Fabio Clemente has been an East Village mainstay since he opened the Alliance Brazilian Jiu Jitsu studio nine years ago at 13th Street and Third Avenue. A single father of two and a second-generation jiu jitsu black belt, Mr. Clemente, who’s 45, dreams of one day spreading the art of jiu jitsu through the Americas with his promising son, Zata, 17, at his side.

NYU Journalism’s Mark Riffee and Greg Howard report.

Jeanette Chi in Tompkins Square ParkClaire Glass

In a particularly secluded part of Tompkins Square Park — on 10th Street between Avenues A and B — Jeanette Chi, 53, a nurse at an area hospital, practices an ancient form of Tai Chi, to channel her Chinese heritage and find a personal sanctuary within the East Village.

What’s this form of Martial Arts called?

This is Chen Tai Chi Quan. It’s supposed to be the oldest style of Tai Chi, the one off of which all of the other styles are based. It’s practiced in the Chen Village in Henan.

A General named Chen Wang Ting, decided to study medical Qigong, which concentrates on breathing exercises. His objective in the new form was to develop a form of movement that would combine meditative awareness with combat technique. So, the practitioner can develop wisdom and fight.

How did you become interested in this particular form?

I started many years ago with a teacher in California in 1982. From there I studied with another teacher and now found another teacher here named Yu Guo Shun who I feel have taught the most.

I thought it was really beautiful and wanted to learn something traditional that was also applicable to self-defense. Read more…

Gabbi Lewin

The sign read, “Free advice from Francisco: Relationships, Sex & Dating.”

Spotted at the foot of the East Village near Astor Place, Francisco Ramirez sits face-to-face with anyone who wants to take a seat. For three years, Ramirez has been offering advice on relationships, sex and dating for no charge (no donations are accepted either). He views this opportunity as an innovative method to provide a public service to a diverse audience—including sexual partners, individuals and the homeless. He told me that this is his opportunity in life to connect with people. He offers everyone the same educated responses on how to stay healthy as those who would often pay high prices might receive.

With a Master in Public Health, concentrating in sexuality & health from Columbia University, he provides well-researched information. This community-based educator doesn’t stay in one place either, offering his free services every weekend, whether it is in Washington Square Park or Union Square. Ramirez is also a global consultant for HIV and sexual health at the United Nations and a contributor to MTV’s “Staying Alive” campaign, continuing his 15-year dedication to the education of public and sexual health issues.

It is becoming more and more rare these days to find anyone with as many credentials as he has offering his time and expertise free. Find out where Francisco will be next, or write to him at his website. Better still, just stumble across him on the streets when you have something on your mind.

Michelle Rick

If you had to identify one defining feature of life in Manhattan, it just might be pedestrianism. There are places where calling someone or something “pedestrian” is an insult; this isn’t one of them. Here, “pedestrian” is an identity to share and be proud of. It does occasionally need defending.

Only a minority of us have cars, but every New Yorker walks and lives near things worth walking to (no matter how often we also take taxis or Zipcars or anything else). Our street grid, formed by the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan, predates the automotive invasion of American space by nearly a century. We’re the pre-automotive Americans, by design and by history as well as by inclination. And if factors like climate change, oil shortages, energy costs, Middle Eastern warfare, and rising awareness of what cars do to human bodies all suggest that the automotive era won’t last forever, we’re ready for post-automotive life, too.

On the East Side, the human/vehicular competition is particularly intense, and with the tire tracks on people’s backs to prove it, a coalition of community groups led by the nonprofit group Transportation Alternatives (along with the East Village Community Coalition, East Harlem Preservation, Civitas, Upper Green Side, and others) has developed an East Side Action Plan to define goals for the improvement of street safety involving multiple city agencies. The East Side, particularly the East Village, is a logical place for this: the area from Chinatown up to East Harlem accounts for only 8 percent of the city’s population but 22 percent of its pedestrian commuters, 13 percent of its bike commuters – and 11 percent of its “fatal and injurious” crashes.
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Adrian Fussell on following his camera around the city.

“A lot of people exclusively shoot at dawn and dusk because of the lighting. I always try to carry my camera when the sun goes down. Winter skies are some of the most beautiful, and with the reflection on Trump Soho and the lighting behind the silhouettes downtown, it looked like there were two suns. “
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This week’s Street Style features menswear including sporty jackets and accessories and vibrant colors and patterns (neon in winter?) that we expect to see more of this spring.

Classics like a vintage backpack, straw fedora and tailored jackets are always in style, as are clothes that fit well and reflect personality — whether that be in a hairstyle, handmade jewelry or clothing that is so well made it has lasted years and still fits.

Street Style hits the pavement with some locals to find that in the East Village the average man on the street is anything but.

NYU Journalism’s Rachel Ohm and Claire Glass report.

Phoenix Eisenberg

Graffiti is an iconic form of artistic rebellion, whose epicenter has long been New York City.

With activities ranging from boxcar tagging to anarchistic promotion, the graffiti artist has a persona associated with intrigue and deviousness. But why the fascination with graffiti as a fine art in the last few years? Do popular graffiti artists today such as Banksy, Judith Supine, Shepard Fairey, and Dan Witz still portray rebellion?

Antonio Garcia, better known as “Chico,” started his career of spray-painting illegally, but soon found a new way to use his talents. Seeing the plain walls and brick that covered the Lower East Side, Chico saw a market. Today it is difficult to walk a block without seeing his commissioned work, whether it is a memorial or a small ad for a veterinarian business. Although Chico’s work is arguably just as skilled and creative as some of the greatest artists in the field, he has not drawn as much interest as Banksy or Shepard Fairey. Perhaps this is because, in jumping on the legal and marketable side of the art form, he risks losing the exact quality that draws so many to graffiti – the thrill of the illicit.

Greg Howard A candle burns in a makeshift alcove where Grace Farrell died Feb. 20.

Twelve days ago, the frozen body of my childhood friend Grace Farrell was found on a few sheets of cardboard in an alcove at St. Brigid’s Catholic Church on Avenue B in the East Village. It was a tragic end to a sad and troubled life.

Mary Grace Farrell came into my life when she was barely seven years old and I was 16. I grew up in Saint Vincent’s, a children’s home run by the Daughters of Charity in Drogheda, Ireland, and it was there that Grace spent three relatively happy years.

Grace was a beautiful and engaging child with a bright, sunny disposition. She was warm and affectionate and full of fun. She smiled often and loved to laugh, deeply. In many respects she was a normal child, though her early years were anything but.

Being born to a young, unmarried couple in 1970’s Ireland would make for a difficult life. Grace’s mother, realizing this, faced a Solomon’s choice of sorts. She could keep her baby and face that lonely and uncertain road together or she could give her up for adoption in the hope of a better chance. She bravely chose the latter path.
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Kathryn Kattalia The Local joins a search for the pages of a novel by an anonymous author that have been affixed to street lights, newspapers distribution boxes and elsewhere. Above, The 11th page of a mystery manuscript hangs on a lamppost on East 11th Street between First and Second Avenues.

I found page six.

Staring at a ripped, weathered and barely legible piece of paper haphazardly taped to the side of a graffiti-covered ATM machine, I let the weight of my victory sink in. Like a treasure hunter unearthing a coveted chest of gold, I had discovered what everyone else wanted to find. There on East Sixth Street, barely visible from the sidewalk, was the elusive page six.

Like almost every other blog in the neighborhood, The Local has been on a literary goose chase, tracking down pages of a mystery manuscript that someone has plastered to lampposts, mailboxes, streetlights and garbage cans throughout the neighborhood. At the bottom of each page, readers are told where they can find the next installment of the story, apparently titled “Holy Crap.”

Earlier this week, the New York Post reported finding pages 7 and 8 on lampposts in the neighborhood, as did fellow blogger EVGrieve. No one had located pages one through six. Always up for a good mystery, I decided to scour the neighborhood myself, choosing to start where the others left off. My goal was to try to find what no one else had.
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Abraham Lincoln, in a portrait by Matthew Brady taken only hours before his famous Cooper Union address, given 151 years ago last week. Insert: a contemporary view of Cooper Union, from an engraving in Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 1883.

Tim MilkThe Great Hall today.

It’s a common trope around these parts, and a friend of mine says it all the time. “Huh? What? I mean, come on, I don’t know about that.” It’s almost palpable as you cross from Broadway west to east, this game of contention.

Socially, politically, it’s been a longstanding history, going back to the 1850’s, when the urbanity of lower Manhattan began to seep like an aroma into the enclave we now call “The East Village.” But more than that, it was almost as if a lens had been held up to catch the lunar rays, and send them down here, right here, a place like nowhere else, where skeptics and firebrands, bohemians and bon vivants converge to strike their poses. One might wonder where all this contention had its start, yet I believe it was never more apparent than when Abraham Lincoln came here to speak.

On Feb. 22, 1860, on the eve of the great Civil War and before his nomination as Presidential candidate seemed possible, Lincoln boarded a train that drew him some 1,800 miles eastward, all six feet five inches of him, folded like a jackknife into a second-class seat. He had a speaking engagement scheduled in New York, and that alone was worth the trip. Originally, he was set to speak in Brooklyn, but a change of venue brought the affair to Cooper Union, a recently established learning center designed to draw thinkers and dreamers to an area that had become, well, just a bit slummy.

Our “Prairie Orator” arrived in New York on Feb. 26, dressed in a brand new suit. It was, however, criss-crossed with razor-sharp creases, having come all the way from Illinois in a very small handbag. He looked grotesque, one man said, as he shambled along, exhausted and rumpled, in the cruelest new shoes known to mankind. Once he had booked a room downtown for the night, he sat up late, refining his speech.
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jdx

Last week, we brought you a photo essay by jdx, a community contributor to The Local. His images seemed to resonate with many of The Local’s readers, who offered a range of reactions about the images and jdx’s commentary on the East Village, its past and its future.

“In a neighborhood that is progressively morphing to costly glass and sheetrock,” jdx wrote of an accompanying image of First Houses. “Someday these untouchable buildings might be the only trace of an East Village that has any sense of its own history.”

Those sentiments struck a chord with many readers.

Pauline Zubin wrote:

“not only are the pictures interesting and worth several looks. the description of each one was informative,
so often we walk by these very things and not take notice. i want to thank the photographer for making them beyond noticeable.

Guillermo added:

“These are very inspirational, poetic, and neolithic. We want more!!!”

Phil Vale said:

“The photographer has found angles that restore the allure of a dangerous, artistic and inspirational East Village, where people gathered to see cokeheads, not Cakeshops, and the most exciting thing on the street wasn’t a new food van. Poverty and violence mingled with music and sex while the wealthy, protected and curious went slumming for an experience. We get another glimpse of that here.”

Join the conversation: What does the work evoke for you?

James Metalarc, 37, is a street musician who has been performing in New York City since 2006. For the past six months he’s been a regular at the Astor Place subway station, entertaining commuters with the reincarnated sounds and stylings of the late Jimi Hendrix. He prefers the term street musician to busker and sees his performances less as an act than an extension of his lifestyle as an artist. To him music is an act of worship.

“The Rejimi Experience,” came about after Mr. Metalarc took stock of the resemblance between himself and the iconic rock star. He had been playing reggae at the time, and was not getting much attention from his audience. He could barely strum a guitar.

He learned Hendrix by ear and it didn’t take long for people to respond.

“Hendrix changed everything for me, it gave my act a whole new structure people could relate to,” Mr. Metalarc said.

Cary Abrams The poet Bob Holman performs at a tribute to Janine Pommy Vega at the Bowery Poetry Club Sunday.

Friends of poet and teacher Janine Pommy Vega, who died in December, gathered at a reading tribute Sunday at The Bowery Poetry Club to remember her.

Poet and author Hettie Jones, a Bowery resident of over 40 years who helped organize the event reminisced about their first meeting at a 1960’s party.

Ms. Vega moved to the Lower East Side from Union City, N.J. after graduating high school at 16, having read ‘On The Road,’ and been inspired by the Beat lifestyle. She met the poet Gregory Corso at The Cedar Tavern, a fabled Village artists’ haunt, who introduced her to Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, with whom she later shared an apartment on Avenue B.

Ms. Vega began teaching writing in prisons in the 1970’s through Incision/Arts, a group that brings writers into prisons; she became the group’s director in 1987. She first introduced Ms. Jones to teaching writing in prisons and they served on the Prison Writing Committee for PEN, the association of poets, essayists, novelists and other writers, and co-authored “Word Over Walls,” a guide on starting writings program in prisons.

Andy Clausen, Ms Vega’s companion, shared reflections and anecdotes about Ms. Vega’s dedication to her writing, work in prisons and indomitable spirit. He described the memorial held recently in Woodstock, N.Y., near their home in Willow, N.Y., and plans for an annual Janine Pommy Vega Poetry Festival to be held there.

Anne Waldman remembered their readings and travels in Italy, reading from “Tracking The Serpent,” Ms. Vega’s account of her extensive travels over four continents exploring what she described as matriarchal power sites. From the outpouring of those who spoke and read, a common theme emerged: how Ms. Vega had touched and inspired many through her writing and teaching.

jdx, a community contributor to The Local East Village, discusses working the streets with a camera.

“Most of these images are captured on the streets of the East Village with a mobile, edited in-device and uploaded. A lot of their inspiration is sourced from writing and literary studies, album covers and underground novels, beat poetry and outsider art. I try not to get hit by cars.”
Read more…