![]() ![]() ![]() From a lime-green cushion upstairs, I watched the video screen display one disturbing image after the next: small animated Crocs ripping off a woman’s high heels after a hard day at work and molesting her feet in a manner familiar from late-night premium cable. I watched a backpack-saddled fellow strip off his socks to try on a pair of flip-flops that looked like a withered bathmat sandwiched between two unforgiving slabs of Croslite ($39.99). Some items weakly nod to conventional footwear: black house slippers made of water-resistant leather with vents around the side ($59.99), and soft olive-green leather boat shoes, also with vents ($59.99), that suggested an amphibious vehicle. Elsewhere on the men’s floor - women’s shoes are at street level, men’s upstairs - are forests of shoes in drab colors and prints, and a handful in bold neons. That’s the only echo of the avant-garde here, though. One of the flip-flops, the ABF (for “almost barefoot”), with its single-injected bulbous swoops, could pass for a cousin - an extremely distant one, several times removed, and estranged from the family - of the shoes Zaha Hadid designed for the Brazilian shoemaker Melissa a couple of years ago. There are various styles, most of them variations on flip-flops or slip-ons. Made of Croslite, a proprietary resin that’s gummy and faintly sticky, Crocs have a bounce to them, like a Jell-O mold that wiggles before retaking its shape. But seeing them is no substitute for touching them. You’ve seen Crocs, of course - the classic one, in green or navy or purple, with holes dotting the toe like a Wiffle ball ($29.99). The Crocs Store on Spring Street in SoHo. It might as well be duty-free.Īs if to emphasize the point, the windows display a handful of nation-themed Crocs: England, Italia, Korea, Deutschland ($39.99), souvenirs of places you don’t even have to go to, or may already be from. This is a store designed completely for export. Crocs, though, might be the first shop in the neighborhood to cater almost wholly to non-natives (except Mario Batali, who probably has a tab there). Theme-park SoHo can bear the H & M, the Uniqlo, the Topshop, even the Desigual, all international chain stores, opened in the last few years, that reasonable New Yorkers might go to for affordable basics. Maybe it’s not so strange that the restaurant’s clapboard husk (it closed in 2006), refashioned with tall glass walls that now exhibitionistically show off rainbows of Crocs to Wooster Street, is still the neighborhood’s Achilles’ heel. Tennessee Mountain, unpretentious and underwhelming, was one of the few spots that felt accessible. ![]() SoHo was alien turf then, especially to a kid from Sheepshead Bay. IN the 1980s, I ate many weighty meals at the SoHo barbecue restaurant Tennessee Mountain with my mother and grandmother, sometimes after shopping, sometimes after visiting my uncle, who lived in a loft a couple of blocks away. ![]()
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