened snapper with mixed vegetables and mashed potatoes ($18). The snapper is smoky, spicy and a little salty, but a valiant effort at creating something more than bar food.

The Paris has been open since 1871

The flexibility with the menu and drink list has helped the Paris stay open in an area where many mainstays have recently closed. When the Fulton Fish Market moved to the Bronx in 2005, fish market workers who had often stopped in for a post-work beer also moved north, which proved fatal for such landmarks as Sweets and Sloppy Louie’s.

“I miss the Fish Market,” Grant lamented. “The neighborhood is much more residential, so [the restaurant] is changing.”

The Paris may be changing, but it still retains its storied past. Anyone that walks in and sees the centuries-old molding on the walls can attest to that.

Thoughts from the neighborhood on Election Day

Though the election buzz has calmed down a little, here's a little recap of what locals thought about Nov. 4. I was surprised to hear that most people didn't care about the historic day:

Stella, a 26-year-old employee at Yorganic in the Financial District, wasn’t sure if she would vote today. She said that she should, but didn’t know enough about the candidates to make an informed decision.

Regina, a 22-year-old employee at Pylones, said the same thing. “I’m not sure [if I’m voting] because I’m not aware of their economic policies, and I think it would depend on that.”

Though this is one of the most exciting elections in recent history, business owners and employees by Wall Street were unenthusiastic about Nov. 4. No one believed that the election would affect his or her business. The owner of Wall Street Wine Merchants said, “If people want to drink, they want to drink.” Martin, an employee at the Stone St. Financier Patisserie said, “people still need their coffee.” Newell Cheung, an investor of B4, said, “people are still going to want to come in [to the bar] and unwind.”

No one cared about the election because they thought it would not create immediate change. As Stella said, “just because one person becomes the president, the economy’s not going to go up the next day.” She couldn’t talk specifically about the candidates’ economic plans, however, because she didn’t know anything about them. Like Stella, most people I talked to had little to say about the election, simply because they were uninformed.

The proprietor of a hair salon on Maiden St. summed it up best: “I’m not voting and I don’t want to talk about it.”

***

I was pretty excited - it was my first time voting!

A Trip to the Tribute WTC Visitor Center

Ground Zero on Sept. 11, 2007

Ground Zero is an inescapable part of any New Yorker’s life, especially one living down in the Financial District. It’s the center of the neighborhood. Whether you were in New York at the time or not, Sept. 11 was a defining moment of this generation, and of all of our lives. I had never been to the Tribute WTC Visitor Center on Liberty Street, though I had walked by it countless times. Our class trip to the Center last week was an eye-opening experience.

I was 12 on Sept. 11, 2001, living in a suburb of Washington, D.C. I was in my Geometry class when we heard the news. Within hours, school had been cancelled (many of my classmates had family who worked at the Pentagon, site of one of the attacks), I was home, and my family and I were glued to the TV. It was a completely surreal experience, like a really bad movie that I couldn’t stop watching.

I’ve never really thought about Sept. 11, partly because it never seemed real, and partly because I don’t like to linger on bad experiences. I didn’t visit Ground Zero until last year, when I was forced to for a class assignment. I never got a sense of the place on my little self-guided tour, and I thought our trip to the Tribute Center would be similar to my experience last year: something very detached and cursory.

John Henderson, who works for Graduate Enrollment Services at NYU and volunteers as a tour guide at the Center, walked us around the site. Somehow he made the imaginary visions in my head real. I never understood the terror that consumed the people trapped in these buildings, until Henderson described their frantic attempts to escape. I never appreciated the thread-thin line between survival and death, until Henderson said that people below the 91st floor in the North Tower could escape, but those above could not, because debris had blocked the stairs completely.

The Center itself was informative, but I couldn’t walk through it without tearing up. It was inspiring to see how determined people were to help out their fellow New Yorkers that day, and to see how resilient families have been in 9/11’s aftermath. We talked to survivor Manny Papir, a business consultant and self-described “political hack” about his experience that day. Papir, who was Rudy Giuliani’s Deputy Chief of Staff at the time, said that he saw smoke rising from the towers from his home in Brooklyn, and immediately headed over to the World Trade Center to help.

I apologize for being graphic, but one thing he said really struck me: when describing the scene at Ground Zero, Papir said, “We weren’t finding whole bodies, we were finding parts.”

Sept. 11 is still something I will never comprehend, but the Tribute Center visit was a big step in finding some understanding of such a watershed moment in all of our lives.