Remember The Alamo

On Tuesday, the Astor Place Cube mysteriously disappeared. The large spinning metal cube which is the hangout of skateboarders and street punks in the East Village went missing without explanation. The cube, whose actual name is The Alamo has sat on the street island near Cooper Union since 1966 and it's absence was a little weird when I walked past it last night to the subway.

There are a few reasons why I immediately found this curious. A few weeks ago, I read an article (which was pointed out to me by the ever-vigilant boyfriend) in The Times that said the cube no longer spun. There was some sort of problem with the spinning mechanism and people were complaining, though no one would take responsibility for the structure. The Village Alliance business improvement district said they were only in charge of cleaning graffiti off the sculpture but not maintenance. Cooper Union said they just give the black paint to the Alliance to cover the graffiti. The Department of Transportation said they don’t maintain the sculpture, but they do own the traffic island on which it sits. And neither the Parks Department nor the Department of Cultural Affairs can decide which is responsible for the cube. How could no one know who is in charge of this? Too many people in love with those freakin' transient Gates to care what happens to a permanent New York Institution? Suck it Jean-Claude!

My conspiracy theories started to kick in. No one want to fix it, so maybe the city just made it go away. There is a huge new shiny, undulating, curvavious building going up directly across from the cube, and I can't imagine the owners are keen to allow the kind of people the cube traditionally attracts to stick around much. Maybe they pulled a little weight to get rid of it completely. My friend Leigh, who first alerted me to its absence, was on the scent! The Parks Department removed the cube for cleaning and repairs and will return in 60 days. When people from the Parks Department claim something is going to happen in a timely manner, they usually have no idea what they are talking about. They took away the bandshell from Tompkins Square Park "for cleaning" and apparently threw it away years ago, never to be seen again. They claimed they were going to clean the Washington Square Arch for about 8 years but instead satisfied their obsessive compulsive tidiness by surrounding it in an attractive chain link fence (thought NYU is just as culpable in this instance). So when they say it'll be back in two months, I remain skeptical.