Stephen Rex Brown Work at the Mars Bar building yesterday.

The Times runs a slideshow of photos by Harvey Wang. They’ll be exhibited at “Out Harvey Wang’s Window,” opening Wednesday night at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum’s new gallery space on Orchard Street. “I miss a New York that was affordable and a little rougher,” says the photographer. “I found it more interesting. I’d rather see an old kosher butcher chop than a big blue hotel.”

While mentioning that a pair of lawyers have bought a condo on East Ninth Street, Blockshopper notes that “there have been five condo sales in [the] East Village during the past 12 months, with a median sales price of $850,000.”

Off The Grid turns its attention to backhouses, the gritty tenement-world equivalent of carriage houses: “There are literally scores of these structures throughout our neighborhoods, but almost none are visible from the street, and therefore most are virtually unknown to anyone other than their residents and immediate neighbors.”

Vanishing New York posts a photo of Third Avenue between 11th and 12th Streets in the late 1970s and notes that once the Nevada Smiths building is demolished, none of the structures in the photo will remain standing.

EV Grieve notices work going on at 185-193 Avenue B, a former church that faces demolition. “According to the DOB, plans for a mixed-use seven-story building with 44 units were ‘disapproved’ last Monday.”

DNA Info points to an exhibit at the Audio Visual Arts gallery on East First Street that uses gobstoppers to interesting effect: “In his works, [Ajay] Kurian breaks open the childhood candy like a geologist might, and places it with rocks and fossils as a comment on nature.”

On Racked, fashion publicist and East Village resident James Volpe says that Pageant on East Fourth Street is “not a place you can go if you are looking for something in particular, but rather to discover art in something you never thought could be.”

DNA Info speaks to dog owners at First Run in the wake of a couple of recent pit bull attacks.

According to Fox News, “Top Chef” finalist Dave Martin’s new East 14th Street restaurant, the Meatball Factory, is just the latest evidence of a nationwide meatball craze.