Police close the park. Video by Susan Keyloun.

While protests at Tompkins Square Park remained modest earlier today and into the evening, a large crowd (estimated by Occupy Wall Street to number over 3,000) gathered at Washington Square Park Saturday night, including many who had attended an earlier protest in Times Square. Ten arrests were reported after police moved into the park to enforce a midnight closing time.

Around 9 p.m., the park’s fountain was packed full of demonstrators – mostly students, it seemed – chanting, waving placards (along with a homemade fake guillotine) and hoisting a banner reading “Everyone’s Invited.” A circle of onlookers – four or five bodies deep – gathered around the perimeter of the fountain to (barely) hear call-and-response speeches along the lines of “Today it’s McDonaldsism from which the globe suffers. The connection between commerce and peace is a lie.”

Early on, just a handful of police officers were seen mixing with the crowd, while some four dozen more milled around at the park’s northern entrance. Those numbers grew as the evening progressed, and by 11:30 p.m., officers on horseback and in riot gear were lined up along the iconic arch, offering Tweeters a dramatic photo op. Read more…

Daniel Maurer

Shortly after 2 a.m. this morning, police sirens sounded on 12th Street after a report of a male shot near Avenue C. Police tape sealed off the eastern half of 12th Street as well as Avenue C at the southwest corner, where a taxi cab, stopped mid-turn in the street, was part of the crime scene.

Police officers on the scene declined to give details of the shooting, but the cab driver, who asked not to be named, described the incident. “I was here at the red light,” he said. “There was a kid walking with another kid, about to cross. I tried to make my turn; he crumbled and he fell down.” Read more…

Carolyn Sun Left to right: Roberto Hernandez, John Penley, Joan Moossy, Jerry Levy, and a student.

Occupy Tompkins Square Park started out as small group of four — John Penley, Joan Moossy, Robert Hernandez and Jerry Levy,  all over the age of fifty.

“We’re geriatric protestors,” Mr. Penley joked.

All had been protesting at Occupy Wall Street since its first week in September, and today, as planned, they met at noon on a grassy knoll in the middle of the park. Protestors trickled steadily in as the day wore on; by mid-afternoon, they numbered a modest dozen. Read more…

Ray LeMoine

Nevermind that “private” bike rack. This afternoon, the Department of Transportation showed that sharing is caring by setting up a preview station for the city’s forthcoming Bike Share NYC program along Avenue A. The program launches next summer, when 600 similar stations will open across the city.

“It’s cheaper for a full year than a monthly MetroCard,” said Al Silvestri, a Department of Transportation representative, to a group of East Villagers outside of Tompkins Square Park. For just $95 per year ($105 less than the tennis pass for city parks), participants are allotted unlimited 30-minute rides, with a sliding scale for longer jaunts. Read more…

Suzanne Rozdeba L.E.S. Jewels and John Penley at Occupy Wall Street.

Runnin’ Scared interviews the bloggers behind EV Grieve and Save The Lower East Side to get their thoughts on why, as Save The Lower East Side pointed out yesterday, Grieve’s commenters are so dismissive of John Penley’s plans to occupy Tompkins Square Park this weekend.  Says Grieve, “Some of the newer residents seem to be more interested in finding the perfect drunk brunch, tweeting about cupcakes and going out and watching, say, the Oklahoma-Texas game in sweatshirts and jerseys. Social movements are for the history books.”

Brooklyn Based notices, as have we, that Williamsburg is becoming “East Village East,” with outposts of Mama’s and Vanessa’s Dumpling House due to open later this month, and an offshoot of Cafe Mogador planned as well. “The recession really hit the East Village pretty hard and we saw our clientele dropping,” explains Jeremiah Clancy, the owner of Mama’s. “It pushed the last notion of young people out because the rents were so high.”

Speaking of Mama’s, the southern food trend continues: EV Grieve notices a Facebook update indicating that Double Wide, a “bar and southern kitchen” will open this weekend at 505 East 12th Street. Their sloppy Joes “bear only the finest ingredients.” Read more…

Susan Keyloun

Save The Lower East Side pens a lengthy thought piece about why exactly the “new breed” of East Village resident feels threatened by Occupy Wall Street: “This new breed of Lower East Sider comes to enjoy a sense of urban authenticity in Manhattan. Of course, it’s not authentic at all, but a kind of faux authenticity, pretend authenticity: the EV feels like it’s hip, it imagines itself to be hip, it has lots of youth who style themselves as hip, but in reality, they are just children of wealth seeking $700 a month more hipness and urban pretend-authenticity than they would get in Queens.”

Speaking of “the never-ending push and pull between New York’s past and present,” The Times tours Bowery House, a shabby flophouse turned chic hotel where some of the old residents are still bunking up for $10 per night. One of them (who may or may not know that he has a room named after him) apparently isn’t a fan of the conversion, and is said to have twice smashed the hotel’s neon sign.

Elsewhere on the Bowery, Bowery Boogie finds out that Bowery Coffee, the café from the owner of the adjoining lighting shop B4 It Was Cool, will open on Monday.

Oh, and The Local noticed, as did EV Grieve, that a new clothing boutique, Riff, now occupies the space that once held Morrison Hotel Gallery. Read more…

Emily Canal

At Community Board 3’s transportation committee meeting last night, local residents were given a second chance to plea for a speed bump on East Seventh Street.  As noted last week, a traffic-flow study conducted at the urging of Daniel Squadron had convinced the Department of Transportation that the block didn’t need a bump (“there is little speeding occurring,” said representative Colleen Chattergoon at the meeting last night). However, after the committee pointed out that St. Brigid School was on the corner of Avenue B, Ms. Chattergoon said she could take another look. “Just because we denied it now, doesn’t mean that we would not revisit down the road,” she said, adding that the School Safety division would have to be brought in and that a more likely measure would be additional speed-reducing signage.

Phillip Kalantzis-Cope

Newly released data of crashes involving pedestrians and cyclists reveals that Bowery and East Houston Street was the city’s most accident-prone intersection for bicyclists from 1995 to 2009.

During that time span, there were 41 accidents at the intersection, according to the advocacy group Transportation Alternatives, which has compiled new data from the New York State Department of Transportation in an interactive map called Crashstat.

Transportation Alternatives said the new statistics pointed to the need for further reforms that would make the city more pedestrian-and-cyclist-friendly.

“As long as the default response to a motor vehicle crash is that it’s an accident, the behavior that’s killing and injuring people will continue,” wrote the group’s director, Paul Steely White, in a press release.
Read more…

Daniel Maurer

The movement to honor late councilwoman Miriam Friedlander by renaming the street she lived on is gathering strength: last night, Community Board 3’s Transportation and Public Safety committee unanimously voted to recommend the name change.

Among others, councilwoman Rosie Mendez made an appearance at Tuesday night’s meeting to lend her weight to the proposal, toting letters of support from government representatives and more than 330 signatures from residents and local restaurant owners. “Miriam was a councilwoman for 18 years,” Ms. Mendez said. “I think this would be a fitting tribute to a woman who loved this community so much, and gave so much of herself.” Read more…

Alexis Lamster

Good morning, East Village.

Despite Community Board 3’s disapproval, Heathers managed to snag a renewal of its liquor license from the State Liquor Authority, according to a Facebook post picked up by EV Grieve.

Apparently there’s a new hawk in Tompkins Square Park. Grieve has photos.

Since Times critic Charles Isherwood might be taking a break from Adam Rapp, L magazine chimes in with a review of the playwright’s latest, “Dreams of Flying Dreams of Falling.” They’re certainly bigger fans than Mr. Isherwood is: “The terrific ensemble finds empathy in even the most caricature-compatible characters, so that by the end we share their long-defered dreams of flight and too-real fears of falling.” Read more…

Want to see the very latest from the occupation? Dave Winer, the RSS pioneer responsible for The Local’s “News River,” has now created a site where you can see Flickr photos from Zuccotti Park and elsewhere as they’re posted. To add to the stream, simply tag your photo with #occupywallst and it’ll show up at occupyweb.org within ten minutes.

The Lo-Down has a reminder regarding Tuesday’s important meeting about the redevelopment of the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area in the Lower East Side. The swaths of property, near Delancey and Grand Streets, have long been eyed by the city as a site for major new development, and have also caused much anxiety about the future of the Essex Street Market. Tomorrow’s public hearing will present opportunities for public comment on the project as it begins the environmental review process. The meeting starts at 3:30 p.m. at 184 Eldridge Street. There is an evening session, as well.

Suzanne Rozdeba

Good morning, East Village.

Did you see this mysterious sky writing on Sunday? City Room explains that it was part of an art project sponsored by Friends of the Highline.

WNYC shows some love for Filipino spot Maharlika and offers up their barbecue sauce recipe.

The Times casts an eye on the state of the Bowery, noting that preservationists are requesting that two blocks be labeled a historic district.

City Room profiles Jason Shelowitz, the man behind all those urban etiquette signs.
Read more…

Lauren Carol Smith Shots from the aftermath of the accident.

A black Ford S.U.V. ran into a Fire Department ambulance on the Bowery at East Fourth Street yesterday, and passengers from both vehicles were taken to the hospital.

A spokesman for the Fire Department said that the accident occurred at around 5:30 p.m., and that a two people were treated at Bellevue Hospital for minor injuries. Roughly a half-hour later the driver of the Ford — which belonged to the Delancey Car Service — was spotted dislodging the front of his S.U.V. from the rear bumper of the F.D.N.Y. ambulance by throwing it in reverse.

Suzanne Rozdeba

Good morning, East Village.

Actress Kirsten Dunst was spotted in the East Village yesterday, as she took some time off from promoting her new movie, “Melancholia.” Meanwhile, Paula Deen stopped by the Big Gay Ice Cream Shop on East Seventh Street. The store hinted at the news via a tweet about a “certain food celeb with a butter-loving mama” and a photo of a film crew.

The plywood came off of Cooper Craft and Kitchen on the corner of Second Avenue and Fifth Street, as photos on EV Grieve show, but the shutter went down on Georgia, a beauty shop on East Houston Street, reports Bowery Boogie. The company plans to move to an as-yet-unannounced location in Manhattan and become a global business.

According to The Times, the Merchant House Museum is holding an exhibit on spirit photography from now until Nov. 28,  and tomorrow Dan Sturges will talk about the parapsychological studies he’s conducted. Read more…

Stephen Rex Brown There it is: free wi-fI!

Many East Village residents have expressed their dismay over the Time Warner cable outage that occurred this morning. Well, The Local is here to give you good news (if you can manage to get it without internet service): free wi-fi is now available in Tompkins Square Park.

A spokesman with the Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications said that the service quietly launched on Sept. 29, and a stroll through the park confirmed that sure enough, “attwifi” is an available network there.

Meanwhile, a spokesman for Time Warner Cable said that the outage was the result of a fire in the Lower East Side, which melted a portion of the fiber-optic network. Read more…

Emily Canal

St. Brigid School just got a new library, and now community members want a speed bump outside of the school at Seventh Street between Avenues B and C. Residents say drivers tend to speed down East Seventh Street because it’s the only one between Fourth and 14th Streets that runs west from Avenue D to the Bowery without interruption.

“A lot of people don’t respect the crossing guard and like to pass through real fast,” said Ramon Santiago, 45, a security guard at the school.

A source at the Department of Transportation said that a speed bump was deemed unnecessary after a study revealed that vehicles traveled down the street at an average speed of 18.7 miles per hour. According to the source, there was an average of one pedestrian injury per year at the location from 2005 to 2009 – none of them fatal. Read more…

As expected, hundreds of students from NYU and the New School showed up at Washington Square Park Wednesday afternoon, before marching down Lafayette Street to join the Occupy Wall Street protesters. “A lot of the problems that Occupy Wall Street is addressing have a particular impact on students,” said co-organizer of NYU Student Walk Out, Christy Thornton, 32. After hooking up with what she said were 60 community groups and what the Times reported were several labor unions at Foley Square, several thousand marched on to Zuccotti Park, per the AP. In the course of the evening, about 28 arrests were made, according to NY1 (update: City Room hears that 23 were arrested), and protesters reported police using pepper-spray and batons to keep the crowd at bay. (Gothamist has video of one such incident.) As you can see from Liv Buli’s report above, the Local was at Washington Square Park to see the start of it all.

Update | 11:15 a.m. Our reporter Yoo Eun Lee was also on the scene and captured the raw footage below. Read more…

Daniel Maurer

Good morning, East Village.

It seems Bob Arihood (the above tribute to whom was painted by Chico yesterday) wasn’t the only one to tend after injured squirrels. On East Seventh Street near Second Avenue, we spotted a sign explaining that an orphaned baby squirrel has gone missing, and must be returned to a “federally licensed wildlife rehabilitator” because it is too young to crack nutshells for itself.

If IHOP’s new sidewalk canopy leaves you cold, and you’re more a fan of the “Eat Me” sign above Crif Dogs, take note: In honor of the hot dog spot’s 10th anniversary, everything is $1 today, and, according to its Facebook page, there’ll be a party with free rum shots tonight.

Just in time for Game 5 tonight, former Yankees and Mets right fielder Darryl Strawberry will be signing autographs between 9 p.m. and 10 p.m. at the Village Pourhouse, reports Bowery Boogie. Read more…