Ria Chung Good morning, East Village.
Ellen Moynihan, who penned a history of the 1990 May Day riot in Tompkins Square Park and also photographed marches last week, tells Gothamist how she feels about anarchists trying to obstruct photographers. “The idea that people who are anarchists can tell me what to do is ridiculous. If you’re going to create a public spectacle in a public street you’re out of your mind if you think people aren’t going to photograph you.”
Speaking of demonstrations, film critic J. Hoberman, on his Movie Journal blog, says that Sara Abruña, the Cooper Student student who was arrested during Jesse Kreuzer’s stand-off atop the Peter Cooper monument, was merely trying to get to Mr. Hoberman’s class inside of the school’s Great Hall. The student “apparently thought she had the right to walk from one Cooper building to another. Not so: She was thrown to the pavement, handcuffed, arrested, charged with ‘harassment, disorderly conduct and obstructing governmental administration,’ and spent the night in custody.”
Runnin’ Scared points out that Abe Haruvi, the landlord who is refusing to renew leases at 50 and 54 East Third Street has been in the news before, for attempting to reclaim an apartment building from rent-stabilized tenants. Read more…
Scott Lynch Good morning, East Village.
Flaming Pablum isn’t getting behind the news we posted yesterday about CBGB being revived as a summer festival. The site writes, “While, yes, seemingly all vestiges of the East Village’s once-thriving musical character and legacy have gone the way of the stegosaurus, I can’t help thinking that naming these new ventures after CBGB is simply an inorganic way of cashing-in.”
Speaking of musical legacy, the late Adam “MCA” Yauch of the Beastie Boys has already been immortalized via a mural on East Seventh Street spotted by EV Grieve.
Another man went missing in the East Village, but only briefly. Yesterday the police sent out notice that they were looking for a man, Victor Rivera, who was last seen on Avenue D on Sunday. The 70-year-old man spoke only Spanish and was wearing a medic alert bracelet when he disappeared. Just hours after the bulletin went out, the missing man was found. Read more…
Phillip Kalantzis-CopeGood morning, East Village.
For its profile of Ed Sanders, NPR spoke to Claudia Dreifus at The Local’s “Blowing Minds” event celebrating The East Village Other. The Times writer says of the East Village in the ’60s, “It didn’t take much money to live. You could live poor, you could have a lot of fun.” Standing across from the former location of his Peace Eye Bookstore on Avenue A, Mr. Sanders says, “The bookstore became pretty famous. It was the stopping off point for all visiting librarians and professors because I had a lot of well-known writers hanging out there — William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg.”
The Times reports that bar denizens of the East Village and Lower East side took the death of Adam Yauch especially hard. In addition to the impromptu memorial outside of Bad Burger, 2A projected Beastie Boys concert footage on a wall across from the bar.
Handsome Dick Manitoba sees a lesson to be learned from Yauch’s death at 47: “PLEASE, ENJOY EACH DAY AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE!” Read more…
Scott Lynch Good morning, East Village.
And happy birthday to Keith Haring. As you may have noticed, Google has revamped its logo in honor of the artist.
According to The Villager, the Anshe Mezeritz synagogue on East Sixth Street is attempting to prove in court that a Brooklyn rabbi who was convicted of stealing a Torah was lying when he claimed to be an assistant rabbi at the East Village synagogue.
Bowery Boogie takes us on a spirited tour of St. Marks Place. Typical nugget: “Friends, there’s only one building in NYC that can boast Teddy Roosevelt as a speaker and the Grateful Dead as performers, and it is Arlington Hall.” Read more…
Bahram Foroughi Good morning, East Village.
According to DNA Info, the northbound lanes of the FDR were closed from 11th Street to 14th Street following a car accident this morning. The site has no information about the crash itself.
Following a mistrial, The Post reports that a second jury has started hearing testimony in the case of a man accused of punching a woman into a coma on East 14th Street.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the Neighborhood School’s library has been saved thanks in part to a $10,000 donation from the Standard East Village. “We should be raising money for extras—like the trampoline,” says Marjorie Ingall, a parent. “Not the library and the arts program. But this is the new reality. We have to get better at fundraising.” Read more…
Photos: Scott Lynch
Good morning, East Village.
Yesterday we spent 19 hours live-blogging May Day activities throughout the city: you can find our initial report here and our follow-up here. There was even a David Byrne cameo. Now a video of one of the arrests has popped up on YouTube (hat tip to Google Alerts). And above, here are Scott Lynch’s photos of Tom Morello’s “guitarmy” in Bryant Park and the festivities at Union Square.
Elsewhere: More Than Usual spots a swastika on the construction plywood at 51 Astor Place.
Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York discovers that sculptor Randy Hage has created a miniature version of Mars Bar. Read more…
Scott LynchGood morning, East Village.
Stay tuned for The Local’s comprehensive coverage of May Day. With major Occupy protests set to begin across the city later today, a number of smaller protest activities have been scheduled for points across the East Village. Among them is a demonstration touted by GOLES via Twitter: “This MAY DAY, LES Public Housing Residents take their struggle to the streets! Meet Up: 2pm Houston & Ave. D”
From 3 p.m. to 4 p.m., workers at The Strand plan to stage a picket outside the bookstore as a part of the 99 Pickets, which are taking place across the city on Tuesday.
And later, at 5:30 p.m., rent reform activists plan to hold a “Tenants’ General Assembly” outside Cooper Union’s Great Hall.
Before all that pops off, here, care of the Allen Ginsberg Project, is the poet waxing revolutionary in Prague, where he had been elected May King thirty years earlier. Read more…
Michael NataleGood morning, East Village.
With May Day around the corner, the Cooper Square Committee announces in an e-mail that tomorrow at 5 p.m., as the Rent Guidelines Board makes its annual vote about raising rent-stabilized rents, there will be a “Tenants General Assembly” at 7 East Seventh Street: “It will be like an OWS general assembly, where you talk about your experiences with the RGB using the ‘people’s mike.’ People will also talk about the origins of tenant protections, the peoples’ struggles to protect them, and the roots of the dreaded RGB.” More info here.
Runnin’ Scared hears rumors that hundreds of police are training on Randall’s Island in preparation for tomorrow’s festivities. Mayor Bloomberg doesn’t say anything about the rumors but tells the blog, “We are prepared for everything we can think of all the time. Our tactics are something that we don’t talk about in advance for obvious reasons.”
Tomorrow will also be the 79th anniversary of Dorothy Day’s founding of the Catholic Worker Movement. The Times visits a resident of one of the Catholic Worker’s two East Village buildings: “Megan Fincher, who, at 29, having completed college (at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where Day studied) and graduate school, decided to devote herself to the movement.” Back in October, The Local also paid a visit to the residences – which, according to The Times, offer “lessons in the kind of radical empathy we rarely get to witness.” Read more…
joanrroseGood morning, East Village.
The Post reports that four 9mm guns – along with cash, jewelry, two bulletproof vests and an iPad – have disappeared from inside lockers at the Ninth Precinct station houses. Officers suspect an inside job.
An East Village man who was in a coma for two weeks after an air conditioning unit fell on him on Second Avenue has suddenly disappeared, possibly walking away from a rent-dispute settlement that would’ve netted him $25,000 and a lawsuit that might’ve brought in another $21 million. According to the Post, his lawyer is perplexed.
Writing for the Washington Square News, N.Y.U. student Ben Miller says the school doesn’t seem to be as frat-driven as others: “N.Y.U. has its flaws, but this kind of widespread Nihilistic violence, against others and against ourselves, is not one of them.” Read more…
Scott LynchGood morning, East Village.
The Daily News reports that Jesse Kreuzer, the student who faced off with police atop the Peter Cooper monument yesterday, has been charged with reckless endangerment, criminal trespass and obstructing governmental administration. A student who tried to duck under a police line was also arrested.
There was also discontent at N.Y.U. yesterday, as three faculty members penned an op-ed for The Times about N.Y.U. 2031. “Our graduates are among the most indebted in the nation,” they write. “We’d rather see such misery ended than prolonged. This brings us to the academic impact. While Mr. Sexton has said often that his plan will make N.Y.U. strong, it will very likely have the opposite effect. This expansion of the university will eventually degrade our student body.”
According to The Post, “The Occupy Wall Streeter accused of dumping buckets full of urine and feces around the Financial District last month has been deemed mentally unfit to assist in his own defense, officials said yesterday.” Read more…
Phillip Kalantzis-Cope Good morning, East Village.
The Times looks back on what made Lakeside Lounge so special (“once, while Joey and Dee Dee Ramone played, audience members watched the police raid a nearby crack house and line suspects up against the picture window beside the stage”) and gives a clue as to why it’s closing at the end of the month: “[Owner Eric] Ambel said rent and expenses had more than quadrupled since the mid-1990s, forcing him and Mr. Marshall to face the prospect of deviating from the formula that had served Lakeside, its musicians and its patrons so well.” According to WNYC, the rent was $9,000 a month.
Flaming Pablum uses the closing of Lakeside as an excuse to look back on five other bygone dive bars, including Alcatraz on St. Marks Place, an “endearingly seedy joint that catered to acolytes of all things loud, boozy and rude.”
With the average rent in Manhattan at $3,418 a month and the vacancy rent at just 1 percent despite the lagging economy, The Times lays down some real talk: “For those who find buying a home in New York City is not an option — whether because of bad credit, tougher lending standards or lack of a down payment — the choices are limited and often unappealing.” If you are buying, the Daily News points out that there are still deals to be found in the Lower East Side. Read more…
Rachel Citron Good morning, East Village.
In The Villager, the neighborhood’s radical comic book artist, Seth Tobocman, describes the arrest of two men at the Sixth Street Community Center on Saturday. “They unquestionably had been beaten,” he says. “They looked totally f—– up. They’d been on the ground with a bunch of guys on top of them for about 10 to 15 minutes. They got beat up. You would not want to be them.”
By the way, anarchists aren’t anything new: Studio 360 puts in a good word for the East Village poetry tour created by one of its former producers, Pejk Malinovski, and posts a snippet in which “at St. Marks Church, we hear the ‘benefit shooting’ of 1968, when Allen Van Newkirk and some fellow anarchists interrupted Kenneth Koch with a fake gun, seizing poetry for the revolution.”
Perhaps surprisingly, the East Village doesn’t make Curbed’s list of the 10 neighborhoods with the highest number of rent-regulated units. The Lower East Side and Chinatown place tenth on the list. Citywide, the number of rent-controlled units has gone down from 285,733 in 1981 to 38,374 in 2011. Read more…
Scott Lynch Good morning, East Village.
The Daily News reports that Michael McManus, a.k.a. the White-Glove Bandit, was arrested near Tompkins Square Park yesterday afternoon. The F.B.I. believes he’s the man who robbed the HSBC branch at Broadway and East Ninth Street on Monday, along with three other banks.
Dwyane Wade wasn’t spotted at Tompkins Square Park on Sunday, despite the Post’s report that the NBA star played a game of pick-up basketball with some kids there (The Observer points out that he was at Thompson Street Playground in SoHo). But another celeb was spotted in the East Village: Rachel Weisz checked out a $8.5 million townhouse at 238 East Fourth Street, between Avenues A and B. The Post calls the townhouse “gorgeous” — you be the judge!
Speaking of which, Real Estate Weekly reminds us that it’s harder to score an East Village apartment than some people think. One group is having trouble finding a true four-bedroom for $5,500 a month, and their broker “recently convinced another college student, who was bent on living by herself in the East Village on a budget of $1,700 a month, to search for cheaper apartments on the Upper East Side.” Ouch. Read more…
Suzanne RozdebaGood morning, East Village.
The Local snapped the above shot a day before longstanding vegetarian spot Kate’s Joint was seized by its landlord yesterday, presumably due to the back rent it owed.
Gothamist reports that a National Lawyers Guild observer is suing the NYPD for wrongfully arresting him on Second Avenue between East 12th and 13th Streets during an Occupy Wall Street march back in the early hours of New Year’s Day.
A real estate broker tells The Voice that you can still get a deal in the East Village. “You could get a small, two-bedroom apartment [in a walk-up], with a kitchen you could cook in for $3,000 a month,” she says. “I’m not saying the rooms are going to be the size of Texas, but I think that’s a bargain. And you have fantastic restaurants.”
Read more…
Stephen Rex Brown Scaffolding went up at Second Avenue and Sixth Street yesterday.Good morning, East Village.
If you missed our coverage earlier this morning of Community Board 3’s S.L.A. committee meeting last night, well then here it is. The Standard East Village didn’t show up to pitch its dining overhaul, but a couple of iconic bars, Joe’s and Nice Guy Eddie’s, got nods of approval for new ownership.
The Mosaic Man tipped us off to his latest work outside of the Bean on Second Avenue. This one is a tribute to the building’s notorious “crazy landlord.”
While organizers of the Anarchist Book Fair disavowed Satuday’s violence, Salon tackled the question of just how much the mayhem had to do with Occupy Wall Street. Natasha Lennard witnessed the impromptu march: “It was rowdy, energetic and fast. Barricades and trash cans were dragged into the street to stop traffic and impede the police cars that eventually arrived on the scene. At one point, two young women watching the surge of people winding through stalled traffic asked me whether this was an ‘Occupy thing.’ I answered ‘yes.’ But, as I soon appreciated, it’s more complicated than that.” Meanwhile, the Daily News digs in to one suspect’s arrest record. Read more…
Suzanne RozdebaGood morning, East Village.
New Music Daily reports that Avenue B fixture Lakeside Lounge has been sold and will close at the end of the month. The bar joins Nice Guy Eddie’s in closing after a 15-year run. “To a generation of pampered, status-grubbing white invaders from the suburbs, Lakeside made no sense,” the site laments. “The place wasn’t kitschy because its owners were genuinely committed to it, and to the musicians who played there. It had no status appeal because it was cheap, dingy and roughhewn, and Ambel refused to book trendy bands.”
Handsome Dick Manitoba isn’t happy about Lakeside’s impending closure. “Sad news. For US, OUR neighborhood, and OUR culture,” he writes on the Maniblog. “Manitoba’s has has been having a terrible time trying to stay intact and not disappear into a sea of 7-11’s, Subways, Starbucks, and, name your BANK.”
Speaking of 7-Elevens: After taking the neighborhood’s pulse about the one that’s coming to St. Marks Place on Friday, The Daily News asks a Chinatown deli owner how he’s dealing with the 7-Eleven that recently opened a block away from him. “It’s definitely going to affect my business and I’m trying to be separate from what they’re carrying,” says the shopkeeper. Read more…
Suzanne Rozdeba Good morning, East Village.
Above: Ray’s Candy Store, home of Obama fries, is now saluting Occupy Wall Street. Meanwhile over at Cooper Square, the Illuminator saluted the 99 percent again last night: see our photos here. And check it out: Ray now has a Wikipedia page, and according to The Villager, he has a new iPhone, too.
Earlier this week, when The Local spotted 7-Eleven signage going up over St. Marks Place, a representative told us the store would open at the end of this month. Now The Daily News trolls local residents for reactions and hears more or less the same thing we heard back in September: “We got rid of The Gap 15 years ago,” says one local. “We can get rid of 7-Eleven.”
The Post reports that Andrew Hanson, the “book worm” who was caught selling stolen library books to East Village Books, has been sentenced to 2.5 to 5 years in jail for felony burglary. Read more…
Stephen Rex Brown Good morning, East Village.
Signage for that Middle Eastern cafe from the owners of Tompkins Finest Deli has gone up at First Avenue and Second Street, as you can see above. And further up the avenue near St. Marks Place, the space that formerly held Cotan will be replaced by another sushi joint, according to an employee from neighboring JoeDough. The Local spotted plywood going up yesterday.
The Local reported last night that a scuffle on Bleecker and Lafayette Streets involving an alleged iPad thief ended with two police officers going to the hospital with cuts on their arms and legs.
If the Parks Department didn’t want to bait Tompkins Square Park last summer, here’s why: Three red-tailed hawks have been found dead in and around Central Park, and The Times reports that the culprit is rat poison. In happier hawk news, City Room is asking readers to name two baby hawks that just hatched in Washington Square Park. Read more…
Daniel MaurerGood morning, East Village.
A manager at Boukiés, the Greek restaurant that will replace Heartbreak on the corner of Second Street and Second Avenue, tells The Local it will open next Monday. As you can see above, the new restaurant from the owner of Pylos hosted its first private event last night.
Speaking of restaurants, The Times bestows three stars on seasonal Japanese hideaway Kyo Ya, putting it in the company of less than a few dozen others around town. Other East Village establishments to boast the honor are Il Buco, Momofuku Ssam, and Momofuku Ko. Critic Pete Wells writes, “If you have heard of Kyo Ya, chances are you have been told that the kaiseki menu is the thing to get. It is a rare treat, no question, but so are many of the dishes that can be ordered à la carte with a smaller investment of time and money.”
Ryan Devereux, a journalist at The Guardian, tweeted about another demonstration for Trayvon Martin. This one went from Union Square to the Riis Houses and back last night. By his estimate, the crowd was “a few hundred” strong. Read more…
Daniel Maurer Good morning, East Village.
As you can see above, 7-Eleven decals have been plastered on the window of the former JAS Mart on St. Marks Place.
In The Post, real estate developer Stephen B. Meister uses the BP station on Houston Street, which may soon be included in a historic district, as evidence that “most properties in historic districts have no architectural value.” He goes on: “Designating so many neighborhoods as historic districts has played a big role in driving up rents and constraining the housing supply.”
The Real Deal links to a subscription-only Crain’s item reporting that as retail rezoning gains traction on the Upper West Side, community boards in the East Village and Upper East Side are considering restricting storefronts against nightlife use as well. Read more…
