Michael NataleGood morning, East Village.
With May Day around the corner, the Cooper Square Committee announces in an e-mail that tomorrow at 5 p.m., as the Rent Guidelines Board makes its annual vote about raising rent-stabilized rents, there will be a “Tenants General Assembly” at 7 East Seventh Street: “It will be like an OWS general assembly, where you talk about your experiences with the RGB using the ‘people’s mike.’ People will also talk about the origins of tenant protections, the peoples’ struggles to protect them, and the roots of the dreaded RGB.” More info here.
Runnin’ Scared hears rumors that hundreds of police are training on Randall’s Island in preparation for tomorrow’s festivities. Mayor Bloomberg doesn’t say anything about the rumors but tells the blog, “We are prepared for everything we can think of all the time. Our tactics are something that we don’t talk about in advance for obvious reasons.”
Tomorrow will also be the 79th anniversary of Dorothy Day’s founding of the Catholic Worker Movement. The Times visits a resident of one of the Catholic Worker’s two East Village buildings: “Megan Fincher, who, at 29, having completed college (at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where Day studied) and graduate school, decided to devote herself to the movement.” Back in October, The Local also paid a visit to the residences – which, according to The Times, offer “lessons in the kind of radical empathy we rarely get to witness.”
Just as the Catholic Worker has found new life with the Occupy Wall Street movement, David Peel, the Lower East Side musician behind such 1960s hits as “The Pope Smokes Dope” and ““I Like Marijuana,” is also gaining new recognition thanks to Occupy. The Times pens a Character Study and interviews him on camera on St. Marks Place.
Speaking of comebacks: The Times notes that not only has Giuseppi Logan’s Kickstarter campaign yielded enough money to make 1,000 CDs of his new album, but his old label, ESP-Disk, wants to re-release his 1965 album and cut a new one. But Suzannah B. Troy is still worried about the Tompkins Square Park jazzman: “I don’t smell roses but I do smell a smell of homelessness – of someone who needs care.” She also posts footage of the saxophonist talking about a recent Canadian interview and belting out a tune.
The Daily News reports that an off-duty police officer from the Seventh Precinct was arrested for driving while intoxicated early Sunday night after he slammed into another vehicle at East 11th Street and Second Avenue. The News also discovers that a man was taken to Bellevue with a head wound after being struck by a livery cab near Union Square on Friday. He was expected to survive.
The Post has a follow-up about the 69-year-old East Village man who was hit on the head by an air conditioning unit and filed a multi-million-dollar lawsuit, only to mysteriously disappear. Anthony Franzese was tracked down to Roosevelt Hospital, but had checked out days before police realized his identity. “He’s extremely incoherent. He couldn’t even say his name to me. He couldn’t formulate words,” says the officer who recognized him.
According to DNA Info, 270 East Seventh Street was one of many illegal hotels shuttered in 2011. The city found “hazardous violations including no fire alarm and inadequate exit routes.”
The Post declares NoHo “so hot!”: “Two of the city’s hottest reservations, Acme and Il Buco Alimentari e Vineria, are within a fork’s throw of one another on Great Jones Street, while other eclectic options continue to pepper the compact district.”
Well, NoHo isn’t that hot: Curbed reports that the Bond Street apartment where Will Smith stayed while filming “Men in Black” hasn’t managed to sell for $19.5 million and it may now be carved up, with one unit going for $9.25 million.
Gay City News cites East Village performance artist Taylor Mac as a reason to see a new production of “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” also starring Christina Ricci and Anthony Heald, at the Classic Stage Company.
Finally, a rare Kanye West sighting in the neighborhood (maybe?): InStyle UK reports that he was out with Kim Kardashian at East Village Cinemas, but where’s East Village Cinemas?
