Thread by @studentactivism

I'm still holding out hope that Spain will return for a victory lap, but this hits hard.

https://twitter.com/AlexVadukul/status/1334305277361991681

Mostly I'm glad to know that they're in a position to make this decision for their own reasons, on their own terms. Spain (the restaurant) is such a sublimely preposterous place that they very much deserve that.

Whenever I go into Spain I feel like I'm stepping back in time to when my dad arrived in NYC from Idaho as a college freshman in 1961. Ancient red-jacket waiters, low ceilings, free tapas with your cheap white wine.

The physical space—I won't even try to describe it, not today. But it's weird enough that I spent a day researching it a couple of years ago and learned that it was built (the back half of it—the front half is a brick rowhouse) as a modern art gallery in the 1920s.

I'd long since concluded that they had to own the building, and had to have owned it for a very long time, since there was no way what they were doing made any sense at all if they were paying Greenwich Village rents. But to see it confirmed is still magical.

Because what it means is that for a very long string of years they were saying "no thank you," day in and day out, to a very large amount of money, so they could keep making their wonderful, absurd restaurant a reality.

Now is not the week to be waxing lyrical about This City on here, so I'll just leave it at that. For now. Sigh.