Drawing the Vanishing Restaurants of New York

Earlier this year, I created All the Restaurants in New York, an ongoing visual compendium of the city’s eateries. The project’s title is a hyperbolic lark—there are some twenty-four thousand restaurants in the city—but my motivation is entirely earnest. Last summer, I started with iconic places, like the Odeon and Peter Luger’s, to build an inventory in anticipation of the launch of my Web site. Recently, I was struck by the ephemeral nature of restaurants themselves. The China Grill, which had stood for decades in midtown, at the base of Eero Saarinen’s CBS headquarters, the famed “Black Rock” building, was closing down. The solidity I had assumed of its façade was an illusion.