Goodbye to Bobo's

Bobo's got the news almost two years ago. The building had been sold. Things like this happen. It was a cramped little Thai restaurant with heavy steel chairs that were impossible to scoot and the best noodles in the city. Really. I think it's the cooking. It must be. All the restaurants probably buy the same noodles and it's the way they are cooked that makes some places have tasty, buttery smooth Pad Thai and others who serve a plate of pasty mush with peppers and little bits of chicken.

Oh, I guess I should mention that it wasn't named Bobo's. It was called Ramsit Thai, but the owner never got around to taking the the sign from the previous restaurant down and it was a lot easier to read than the little street level sign that said Ramsit Thai cuisine and everyone, except telephone information operators, were in on the joke. Getting delivery was a problem for those outside the loop because they would call 411 and draw a blank on the name Bobo's. Then they would go get a menu with the phone number and later call the place and the waitress would answer "Hello." The caller would say "Is this Bobo's?" and the waitress would say, "Whatever. You want delivery?"



The big, dirty magazine store next door which was dirty in the could-be-improved-by-hot-soapy-rag sense, didn't really sell anything dirtier than some of those awful so-called Men's Magazines that have a scantily dressed little known actress on the cover and listings for articles titled "Have the Best Abs on the Beach." They sold a lot of Lotto tickets. A lot. But I never saw a notice that they had had a big winner of any kind. The people who lived in the building could have used a big win or two. They were mostly very young or very old. Amongst the young were a scattering of artists and sculptors, some of whom were recent graduates of the School of Visual Arts and who had decided not to stray too far from their mentors. They dispersed quickly upon receiving their notices of eviction, off to the Lower East Side just as it was beginning to gentrify itself, off to Astoria and her lofts, some just moved a block or two, one or two boxes at time over to the corner building on Lexington. The older people just seemed to evaporate one weekend in June or July, some said to a building on the beltway in the Bronx. No one really could say.


They chewed the building down in about a month using nothing but pointed armbars and prying tools, sledge hammers and hooks. It took about a week to take a floor apart, remove the crummy little kitchen cabinets and closet doors, knock down the interior plaster walls and then pull down the exteriors. Hardly a brick fell onto the sidewalk cover, the bridge as it is known, nor did any of the steel from the fire escapes fall the the wrong way. Anybody who was away for a few days came back to see the building melting in the sunshine. There has been much speculation about what was moving into the corner lot, a dorm for SVA or Baruch, which is on the next corner at Lex, or a mammoth condo building what with housing going completely nuts here in the city over the past few years. The owner of the little loan shop at the other end of the block didn't sell and is widely considered to be an idiot because now his little plot of land is too small to build anything on. His tenants will have about a year or so of sunlight before the new building rises. For now there is only this.