Bloomberg is Coming, September 2

So, if you have any questions for him...

Fading

The name Marmara is slowly fading away.

Owning Marmara

A sign on the door of Marmara, I noticed today.

Another Business, Gone

A store on the same block as Marmara is closed and looking for a new tenant. Sigh.

Life in Marmara?

Marmara restaurant, located at 39th Place and Queens Boulevard, has been closed for months. But tonight, walking by the restaurant windows on 39th Place, I saw two men inside the kitchen.<

Maybe a sign of a re-opening?

Let's hope. But maybe, this time, they could get their liquor license. Here's the Chronicle's restaurant review from December 2007:

"With its pastel-colored interior, track lighting and ample space offered between tables, Marmara has a romantic ambience and is as good a “date restaurant” as any you will find a few miles west in Manhattan with prices that are far more reasonable. Marmara has not obtained its liquor license yet, but patrons are allowed to bring their own bottle of wine if they desire."

R.I.P. Ivan Cortes

Here's the sidewalk memorial for Ivan Cortes, who died on August 5 on Queens Boulevard.

Anybody know more about what happened?

Sunnyside

The novel! Its main character is Charlie Chaplin. Anybody reading it?

About the book, from Amazon:

Sunnyside opens on a winter day in 1916 during which Charlie Chaplin is spotted in more than eight hundred places simultaneously, an extraordinary delusion that forever binds the overlapping fortunes of three men: Leland Wheeler, son of the world’s last (and worst) Wild West star, as he finds unexpected love on the battlefields of France; Hugo Black, drafted to fight under the towering General Edmund Ironside in America’s doomed expedition against the Bolsheviks; and Chaplin himself, as he faces a tightening vise of complications—studio moguls, questions about his patriotism, his unchecked heart, and, most menacing of all, his mother.

Fom the author:

My great aunt Ingrid, a journalist, was Chaplin's neighbor in Switzerland; family legend has it that he dictated parts of his autobiography to her.

So: in 1914, Chaplin was barely even a film comedian, Hollywood was a farm town where the lights went out at 8 o'clock, and America was more or less a great big cornfield with an occasional city poking among its rows. And in 1918, Chaplin was a genius, Hollywood was the world's aspirational mecca, and America... well, America was in serious trouble, in that it thought it had won the War.

Sunnyside is the story of this rapid transformation as Chaplin and his adopted country lose, one more devastating time, their innocence.