Monday, May 02, 2005

Today while wandering around Noho (the real one) I found a small dumpster filled to the brim with brand-new, trendy shoes and sneakers. All of them were paired, all looked perfect, except someone had slashed the uppers so they would be unwearable. The retail clearance system is cruel.

9 comments:

Henning said...

Isn't the real Noho in London?

Those shoes you found? Those are called "fuck the homeless shoes".

stewbie2 said...

Cruel, indeed.

debl said...

Henning is right, I think. The Noho in Manhattan is only one step more real than the one in Massachusetts.

I keep an eye on all dumpsters. It is what I do.

debl said...

Henning is right, I think. The Noho in Manhattan is only one step more real than the one in Massachusetts.

I keep an eye on all dumpsters. It is what I do.

Anonymous said...

Look at the material NYC gives you! Welcome. Here are your fucked-up shoes.

--Alice

Anonymous said...

OK, I'm going to be a know-it-all and point out that Noho in Manhattan and Noho as in Northampton are equally real. I'm not sure when the real estate agents decided that North of Soho should be called Noho, but it may have been after the funky arty Northampton got its own Soho-y nickname. But I'm sure both Nohos are derived from Soho, which itself came from abbrieviating South of Houston Street, in Manhattan, but which was first (by many years) the name of a neighborhood in London, supposedly named after the hunters' cry of "soho! soho!" As far as I know, there's no London Noho, but I could be wrong.

The best dumpster haul I ever made was from a shoe store on 8th Street (NY). They had just changed their store design and had thrown out the old design elements -- in this case, about a dozen vintage wooden juggling pins. Score!

S-Way

Anonymous said...

I know someone who once found several almost-new drum heads in a dumpster--who's drummer were they? David Byrne's. My friend took the heads.

Anonymous said...

Hi. Welcome to town.
The rest of you, give me back my stuff.

Yours very truly,
David Byrne

debl said...

SWay, I seem to vaguely remember during the hot art scene in Soho in the 1980s, when the gallery creep ventured north and they named the new area NoHo. So I think that came first. Of course I am basing this on almost nothing.

The sliced-up shoes were too thoroughly sliced to really save, though I probably should have found a pair in my size and grabbed them for fun. The bin was full of all different shoe kinds and designs, not just one or two kinds, making it very treasure-chesty and alluring. Oh well. It started raining that night so I am certain even if they were still there they would be quite gross.

A friend of mine in high school once found a black leather motorcycle jacket in perfect condition in the trash in Manhattan. Major, major score.