Rachel Citron Good morning, East Village.
In The Villager, the neighborhood’s radical comic book artist, Seth Tobocman, describes the arrest of two men at the Sixth Street Community Center on Saturday. “They unquestionably had been beaten,” he says. “They looked totally f—– up. They’d been on the ground with a bunch of guys on top of them for about 10 to 15 minutes. They got beat up. You would not want to be them.”
By the way, anarchists aren’t anything new: Studio 360 puts in a good word for the East Village poetry tour created by one of its former producers, Pejk Malinovski, and posts a snippet in which “at St. Marks Church, we hear the ‘benefit shooting’ of 1968, when Allen Van Newkirk and some fellow anarchists interrupted Kenneth Koch with a fake gun, seizing poetry for the revolution.”
Perhaps surprisingly, the East Village doesn’t make Curbed’s list of the 10 neighborhoods with the highest number of rent-regulated units. The Lower East Side and Chinatown place tenth on the list. Citywide, the number of rent-controlled units has gone down from 285,733 in 1981 to 38,374 in 2011.
Curbed thinks a one-bedroom co-op on East 10th Street is a steal at $650,000: “At the risk of sounding like shills, it is delightful, from its 220-square-foot living room, to its windowed kitchen, to the Jacuzzi tub in its marble bath. It even allows pets! It almost seems too good to be true, especially since it sold for $710,000 in 2007 and $702,500 in 2005.”
The Times and Washington Square News pen separate editorials against the police department’s stop-and-frisk practices. The authors of The Times op-ed propose a method of “focused deterrence,” which worked in Boston: “Rather than sweep through and stop large numbers of young black men, the police built strong relationships with residents, promising greater responsiveness if they took back the reins of their community and told their sons, nephews and grandsons that the violence and the overt dealing must end. Meanwhile, the police identified the 17 men driving the drug market and built solid cases against each. In one fell swoop, they arrested three with violent records.”
Off the Grid has a nice then-and-now photo of Astor Place in 1936 and today.
Eater has interior shots (as well as the menu) of Boukie’s, the Greek restaurant that opened in the former Heartbreak space earlier this week.
Dave Arnold of Booker & Dax tells Grub Street he’s planning a workshop and laboratory space on Eldridge Street. In the meantime, he’s debuting a new Mexican-themed “triptych” of three cocktails at his bar.
Eater spends a work day (starting at the break of dawn) with Kamel Saci, the bread baker at Il Buco Alimentari & Vineria.
JoeDough isn’t the only local establishment nodding to the 4:20 tradition. Eater reports that today, 4/20, “all locations of Two Boots will be giving away samples of their Big Lebowski-themed pizza, The Dude, from 4:20 p.m. – 6 p.m. The pie is topped with tasso, andouille, ground beef, cheddar, and mozzarella.”
