Stephen Rex Brown A tag on the crane outside of what’s said to be David Schwimmer’s future abode.

The star of “Friends” sure isn’t getting a friendly welcome to the neighborhood. Someone tagged “a butcher” on the crane outside of what’s said to be the future home of David Schwimmer — a likely reference to the townhouse built in 1852 that used to sit on the site.

A previous tag at the site referenced the “destruction of an irreplaceable historic building” to make way for “another ugly, yuppie, ghetto catering to monied transients.”

Of course, close followers of proceedings at 331 East Sixth Street will recall that this isn’t the first time the crane has made headlines. Earlier this month the contraption knocked over scaffolding, injuring a pedestrian below.

The cafe is closed, but at least there will be an online refuge for “Rent” fanatics. Owner Kathy Kirkpatrick announced yesterday on Life Cafe’s Facebook page that she is nearing a “soft launch” for Rentheadregisters.com, a digital version of the tomes full of the signatures of “Rent” fanatics who made a pilgrimage to the restaurant where the musical was written. “An estimated 10,000 ‘Rent’ and Life Cafe fans left messages in these books. We will eventually have all the pages scanned and available to read on the site,” Ms. Kirkpatrick wrote.

Stephen Rex Brown The film crew outside of the Holiday Cocktail Lounge.

“Kill Your Darlings,” starring Daniel Radcliffe along with Jennifer Jason Leigh, former local David Cross, and Michael C. Hall (also no stranger to the neighborhood) is filming at the vacant Holiday Cocktail Lounge right now.

A couple of weeks ago, The Times looked back at the incident on which the film is based: 68 years ago, Beat muse Lucien Carr, then 19 years old, stabbed an older suitor with his Boy Scout knife and dumped his body in the Hudson River. Mr. Carr (played by Dane DeHaan in the film) confessed to his friends William S. Burroughs (played by Ben Foster) and Jack Kerouac (played by Jack Huston) before eventually turning himself in and being convicted of manslaughter. Mr. Radcliffe plays Allen Ginsberg, who was well familiar with the Holiday while it was open.

Kathryn Doyle A beach under the Brooklyn Bridge is
inundated with sewage waste and runoff
from South Street in rainy weather

Swimming pools in the East River? Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer floated the idea in a video introduction to the Blueway, a project that would revitalize a stretch of the East River from the Brooklyn Bridge to Midtown East. And it’s not as farfetched as you’d think: the historically polluted waterway is perfectly swimmable by Environmental Protection Agency standards. There’s just one problem: sewage overflows.

Dan Tainow, education director at the Lower East Side Ecology Center, explained the issue to local residents yesterday during a tour of the East River that doubled as a discussion of the Blueway project. Due to the age of New York City’s sewer system, he said, wastewater from household sinks, showers and toilets shares the same set of pipes as runoff from city streets.

Most of Lower Manhattan’s wastewater travels through this pipe system to the Newtown Creek plant in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where it is cleaned, filtered and released into the East River. But during the fifty to sixty rainy days per year when gushes of street water could overwhelm the pipe system and force sewage back up into homes, the sewage is diverted directly into the East River by Combined Sewage Outflows, or CSOs. Read more…

Who are the men and women seeking to occupy Union Square Park? So far we’ve met Karin Hofmann and Justin Stone-Diaz; Fathema Shadida and Tim “Chyno” Chin; John Eustor and Carlton Hall; and Ed Mortimer and James Pistocco. Today, in the final installment of The Local’s series, meet two more of your new neighbors.

Jared Malsin

Name: Sam Wood
Age: 22
Originally from: Farmingdale, New York
Current residence: Full-time occupier. “I’ve spent a decent amount of nights here in Union Square.”
Job before joining occupy: Unemployed
Current job: Full-time occupier, unemployed Read more…

Who are the men and women seeking to occupy Union Square Park? So far we’ve met Karin Hofmann and Justin Stone-Diaz; Fathema Shadida and Tim “Chyno” Chin; and John Eustor and Carlton Hall. Today, meet two more of your new neighbors.

Jared Malsin

Name: Ed Mortimer
Age: 56
Originally from: Connecticut
Current residence: Full-time occupier. Couch surfing. Occasionally sleeping on street.
Current job: Volunteer street medic
Looking for work? No. Dedicated to work with Occupy: “I’ve never worked so hard in my whole life.” Read more…

Daniel Maurer

Last night, Mary Help of Christians Church was ethereally illuminated as writer-director Larry Brand filmed scenes from “Girl on the Train,” a neo-noir thriller starring Henry Ian Cusick as a documentary filmmaker, Stephen Lang as a detective, and Nicki Aycox as the titular femme fatale.

Rebecca Reynolds, a producer, said that the corner of East 12th Street and Avenue A will feature prominently in the indie flick: scenes were shot at Table 12, the deli across the street, and inside of the vacant school building behind Mary Help of Christians, as well as in Brooklyn, Queens, Riverdale, and on the Metro-North train. “This location can just be so many things,” she said, nodding toward the church’s rectory. “We were able to use it as Lexi’s childhood-home kitchen, we did an after-hours club in here, we did an abandoned tenement room, plus they have a dining hall where we fed and catered the crew.” Read more…

Who are the men and women seeking to occupy Union Square Park? So far we’ve met Karin Hofmann and Justin Stone-Diaz as well as Fathema Shadida and Tim “Chyno” Chin. Today, meet two more of your new neighbors.

Jared Malsin

Name: John Eustor
Age: 46
Originally from: Queens
Current residence: Was a full time occupier at Zuccotti Park, currently staying in New Jersey.
Current job: Unemployed computer programmer
Looking for work? “I’ve been looking for work, yeah, but I’m looking for work that is not in that corporate mindset. I worked in pharmaceuticals, banking. I worked on Wall Street for seven years. I worked for all these different kind of industries and they’re all the same.” Read more…

As soon as The Local noticed yesterday that 7-Eleven decals had been affixed to the windows of the former Jas Mart, we dispatched news vans to the heart of St. Marks Place. They’ve been stationed there ever since, awaiting the new store’s moment of christening. Readers, that moment came mere minutes ago, and our cameras were rolling as workers hoisted the universal Slurpee sign in place.

Okay, so in all honesty, we just happened to see this on our lunch break, but don’t let that detract from the drama. A 7-Eleven rep previously told The Local that the store at 35 St. Marks Place, along with another one on 14th Street, would open by the end of July. Looks like it could be even sooner.

Update: A representative says the store should open by the end of this month.

Entwined Studio The author, second from right, with friends on the stoop of 50 East Third Street.

A few weeks ago I had a night so magical it only could have happened in New York City: rooftop skyline, cocktails, killer jams. We were giddy. It was one of those nights that makes you want to dig out your old “I heart NY” t-shirt and wear it to bed.

The next morning, I got a buzz from the mailman. It was a registered letter from the landlord: we were getting evicted from our home at 50 East Third Street.

Our building sold and the new landlord had no interest in renewing our lease, so we were given 60 days to pack up our lives and vacate our apartments by May 14. Around 20 other people in our building and two neighboring ones at 54 and 58 East Third Street received the same notice. I was told that the sale of the building hinged upon the vacancy of our apartments. Our lives were used as a bartering chip.

The rug was literally being pulled from underneath us. Read more…

Who are the men and women seeking to occupy Union Square Park? Yesterday we met Fathema Shadida and Tim “Chyno” Chin. Today, meet two more of your new neighbors. 

Jared Malsin

Name: Karin Hofmann
Age: 69
Originally from: Germany. Emigrated to the Bronx at age 12.
Current residence: East 12th Street
Current job: Retired
Ideology: “Definitely a Liberal, and I say it proudly.” Read more…

Jared Malsin Fathema Shadida in Union Square Park

Since members of the Occupy Wall Street movement launched their attempted occupation of Union Square three weeks ago, the protesters have engaged in a nightly tug-o-war with police. The occupiers have responded to the nightly closure of Union Square Park and arrests with rap battles, sleep-ins and dangling donuts on strings.

But who are the men and women seeking to occupy the square? In hopes of learning more about our new neighbors (some of them old neighbors, actually), The Local spoke with 10 core activists, all of whom have spent at least one night sleeping on the edge of Union Square, and all of whom are dedicating their days to the new protest camp. Here are the vitals on two of them, with more to come every day this week.

Name: Fathema Shadida
Age: 57
Originally from: Sahara, Egypt
Current residence: Brooklyn
Job before joining occupy: New York City Parks Enforcement Patrol Officer Read more…

Melvin Felix

A group of over 30 people gathered Saturday afternoon at Le Petit Versailles community garden to celebrate what would have been the 100th birthday of gay activist Harry Hay.

Mr. Hay, who died of lung cancer in 2002, was one of the first advocates of the concept of gay rights in the 1950s. He co-founded the Mattachine Society only to be expelled due to his Communist beliefs; later, he and others created the Radical Faeries, a spiritual society of gay men with sanctuaries around the world.

Peter Sturman, who joined the group shortly after coming out in his early twenties, said the faeries almost spoiled him to the realities of the outside world. “We go into a separate space and we get to suspend the rules of society,” he said. Read more…

Hillary McHone

On March 23, a malevolent, intoxicated hobgoblin named Ryan Beauchamp viciously attacked Joshua Basin – a poet, music lover, levelheaded friend and son – and hurled him onto the tracks of the Bedford Avenue subway station, where he was pinned and killed by a train. At least, that’s the way it was portrayed in the media and discussed in the comment sections: Joshua Basin was the helpless bystander and a victim who’d been murdered in cold blood before a gallery of straphangers.

I was one of those horrified witnesses. For two weeks, I held off on publicly speaking about what I saw because I didn’t want to undermine a potential homicide case. But with a murder charge no longer in play, I can now step forward to say that the incident did not occur as it was said to have. Ryan Beauchamp was no “Subway Slayer.” Read more…