Lauren Carol Smith The aftermath of a collision between a cyclist and pedestrian at Astor Place.

A cyclist ran into a pedestrian at Lafayette and Eighth Streets yesterday at around 6:30 p.m., a fire department spokesman said.

The 30-year-old woman, who was conscious and not bleeding, was treated at Bellevue Hospital, the spokesman added. The cyclist was not hauled to the hospital.

A bystander on the scene told the Local that the woman had stepped into the path of the cyclist, though that could not be confirmed.

Phillip Kalantzis-Cope

Good morning, East Village.

According to a press release posted by Bowery Boogie, a new East Village-based start-up lets you have packages delivered to participating stores so that you can be notified via text message about their arrival and pick them up 24/7.

Photographer Michael Sean Edwards gave EV Grieve some photos from the last night of service at Life Cafe. Designer Patrick McDonald was on the scene, and the chalkboard sign read “9-11-11: Landlords are the real terrorists.”

Grieve noticed that gift shop Exit 9 reopened at its new location yesterday –  it can now be found at 51 Avenue A between Third and Fourth Streets.

According to the Wall Street Journal and others, drug charges have been dropped against Kenneth Moreno, the former NYPD officer that was found guilty of official misconduct for repeatedly entering a woman’s East Village apartment in 2009. The charges stemmed from the discovery of a small amount of heroin in the officer’s locker.

Courtesy of Patricia Thomsen

On Saturday, near the corner of Avenue B and Seventh Street, under a short stretch of blue scaffolding across from Tompkins Square Park, a makeshift bed of cardboard stretched across a few blocks of concrete. At the top – where a pillow would be on most beds – lay a crumpled heap of clothes and a few plastic bags. A solitary votive candle stood in the center of the designated sleeping spot, the flame so feeble that a small gust of wind might have blown it out.

Liz Hooper, 50, a homeless woman, had occupied this sidewalk space for the last six months until she was found dead next to it on Saturday morning, as reported by City Room. Ellen Borakove, a spokesperson for the city medical examiner told The Local that, as of now, the cause of death is still uncertain. Read more…

While the Department of Transportation, in a report posted by City Room, has declared the pedestrian plazas on the north side of Union Square Park to be a success, Gothamist points to a more recent change to the park: Spanish artist Miquel Barceló’s 26-foot-tall bronze sculpture of an elephant standing on its trunk is being installed today.

Stephen Rex Brown Ron Britt, the owner of the Free Willie Nelson, in front of his damaged RV

The East Village’s most recognizable recreational vehicle caught on fire this morning, destroying the engine and leaving its mellow owner bummed but not brokenhearted.

The Free Willie Nelson, a 1973 Dodge Mahal Travco known for its whale-themed paint job and cowboy-style interior, was set ablaze by an electrical fire at around 8:55 a.m. on Sixth Street near Avenue A.

“A neighborhood icon comes to rest,” said Darryl Thompson, a musician. “Man, this sucks. I slept many nights in this thing — it’s like my old buddy.” Read more…

Neighborhoodr tweets a photo of smoke coming out of the neighborhood’s most visible vehicle, the Free Willie Nelson, after an apparent fire this morning. Good thing owner Rob Britt just invested in another RV. The fire doesn’t appear to be serious, but we’ll let you know if we hear more.

On Friday afternoon, while asking East Villagers to reflect on the events of a decade ago, The Local happened upon a Roman Catholic priest and a Villager who asked to be identified as Monsignor Donald, blessing the home of Engine Company 28 and Ladder Company 11, at 222 East 2nd Street.  The firehouse lost six members at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2011, and earlier this year, it lost another firefighter, Roy Chelsen, to bone-marrow cancer said to be linked to his work at Ground Zero in the weeks following the attacks. Here, Monsignor Donald talks about his work blessing local firehouses.

jdx View from the East Village, September 11, 2001.

Last week Susan Keyloun reviewed “nine/twelve tapes,” a play that reenacted man-on-the-street interviews conducted in the days following September 11, 2001. Now The Local has acquired clips from the tapes, which you can listen to for the first time below. Collin Daniels, 40, had been living in New York City for just three months when the World Trade Center attacks occurred – he had moved here along with eight other Ohio University theater-program graduates, and was working a temp job in publishing. “I was feeling out of place and alienated,” said Mr. Daniels over the telephone today, “and when 9/11 happened, it heightened my sense that I didn’t belong to this city yet and I wanted to do something to heal and process this.” Read more…

This event has passed.

Today, the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, which publishes The Local with The New York Times, is hosting a series of panel discussions on “The Journalism of 9/11 – A Decade Later.” All day, esteemed journalists will discuss their coverage of the attacks on September 11, 2001. If you can’t attend the free event at 20 Cooper Square, 7th floor, watch it here as we stream it live throughout the day – the schedule is below. Read more…

Phillip Kalantzis-Cope

Good morning, East Village.

Finally, we get to hear Ryan Gosling’s take on the Astor Place street fight, in an MTV interview. He says he’s embarrassed and “should’ve just kept my nose out of it,” because the alleged thief was actually a fan of the artist whose painting he stole: “He finally steals the painting and he’s getting his ass kicked by his hero and then the guy from ‘The Notebook’ shows up and makes it weirder. The whole thing – nobody wins.” Gosling had just come from the gym and was “feeling warmed up.”

Elsewhere in heartthrob news, The Daily Beast reports that former Backstreet Boy A.J. McLean was a no-show at the Fashion’s Night Out event at Kiehl’s last night.

Here’s some good news: According to DNAinfo’s math, parking tickets in the East Village were down 48.8 percent – from 26,200 citations issued to 13,422 – between 2009 and 2010.

According to Eater, NGam, a new spot serving traditional Thai dishes as well as a burger and chicken wings for lunch, has opened at Third Avenue and 13^th Street.

Stephen Rex Brown A new sign outside the Bowery Hotel.

Signs from the fictional “Metropolitan Etiquette Authority” were posted all over Manhattan last night by the artist Jay Shells, according to Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York. The Local spotted signs at Cooper Square and (above) at the Bowery Hotel. Seen any others around the neighborhood?

An article on Gothamist offers a behind-the-scenes look — from the perspective of one of the jurors — at the trial of an ex-police officer accused of raping a woman in her East Village home. In one bizarre scene in the story (which is behind a paywall), the exonerated police officer, Kenneth Moreno, embraces and thanks the author, who only a few days prior had declared him not guilty. Another episode reveals that on the first day of deliberations, nine of the 12 jurors already thought that the prosecution had failed to prove Mr. Moreno’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Stephen Rex Brown Firefighters blasting a manhole with a fire hose.

Firefighters were dousing a manhole with water at Second Avenue and Seventh Street this morning after it caught fire. A spokesman for the fire department said the first report of the blaze came in at 9:17 a.m., and that there were roughly 30 firefighters on the scene. Read more…

Scott Lynch

Good morning, East Village.

According to a report compiled by DNAinfo, the East Village is the 58th safest out of 69 neighborhoods citywide. The reason it’s less safe than Harlem, according to DNAinfo’s math? High rates of grand larceny and burglary, as well as a “600 percent increase in DWI arrests from 2001 to 2010 in the East Village’s 9th Precinct, as well as a 56 percent increase in reported rapes since 2008.”

Some more stats for you: According to a rental market report released by Citi Habitats and excerpted on the Real Deal, the citywide occupancy rate has risen to 1%, but is still at 0.88% in the East Village: “Below 96th Street, the cheapest neighborhoods were on the East Side, the report shows, as rents in the neighborhoods from the Lower East Side to the Upper East Side rose steadily from $2,950 to $3,290 heading north.”

According to City Room, the city’s plan to install a restaurant, City Farm Café, in the Union Square Park pavilion has fallen through because concessionaire Don Pintabona pulled out. Manhattan borough president, Scott Stringer, wants to see the pavilion go to public use, but the Parks department says it’s “reviewing other high-quality proposals submitted and will select a new operator in the very near future.” Read more…

Phillip Kalantzis-Cope

Good morning, East Village.

City Room profiles Larry Fagin, a poet and teacher who, at the age of 74, is “one of the East Village’s last standing bohemians.” He lives in a two-bedroom walk-up in Allen Ginsberg’s old building. His rent has almost tripled since he took the apartment in 1968 – yet he’s still paying only $150 a month.

EV Grieve notes that the Upright Citizens Brigade has opened its outpost on East 3rd Street, complete with Hot Chicks Room.

Thought Delancey was a bad street to bike on? Brooklyn Spoke thinks the Bowery is also a “death-trap” for bikers, and believes there has been “too much focus on what’s happening on the Manhattan Bridge and not enough on what’s happening when cyclists get off of it.” Read more…

A FDNY spokesman told The Local that at 8:02 p.m., a call came in regarding a transformer fire at the Con Edison plant at 14^th Street and FDR Drive. According to the spokesman, a standard response team of 12 units comprising 65 firefighters was dispatched to the scene. “It doesn’t appear to be serious,” he said. (The cause of these types of fires is typically determined after an investigation by fire marshals.) EV Grieve has some shots from the scene as well as an eyewitness account: “big explosion, giant black plume of smoke, no flames.” A tipster tells Grieve that “most of the emergency crews” had packed up as of 9 p.m.

Check back here for any updates.

See the full chart here.

When we sent you into the Labor Day weekend with a compendium of hot dog horror stories, we expected a reaction. And what a reaction! Of course, there were the jaded eaters who found this to be a dog-bites-man story: a Huffington Post commenter thought that 64 reported instances of allegedly adulterated hot dogs over the course of two years “isn’t really enough to warrant such a panic-inducing headline” about stray Band-Aids. But the comments we’re throwing into the Chatter Box today come from people who’ve had some truly hairy experiences with food production, starting with BaobabDobbs, a Boing Boing commenter. Read more…

Stephen Rex Brown

The long weekend was rife with shootings, and the East Village was no exception. A man and woman shot a 24-year-old man in the stomach on Saturday morning and were arrested at the Second Avenue subway station, the police said.

A NYPD spokesman told The Local that the victim was at Third Street and First Avenue at 3:45 a.m. when the duo shot him, and was taken to Bellevue Hospital in stable condition. The spokesman did not explain if there was a motive for the attack.

The police apprehended the two suspects — a 34-year-old man from Vinegar Hill and a 26-year-old woman from East New York — on the platform of the F train. Both were charged with assault, criminal possession of a weapon and reckless endangerment.

Daniel Maurer

Good morning, East Village. It was a busy holiday weekend, so let’s get right to it.

First, a sign in the door of Ave. A Mini Market indicates the mysteriously shuttered deli will return after a renovation.

Over the weekend, a local lounger, Heryk Tomasini, set up hammocks at Astor Place, Houston Street, and some other East Village and Lower East Side spots. According to Bowery Boogie, two of them were promptly stolen. Meanwhile a more renowned public artist, Chico, painted a new mural on Houston Street (EV Grieve has a photo), but was upstaged by actor-comedian Jim Carrey, who according to the Post “tried his hand at tagging yesterday by spraying the outside of a multimillion-dollar East Village home.” Contact Music says the home was Mr. Carrey’s own.

Another celebrity made an appearance at the much anticipated opening of the Big Gay Ice Cream Shop on Saturday, where the line stretched all the way to the park. Robert Sietsema of the Voice posted photos on Fork in the Road, and Bob Arihood, on Neither More Nor Less, pointed out that the line wasn’t unlike the bread line over at the park. EV Grieve posted video, then returned later to spot Anthony Bourdain in a priest’s costume, and then returned still later in the weekend to see the line was still going strong. Read more…