Andre Tartar

On a recent Monday afternoon, the sounds of Edith Piaf and Jacques Brel lilt across Tompkins Square Park. Helen Stratford, 54, an East Village poet and composer, sits with her little white accordion and talks to The Local about the 10 years, and more, she has been performing on the streets.

Where do you perform?

At different points in the East Village — once, if not twice, a day. I like Tompkins Square because it’s near where I live. Sometimes I’ll play in front of St. Marks Church. It’s sort of whimsical.

I used to play in the subway — Astor Place, Eighth and Broadway — but I had to stop performing. Somebody walks by with their Whole Foods bag and their designer dog and their $400 pair of boots and they can’t even give me a quarter? It hurts my feelings.

Do you ever play for money anymore?

I do, I do. But nobody becomes an accordion player because it’s where the money is. If you want to make money, you write poetry. Poetry! That’s where the money’s at. Oh man!

How much can you make performing?

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Forget bedbugs. East Village storekeepers said they’ve been dealing this summer with a persistent case of sticky fingers.

While the New York Police Department reported 100 robberies and burglaries in the area during the steamy summer months, storekeepers say it’s not only gun-wielding intruders they’re concerned about — it’s shoplifters.

From 2002-2009, the number of arrests for shoplifting in the city has increased to 23,237 from 13,826, according to NYPD reports.

“We see a lot of the professional shoplifters,” said Dwijen Byapari, 52, an assistant manager at Stuyvesant Stationery at 438 East 14th Street. “They come wearing a hood, they cover their face.” They know the stores have surveillance cameras, he said. “They are very professional.”

Mr. Byapari has worked behind the counter of the small, cluttered shop for eight years. It stocks everything from Hallmark greeting cards to decorative tchotchkes to Silly Bandz.

Strangely, Mr. Byapari said the most commonly shoplifted item is a Masterlock brand combination lock — an item that sells for $6.99. Other commonly stolen items are Gelly Roll pens and Hallmark cards, all easily shoved in a pocket or hidden under an oversize jacket.

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Maybe you’ve seen Bruce Lanterman sitting in a blue folding chair in Union Square Park handing out fliers with a photograph that now makes his heart ache.

For almost a year and a half, Mr. Lanterman has been handing out information in Union Square and on the streets of the East Village looking for leads into the disappearance of son, Douglas, a former resident of the neighborhood.

“I feel like I owe it to Doug,“ he said.  “I owe it to myself to give it the best shot I can this year to find him.”

Courtesy Lanterman Family Douglas Lanterman.

Doctors diagnosed Mr.’s Lanterman’s son with bipolar disorder in December 2007.  Over the next two years, he alternated living with his parents in Hackettstown, N. J., and with his brother in an apartment on East 11th Street that they had shared since 2003.

But investigators said that on March 13, 2009, the younger Mr. Lanterman boarded the wrong bus when he was returning to Hackettstown from his job in the Financial District and ended up in Pennsylvania. Mr. Lanterman said that the next day his son called and asked to be picked up.

But Mr. Lanterman said that when he and his wife, Carole, arrived to pick up their son, he refused to get into the car and they have not seen him since. “He just seemed like it wasn’t him, like he was being motivated by something else,” Mr. Lanterman said.

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Are you missing?

We’ve added many of our neighbor bloggers to our Blogroll but tell us: who have we missed?

Which blogs should everyone in the East Village be reading?

Feel free to nominate your own site, a neighbor’s or a favorite. Here’s how to do it.

Courtesy Al Kavadlo The author strikes the Warrior II pose.

Community contributor Al Kavadlo, a personal fitness trainer, offers his perspective on Yoga to the People.

I’ve done yoga on and off for nearly a decade and made my living as a
personal trainer in this neighborhood for almost as long. I’ve walked by
Yoga to the People countless times over the last several years, but never
attended a class until recently, when my curiosity, coupled with the
fact that I’d recently been neglecting my yoga practice, finally got me into the old pre-war walk-up to sweat it out.

The vibe inside was welcoming, and the instructor was friendly and
professional, yet there were some negative aspects to the experience. Most yoga studios that I’ve encountered in the city are typically crowded, but I’d never before seen this many people in one room.

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The city’s latest report tells us our payphones are clean and that most of them work. But in the East Village many are either broken, disgusting or both.

Think crusty gum stuck to receivers, lewd drawings of body parts scrawled across metal enclosures or slime from sweaty hands glistening on plastic handles.

There are 13 payphones on 13th and 14th Streets near Avenues A and B alone. Most are pretty grungy — and recently many were not functioning. Six of the 13 payphones on that small stretch of East Village pavement were broken. The one outside Stuyvesant Grocery and Deli on Avenue A near 14th Street had no dial tone; the one outside Alphabet Café on 14th Street at Avenue A had wires ripped from the receiver; and the one outside the East Village Café on Avenue B near 13th Street had a sticker that read: “This public pay telephone is temporarily out of service,” dated July 30, 2010.

It’s amazing that anyone ever uses them, but they do.

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