Trust us: It gets good around the two-minute mark.

While hundreds gathered in Union Square for a protest against police brutality on Saturday afternoon, a smaller, more impromptu crowd formed at Astor Place to watch a most bizarre act. Matthew Silver, 32, and Cory Metrick, 20, said they decided to set up at Astor Place around 3 p.m. after the police ejected them from Washington Square Park in the wake of a march that passed through the area. “A magician that got kicked out was outraged,” said Mr. Metrick, who drums in the comedic hip-hop band Buckwheat Groats, among others. “He was like, ‘I’m going to try to talk sense into [the police],’ but to no avail.” Read more…

Pooches strutted their stuff at the 21st Tompkins Square Halloween Dog Parade Saturday afternoon in one of the East Village’s most highly anticipated annual events. Among the hundreds of costumed canines: doggie versions of Yoda, Lady Gaga and the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz, which might have been the most popular of the bunch. The contest’s “best in show” winner: A corgi dressed as a M23 bus. Watch our video for more.

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The Local has more Halloween treats for you! Just click on any of the stories below:

Earlier, The Local tweeted and reported from the scene of the National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation. Now see video of the demonstration as it moved from Union Square, down East Eighth Street, to Avenue D – near to where Makever Brown died on the FDR Drive while fleeing the police. We spoke to the march’s organizers and attendees, including Shamar Thomas, a former Marine whose yelling at N.Y.P.D. officers last week received widespread attention, and Jean Griffin, the sister of David Glowczenski, who died after Southampton police used a Taser stun gun on him in 2004.

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Daniel Maurer At Astor Place shortly before 4 p.m.

Hundreds of people protesting police brutality have marched from Union Square, down Broadway, down East 8th Street and St. Marks Place, and through Tompkins Square Park heading toward Avenue D. Follow The Local and its editor on Twitter as we tweet minute-by-minute updates from the scene. Tweet us your own updates and add photos to our Flickr pool as you take them. We’ll have more from the scene as this unfolds.

Update | 7:15 p.m. The event was the October 22nd Coalition’s 16th Annual National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation. Similar marches were planned in 27 other cities today. The march ended with a gathering at Avenue D and East Sixth Street, outside of the Jacob Riis Houses, where a group of about 350 – including members of the Communist organization Ignite, Occupy The Hood, and others – listened to short call-and-response speeches.

Among those who took the bullhorn were Carl Dix of the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Stop Mass Incarceration Network (which spearheaded a “Stop and Frisk” protest that ended in the arrest of Cornel West and others in Harlem yesterday) as well as the parents of Elijah Foster-Bey, a teenager who was involved in a shootout with police in Brooklyn a year ago. “Shoot first, ask questions later is not right,” said Mr. Foster-Bey’s mother, Ellen Cross.

About 65 police officers lined Avenue D, many of them riding motor scooters and some of them surveying the scene from rooftops as demonstrators chanted, “Come down and face the truth, no hiding on the roof.” Their number had dwindled to about 20 community affairs officers by 6 p.m., when the crowd began thinning. The Stop Mass Incarceration Network will organize their next demonstration against “stop and frisk” policies during a meeting at St. Mary’s Church in Harlem, tomorrow at 2 p.m.

Update | Oct. 23, 12:45 a.m. We’ve now posted video from the demonstration. Watch it here.

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We’re a little late celebrating National Hispanic Heritage Month (it ended last week), but it’s never too late to celebrate Loisaida. To take you into the weekend: Amanda Plasencia’s recent photos from east of A.

Shulie Seidler-Feller Jenni Wolfson.

Jenni Wolfson is a woman of many talents with a passion for human rights. Scottish born, she’s a onetime resident of the East Village, having lived on East First Street as well as East 13th Street. She will perform her monologue “RASH: What If Your Dream Job Could Kill You?” next month at Theater 80 on St. Marks Place as part of the All For One Theater Festival. The play tells a profound, humorous, and hopeful tale about her 12 years as a UN diplomat – three of which were spent in post-genocide Rwanda.

Why did you decide to go into human rights?

I am partly wired that way, and the other part was my environment. Growing up, I experienced a lot of anti-Semitism in Scotland. The Scottish Jews were one-tenth of a percent of the entire population. Shocking images of the Holocaust and the direct experience of being discriminated against influenced me. I even went undercover in Russia to help Soviet Jews escape. It was becoming clearer and clearer I would not work for the Royal Bank of Scotland.
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Colorful jeans have been getting a lot of attention lately, but tights in the same hues can add personality and pizazz to a dress or shorts. Check out the trendy tights The Local’s Rachel Ohm spotted around the neighborhood.

EV Grieve notes that the BMW Guggenheim Lab will be dismantled Saturday and Sunday, resulting in the closure of East First Street between First and Second Avenues to traffic during the day. The ballyhooed “urban experiment” hosted its final gathering last weekend and is now bound for Berlin. It’s unclear what is next in store for the lot. A forum last month suggested making it a sculpture garden, or even a cat park.

Stephen Rex Brown Cafe Orlin at 41 St. Marks Place.

Ajay Naidu isn’t the only celebrity who enjoys Cafe Orlin. A reader spotted Julia Stiles lounging with a friend in the terrace of the restaurant on St. Marks Place at around 12:30 a.m. on Wednesday. “Why couldn’t she be alone?” our reader joked. “Why wasn’t she seated there in mournful solitude with an expectant look on her face? I guess it’s because… she’s a movie star!”

He added that the star of “The Bourne Ultimatum” and “10 Things I Hate About You” did have a certain aura about her. “She looks like the girl next door. The wholesome farmer’s daughter who, thankfully, didn’t have the gap between her teeth fixed.”

Liv Buli

The 25 toddlers attending the new Preschool of the Arts in Cooper Union’s sleek new academic building aren’t just learning — they’re “exploring.” They don’t play with toys — they play with “heuristic tools.” And once a week, they do yoga.

The Jewish preschool originally opened on East Sixth Street in 1999, but quickly outgrew the location and found new digs in Chelsea four years later. “We have always been looking back to the neighborhood,” said director Sarah Rotenstreich of the school’s satellite location, which opened at 41 Cooper Square last month. “There is something so exciting about the East Village; the pulse, the creativity, the types of families.”

The Local visited on a recent Tuesday as an instructor gave morning yoga classes to each of the school’s three age groups. (In the case of toddlers, calling it yoga might be a bit of a stretch.) Read more…

Simon McCormack

During two separate meetings with representatives of the police department this week, East Villagers complained about noise caused by the 13th Step on Second Avenue between Ninth and Tenth Streets, with one resident comparing the sports bar to Sodom and Gomorrah. Last night, other bars – including the Village Pourhouse, Webster Hall, and Amsterdam Billiards – were also singled out as sources of fighting and noise.

At Tuesday’s meeting of the Ninth Precinct Community Council, David Keller, who lives across the street from the bar, complained that “late at night, it transforms into a nightclub. There is a line winding down the street.” Lieutenant Patrick Ferguson described it as one of the most successful bars in the neighborhood. He said the police were well aware of the quality of life issues there, but that it passed a noise test by the Department of Environmental Protection on Sept. 17, so there wasn’t much he could do.

Last night, the bar came up again at a community forum at Webster Hall, meant to address ongoing nightlife problems around Second and Third Avenues.

A crowd of about 25 gathered at the nightclub to discuss heavy foot traffic, street noise, and drunken behavior in the northwest corner of the East Village on weekend nights. Webster Hall general manager Gerard McNamee, who began hosting bi-annual community forums about four years ago, moderated the conversation, which incorporated voices of neighbors across generations and representatives from popular bars on nearby blocks, including the Village Pourhouse and Amsterdam Billiards. Read more…

Suzanne Rozdeba

Good morning, East Village.

The Bowery’s new status as a historic district won’t stop progress: From an EV Grieve photo, it looks like the fridges have been installed at the forthcoming 7-Eleven. And per a Bowery Boogie shot, the neon signage has been switched on at Bowery Diner.

Elsewhere on the Bowery, Grub Street takes a look at the pies at soon-to-open Forcella. The specialty of the house: Pizza that is both fried and baked.

The Fine Fare on Fourth Street near Avenue C has agreed to fence off the recycling center that neighbors have complained about, but that isn’t good enough for one resident, who tells DNA Info that the fence is a potential eyesore. Read more…

Dominique Zonyee Scott Officer James Luongo

On Nov. 11 of last year, Sergeant Michael Fabitti and officers Katherine Keating, Joanna Lopez, and Natasha Deleon came upon a burning building at East Fourth Street and Avenue A. Recognizing that many of the residents would still be asleep in their apartments, the police officers ran into the blaze and helped evacuate the building. No one died — though all the officers and seven residents were treated for smoke inhalation.

The heroic tale of police work was just one of the many stories shared on Wednesday evening in Cooper Union’s Great Hall as part of the Ninth Precinct Community Council’s 16th annual awards ceremony. Read more…

Stephen Rex Brown The Bowery Hotel.

The Department of Buildings hit the Bowery Hotel with a violation for an enclosed roof over a backyard terrace on Monday. According to Department of Buildings spokeswoman Ryan Fitzgibbon, the roof was contrary to the building’s approved plans. The hotel’s management will now face a formal hearing regarding the violation.

Interestingly, the complaint is nearly identical to one filed last year when the structure was being built. According to online records, workers were improperly storing construction equipment on the property of the New York Marble Cemetery, which abuts a portion of the hotel.

Caroline DuBois, the president of the cemetery, said she did not know why the violation was reopened (all complaints are filed with 311 anonymously). Rumors regarding a dispute between the hotel and the cemetery over the burial ground’s crumbling walls have swirled since an article in The New York Times in 2008.

Stephen Rex Brown Le Basket at 683 Broadway.

An armed thief robbed the popular bodega, Le Basket, this morning and made off with around $3,000.

Police said that the heist occurred at around 4:35 a.m. Nick Lee, the 51-year-old owner of the business on Broadway at East Third Street, said that the suspect held up one of his employees (who was still working at lunchtime) at gunpoint and demanded the cash from the registers.
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Stephen Rex Brown A camera dolly at East Fourth Street and Avenue D.

Stephen Rex Brown

An overturned motorcycle, an ambulance, and a fire truck would normally be cause for concern. Rest assured, the scene at Fourth Street near Avenue D was all part of a shoot of the new CBS drama, “A Gifted Man.” The show, starring Patrick Wilson (he was in “The Watchmen”) tells the story of “A brilliant, charismatic surgeon whose life changes forever when his deceased ex-wife begins teaching him the meaning of life from the hereafter,” according to its website.

A cultural oddity of the East Village is that it has more often been a home to poets than novelists. Some of the poets (Allen Ginsberg, W.H. Auden) are about as famous as poets get. Others (Edwin Denby, Bernadette Mayer) are known to only a few. The vast majority, as you would expect, are almost completely unknown.

Weldon Kees, who lived at 129 E. 10^th Street (the apartment building directly next to St. Mark’s Church) from October 1943 until November 1945, and later rented a loft at 179 Stanton Street in the Lower East Side, is an exception. As a cult figure with an ardent following, he’s certainly known to some people –  but his connection to the East Village has been all but forgotten. Perhaps that’s appropriate: An absence as much as a presence, a shadow where a human should be, Kees is the Harry Lime of modern American poetry, as in the character played by Orson Welles in “The Third Man”: Now you see him, now you don’t. Read more…

The Real Deal brings news that puts an end to the speculation surrounding the empty lots on 13th Street between Second and Third Avenues. Charles Blaichman, a big-time developer who works primarily in Chelsea, bought the three parcels of land for $33.2 million, according to paperwork filed today. Last month, The Local noticed some activity at the lot while reporting on a proposed homeless shelter that is across the street. EV Grieve assumes that the lot is now bound for a “luxurious end.”

Earlier today we heard from John Penley and other longtime East Villagers spending time at Zuccotti Park. Now contributor Sarah Shanfield, a more recent arrival to the neighborhood, writes about an early encounter with the movement at Tompkins Square Park last weekend.

Rachel Citron

I first heard about Occupy Wall Street when a friend sent me a YouTube video of girls in crop tops being maced while they let out blood curdling screams. My reaction: complete horror. What the hell was going on? And where were they, so I could go and watch?

In the beginning, it didn’t seem these protests would end in compromise, especially because it was unclear who the interested parties even were. And yet these people spent their precious New York time going down to Wall Street, to sit and protest for a change that they couldn’t define.

At first, I simply wanted to watch these people, with their matted hair, cutoffs, and the checkered Israeli keffiyehs that were in style several years ago. They hoisted signs with witty sayings and held dazzlingly intelligent conversation. But they frightened me because they were so angry. I didn’t identify with them, because I didn’t feel angry at all. Read more…