Emily Lawrence

Good morning, East Village.

As the Great Dig Out continues, The Times considers a question on the minds of many New Yorkers: how did the city do with the snow-clearing effort? The answer, the article notes, depends on how one interprets the Sanitation Department’s arcane system for classifying snow removal.

EV Grieve landed an exclusive interview with the bicycle at Avenue C and Eighth Street that is the subject of one of the iconic images of the blizzard.

And Bowery Boogie takes a look at some of the more notable snowmen that have been built in the neighborhood.

Vivienne Gucwa

Good morning, East Village.

On day two of what New York 1 is calling “the sixth biggest snowstorm in the city’s history,” (East Village Radio just says Snowpocalypse!) most streets in the neighborhood remain hushed, either blanketed in white or lined with pushed-aside walls of snow. The Times has region-wide coverage including information on transport delays and power failures. Unresolved problems in this neighborhood? Please let us know (editor@thelocaleastvillage.com).

Still, no reason not to continue with the traditions of the season, like throwing unwanted Christmas trees on the sidewalk.

Roey Ahram

Good morning, East Village.

There are mornings when New York is not a collection of neighborhoods, but one big city sharing the same experience. This is one of those mornings.

Read more…

Last month, The Local published excerpts from a photo essay by Steven Hirsch on the community of “Crusty Punks” who live in Tompkins Square Park. Earlier this week, a commenter noted that one of the men featured in the post, Robert Edward Dyck, who was known as Yardsale, had recently been killed. The Local has confirmed that two men face voluntary manslaughter charges in the death of Mr. Dyck, who was found dead in Virginia last month of blunt force injuries.—The Local

Phillip Kalantzis Cope

Good morning, East Village.

A fire in a five-story building on First Avenue near East Third Street briefly disturbed the pre-holiday peace Wednesday night, but was quickly extinguished. EV Grieve has photos. Battalion Chief Patrick Sheridan told The Local that the fire started inside a duplex apartment on the top floor of the building and that the cause was under investigation. There were no injuries to firefighters or civilians, Chief Sheridan said, adding that all residents of the building except those living in the apartment where the fire began were permitted to return to their homes Wednesday night.

In other neighborhood news, The Times reports on a judge’s ruling against the use of “stop-and-frisk” police tactics in public housing developments; the case at issue originated a bit south of the East Village in the Baruch Houses.

And New York magazine offers a look inside the East Village apartment of the singer John Legend.

Carol Vinzant Drayton Michael, a dog trainer, discourages pet owners from carrying weapons to fend off dog attacks. He spoke to pet owners Sunday at the Tompkins Square Dog Run.

Leave the knife, take a bottle of water.

That’s the advice Drayton Michael, a dog trainer known as the “pit bull guru,” is offering to the citizens of the East Village who are concerned about a series of attacks at the Tompkins Square Dog Run.

After a series of serious dog fights, to which some dog owners reportedly responded by carrying knives to the park to protect their dogs, the community was worried — though not all were sure these fights were anything new in a neighborhood that only a decade or so ago had more pit bulls than the toy breeds that now frolic in the specially segregated small dog run.

“Don’t worry,” said the dog run manager and dog trainer, Garrett Rosso, introducing Mr. Michael to the crowd of about 80 who gathered at an information session at the park on Sunday. “He knows that we’re not the type of dog run where people sit around on the edges and are afraid of certain breeds.”
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Michelle Rick

Good morning, East Village.

Even with the start of winter today, one of the summer’s most significant stories – the debate over the safety of bike lanes in the neighborhood – remains very much in the news.

The Post reports this morning on a 16 percent increase in collisions between bicycles and other vehicles during the past year, which notes that our neighborhood and downtown Brooklyn have the most perilous intersections. The piece attributes the spike to “rogue cyclists who have turned city streets into demolition derbies.”

“This was a catastrophe in the making as soon as they put those bike lanes up around the city,” The Post quotes a police officer in the neighborhood as saying. “They are arrogant. They think they now own the road and think they can do no wrong. Some even yell at police cars saying they have the right of way.”

In other neighborhood news, DNAinfo has a post about a Christmas tree vendor outside St. Marks Church in the Bowery who has been hit with a $1,500 fine for building a makeshift shack where his employees can stay warm.

Gloria Chung

Good morning, East Village.

We return today after a weekend build-up to holiday cheer. EV Grieve has a report on the tree-lighting in Tompkins Square Park and the “Unsilent Night” celebration. Like many of our readers, some of us will be making a list, checking it twice, then schlepping around the stores this week, so brace yourselves for a slightly less busy The Local than usual.

Nostalgia still abounds, though, as Bowery Boogie offers a look at some footage from a 1928 silent film shot in Washington Square Park and other parts of the neighborhood that shows how driving in New York was a perilous activity even back in the day.

And Ephemeral New York takes in some of the architectural details at 704 Broadway.

Michelle Rick

Good morning, East Village.

Always in the mood for radical political debate, East Village anarchists are divided on the Wikileaks affair, according to The Villager, some supporting Julian Assange’s exposure of government secrets while others wonder if Wikileaks isn’t a phony cover for a government assault on Internet freedom.

If the paranoia is too much, let I Love Charts take you back to a simpler time, when all you had to worry about it in the neighborhood were the Bowery Boys, with their contract killing, gambling and “stockpiling of weapons.” Famous for their dandy dress sense, we’re guessing the Bowery Boys would be shopping at EV Grieve if they were around today.

Gloria Chung

Good morning, East Village.

Those who fear a Starbucks on every corner might breathe a little easier this morning, as the company tells DNAinfo that it currently has no designs on First Avenue or Avenue A. Devotees of bric-a-brac will spare a thought for Billy LeRoy of Billy’s Antiques. Having failed to follow through with a threatened prosecution for illegally selling subway signs, according to Gothamist the city still won’t give him the signs back.

Meanwhile, the threatened Mars Bar has never, it seems, been so newsworthy. Marty Wombacher, who devoted the year to an attempt to visit 365 bars tells Jeremiah that his night at Mars Bar was the most fun of all. Also, evidence at Eater suggests that it’s Santa’s choice for refreshment before the rigors of Christmas night; although, wait – why are we seeing triple?

Some employees of the souvenir shops on St. Marks Place near Cooper Square say they are relying on Christmas sales to boost their revenue before the end of the year.

Business at Village Tattoo is so bad, says one employee, that the store might have to close its doors after 15 years.

Jason Smith, an employee at First Rich Gift Shop across the street tells The Local that revenue so far this December is less than half of what it was at the same time last year.

Vendors say the stores traditionally do well around the holidays and they hope that a break in the weather will bring shoppers into the streets – and maybe even motivate them to spend.

NYU Journalism’s Liz Wagner reports.

Michelle Rick

Good morning, East Village.

At a moment when many people who live in our community are intensely focused on changes brought about by development and the loss of local institutions, The Times offers a fascinating look at new Census data showing how the demographics of neighborhoods in the New York region have shifted over the past decade.

The Lower East Side is cited in the piece as one of the locations in the region where the non-Hispanic white population has surged. The data comes from a five-year survey of neighborhoods across the country; the full Census report is expected to be released early next year.

The story also describes how segregation in city neighborhoods persists. “Most whites in the metropolitan area and most blacks in the city still live where a majority of their neighbors are of the same race,” the article notes. An interactive map also let’s you take a look at the data at the census tract level.

In other neighborhood news, EV Grieve, who last week was outraged by the apparent demise of a local willow tree near Eighth Street and Avenue C, re-visits the block this week and finds that the damage to the tree might not be as bad as originally feared.

The uniformed students of Girls Prep Lower East Side Elementary walk quietly in single file through neon orange hallways, under banners with slogans for the school’s four “core values”: sisterhood, scholarship, merit and responsibility. Since opening in 2005 as the first all-girls charter school in the city, it has been part of an ongoing experiment to boost performance in public schools. And for years now, students there have been quietly defying conventional wisdom about the link between income and academic performance.

At Girls Prep, where 98 percent of students are minority and almost three-quarters come from families with such low incomes that they qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, test scores have exceeded the state median the past few years – one of only a handful of schools in the East Village to do so.

NYU Journalism’s Andre Tartar reports.

Gloria Chung

Good morning, East Village.

We awoke this morning with a dusting of snow coating much of the neighborhood. It seems to have done little, however, to soothe the spirits of many in the neighborhood who fear the passing of some local iconic institutions.

Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York offers long take on the temporary closure of Mars Bar and some then-and-now photos that show how much the neighborhood has changed during the past seven years.

“When people talk about how the city is ‘always changing,’ I tell them this story,” the post reads. “The story of a historic, culturally relevant neighborhood sold down the river, demolished to the roots, and rebuilt into an unrecognizable playground for people passing through with money to burn. All in less than a single decade.” There’s more on Mars Bar at The Wall Street Journal and EV Grieve.

In other neighborhood news, Grieve also has a look at how a local artist traced the oddly-shaped buildings at the intersection of Bowery and Houston to property lines of 19th century farmers.

And The Athenaeum has a photo of Allen Ginsberg taken on the roof of his East Village apartment by William Burroughs in the fall of 1953.

Bruce Monroe

Good morning, East Village.

We begin the week still trying to process many of the sights, sounds and, yes, smells of Santacon. During the weekend, hundreds of revelers dressed as St. Nick descended on East Village bars in an event that seemed to underscore neighborhood tensions around such issues as noise and alcohol. And, as if on cue, The Post offered two pieces over the past few days examining some of those very issues.

One article, headlined “Lower East Side Is Losing It” mourns the loss of Mars Bar, Max Fish and Pink Pony. “There are no neighborhoods in Manhattan anymore,” The Post quotes the author Richard Price saying. “South of Harlem, it feels like a bunch of districts where rich people can crash.”

The second piece took a wildly divergent view citing the recent Capital piece on Superdive to describe how “bohemian snobs” are driving “frat boys” out of the neighborhood. “The story of the East Village might be how little things have changed,” the author writes. “It’s still a cramped little hipster Vatican suspicious of outsiders.” Two pieces very much worth reading.

Meredith Hoffman Shaniqua Pippen said that she was denied admittance to the Continental bar by a bouncer who said “Your kind don’t know how to act.” Ms. Pippen joined a demonstration tonight at the bar.

Yelling “down with racism,” a group of 30 demonstrators gathered tonight outside the Continental Bar to protest what they said was a pattern of bias by the bar’s owners against African-American patrons.

“This is the first protest,” said Shaniqua Pippen, one of the demonstrators. “And I feel like if we continue more people will come, and something will change.”

Ms. Pippen, who is African-American, said that she was turned away from the bar in June when a bouncer, who is also African-American, told her “Your kind don’t know how to act.”

The owner of the Continental, Trigger Smith, denied that there was anything improper about the way that the bar screened its patrons.

“I’m not going to be politically correct and just let anybody in,” Mr. Smith said in an interview earlier this week. “I look at things in the long run — my bar’s been here 19 years — and I’ll turn away people if they don’t meet my dress code.”

Mr. Smith, who is white, said that patrons were not being turned away because of the color of their skin but because the bar has a policy against admitting patrons who do not adhere to its unwritten dress code.

“It just so happens that more people of a certain minority wear these things than others,” Mr. Smith said. “But I don’t want white trash either, or Jersey Shore boys.”
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It’s the final day to buy Four Loko.

After today, it will be illegal for any retailer to sell the alcoholic energy drink in New York, and other states are following suit.

In the final week of Four Loko sales, fans of the beverage have been emptying their wallets to stock up and clearing East Village bodegas of their supplies in the process. Beer distributors and the Chicago-based Four Loko manufacturer, Phusion Projects, were asked to stop restocking the product as of Nov. 19. Retailers who fail to unload the product by today will have to pay a fine.

Why all the fuss? One 24-ounce can of Four Loko contains approximately the same amount of alcohol as five beers, plus the caffeine content of three cups of coffee. In the East Village, most cans, which boast 12 percent alcohol by volume, were selling for $3 or $4.

NYU Journalism’s Claire Glass reports.

Vivienne Gucwa

Good morning, East Village.

With many in the neighborhood still reeling from the expected temporary closure of Mars Bar, EV Grieve notes the loss of a natural neighborhood landmark, a willow tree on Eighth Street near Avenue C.

On the subject of Mars Bar, DNAinfo has a post with more details about how the bar could close as early as the spring and might remain shut for as long as three years. That timeline, DNA notes, “could make it difficult for the diminutive dive to see new life.”

Instead of pondering the future of Mars Bar, Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York re-visits the past through a series of vivid photographs documenting early 20th century life at the intersection of Second Avenue and First Street where the bar stands now. There are some other interesting takes on Mars Bar at The Gog Log and Blackbook.

In other neighborhood news, The Times reports on Thursday’s City Council meeting where one of our community’s most contentious issues – bike lanes – took centerstage. A highlight: Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz borrowing a page from “The Sound of Music” to sing his self-penned “These are a few of my favorite lanes.”

The Local East Village invites you to a Saturday morning group event featuring the use of SeeClickFix to log neighborhood concerns.

On Tuesday, we announced a new collaboration between The Local East Village and SeeClickFix, an organization that offers a variety of platforms to report local non-emergency concerns, such as potholes and broken street lights.

SeeClickFix relies on citizen reporting, and to kick things off, we plan to hold a walk through the East Village to log concerns.

We will meet Saturday morning at 9:30 outside 20 Cooper Square and spend an hour walking the East Village area to report issues.

If you are interested in joining this event, please e-mail me on seeclickfixlev@gmail.com. If you have a smartphone, please download a free SeeClickFix app and bring it with you to log concerns.

We look forward to seeing you there, and please remember that you can log issues at any time on the map page on this site.

You can also post to SeeClickFix while on the go using mobile devices and you can follow posts within the East Village area via @SeeClickFixLEV on Twitter.