New York's upper crust is struggling with the age-old existential question, “Do I have an affair, get a divorce or get a downtown apartment?”

After the recent unexpected death of its namesake founder, the new owners of Don Hill's closed the downtown nightlife institution for good on Monday night. Developers are going to turn it into a condo. Welcome to the new downtown Manhattan!

How bad is it out there? So bad that innocent citizens are being assaulted in fawncy downtown NYC much more than they were last year! Panic! How bad is it really? It's not that bad:

This is exactly the type of shit you won't be missing if you have the blessing of going out of town this weekend: being yelled at by jerks at the trendiest new dive-themed dive bar downtown. This week's culprit: Taavo-Somers designed nautical spot The Rusty Knot, where a tipster went the other night:

Back in the old days, man, downtown was so much better. So much realer. So raw. In fact, it was so real that we had to paddle a canoe across it. (The pic on the left is of Collect Pond in the early 1800s, which as you can see from the map on the right, was where downtown is today.) Click to enlarge. [via The Bowery…

What do you get when you take the snobbish manufactured exclusivity of the downtown NYC faux-celebrity modeltrash circuit and combine it with the barren urban nightmare that is Atlantic City? I don't know, but idly rich hipsters across the tristate area will soon be paying big money to find out, if cultural…

So, Tuesday night, former Seventeen editor and current girly-empire-building MySpace queen Atoosa Rubenstein goes to ridiculous Lower East Side hotspot The Box. Some trannies were doing a show, with some person of indeterminate gender stripping for a midget and simulating fellatio. (Louche times!) The climax of the…

Architect Lebbeus Woods on his 1999 drawing of a dammed and dug-out Lower Manhattan: "Le Corbusier was totally misunderstood by New Yorkers who thought, oh, our buildings aren't tall enough—we've got to go higher! Of course, he wasn't interested at all in their height—more in their plan relationship.... New York is…

Red alert for the Lower East Side! Vegan electronica gnome Moby just finished refurbishing the Central Park West apartment he bought two years ago. But now he's sent out an email to his friends about moving back downtown—according to our source, the Mobester is wracked by class guilt and "can't deal with living in a…

Though Mercat, the new tapas bar at 45 Bond St., is good, maybe super, it seems destined to inhabit the vestibule of its full potential without ever reaching its peak. (Hash that metaphor!) Dwell, for a moment, on how much better and how much more excited one might be for a place called Meerkat, but as a topless bar.…

In general, real estate listings traffic in the hyperbolic. Views aren't nice or tolerable, they're spectacular and expansive. A neighborhood isn't simply a nice place to live but the most exclusive, the hottest, or the most peaceful. But rarely does shilling of real estate agents become transcendent. And when it…

A week after the New York Times spun a hefty cautionary tale on the dangers of buying a unit before it's built, they've gone and sent Suzanne Slesin to the as-yet-unbuilt William Beaver House, Andr Balazs's vaguely vaginal condominium on William and Beaver streets downtown. When Slesin gets "out of a cab at the…

One of the nicer things about the Bowery Hotel, up until recently, was that after a night drinking Pimm's Cups and being too much of a schlub to approach the women whose long languorous limbs are so thoroughly draped over every armchair, you could stumble to Bowery Video, a video store-cum-brothel, right next door.…

It's real! The MisShapes coffee table book that you simply must own will at last arrive in September. Why, this MTV book is "a document of their unique world," with portraits of "cutting edge" folk, "some from different generations, alongside the youth of down town New York." Who, you ask? Who? Why: "Madonna, Yoko…