Scott Lynch

Yesterday when The Times reported that Cooper Union agreed to give St. Mark’s Bookshop a rent reduction of $2,500 per month, we mentioned that Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer promised a formal announcement at 11 a.m. today. Now a press release from Mr. Stringer’s office informs that he’ll be doing so at the Bookshop along with Cooper Union’s president, Jamshed Bharucha, and the store’s co-owners.

According to the Post, a woman got a photo of the man who she said groped her on the subway platform at Union Square. “He went on the train and sat down as if nothing happened. I was hysterical. I yelled that he just groped me. I literally started punching him in the head,” City College senior Shyane DeJesus tells the paper.

The Huffington Post has a great interview with Billy Leroy of Billy’s Antiques, who tells a classic “Bowery story” about the time he bought a preserved tiger from a drunk man for $1,200 and turned around and sold it to the Museum of Natural History for $16,000. He says that the “old New York” is dwindling and becoming a gated community. “We have a sense of pride because we’re holding on,” he says of his antiques and oddities tent on Houston Street. “We’re the old New York. We’re really holding on by our fingernails.”

Flaming Pablum pens an appreciation of “Handsome” Dick Manitoba, remembering the pre-Manitoba’s days when the punk legend tended bar at 7A, and describing his former band the Dictators as “part of that same first class of New York bands who helped put CBGB on the map, leaving no shortage of wreckage in their endearingly messy, high-decibel wake.”

Paper checks in with Padma Lakshmi, and finds her East Village apartment “homey yet chic.”

According to Music Industry News Network, The Bowery Presents – which puts on shows at Bowery Ballroom and Mercury Lounge, among others – is launching a YouTube channel featuring live streaming concerts as well as archived shows.

DNAinfo has more from Ed Koch’s appearance at P.S. 64 Robert Simon yesterday; the former mayor said that the East Village has gone from being an “awful” place to “one of the neighborhoods people want to live in and pay a lot of money to live in.”