Melvin Felix Chef Paul Gerard outside his future restaurant, Exchange Alley.

A touch of the bayou is coming to East Ninth Street, in the space that was briefly home to Zi’Pep. Paul Gerard, formerly chef at SoHo House, will open Exchange Alley in September along with investors John Harris, the acclaimed chef-owner of Lilette in New Orleans, and Billy Gilroy, a partner in West Village hotspot Employees Only. (Peter Herrero, who used to own Cafe Central on Columbus Avenue, is also helping out.) The trio has enlisted Sisha Ortuzar, the executive chef at Tom Colicchio’s Riverpark, to help build an herb and vegetable garden resembling a “ramshackle New Orleans courtyard,” said Mr. Gerard.

The restaurant’s name is taken from a picturesque cobbled lane in New Orleans, where Mr. Gerard lived until Katrina ravaged the city in 2005. The menu, said the 42-year-old chef, would be “New York with a New Orleans flair,” with additional influences from other places he had lived and worked, including South America and Puerto Rico. Read more…

Sarah Darville The City Planning Commission.

New York University reined in its expansion plans further today by eliminating a controversial hotel and accommodations for retail, paving the way for an easy approval from the City Planning Commission.

“The N.Y.U. proposal for the superblocks will provide important new and needed space to one of the city’s most important institutions of higher learning,” said commission chair Amanda Burden, referring to the two blocks south of Washington Square Park that will be the sites of construction.

The green light from the commission did not come as a surprise — Ms. Burden had praised the plan just last week. Only one of the 13 members of the commission voted against the proposal. Read more…

Laurie Gwen Shapiro Gita Reddy.

The Ex-Villagers: They loved the East Village and they left it. A couple of days ago, actress Gita Reddy grabbed a hot dog and an egg cream at Ray’s Candy Store on Avenue A, and during one last walk around, shared her memories of twenty years in the neighborhood.

Now that I’m leaving for Los Angeles I keep running into random people I haven’t seen in ages. When I hadn’t slept for 48 hours, and had just done a big part of my move, I put on lipstick and concealer to look like a coherent human being and I ran into Arjun Bhasin, a hot costume designer in Mumbai (he’s working on “Life of Pi”) who I knew when he was a fellow student back in Cinema Studies at NYU. He looked me up and down and declared, “Gita Reddy, you are aging well!”

It’s a little embarrassing to realize the students who live here now give me the same dismissive looks I once gave the old-timers when I moved here as a student. But I’m proud to leave as a true old-timer myself. It even feels vaguely cool to have lived here longer than them.

I’ve lived in the same apartment the whole time, with so many roommates over the years: Debbie, Jennifer, Erin, then that Brazilian male flight attendant, Rina, then Daniel, Leah and most recently Sabrina, a middle school teacher I’ve been rooming with for over two years. Read more…

Melvin Felix Salon Eco Chic

After Natalie Esfandiari is done using the shampoo bottles that line the wall at her new hair salon, she’ll bury them in the ground somewhere. Then they’ll grow into trees.

The bottles at Eco Chic, which opened last month, are made of a biodegradable plastic that serves as compost for seeds that are plugged into the bottom of the container. They’re part of a number of ecologically-friendly products that make Eco Chic one of the most environmentally-conscious hair salons in the East Village.

“Everything here is 100 percent organic certified,” said Ms. Esfandiari, a 34-year-old Iranian who grew up in Denmark and worked at a Japanese hair salon elsewhere in the neighborhood before striking out on her own. Read more…

The CBGB Festival just added a few big names. Superchunk, Wyclef Jean and Fishbone will play shows during the frenzy of rock music, conferences, and movies on the weekend of July 4. The former bass player of Nirvana, Krist Novoselic, will also deliver the keynote address on “association and how it can transform politics,” according to a press release.

The new names join other bands like Guided By Voices, War On Drugs, MxPx, the Pains Of Being Pure At Heart that will play the festival taking place at around 30 venues around Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. Local joints like Lit Lounge, Webster Hall, Bowery Electric and Otto’s Shrunken Head are slated to host.

For every East Village business that’s opening or closing, dozens are quietly making it. Here’s one of them: Igor’s Clean Cuts.

Shira Levine Igor Iskiyev tends to a customer while Imanuel (Manny) Ibragimov looks on.

Five years ago Igor Iskiyev left his gig cutting hair at Neighborhood Barber on East Ninth Street and became commissar of his own chop shop at 20 First Avenue. The Azerbaijan native had dabbled with hair-cutting back home after serving as an anti-aircraft gunman. Igor’s reputation for detail and perfection precedes him: good Yelp reviews, affordable prices ($15 for a haircut, $15 for a shave) and, let’s face it, the occasional offer of a beer have been key to his success. The Local recently spoke with Mr. Iskiyev and his right-hand man, Imanuel (Manny) Ibragimov about Mr. Iskiyev’s decision to go solo and his distaste for small talk.

How is business?

Igor: Right now it is slow, but not very bad. It was not good in 2008. Customers didn’t come as much. Some moved because they couldn’t afford to stay. We didn’t see many of our old customers for a while. Read more…

Melvin Felix The school today.

The University Neighborhood High School was briefly evacuated today due to a bomb threat, a tipster told The Local. A person who answered the phone at the school at 200 Monroe Street confirmed the story, saying students and administrators were led to an auditorium in the nearby University Neighborhood Middle School this morning. The high school’s principal referred inquiries to the Department of Education, which declined to comment.

Update | 3:22 p.m. The police said that at 8:47 a.m., someone phoned in a threat claiming there was a bomb inside of a soda machine. The building was evacuated, searched, and it was determined that there was no bomb. The students then returned to class.

Chris O. Cook Mara Mayhem, Ashley Bad, Maya Sinstress, DJ Xris Smack, DJ Jeffo!

The Howl! Festival wasn’t the only extravaganza of eccentricity to take the neighborhood this past weekend, and even with Low Life in full effect, maybe not even the most outlandish one. That honor, as you might have guessed from Thursday’s “Beat and Greet,” may have gone to the New York Fetish Marathon. But on Friday night, the festivities were hampered just a bit, as frisky fetishists were spanked by rain and disciplined by bouncers at Webster Hall.

Despite a posted start time of 9 p.m. and showers that began at 10 p.m., ticketholders weren’t admitted until nearly 11:30 p.m., meaning that waiting fetishists were sitting ducks for the occasional snide remark from spiky-haired gawkers hitting the neighborhood from Jersey and elsewhere. Still, the rubber-clad types kept their chins up as event workers repeatedly materialized in the doorway to announce that they would be ready “any minute now.”

Once fetishists were finally admitted, though only intermittently in groups of five, they made their way up to the venue’s top floor where pumping music, a stage set for performances, and plentiful “prayer benches” for spanking play implied that the evening would be worth the wet wait. Read more…

The self-described climax of the Howl! Festival this weekend was the sixth annual Low Life event, led by East Village husband-and-wife team Johnny Dynell and Chi Chi Valenti of legendary 1990s clubs Jackie 60 and Mother. This year, the spectacle paid tribute to the neighborhood as it was during The East Village Other’s glorious run from 1965 to 1972. (Between this and The Local’s retrospective of The Other, the underground paper might just be making a comeback.)

On stage, performers and personalities like Heather Litteer, Zoe Hansen, and Tabboo! of nearby Pyramid Club paid tribute to counterculture icons like Ed Sanders and the Fugs, the Slum Goddesses, the Yippies, Jackie Curtis, filmmaker Jack Smith, and others. Watch The Local’s video and you’ll see it was anything but a drag.

Melvin Felix The crime scene at Union Square East.

A man was slashed with a razor blade in Union Square this afternoon by an attacker who fled the scene, the police and witnesses said.

The police said that around 2:30 p.m., across from Beth Israel’s Phillips Ambulatory Care Center at Union Square East near 15th Street, a 37-year-old man was slashed in the face by a man who wore a white t-shirt and is said to be around five-foot-eight and 170 pounds.

Melvin Felix Robin Stewart was spotted by the victim’s blood.

Robin Stewart said she saw the alleged attacker approach her acquaintance, whom she named only as Mr. P, from behind and then use a razor blade to stab him in his head and neck. The slashing, she said, was in retaliation for an altercation between the two men yesterday in the same area.

Ms. Stewart described the victim as “a good hard-working man who’s in between jobs,” and the incident as “a senseless act of brutality.”

Tyrone Curry, another witness, said, “It cut him so deep and hard that the blade broke.” Shortly after the attack, the blade lay on the ground in an area cordoned off by police tape. Read more…

Stephen Rex Brown

Someone made a failed attempt to rob the Emigrant Savings Bank at 105 Second Avenue around 45 minutes ago, a police officer and bank employee confirmed. The pair would only add that the suspect did not flash a weapon. Just last Wednesday a man robbed the HSBC three blocks to the north.

Sandy Berger The view out of Sandy Berger’s window.

I’m not averse to bacon. I used to make it, on very rare occasions. But ever since the International House of Putrid Odors opened and its ventilation fans began pumping out the smell of recycled bacon through my bedroom windows, a mere whiff of it is enough to make me ill.

Last August, before IHOP opened on East 14th Street, two gigantic air conditioners suddenly appeared on its second floor roof (they must have been crane lifted). At night, when it used to be pretty quiet, they sounded like 100 antiquated air conditioners running simultaneously.

It took several 311 complaints before a Department of Environmental Protection inspector found them in violation of the law. The inspector told me he knew he’d be back once the restaurant opened: he predicted there would be odor complaints, and he was so right. Read more…

Stephen Rex Brown Outside of the shuttered restaurant.

Tables, chairs and old plates from Kate’s Joint were being tossed in a dumpster at the corner of Avenue B and East Fourth Street this morning. The For Rent signs are still up at the old vegetarian standby, which closed for good in April.

Stephen Rex Brown The sidewalk outside Fine Fare was a bloody mess Sunday morning.

Wondering why there was pool of blood outside the Fine Fare on Avenue C Sunday morning? Here’s your answer: One of the men injured during Saturday night’s stabbing in East River Park was arrested outside of the grocery store.

The neighborhood’s top police officer, Deputy Inspector John Cappelmann (he was promoted from captain last week) confirmed the sequence of events, saying that the perp fled the park and was found at Avenue C and East Fourth Street. Initially, the police reported that only the suspect found at Fine Fare was arrested, but Inspector Cappelmann revealed that the 59-year-old “victim” ended up in handcuffs, as well.

“It was two people who are acquaintances. They got in a dispute in the park, wound up assaulting each other and both were charged,” Inspector Cappelmann said.

Meanwhile the blood, which was a hot topic of discussion on EV Grieve and Gothamist, has washed away in the rain.

Daniel Maurer

Not one but apparently two indie dramas about a restaurant owner and his wife are set to be filmed in the East Village – maybe even in your apartment.

Flyers posted in the doorway of 277 Tenth Street over the weekend indicate that “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby,” starring James McAvoy and Jessica Chastain, will be filming in the neighborhood for approximately one week between July 9 and August 31.

According to Variety, the film, written by Ned Benson, will actually be two stand-alone movies: one written from the perspective of the husband, and the other from the perspective of the wife.

The casting flyer informs locals that “we are currently seeking locations in your area for the film” without saying much more. If you think your bar looks like the type of place where a man would skulk into his beer while his wife goes back to college, you may be in business.

Photos: Chris O. Cook.

The finale of Howl! Festival today was marred by intermittent bouts of rain, but the party never quite ground to a halt.

Rap and rock acts were the order of the day, with performances from Hip Hop Howl, Bear 54, and others. Male members of Deans of Discipline sported kilts for the occasion, perhaps as a means of acclimating the crowd to the drag queens who would be taking the stage at 5 p.m. Read more…

A man was stabbed in a playground in East River Park last night, the police said.

The 59-year-old was near FDR Drive and East Eighth Street at around 8:30 p.m. when he got in a dispute with another man. The argument escalated, and the victim was stabbed in the torso.

Police charged Conrado Speck, 50, with assault with a weapon and criminal possession of a weapon. The victim is expected to survive.

Stephen Rex Brown

A cyclist collided with a cab at the intersection of Fourth Avenue and 10th Street shortly after 7 p.m. this evening.

The cab driver, Abou Coulibaly, said the bike rider was heading east on 10th Street and ran a red light. When an MTA bus crossed her path, she tried to turn back and collided with the cab, which was going north on Fourth Avenue.

“Nothing happened to her,” said Mr. Coulibaly, who said he had been driving a cab for three years. “No cuts or bruises, but she was pregnant. I was almost to a complete stop but I bumped her a little bit.” Read more…

Daniel Maurer Original tilework from Ratner’s

The Met Foods on Second Avenue will soon be reborn as Metropolitan Citymarket, complete with photo murals paying tribute to Ratner’s and the Fillmore East. The new signage has already been installed, but it’s covered by a gigantic plastic tarp and won’t be unveiled until fall. That’s because N.Y.U., the building’s owner, is about to cast the store in the shadow of its scaffolding. But there’s something you can feast your eyes on in the meantime: original tilework from Ratner’s restaurant.

Michael Schumacher, who owns and manages the store with his brother Steven (their father, Sam, took it over in 1986), said the supermarket’s overhaul was long overdue. In 2004, he explained, he was told by N.Y.U. that the store’s lease wouldn’t be renewed, and its appearance went into decline. “They told us four years prior that we weren’t getting a lease in 2008, so it was the nail in the coffin,” he said.

But as stories in The Villager recounted, N.Y.U. eventually renewed the lease for 15 years after much public outcry and intervention from public officials (Mr. Schumacher said his rent was raised by 20 percent). That left the grocers free to revamp. In gutting the store, they found remnants of Ratner’s, the 24-hour dairy restaurant that once occupied the space. Its original tilework now gleams on either side of the front entrance. Read more…