Ella ZhangScenes from last night’s opening of the “WTC” exhibit on East Fourth Street.
A longtime photographer of Lower Manhattan has taken close-up photos of the World Trade Center and mounted them on a scaffolding on East Fourth Street, just out of reach.
Brian Rose, the photographer behind “WTC,” said he was inspired to prepare the outdoor exhibit after cleaning negatives of World Trade Center photos he took as long as 30 years ago. In the process of ridding the film of dust, he zoomed in on it and became mesmerized by the architectural beauty of the towers’ details.
“’WTC’ was never a project, it was found,” Mr. Rose said. Read more…
Last week, photographer Guney Cuceloglu contributed a memorable Street Scene of a couple of retro stylers in Union Square. Turns out they’re members of a group called Tribe NYC. Check out Mr. Cuceloglu’s blog for more on the colorful consortium of dancers, musicians, poets and designers. (Correction: An earlier version of this post misstated the name of the group and mistakenly said it was based in Bushwick, where the photo shoot occurred.)
Last month, the twentieth anniversary of Ukraine’s declaration of independence from the Soviet Union went largely unnoticed elsewhere in Manhattan; but in a corner of town once known as Little Ukraine, the modest Ukrainian Museum served, as it has since 1976, as a central meeting place for the region’s expats – or as historian Orest Subtelny put it, “a good place to get together to talk.” Last night, Mr. Subtelny, a professor at York University in Toronto, addressed a crowd of about 100 that had gathered to hear him discuss the country’s uncertain future. The event helped launch the museum’s fall season. Read more…
For most Villagers, the FAB! Festival on East Fourth Street between Bowery and Second Avenue this past Saturday meant homemade kimchi from the 4th Street Food Co-op, choreographed dance performances (as you can see in our slideshow, the Rod Rodgers Dance Company‘s youth ensemble performed a number from “Chicago”), and shopping courtesy of MissWit’s Deborah Goldstein (her best effort: a T-shirt emblazoned with the text “The Unbearable Lightness of Bieber”). For a handful of local artists, the day was quite literally groundbreaking. Read more…
Dan GlassSaxophonist Darius Jones and Kirk Knuffke on cornet lead the Kirk-Jones Quintet during a less controversial performance at the University of the Streets.
The executive director of University of the Streets has broken her silence regarding a brawl that occurred at her long-standing Seventh Street venue earlier this month. According to Saadia Salahuddeen, the scuffle stemmed from a dispute over $50 that she said the band, Talibam!, owed the University because no one showed up for its show.
That’s when things got heated, according to a statement by Ms. Salahuddeen posted on the University’s Facebook page. A member of Talibam!, Kevin Shea, allegedly said to her, “You think we’re acting crazy? I am crazy — let’s get crazy.” He then allegedly lunged at Ms. Salahuddeen, leading to the fisticuffs. Read more…
Next Saturday the artistic haven on Fourth Street between the Bowery and Second Avenue will mark a major milestone, as two newly renovated buildings will be officially opened, and crews will break ground on a Latino cultural center.
Fourth Arts Block, the group overseeing the development of the Fourth Street arts district, is hosting the ribbon cuttings and groundbreakings, which will coincide with the FAB! Festival of performances, food and other street-fair fare.
Tamara Greenfield, the executive director of FAB, heralded the upgraded facilities — which were renovated with $10 million in public financing, as well as some private funds — as vital new spaces for artists and their audience. Read more…
The final performance of “Bamboozled, or, The Real Reality Show” (the Theater for the New City’s 25th summer street-theater tour) will be staged outside St. Mark’s Church this Sunday at 2 p.m. With puppets, masks, hand-painted backdrops, a five-piece band, and 30 actors ranging from 7-year-olds to seniors, the hour-plus-long musical will take humorous stabs at everything from Anthony Weiner to Lindsay Lohan. Read more…
According to ArtsBeat, Elizabeth Swados has created “The La MaMa Cantata” using words spoken by the late Ellen Stewart over the course of her career as founder of La MaMa Experimental Theater. The musical will be staged on Nov. 7 and 8, after the theater launches its 50th season with a block party (Oct. 16) and gala performances by Patti Smith and Bill Irwin (Oct. 17).
This week we took a cue from “T” and tackled brightly colored hues from emerald green to fiery red and sprightly yellow. See how these locals pair their favorite statement colors with neutrals and whites.
What will happen to the BMW Guggenheim Lab once it packs up its video screens and moves on to Berlin? Members of First Street Green – the community group that for years lobbied the city to renovate the lot at Houston Street and Second Avenue – held a brainstorming event at the Lab on Saturday to answer just that. This much is certain: They’ve secured approval from the Parks Department, which owns the land, to install a new sculpture by Robert Sestok, a Detroit-based artist who has been visiting New York for three decades.
Mr. Sestok, who said he has been involved with Detroit’s influential Cass Corridor art movement since the 1970s, called “First St. Iron,” his welded steel sculpture, “a tribute to my past associations with the city of New York.” The piece was inspired by the wrought iron fences lining the streets near a friend’s house in the East Village. Read more…
Since 2007, Clayton Patterson, the photographer, documentarian and gallery owner who is the subject of the film “Captured,” has been collecting essays for an anthology, “Jews: A People’s History of the Lower East Side.” Earlier this week, he launched a Kickstarter campaign to get the book published – with 57 days to go, his promotional video (which you can see above) has raised almost $2,500. We spoke to Mr. Patterson about the project, which he says currently totals 160 essays and 1,500 manuscript pages. In case you’re curious to see which East Village and Lower East Side luminaries will be featured, we’ve posted the table of contents below. Read more…
Huffington Post has a write-up of The Moth’s storytelling event featuring East Villagers David Chang and Padma Lakshmi. Padma recently told Daily Intel that the Tompkins Square Park rats are her least favorite part of living in New York, and now HuffPo has a fun fact about the Momofuku impresario: “When he knows that someone important in the food world is dining at his restaurants, Chang and his chefs chant ‘kill, kill, kill’ before serving food.” Outgoing New York Times critic Sam Sifton is apparently an exception: “Congratulations on new job,” Mr. Chang tweeted yesterday. “Now I’m panicking, we just got used to having you around.”
On Sunday night, John Leavitt sat in the back room of the Bowery Poetry Club, surrounded by students holding sketchpads, pens, and pencils. Their subject: Penthouse Pet Justine Joli, wearing a replica of Princess Leia’s iconic gold and lavender bikini from “Return of the Jedi.” Soon, she would shed the bikini.
Yes, this is what passes for a drawing class at Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School, founded in 2005 by two art school drop-outs, Molly Crabapple and John Leavitt. “We both hated life drawing,” explained Mr. Leavitt. “Instead of boring models sitting in a room, we wanted to have music and burlesque and drinking.” Read more…
There’s no sign on East 3rd Street to mark the Upright Citizens Brigade’s second New York City theater, but neighboring Two Boots offers a hint: today the pizzeria is premiering a “Hot Chicks” pie in honor of UCBeast’s arrival – controversy be damned! The 100-seat theater (which forms an L around Two Boots and opens onto both 3rd Street and Avenue A) soft-opened last Tuesday and is already hosting a full line-up of storytelling, improv and sketch shows featuring house comedians, students of UCB’s respected improv school, and big-name acts. Last week saw performances by popular stand-ups Todd Barry and T. J. Miller as well as UCB founding member Horatio Sanz. Next Saturday at 9 p.m., Janeane Garofalo will headline a show called “If You Build It.” Read more…
Mark BurtonMike Iveson, Frank Boyd and Ben Williams
After their highly acclaimed production of “Gatz” (based on “The Great Gatsby”) at the Public Theater last year, Elevator Repair Service has returned to the stage with Ernest Hemingway’s “The Select (The Sun Also Rises)” at New York Theatre Workshop. The group’s third adaptations of a classic of American literature (William Faulkner’s “The Sound and The Fury” was the first) tells the story of expatriates living in Europe after World War I. They’re members of Gertrude Stein’s “lost generation” – left numb by the atrocities of war. Read more…
As anticipated, the annual Lit Crawl offered hundreds of readers across the East Village and the Lower East Side the opportunity to drink, schmooze and, in one instance, square off in a contest of literary acumen with their favorite poets and novelists. “Nerd Jeopardy” was sponsored by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, but house authors Will Hermes, Paul La Farge and Alina Simone lost to a team of laymen going by the name of “Whale Blubber.” (The Daily Double question: “The first book in Stieg Larsson’s Millenium trilogy would have been a veritable house party if only Lisbeth had listened to this master sampler.” The answer: “Girl Talk with the Dragon Tattoo.”) Meanwhile on East Sixth Street and Second Avenue, the Laundrette laundromat hosted “Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose,” a collection of stain-inspired short stories. The material wasn’t everyone’s cup of Tide: Most regulars scurried to the washing machines at the back of the store.
“I very rarely go above 14th Street,” says menswear designer Andrew Buckler. His daily commute, on foot no less, takes him from his East Village apartment straight across Manhattan to Buckler headquarters at 13 Gansevoort Street, where his subterranean shop is stocked with clothing described as “English bloke meets New York.” It’s a rather fitting description of Buckler himself, who has lived in the East Village ever since launching his line in 2001. He finds the neighborhood inspirational because it’s “a little bit untouched. It’s still a bit bohemian. It hasn’t gentrified as much as other areas and it’s got a younger vibe.” Mr. Buckler presents his Spring 2012 collection today in the heart of the meatpacking district, but not before telling us about his local favorites. Read more…
Daniel TalbottTony (Bryan Kaplan) and Dina (Melody Bates).
Four wildly different characters make up the cast of Eightythree Down, an airtight thriller-comedy written by J. Stephen Brantley, directed by Daniel Talbott and now playing at Under St. Marks. First we meet Martin. Even during the raucous, drug-riddled eighties, he’s content to spend New Year’s Eve at his parents’ house, reading about birds (his obsession) in his quilted bed. A Cyndi Lauper poster on the wall and Duran Duran on the stereo hint at the year that’s about to pass – 1983. But crashing into this subdued suburban New York scene comes his old high-school friend Dina, played by a dynamic Melody Bates. She’s accompanied by her East Village roommates: Stuart (Ian Holcomb) is a gay English punk-rocker, and Tony (Bryan Kaplan) is his beefcake Italian-American polar opposite. The only thing these “silly boys” have in common is their love for Dina.
Clad in black leather, the half-brilliant, half-batty blonde (clearly a student of Madonna) bounces between the arms of Stuart and Tony while making her best effort to bring Martin up to speed on her new life. She is friends with a transvestite named Sal as well as with Keith Haring and Basquiat. The producer Jellybean Benitez recently encouraged her to “work on herself.” Read more…
Over the next several days, Fashion Week will bring a barrage of exclusive runway shows and parties, none of which you’ve likely been invited to. But then who wants to trek up to Lincoln Center anyway? Fashion Week’s populist spin-off cum kick-off, Fashion’s Night Out, takes place right here in the East Village and elsewhere around town tonight, and everyone’s invited. Here’s our rundown of this evening’s festivities.
Photos: Rachel OhmPatricia Field Boutique
Patricia Field Boutique 302 Bowery, (212) 966-4066
From 6 p.m. to midnight, Patricia Field, who famously outfitted the “Sex and the City” gals, will host a party that will double as a celebration of Veselka’s second location across the street. There’ll be a D.J., raffles for cute bags, vodka cocktails (or free coconut water), and pierogi from Veselka. Read more…
George Kuchar, a filmmaker who, along with his twin brother Mike, had a great influence on the Lower East Side’s “underground” (or New American) cinema movement as well as lo-fi and “camp” cinema in general, died in San Francisco on Tuesday at the age of 69, per an obituary in The Times. Runnin’ Scared, which also eulogizes Mr. Kuchar, describes his 1964 film “The Lovers of Eternity” as “a burlesque of bohemian squalor set on the Lower East Side and featuring a monstrous cockroach, as well as several avant-garde filmmakers (notably Jack Smith).”
The Local was a journalistic collaboration designed to reflect the richness of the East Village, report on its issues and concerns, give voice to its people and create a space for our neighbors to tell stories about themselves. It was operated by the students and faculty of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, in collaboration with The New York Times, which provides supervision to ensure that the blog remains impartial, reporting-based, thorough and rooted in Times standards. Read more »
