Dan Kendmey Nancy Schreiber (left) and Katarzyna Swidzinski
review records of their noise complaints.

According to city regulations, noise from a bar should not exceed 42 decibels, which is somewhere between a whisper and a laugh. According to Nancy Schreiber, the noise from the Cloister Cafe is loud enough to shake her walls.

Four years ago, the cafe erected a party tent in the patio beneath Ms. Schreiber’s bedroom window. Since then, she says she has had to endure an escalating barrage of noise over the course of a given night. Around 10 p.m., the noise of the crowd begins to swell. At 11 p.m., the disco lights start flashing on the windowpane. Next comes the music, the singing, and occasional accordion playing. It is channeled through a PA system, which sometimes plays until 4 a.m.

Ms. Schreiber said she had tried running the air conditioner, wearing earplugs, and taking Tylenol PM. On especially loud nights she will blow up an air mattress and sleep on the other end of her apartment. “My neighbor, who is five months pregnant, has called me up at 3 a.m. in tears because of the noise,” she said.

Read more…

Lorcan Otway

Tonight at 7:15 p.m., friends of Bob Arihood and admirers of his work documenting the daily life of the East Village will gather at Lucy’s, with a candlelight vigil to follow at 8 p.m. at Ray’s Candy Store. Today, his body is being returned to his hometown of Lafayette, Indiana. According to Leslie Arihood, his younger brother, funeral arrangements have been tentatively set for Sunday at the Soller-Baker Funeral Home.

In the days since Mr. Arihood was found dead in his apartment, bloggers have paid tribute to him, but few personal details have emerged about the man who Wah Mohn, 21, a Columbia student and acquaintance of the photographer, called a “super loner.”

“What made Bob special was that he listened to people,” said one of the three men who found Mr. Arihood’s body on Friday, adding that Mr. Arihood was more inclined to hear someone’s life story than to tell his own.

It was just that kind of warmth that drew people to him as he canvassed the neighborhood, and last week, his conspicuous absence from his usual local haunts around Tompkins Square Park was cause for concern. So was the surgical appointment he missed on Tuesday. Read more…

Tickets are on sale for the Fourth Arts Block East Village Eats Tasting Tour on October 22. According to East Village Eats, $29 buys around $50 in food, drink and discounts. Participating restaurants include Cucina di Pesce, Hecho en Dumbo, Jimmy’s No. 43, Luke’s Lobster, Oaxaca and others. In June the tasting tour was canceled due to poor ticket sales. Hopefully, appetites will be stronger this month.

Photo illustration: Lauren Carol Smith

State Senator Daniel Squadron has announced that the Metropolitan Transit Authority will increase the number of trains running on the L line around June of next year. Mr. Squadron said that the authority had analyzed data and found a “meteoric” increase in ridership on the line. “Weekend ridership on the L train has increased by 141 percent since 1998, while service has only increased by 58 percent on Saturdays and 52 percent on Sundays,” Mr. Squadron said in a press release. Unfortunately, straphangers on the F train aren’t so lucky. The M.T.A. studied the line and determined that an increase in F trains on the weekend is not currently feasible, according to the release. City Room has more on the story.

A man’s foot was lodged between the 5 train and the subway platform at the Union Square station at 9:55 a.m. this morning. A spokesman for the fire department said the man was taken to Bellevue Hospital, but no further details were available. This is at least the second near-miss at the station in the last two days. Yesterday, a drunk man fell onto the tracks of the Q train and narrowly avoided being run over, according to the New York Post. Last week, Joe Pan Millar wrote about an apparent suicide that occurred a couple of stops over on the L line.

Kathy Kirpatrick, the owner of Life Cafe, is apparently pretty peeved that her business is still shuttered as a result of a dispute with her landlord. In a series of messages posted on Facebook, the owner considers converting the cafe at 10th Street and Avenue B into a space that would host “events around the theme Art Against Greed.” Two days prior to that post, Ms. Kirkpatrick noted, “It’s been three weeks this weekend since I had to close with a hope and a dream to be able to reopen. I, a single woman warrior, am fighting two Goliaths with deep pockets for Life.”

The dressing of the Cube wasn’t the only conspicuous thing that happened at Astor Place over the weekend. Yesterday, around 40 musicians rocking strings, drums, bagpipes, and even a harp convened for what an organizer said was a photo shoot for The New York Times Magazine. As you can see from our video, passersby really dug it.

Stephen Rex Brown The cube this morning.

Around 5 a.m. today, Agata Olek, the artist and “yarn bomber” behind this little number and others, pulled off what may be her masterpiece by wrapping the Astor Place cube. She told Runnin’ Scared the piece is her response to Wall Street, and its name is “I’m still proud to say what i do for a living.”

Around 1,000 people gathered in Union Square on Saturday for “SlutWalk,” which seeks to highlight violence against women, as well society’s perception of the crime. The Local was on the scene and spoke with the diverse group of protestors.

Phillip Kalantzis-Cope

Good Morning, East Village.

Villagers continued to mourn the passing of photographer Bob Arihood on Friday. EV Grieve shares a collection of Mr. Arihood’s photographs, and Runnin’ Scared offered its own tribute over the weekend. A vigil is planned for Tuesday night in front of Ray’s Candy Store, one of Mr. Arihood’s favorite haunts.

From one artist to another, Antonio “Chico” Garcia completed a mural for The Children’s Workshop School on East Twelfth Street over the weekend. NY1 reports that the veteran graffiti artist now plans to “cap his spray cans for good.”

Garcia began his painting career 34 years ago — not long before the band Blondie started playing CBGB. The San Francisco Chronicle writes that the band has stayed true to its East Village roots with its latest release.
Read more…

Steven Hirsch Bob Arihood.

Bob Arihood, friend and photographer of the East Villlage’s misfits, free spirits and longtime locals died yesterday in his Fourth Street apartment. He was 65.

A spokesman for the fire department said that the cause was cardiac arrest at around 7:45 p.m.

Many of Mr. Arihood’s photographs on his blog, Neither More Nor Less, had an unmistakable air of grit and nostalgia. But others, many of them snapped in the wee hours of the morning, carried legitimate neighborhood news overlooked by other outlets. His blog began as a way to document the plight of the Mosaic Man Jim Power, who was evicted from an apartment on St. Marks Place. Later, Mr. Arihood would expand his blog to cover the ups and downs of Ray’s Candy Store, as well as the constant goings-on in Tompkins Square Park.
Read more…

Lauren Carol Smith

A fire broke out in a stove at 107 St. Marks Place at around 6:25 p.m. today, and was under control within 20 minutes. According to a fire department spokesman, 60 firefighters responded to the fire in an apartment on the first floor of the six-story building between First Avenue and Avenue A. Only one fire hose was needed to extinguish the blaze and there were no injuries.

Tompkins Square Park, September 1994

From 1994 to 1995 I lived in a converted storefront on the Lower East Side, at 112 Suffolk Street between Delancey and Rivington Streets. Back then the neighborhood was not yet gentrified and was somewhat rough around the edges. I was a new father and even though I was pushing my baby daughter around in a stroller it took the drug dealers a couple of weeks before they realized I lived there and wasn’t there to buy heroin. I worked part-time waiting tables and working as a photographer’s assistant whenever I could; I was rarely without a camera.

I always found the temperance fountain in Tompkins Square Park to be quite out of place — not many of the park’s residents practiced temperance.

Read more…

Guy Fieri, the peroxided Food Network star, was spotted filming at John’s of 12th Street yesterday for his show, “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives.”

Mr. Fieri spent about three hours in the afternoon shooting at the Italian restaurant between First and Second Avenues, and co-owner Mike Alpert was thrilled.

“He learned about us through the grapevine. I was amazed that he’d never heard of us; an Italian restaurant that’s been around for 103 years,” said Mr. Alpert.
Read more…

Two of the most comprehensive documentarians of the late-1970s East Village punk scene will give a screening of their rare no wave footage at the BMW Guggeinheim Lab on Sunday.

Read more…

The neighborhood’s renegade documentarian, Clayton Patterson, filed a dispatch from the Occupy Wall Street protests to Bowery Boogie. In a photo essay, Mr. Patterson writes that he snapped pictures of an officer trying to start a fight with protestors as an excuse to lock them up. Other shots capture the tension between the police and protestors as Occupy Wall Street approaches its second week.

Liv Buli Michael Moore addresses the crowd at St. Mark’s Bookshop.

A book signing at St. Mark’s Bookshop by Michael Moore turned into a rally for the embattled store on Thursday, as the champion of the left exhorted patrons to continue buying literature in person.

“At some point you just have to stop and stand up and say: ‘No more,’ ” Mr. Moore shouted to the roughly 100 people packing the store on Third Avenue.

Mr. Moore’s appearance reaffirmed the sudden swell of affection for the Bookshop, which has gone from a store struggling to turn a profit into a symbol of the rapidly changing neighborhood in only one month.

“It comes down to a simple bookstore here on the corner of Third Avenue and Ninth Street in the East Village in New York City,” Mr. Moore said in between criticism of corporate executives and appeals to the store’s landlord, Cooper Union.
Read more…