The blog of the Museum Of The City Of New York has a nice examination of the Bowery since the days when it was known as “Bowerij Road” and thought of as “an idyllic countryside.” Photos from the late 1800s through 1946 capture the thoroughfare’s oft-romanticized days as skid row, when a bar nicknamed Paresis Hall referenced the symptoms of late-stage Syphilis. The blog notes that the Bowery of today bears little resemblance to the 20th century version, but that’s shouldn’t come as a shock: “Even as early as 1905, the New York Times was lamenting the death of the Bowery.” The one thing missing from the post? A soundtrack provided by Poor Baby Bree.

For every East Village business that’s opening or closing, dozens are quietly making it. Here’s one of them: Figlia & Sons.

Melvin FelixRyan Figlia with employee Leonard “Lee” Hills.

If he could, 23-year-old Ryan Figlia would spend the steamiest summer days cooling off atop his surfboard, rather than helping run the air-conditioning sales and service business his grandfather started nearly 50 years ago on Avenue A. But his brother is off in Florida – “he’s pursing a golf career and a girlfriend,” Ryan explained – and his father will eventually hand over the family business, now located at 746 East Ninth Street. “My plan is to retire and for him to send me a check every week,” said Ryan’s father, George, “but first this guy has to start making me some money already!” Actually, business has tripled in the last year, according to Ryan: this summer they’ll install a record 5,000 cooling units around the city. We asked the father-and-son team why they aren’t sweating the economy.

At 23, you are pretty new to this.

Ryan: I started three or four years ago and started developing a company that mainly focuses on cooling the lobbies in the buildings that we already do the residential for. The market for commercial air-conditioning is a lot bigger than residential. So far it’s doing all right. That’s what I want to focus on growing and do more. Read more…

Time for the latest installment of What’s That You’re Playing?, where we ask a clerk at one of the neighborhood’s record stores to tell us what’s spinning. This week, Mike Cobbs of A-1 Records helps a DJ pick out tunes for a five-hour set.

Good morning, East Village.

Above, watch Marky Ramone give a tour of his food truck for Fuse TV.

Gallerist brings word that Audio Visual Arts Gallery on East First Street near Second Avenue is planning a 60-hour marathon of German artist Conrad Schnitzler. According to the site, the event is part of Con-Mythology, “a whole slate of Schnitzler activities in New York over the next week.” It starts at 6 p.m. on Friday.

Zagat takes a peek in Extra Place and Heidi. The former will feature a “Mediterranean menu with a focus on döner, a type of German-meets-Turkish Street food,” according to the blog. The latter is a “tiny Swiss eatery that will serve fondue.” EV Grieve reports that both are opening today. Read more…

A tag photographed by one of our eagle-eyed community contributors, Scott Lynch, reveals plans for Tompkins Square Park riot reunions on July 29, and August 4 and 5. The former and latter dates correspond to Tompkins Square Park Live! events, which feature music, spoken word and other types of performance. Meanwhile, The Lo-Down brings word that the Sierra Leone Refugee All-Stars will headline a concern in the East River Park amphitheater on August 23.

Courtesy of N.Y.U. A rendering of N.Y.U.’s plans for two blocks south of Washington Square Park that features the newly reduced buildings.

Opponents of N.Y.U.’s expansion are hinting that they will announce new legal maneuvers to derail the project should it be approved the City Council tomorrow as expected.

An e-mail from the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation notes that lawyers representing faculty opposed to the plan will speak tomorrow after the vote at City Hill “regarding their next steps.” Those opponents have long spoken about the possibility of challenging the land-use review process in court.

N.Y.U. A slide depicting the reduction of building’s in
the proposed project footprint.

The executive director of the Greenwich Village Society, Andrew Berman, would not comment on the organization’s specific legal plans until tomorrow, but added, “Should they vote to approve this plan, we and our partners on the N.Y.U. faculty will be working closely with our counsel, Gibson Dunn, to look at every remedy available to right this wrong.” Read more…

NBC’s “Smash” will be filming at Cafe Orlin on St. Marks Place today. This morning the show’s crew was spotted bringing equipment into a closed set on Lafayette Street, between East Fourth Street and Astor Place; a spokesperson for the locations department confirmed that filming will move to the cafe between First and Second Avenues this afternoon. The show filmed at Orlin in September and has been seen around the neighborhood a few times since then. If a sign on a trailer is any indicator, Anjelica Huston will make an appearance today as her character Eileen.

Update | 4:30 p.m. No sign of Anjelica Huston, but as you can see in our spy footage above, Katharine McPhee, who plays Karen on the show, and Jack Davenport (Derek) were on site.

Daniel Maurer

Death & Co., the perennially packed cocktail lounge on East Sixth Street, has sold its first book for what an agent in the deal confirms is over $250,000.

The as-yet untitled book will gather over 500 recipes, according to agent Jonah Straus, who said a handful of publishers were interested in it before Aaron Wehner at Ten Speed Press pre-empted an auction with a six-figure offer. (Ten Speed published the People’s Pops cookbook last month.)

Nick Fauchald, a former Food & Wine editor who founded Tasting Table, will share writing duties with David Kaplan, an owner of the bar that Mr. Fauchald said is hugely influential in the cocktail world. “When I’m researching a cocktail trend or a bunch of recipes for something and you start tracing the recipes back to their origin, more often than not it ends up at Death & Co.,” he said, citing a recent trip to a prestigious bar in Amsterdam where the barkeep surprised him with drinks from the lounge’s stable. Read more…

Courtesy Alphabet City Brewing Jason Yarusi with half-barrel kegs in Garretsville.

The owners of Alphabet City Brewing Company breathed a sigh of relief last week as Governor Cuomo signed into law a tax credit – supported by State Senator Daniel Squadron – for New York’s craft breweries.

“We’re small enough that anything like that affects our margins drastically,” Jeffrey Simón told the Local. Small, yes, but growing: Mr. Simón and his business partner and former roommate, Jason Yarusi, are currently expanding their brewing operation and planning an East Village beer garden.

The duo started the company in their third-floor apartment on Seventh Street and Avenue A. During those home-brewing days of searching for the perfect recipe, they could often be seen crisscrossing Tompkins Square Park and carting sacks of hops or malt, or test tubes full of yeast.

“Pushing a keg in a cart through Tompkins will get you attention,” said Mr. Simón. Read more…

Courtesy B. Dolan B. Dolan in full regalia.

This Sunday, the Church of Love and Ruin Tour returns to the East Village, bringing with it a kaleidoscopic array of acts ranging from independent rap sensation Sage Francis to a marching band to the gender-bending practitioners of sissy bounce. The tour’s headliner and mastermind, B. Dolan (Bernard Dolan), hopes to get the New York audience – “which can stereotypically be very stoic and non-responsive,” he said – wiling out with the help of a new host, a drag queen by the name of Yekaterina Petrovna Zamolodchikova. “I predict that she is about to become a hip-hop legend,” he told The Local, adding that “what she’s going to do to these audiences will be remembered by their children’s children.”

You heard it here first. Mr. Dolan recently sat down with us to discuss his East Village origins as well as the significance of bringing the tour back to where he got his start.

What inspired you to make a name for yourself in the East Village?

I grew up in an old mill town outside Providence, R.I., and hip-hop culture was nowhere near me really. I discovered rap via an older cousin, and then scavenged for what I could find. I knew shortly after that I wanted to be a writer-rapper and that my favorite hip-hop came from New York City. So that’s where I headed in 1999, as soon as I finished high school. I discovered the scene in the East Village and started performing there. Read more…

Stephen Rex Brown

After interviewing embattled ex-Cro-Mag Harley Flanagan, Steven Blush, author of “American Hardcore: A Tribal History,” believes that the man accused of stabbing two current band members was set up. “To accept Harley’s ‘beatdown’ scenario is to accede to a not-totally-unlikely conspiracy involving his long-standing beefs with the intimidating DMS street gang (mostly over who did what to whom back in the day) as well as other NYHC elements. Anyone who knows the tough new punk subculture around DMS realizes nothing is beyond the pale,” Mr. Blush writes for Papermag.

EV Grieve notes that construction has commenced at the Mystery Lot on East 13th Street, and neighbors are already using words like “nightmarish” to describe it.

ArtsBeat has first word on PS 122’s upcoming fall season, which will be a collaboration with the French Institute Alliance Française and the Chocolate Factory in Long Island City. The renovation of its headquarters on First Avenue will soon be underway. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal attends “Uncle Vanya” in the Lincoln Center Festival with PS 122’s artistic director, Vallejo Gantner.
Read more…

Sarah Darville Radouane Eljaouhari beside his new clay tandoori oven.

When Radouane Eljaouhari moved into his new location on East Sixth Street, he told contractors clearing out a shuttered Indian restaurant to not completely gut the kitchen. Now, what was once a lark for Mr. Eljaouhari and his chefs at the new location of his Moroccan restaurant Zerza has turned into a permanent cross-cultural twist.

Instead of a traditional Moroccan grill, meat dishes are cooked in a clay tandoori oven leftover from Angon on the Sixth, which closed in 2010. (Another Indian restaurant briefly occupied the space after Angon).

The clay oven gets twice as hot as the Moroccan grill, and “makes the meat cook without burning it,” Mr. Eljaouhari said. “It’s juicy, and that’s not the case with the grill, where it touches the flame sometimes. So this is a treat.” Read more…

A critical public hearing on a proposed hotel next-door to the Merchant’s House Museum has been postponed for the fourth time. A spokeswoman for the Landmarks Preservation Commission said that the presentation, originally scheduled for tomorrow, had been put off at the request of the developer, who needed more time to prepare. The museum’s administration has fiercely lobbied against the nine-story hotel, saying it would ruin the 180-year-old building’s aesthetic and could potentially undermine its foundation, as well. A new date for the hearing has not yet been scheduled. Update | 3:56 p.m. An earlier version of this post said the public hearing had been delayed for the second time. According to the Merchant’s House Museum, it is the fourth. “We want to believe it is because the Commission is taking this very, very seriously. As well they should,” the museum wrote in an e-mail.

Clip from “Million Dollar Menu”

The latest hip-hop act to bust out of the East Village didn’t come out of the Bowery Poetry Club, the Pyramid, or any of those other hallowed spots. Buckwheat Groats emerged from… McDonald’s?

The comedic rap duo’s “Million Dollar Menu” is a tribute to the decadent rap videos of the early 2000s: members Lil’ Dinky (a.k.a. “Def Janiels”) and Penis Bailey, who asked that their real names not be printed as a condition of an interview (they’re shy, see), traded the imagery of the mansions and yachts of yesteryear for something significantly more accessible to most viewers.

Shooting at McDonald’s locations all over the city, the two found some of the best footage emerging from the fast-food chain’s East Village locations. The outlandish, not-safe-for-work video kicks off with the duo striding into the McDonald’s on 14th Street.

“The East Village held it down for the Groats, and we appreciate that,” said Bailey. Read more…

Scott Lynch Inside the new Forbidden Planet.

The Post doesn’t just hate the new water cafe on East 10th Street. A pair of reporters got wind of an $18 entree at Northern Spy Food Co. that consists of carrots with wild spinach, freekeh, and almonds — and they are outraged. The pricey plate, like the water cafe, is a signal that New York’s dining scene is spiraling out of control, according to the paper. (“Even Bugs Bunny would balk.”) The restaurant doesn’t seem too concerned, though. “The fact that we’ve teed off the NY Post could stand as a point of pride,” it writes on Twitter.

By the way, The Voice joins The Post in criticizing the water cafe, calling it a “snake oil factory.”

DNAInfo reports that Bleecker Bob’s won’t be at its current location for much longer, as the landlord is actively dealing with potential tenants. “We’re letting them stay there until we get somebody, so it works for both of us,” the landlord said. “There’s no timeline, but they should be finished very shortly though.” Read more…

eBay

Mars Bar closed and all you can get is this lousy t-shirt.

It’s been a year (plus a couple of days) since the dive was shuttered, and the former regular who designed the “Marz Bar” shirts is selling the very last of them. “This building has been marked and stocked as a fallout shelter,” the t-shirt reads.

“I thought I had sold out of them last year but this one turned up in a box of records for some reason,” writes the designer (who goes by the name of Ecto-Glow) in an eBay listing, adding that he won’t be reprinting the shirt. The size-small is going for $25 and at the time of posting, a little over 4 and a half hours were left on the auction.

In an earlier blog post, the shirt’s designer, who says he grew up on Lafayette Street, explained that he first designed a “DEFEND MARZ BAR” shirt because “everyone wanted a shirt, including me. I asked someone to ask Hank [Penza, the owner] for me and he was cool with it so the first lot came out and sold out fast.” The fallout shelter shirts followed, and a little under 300 shirts were sold in the end.

“I’ve been to tons of Bars in NYC,” wrote Ecto-Glow, “but the only place I’ve been to at least triple digits was Mars (stoops and 40s don’t count) and I could probably fill a book with stories about the place (as I’m sure most could).”

If you’re not a size small or the auction’s over, don’t worry: Sergey Aniskov’s drunken Santa shirts are also still available for purchase.

N.Y.U. Red lines indicate the reduction of the boomerang
buildings on the northern block.

At a meeting attended by Rosie Mendez and Margaret Chin last night, members of Community Board 2 spoke out against the scaled-back version of N.Y.U.’s controversial expansion plan that the two City Council members supported earlier this week.

Ms. Chin said she wanted to explain the “compromise” she helped work out, which she said reduced above-ground space associated with N.Y.U. 2031 by an additional 17.4 percent, or 212,000 square feet.

The modified plan would cut the Mercer Street building from 11 stories to four, and shrink the height of towers in the Zipper Building. Over all, according to Ms. Chin’s newsletter for her district, it represents a reduction of 26 percent or 352,000 square feet from the original proposal that was certified in January.

Residents last night were clearly disappointed that the City Council’s land use committee had approved the plan by a vote of 19-1, with the Council’s subcommittee on zoning also voting in favor of it. “I know people aren’t happy,” Ms. Chin said, to sardonic laughter. “It’s a compromise. But I want you to look at what we’ve been able to achieve with density and open space, because the City Council will vote on this issue.” Read more…

Melvin Felix

Melvin Felix

An electrical fire at the Union Square subway station led to the temporary closing of one block of 14th Street at around 2 p.m.

EV Grieve rounded up photos of the small blaze, which is in a grate beside a subway entrance on the south side of 14th Street between Broadway and Fourth Avenue. The fire was caused by a “service box failure,” a spokesman for Con Edison told The Local. A spokesman told Gothamist, which gathered tweets about the fire, that the cause was “a failure of electrical cables.” No injuries were reported. Read more…

Sarah Darville Postal and other businesses on East Fourth.

Store owners already struggling to get by are worried about a significant rent increase planned by their landlord, the Cooper Square Mutual Housing Association.

The Local spoke to about a half dozen shopkeepers on Third and Fourth Streets, between Bowery and Second Avenue, who said they were grappling with a sluggish economy as well as challenges unique to their blocks. Some worried they would follow in the footsteps of La Sirena, which earlier this week announced that it would be closing, should they too face rent hikes of what is expected to be around 30 percent.

At Postal, a packing and shipping store on Fourth Street, owner Gary Patick said he alternates between busy days and days when “nothing happens,” and doubted he’d have any room to negotiate when his lease expires in two years. He described his profits, which in 2010 and 2011 were their lowest in a decade, as “a real roller coaster” and said that one-third of them go toward rent payments.  Read more…