Smiler's

There's a Smilers on 54th and Mad one block east of the McKim, Mead, White neo-Renaissance University Club and and also east of the rear entrance to MoMA. Do institutions whether high or ordinary possess DNA? There was an all-night Smilers on Sixth Avenue down from The Waverly (now IFC), where The Rocky Horror Show, played at Midnight, and a couple of blocks up from Film Forum and the 220s a notorious after hours club that catered to the spillover of beautiful pre-op transsexual prostitutes from The Terminal Bar opposite the Port Authority and G.G's Barnum Room, famous for its trapeze. But one wonders if the Smiler's on 54th is the country cousin  of the original--which had just come over on the ship. The children and grandchildren of many Eastern European immigrants, who inhabited the tenements of the Lower East Side, eventually became shareholders in the cavernous and majestic pre-war apartment houses that line Park Avenue. Is it that Smiler's has come up in the world?

read Hallie Cohen's interview on collaboration

and see the invite for her show, Mi Ricordo: Roman Watercolors, opening on February 29