Retail developer Jack Menashe masterminded the whole transformation. A look at the Limelight Marketplace website and this Real Deal article feature the pictures of the new space, which intends to be stores, restaurants, specialty food shops, and little carts all selling crazy fun things for tourists to haul back to wherever they came from. Sadly 75% of the 60 store spaces are already leased.

Established retailers that have already signed on are Caswell Massey, America's oldest retailer (they made George Washington's cologne), and Hunter Boots, the 150-year-old firm that supplies boots to England's Royal Family. New York newcomers include Mari's New York — Mari Tuttle was a chef at Balthazar's, and this is her artisanal brownie business — It's Sugar, a candy store created by Jeff Rubin, co-creator of Dylan's Candy Bar, Carter & Cavero Old World Olive Oil, and Silly Souls, a baby goods store.

It's basically going to be South Street Seaport on Sixth Avenue and 20th Street, where murderous club kid Michael Alig once walked around dressed as a demonic Ronald McDonald and handed out tablets of E like they were chicklets. Ah, progress.

Thankfully, the former church will retain some of the architectural flourishes that made it distinct, but its soul will be crushed by the feet of ten thousand fat visitors from Texas.

This is the first time we've ever seen the outside of the Limelight in the daylight.
In 1996, we once saw the inside of the Limelight in exactly the same way. Massive doses of Ketamine were involved.
They're going to have cotton candy! Just what we needed.
The real problem with this whole scheme is like it is a club with no velvet rope. "Real" New Yorkers will never shop in a place that looks like a mall where all the visitors go.
There will be carts at the Limelight Marketplace. If you need to get a hat embroidered with the name of your boyfriend, you'll know where to go. Also, no sophisticated shopping space has carts.
They also plan on selling a lot of food. We know this is a country full of fat people, but this still seems odd.
The first floor will host all the little gourmet food stores and restaurants. And don't forget the festival of shops. They're so happy to be there, it's a party!
The second floor is where all the home goods and beauty supplies will be. It is also home to the sneaker gallery, in case you ever need to go somewhere to see children and straight boys pout when their mothers or wives won't let them buy a ridiculous priced pair of rainbow-colored Nikes.
This is where the VIP bottle service is. Ha! Just kidding. But there will be music and fashion!

Below is the updated map of the neighborhood. The areas shaded red are stores that are closed, vacant, or under construction. The yellow ones are those currently having sales. The white ones are either restaurants, private residences, or places where someone has managed to make a coin or two in these bleak times.

So, what did we (and by we, I mean intrepid intern Daniel Pardo) find in the intervening eight months? Six of the properties that were closed before are still closed, seven of the stores that were having sales are now closed, 20 properties are now vacant that weren't before, nine stores are still having sales, ten stores that weren't having sales are now trying to get rid of their merchandise, twelve stores that were having sales are no longer offering discounts, and three brave souls have opened new business in addresses that were formerly vacant.

What does all this mean? We're all screwed. Sales worked for some, but didn't work for others. Some places that were going strong are now on the ropes. Some places are just meant to be closed, and some people have the optimistic delusion to chase the American dream even in this economy.

Here is a selection of the places having sales:

White Saffron—232 Mott St.—40% off.

Tangdance—230 Mott St.—50 % off.

Mink—219 Mott St.—40 % off.

Second Time Around – 262 Mott St.—50 % off.

Mixane—272 Mott St.—30 % off.

TUTU—55 Spring St.—60 % off

Irregular Choice—288 Lafayette St.—30 % off.

Amarcord—252 Lafayette St.—25 % off

Label—273 Lafayette St.—70 % off.

NY Poll—269 Lafayette St.—70 % off.

Christian Audigier—275 Lafayette St.—70 % off.

B Tiff—244 Mulberry St.—70 % off.

Think Closet—242 Mulberry St.—70 % off

The Red Thread—190 Elizabeth St.—30-70 % off

When dealing with the most extreme and bizarre practices of foreign cultures, it's often best not to judge. Grotesquely stretching women's necks with a series of metal rings? Outsiders wouldn't understand. Setting old people adrift on ice floes to die? It's just their way. Chinese people using the Beijing Ikea like it's some theme park, spending hours and hours there hanging out like common homeless people, but ostensibly for pleasure? It's not something we could or would desire to understand, no. Nevertheless, the LAT reports:

"It's the only big store in Beijing where a security guard doesn't stop you from taking a picture," said Jing Bo, 30, who was looking for promising backdrops for a photograph of his girlfriend.

Sure, it's tempting to believe that our friends in the Far East have already fast-forwarded directly into our dystopian nightmare future in which soulless big box stores are offered to a zombie-like populace like a fast food menu to replace any dangerous, free-thinking "culture." But who are we to judge?

Imagining the possibilities here is one of the reasons Bai Yalin drove an hour and a half from her apartment to spend a day at the store with her 7-year-old son and two teenage nieces. There are few other indoor spaces, she said, where she can entertain the children free on an oppressive summer afternoon.

Bai mapped out a five-hour outing. First, they had hot dogs and soft ice cream cones at noon. Then they enjoyed a long rest lounging on the beds. Bai kicked off her sandals and sprawled out on a Tromso bunk bed. The 36-year-old homemaker made herself comfortable and even answered passing shoppers' questions about the quality of the mattress.

Fuck it! These people are crazy. I will swallow cyanide if America ever gets to the point that we forsake the outdoors in favor of whiling away long hours lounging in corporate chain stores while... oh, Barnes & Noble.

Global dystopia, huzzah!
[Pics: pmorgan, Mana Dili]

Here we have the Album de Famiglia design collection customizable cardboard cot (brown), a.k.a. a cardboard box. No, really:

Delivered flat-packed, very easy to assemble...You can decide to keep it plain - simply stamped with the brand's logo on the side - for the super chic industrial living look. Or you can customize it, paint it, or simply decorate it with your child's name.

Hey, do whatever you want to it. It's a cardboard box! Neal Pollack probably has dozens of these. Rock-n-roll, yall. Yours for only $255. Fits little Lorenzo and his evil twin.
[via Mamaista]

Obese Americans—the majority—can no longer just waddle into Ann Taylor and pick out a hefty-sized pant suit off the rack. Retailers are moving all their large-person clothing online, meaning even less exercise for our oversized citizens, who will now be able to move merely their fingertips to pick out clothes, while, doubtless, eating with the other hand.

And what will this mean for New Hampshire's beloved baguette shops? Doom, that's what it fucking means. If more of you obese internet shoppers had come out and enjoyed some tasty Real French Croissants rather than sitting home and eating Pillsbury cinnamon bun dough directly from the container, New Hampshire could have had a nice French bakery, for once. But you didn't, so the respectable foodie place didn't make enough money, so the government is shipping the French people back home and leaving you all with your Taco Bell Taco Salads, as snacks. We hope you're happy.

The sens of community is lost, you see? This recession has splintered us into various discordant, competing groups: Fatties vs. slims, Frenchies vs. Mair-cans, Foodies vs. Consumer of vast quantities of food, whatever it may be. These days you can't even come out and gaze upon a Triceratops skull unless you have $125,000 to spend. And that's just wrong. Wrong for dinosaurs. Wrong for Ann Taylor plus-size shoppers. Wrong for baguette-swallowers. Just wrong.
[Pic via]

With impeccable Enraging Thursday Styles Trend Piece timing, the NYT offers a story that is essentially a listing of the most outrageous male short prices of the season. Tom Ford's cotton chino tennis shorts, $650; Giorgio Armani's cotton drawstring shorts, $775; Thom Browne's seersucker man-skort, $1,495. Sadly, the Times reports, anybody looking to pay less than a hundred bucks for some shorts "will find few options outside of mall chains." Which, needless to say, is unacceptable.

There's also this sentence: "American Apparel sells a decent pair of city shorts for $42, but they look as if they might be from the suburbs." We don't know what that means.

All of this has apparently intimidated women in the over-35 demographic so much that they do all of their shopping online now. Which is a good thing! Not only are they supporting the entire online apparel shopping industry (despite the fact that it ignores them—CLOTHES FOR YOUNGS ONLY), they also stay safely at home, less likely to wander into the male shorts section of a luxury store and confuse everyone.

Meanwhile the state of California cannot afford clothes at all.

Let's find out using the power of Lexis-Nexis!

"SkyMall Catalogue": 476 stories since 1990
"SkyMall Catalogue Funny": 18 stories
"SkyMall Catalogue Weird": 18 stories
"SkyMall Catalogue Junk": 6 stories
"SkyMall Catalogue Symbol": 25 stories

Enough! Even I've written a SkyMallLOL Catalogue story, back a couple years ago when it was edgy.

As far as I can discern, the premise here is something about Abercrombie and its role in teen culture during the recession so the NYT found out that teens are spending less and then they pretty much leveraged that solid piece of data into other points about teens, like saying they care less about labels, or even quoting a kid walking out of an Abercrombie store saying "This stuff is too expensive" and insinuating that that is proof of some deeper trend, if you can imagine, and on the other hand Hot Topic is doing okay and Aeropostale has two-for-one sales and a store called Buckle is doing a thing where they're constantly switching out the fashions, which is working for them, and teen girls like cute things that look good but don't cost so much, although they'll still spend a couple hundred bucks on a prom dress, and if you mix all this information up and write it out for a couple thousand words or whatever, you can get in the Style section and also reinforce the conclusion that we all already suspected, "Kids are dumb."
[NYT. Pic via]

"The number of people who changed residences declined to 35.2 million from March 2007 to March 2008, the lowest number since 1962, when the nation had 120 million fewer people." Perfectly understandable. I just moved, and do you know that movers want literally hundreds of dollars to move your stuff down one flight of stairs, and later, up another flight of stairs? I mean, everybody in New York is moving, because apartment prices are going down about a hundred bucks a month per month. But elsewhere, yea: just huddle up where you are. Moving expends energy, which requires calories to replace it, which ups your grocery bill. Stay still.

Unless you're in college! In that case, run around grabbing everything you can, lest the administration sell it off to pay the bills. Across the country, schools are selling off art collections, and also taking donations that may have been "earmarked" for one specific cause and re-earmarking them for another cause, like staying afloat financially. Donors are mad, but hey, donors are always mad. Education demands extreme measures sometimes.

It could be worse: you could be trying to sell "high end merchandise" these days, if you can imagine such a preposterous thing. Needless to say, fancy stores are now putting their fancy clothes and whatnot on Ebay. You can shop from your same home, while conserving energy. Everybody wins/ loses!
[Pic via]

General Growth Properties, which operated more than 200 malls covering 44 states, declared bankruptcy today. Think about that for a moment. Malls were the sickly shining symbol of suburban America's rotting commercial heart! And now they're mere shells of themselves, with a few ghostly Orange Julii and whatnot interspersed between vacant former Coconuts locations, while all the shopping public is off at the gun show.

Perhaps even more jarring than that: "As the recession prompts U.K. pub crawlers to drink at home more often, two of the country's biggest pub owners are selling or closing hundreds of locations to pay the tab from a decade-long expansion." Are you hearing this? Pubs going out of business in England, of all places. There is absolutely nothing to do in vast swaths of England except go to pubs, unless the new "US vs. UK Challenge" season of Spike TV's "The Ultimate Fighter" is far more popular than I imagined. Brits are reportedly drinking at home to save money, preferring the sad, lonely existence of beer-guzzling in front of the TV to the sad, lonely existence of beer-guzzling in a dimly lit pub, and then fighting.

If malls and pubs can't turn profits any more, it's quite obvious that there's no hope for Saturn dealers or the entire real estate industry. When your most appealing services don't sell, despite the public's inherent hypnotic attachment to them, you know that bad days are ahead.

And fat people can't fly.

You are invited to a Book Signing and Discussion for

Obama: The Historic Journey
Thursday, February 19 at 7:30 p.m.
at Barnes & Noble at 66th Street(1972 Broadway - 212.595.6859)

The discussion will feature:

JILL ABRAMSON, Managing Editor
MICHAEL POWELL, Metro Reporter
DAMON WINTER, Photographer
JODI KANTOR, Washington Correspondent

Want to buy the book? Times employees are eligible for a 25% discount
through The Times's Store.

Can you imagine if this was all for Pres. George W. Bush? That's all we're saying.

Intern Whitney Jefferson traversed a few blocks around our front door — between Bowery and Laffayette, Houston and Kenmare — peering in the windows of cutesy boutiques and club-thumping clothing stores. What she found was a pretty grim picture. "80% Off" sales. Shuttered windows. All the sad evidence of a material world in decline.

Below is a list of the shops she surveyed along with a handy map. Happy cheap shopping, you broke bastards!

Red shows stores that are closed or empty. Yellow is the shops promoting discounts of 50% or more.

1. Triple Five Soul Apparel - 290 Lafayette St. - 50-70% Off

2. WESC - 282 Lafayette St. - 70% Off

3. Christian Audiger - 273 Lafayette St. - 30-50% Off

4. L P & P New York - 250 Lafayette St. - 80% Off

5. Bicycle Habitat - 242 Lafayette St. - Bikes Reduced by $3,000+

6. Lilliput SoHo Kids - 240 Lafayette St. - 40-50% Off

7. Sissy - 231 Lafayette St. - 50% Off

8. Parasuco - 60 Spring St. - 70% Off

9. Mary Jaeger - 51 Spring St. - Closed, Moved

10. Spring Communication, LLC - 50 Spring St. - Dirt Cheap Cell Phone Plans (see image)

11. Varazioni - 214 Mulberry St. - 60% Off

12. Coqueta Lingeries - 215 Mulberry St. - 50% Off

13. Think Closet - 230 Mulberry St. - 30-50% Off, Cheap Coats

14. Bul Bul - 230 Mulberry St. - $80 Couture Dresses

15. Cutie Room - 234 Mulberry St. - 40, 70, and then 90% Off (see image)

16. MK Lifestyle - 236 Mulberry St. - Closed, For Rent

17. Shane Shawn - 238 Mulberry St. - $25 Shoes Sample Sale

18. Nanja Yeoja Boutique - 241 Mulberry St. - Closed, For Rent

19. Amalia - 44 Prince St. - 50-80% Off Storewide

20. Femmegems NoLita - 280 Mulberry St. - Closed

21. Poppy - 281 Mott St. - 30-70% Off

22. Bara Bock - 279 Mott St. - Closed

23. The Shoe NY - 272 Mott St. - 20-50% Off

24. Christopher Totman - 262 Mott St. - 30-75% Off

25. Modo - 252 Mott St. - 50% Off Prescription Lenses

26. Lugo Tailored Menswear - 246 Mott St. - Closed, For Rent

27. Belle - 242 Mott St. - 70% Off

28. Baby Blue Line - 238 Mott St. - 70% Off

29. Alice + Olivia - 219 Mott St. - Store For Rent

30. Nancy Koltes - 29 Spring St.- 40-80% Off, Changed to 50-90% Off

31. Barsow - 170 Elizabeth St. - For Rent

32. Tricia's Place - 171 Elizabeth St. - 25-50% Off

33. The Red Threads - 190 Elizabeth - 30-50% Off

34. Character - 19 Prince St. - 40% Off

35. Varazioni - 23 Prince St. - "Last Call" 80% Off

36. Eleven - 11 Prince St. - 20% Off, Changed to 40% Off

37. Unis - 226 Elizabeth St. - 50% Off

38. Kitt - 228 Elizabeth St. - 70% Off

39. La Petite Princesse - 232 Elizabeth St. - All Clothes $59-$69

40. GirlCat - 237 Elizabeth St. - 20-40% Off

41. EMC2 - 240 Elizabeth St. - Huge Sale (see image) ex. Coats $995 down to $295

42. Kipepeo - 248 Elizabeth St. - Closed, For Rent

43. Silver Goddess - 259 Elizabeth St. - Closed, For Rent

44. RS Equipment Corp. - 274 Bowery - For Rent

45. Bowery Home Supply - 270 Bowery - For Rent

46. The Chair Factory - 214 Bowery - "Red Tag Sale"

47. Manhattan Realty Corp - 8 Spring St. - Moved, For Rent

48. B. Tiff - 244 Mulberry St. - Jewelry: Buy 1, Get One Free

49. John Fluevog - 250 Mulberry St. - 60% Off

50. Gates of Morocco - 8 Prince St. - Going Out of Business Sale

The labels are not essential. They're not going to make you happy, even at 75 percent off!

One of the refreshing things about a recession, or at least about the last one, is that everyone remembers money is overrated and ceases their most conspicuous consumption.

Maybe it's a mark of the desperation and panic in the air that this cleansing process isn't happening this time around. The rich have their secret stores, and the poors have their sales. Reports the AP:

More and more consumers are... treating a trip to the mall like a visit to the used car lot.

Allen Chen, a part-time cashier at a J. Crew store in White Plains, N.Y., said shoppers with two-month-old receipts are asking for partial refunds for items now on sale. Normally, the store's policy is to refund the difference between an item's purchase price and a later sale price only if it goes on sale within seven days of the purchase.

"When I tell them it is past the seven-day policy, they tell me that they will just return it and re-buy it" at the sale price, he said, adding that his store managers are now allowing customers to do so most of the time.

Shoppers are also being far more savvy about asking retailers to match a competitor's lower price.

...Jill duPont the owner of a small women's clothing and accessories boutique called Out of the Box in Greenwich, Conn., said she's felt some pressure to mark her prices down to be competitive with others.

"Customers aren't shy about telling us 'what a good price' they found somewhere else," she said.

It's all very desperate. Consumers may be cutting back, but they're still shopping, clinging on to one last, relatively normal Christmas. It's in no one's interests to stop them, except their own.

Well, not really quiet, exactly. But these days Fuld, wife of villainous Lehman Brothers CEO Dick, does request a little white bag in which to carry her $2,225 cashmere throws out of the store, rather than the traditional look-at-me orange sacks the store is so known for. How demure! (Or, you know, shameful.) This is a whole new trend, The Daily Beast reports, with rich ladies all over town opting to, oh mercy God yes, still spend the money, but also to be classy about it and not flaunt they shit. It's called "secret shopping"! (And strangely, this report doesn't carry a byline, which means someone at TDB wants to keep their investigation a secret, too.)

"People are feeling guilty and they’re feeling confused and they’re feeling like they didn’t earn their money, especially within the financial community," said somebody from a marketing research house called the Luxury Institute. Aww, sad and confused and guilty, but not sad, confused, or guilty enough to stop spending money. It's like taking the hood ornament off your Mercedes and being proud of yourself.

It's too bad there isn't some way for Kathy Fuld, whose hubby did a really good job of putting many, many people out of work, to like, you know, give back or something. Someone should set up organizations through which people with money, especially folks who don't deserve it, like the Fulds, can give some of that money to people who need it more. Since nothing like that exists though, she'll just have to bury her sad guilty feelings under a mountain of three thousand dollar scarves and white paper bags.

For the boy who...

...likes to imagine he's walking in slow motion and furtively writes screenplays about things like a bookie who falls in love with a hooker and has to shoot his way out of a bad situation: Um, duhhh. The complete Sopranos series on DVD. It comes, of course, with a bunch of extras that he can watch and bone up on so when he's not showing off his new leather coat or talking about the time he went clubbing "in the city" and Vin Diesel was there, he can "impress" ladies with mob minutiae. And it only costs $399.99!

...hung some beads off the rear view mirror of his VW Bug, waits tables at the Cheesecake Factory and calls everybody Miss Thang out of the house but back at home mostly stays in his room, from which muffled sobs and/or singing can be heard: Christmas with a Z, naturally! Buy him tickets to Liza's at the Palace..., the indefatigable Minnelli's latest well reviewed cabaret act cum Kay Thompson homage. It closes on the 28th, so make it an early present. He'll wait by the stage door, meet her, and then drive around town in that silly car of his, feeling a little bit special for a few days.

...always has a slight orangey Cheetos tint to his hands, doesn't shave (if he even needs to shave) a lot, and kinda smells. The whole 'girl' thing seems to elude him thus far, but not in the same way as his Bug-driving cousin. Sometimes when you're driving with him in the car he'll start to say something and you think "this is it... he's finally going to open up" but then he seems to think better of it and you keep driving in silence and you wonder where your little boy went: I dunno, there are a whole lotta videogames for sale, I'm told. Our younger brother site Kotaku has a whole holiday list.

For the girl who...

...will only glumly kick the ball once when it's soccer day at gym, who writes long secret things (poems? songs? love notes?) in her big, well-protected spiral bound notebook. On Friday nights she'll usually make a bowl of Kraft Mac n' Cheese and retreat to her room, where she'll spend hours on internet messageboards and fan sites, listening to the William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet Soundtrack, Volume 2, because it's the one with the sad opera aria on it: Give her something new and contemporary and with it to listen to. Like the Twilight movie soundtrack! There's some Muse, some Paramore, some Black Ghosts. Grim and romantic, just like the vampire teen romance books she can't get enough of. Then tell her she's not allowed to eat in her room anymore.

...looks at the boy with the leather jacket and the clubbing stories and smokes her long cigarette and smiles a little bit and figures, hey, sounds more fun than giving Vinnie Meloni handjobs in his Durango out behind the All City Diner: How about some delicious Sopranos wine which she can drink on the squeaky leather sofa in big gulps while the boy rewinds the scene yet again and says "I mean, he just cuts Ralphie's head right the fuck off, crazy huh?"

...the girl... the girl who has... everything:
Forget gadgets, gizmos, whoseits, whatzits, and thingamabobs. If my research serves me correctly, the girl who has everything only wants one thing: legs. And since you probably wouldn't be friends with someone who didn't have legs (shallow asshole) we suggest the next best thing, stilts.

Happy holidays! (And by that I really only mean Christmas.)

A complaint filed today in New York State Supreme Court in the Bronx on behalf of survivors of the fallen worker, Jdimytai Damour, claims that besides failing to provide adequate security, Wal-Mart "engaged in specific marketing and advertising techniques to specifically attract a large crowd and create an environment of frenzy and mayhem," according to published reports.

Wal-Mart's ad agency would consider that an honor! At least one of those frenzy-inducing ads was still running well after Damour's death. When framed as a cold, calculating, malicious act by Wal-Mart, the charge may sound borderline ludicrous, like something a lawyer throws in just in case; but Ad Age points out that there's been a longtime campaign to try to get stores to stock adequate merchandise on Black Friday, so shoppers don't feel the need to trample each other to get those few super-cheap TVs in the back of the store. That's not a bad idea at all. [Ad Age; pic via]

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