In a way, New York has a permanence to it that many other major cities lack. There’s plenty that’s recognizable in pictures from a hundred years ago: the teeming and probably anxiety-ridden crowds, the lively street life, the squalor, the awesome scale of the place. This is the New York whose street system hasn’t undergone any major changes since the early 1600s (south of Chambers, at least), and whose prevailing mythologies imagine some kinship between the turn-of-the-century Lower East Side and modern-day Jackson Heights or Inwood.
But then there’s the New York that tore down the old Penn Station, kicked the Dodgers out of Brooklyn, exiled Fulton Fish Market to the Bronx, hurled stones at Steeplechase’s Pavilion of Fun, cordoned off miles of empty subway tunnel, and drags its marine waste to an open grave at the end of Arthur Kill Road. You could argue that the emphemeral New York is in perfect balance with the permanent one; indeed, that the maintenance of the city’s lasting character is somehow spurred by its ability to shed some extraneous aspects of its former self. To wit: Fresh Kills Landfill, which was once the largest man-made structure on Earth, is about to be turned into a public park. Harmony, right?
Well, maybe. Still doesn’t mean you can’t mourn the passing ephemera, or, indeed, mourn the fact that some of these things could even be considered ephemeral. This summer, New York City lost Astroland, Shea Stadium, McCarren Pool (as a concert venue), Yankee Stadium, Riffifi, Burritoville, and, closest to my heart, Kim’s Morningside Heights location. Today’s game at Yankee Stadium will be its last; meanwhile, it was just yesterday that Kim’s sold its last Criterion Collection DVD/film theory book/overpriced CD.
The University of Georgia editorial board 
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