The Manhattan Times

Shhhh!

compiled by Mike Fitelson

Shhhh!

Signs of the arrival of the season of shopping began popping up all over Northern Manhattan in recent weeks, from holiday food displays at Frank’s Market to decorative street lighting along the busiest shopping corridors.

Coincidence or not, the season of giving is ushering in several notable new businesses to Northern Manhattan and a stone’s throw away in the Bronx.

One of the more interesting, and unique, businesses to open recently is Wiggles and Giggles Playhouse, at the corner of W. 181st Street and Riverside Drive in the space of the former KB Gallery. The Nov. 14 grand opening, a rainy Saturday, saw dozens of children with parents in tow explore the colorful space’s toys, cushioned mats and tyke-sized play things.

The Playhouse offers a host of programs for both children and adults (yoga anyone?) as well as scheduled drop-in play time for $5 an hour. For those looking for gift ideas for the stay-at-home mom or dad on your list, I imagine there are handy dandy Giggles and Wiggles gift certificates.

At the other end of the district, 1-Month Fee, a new residential apartment rental agency, staged a launch party for its Web site last week. Thinking vertically, the husband and wife team of Ronit and Kevin have paired her real estate savvy with his moving company to give every client the option of a free move. They also run a home furnishings business with merchandise purchased at estate sales so their clients can outfit their new apartments. Both the rental agency and showroom are housed at the Inwood Center, 5030 Broadway.

Perhaps the most local gift you can give this year is a calendar from the Riverside Oval Association. The group, headquartered around Riverside Drive in the W. 150s, has produced its third annual fundraising calendar, featuring rarely seen historical photographs to mark the landmarking of the Audubon Park Historic District. The calendar includes five images from the archive of the Hispanic Society of America showing the neighborhood when the museum complex was under construction over 100 years ago. There are also images of the waterfront around W. 157th Street. The calendars, $10 each, can be ordered by emailing This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . 

For those serious shoppers who treat holiday gift-giving as an Olympic sport, a new mega-shopping complex opened in August right by Yankee Stadium. If you’ll need to visit a Home Depot-Best Buy-Target-Bed Bath & Beyond-Marshall’s-Raymour & Flanigan-Toys and/or Babies “R” Us all in one trip, the Gateway Center at Terminal Market is your closest bet.

The gargantuan parking structures are braced for Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, when the center’s Applebee’s Restaurant will open at 4 a.m. to help shoppers fuel up for their marathon sprees.

For some, the shopping has already begun. At Target, store team leader Bill Florin said that a customer had purchased 300 cans of vegetables. Why 300? At 49 cents a can, the customer only had $150, Florin joked.

But the Bronx hasn’t been lost in the 18 acres of big box retail. At the Home Depot, the staff wears aprons with their names written in graffiti style. They start every day off with a pep squad cheer.

That “Bronx flavor,” said store manager Stanley Pierre, “is our internal way of saying how happy we are to be here.”

The $500 million Gateway project developed by Related Companies is said to have brought 2,100 permanent jobs to the South Bronx, over half filled by Bronxites.

If Northern Manhattan were to make a wish list this holiday season, asking Santa, Hanukkah Harry, Bloomberg or whomever for 1,000 new local jobs should be item number one.

Shhhh!

This has nothing to do with holiday shopping, but it’s good for a couple of “only in New York” anecdotes.

During a Nov. 13 meeting at Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer’s Center Street office, the BP was preparing to make a point about inter-borough rivalries by citing a recent news report that Brooklyn restaurants were gaining in popularity vis-à-vis Manhattan. Stringer asked the crowd of over 100 community leaders with a show of hands how many had read the story about it in that morning’s New York Post.

Not a hand went up.

With a subtle prompt from yours truly, Stringer asked the crowd how many had read the Manhattan Times. Up shot the arm of Community Board 12 District Manager Ebenezer Smith, still clutching the most recent edition of the bilingual newspaper of Washington Heights and Inwood.

But that’s nothing compared to what happened later that afternoon. I was standing on the corner of Ft. Washington Avenue and W. 163rd Street when I hailed a passing yellow cab. (It wasn’t so long ago that simply getting a yellow cab to stop in the neighborhood would have merited a Shhhh! item.) I get into the cab and take it several blocks before getting out. When I do, the driver does as well and asks me: “Are you the media guy who was at the meeting downtown this morning?” Evidently when he is not driving a taxi he works with a Senegalese group and remembered me – and the paper – from Stringer’s get together.

Maybe, just maybe, the word has gotten out about what’s happening in Washington Heights and Inwood.