Suzanne Rozdeba Good morning, East Village.
Above: Ray’s Candy Store, home of Obama fries, is now saluting Occupy Wall Street. Meanwhile over at Cooper Square, the Illuminator saluted the 99 percent again last night: see our photos here. And check it out: Ray now has a Wikipedia page, and according to The Villager, he has a new iPhone, too.
Earlier this week, when The Local spotted 7-Eleven signage going up over St. Marks Place, a representative told us the store would open at the end of this month. Now The Daily News trolls local residents for reactions and hears more or less the same thing we heard back in September: “We got rid of The Gap 15 years ago,” says one local. “We can get rid of 7-Eleven.”
The Post reports that Andrew Hanson, the “book worm” who was caught selling stolen library books to East Village Books, has been sentenced to 2.5 to 5 years in jail for felony burglary.
Speaking of book theft, novelist Jürgen Fauth “confessed to pilfering the Gideon Bible from every motel he happened to stay in” last night, according to a Reluctant Habits review of KGB’s “Behind the Books” night.
Elsewhere in the literary world, Alexander Nazaryan, on the Daily News’s Books Blog, explains why he left “Gatz” during its intermission at the Public Theater. “Throughout the three hours I spent watching and listening [to] Scott Shepherd (playing narrator Nick Carraway) read ‘The Great Gatsby’ as workers in a drab office bustled around him in clever pantomime of the novel’s action, I had the distinct feeling that Fitzgerald’s novel was being mocked.”
Off the Grid admires a nearly 100-year-old Gothic Revival-style apartment building at 135 East Second Street that once served as the rectory for St. Nicholas Church. The church was demolished and turned into a parking lot in the 1960s.
Complex includes Tompkins Square Park on its list of 100 Coolest Places of the Complex Decade: “Someday, someone will make a period piece about the 2000s, and Tompkins Square Park will figure prominently.”
And hey, the park is still cool: Queerty interviews Walt Cessna there. The former club kid was going to Mudd Club at the age of 14; his new book of short stories “chronicles the lives of street kids, hustlers, underage party girls, the beautiful and the damned of New York’s East Village circa 1989.”
Fork in the Road digs St. Marks Place newcomer San Matteo Panuozzo: “The Italian guys making your sandwich to order behind the tiny shop’s wooden bar won’t skimp on the filling, making this panuozzo’s price ($9) seem reasonable for a quick lunch.” The Voice’s food blog also recommends Turkish transplant Çiğköftem as a raw-food option.
