Suzanne Rozdeba

Racing heart? Sweaty palms? Dizziness? Either you’re in love or you’re having a panic attack over the fact that Valentine’s Day is right around the corner. Or maybe both. Either way, you should climb back off the window ledge because we’ve got just what you need this year. Regardless of whether you are madly in love or just plain mad, there’s Valentine’s Day fun to be had in the East Village.

TRULY, MADLY, DEEPLY IN LOVE

Merchant’s House Museum

Love in the Parlors: A Valentine’s Concert
Merchant’s House Museum, 29 East Fourth Street, (212) 777-1089; 7 p.m. to 8:15 p.m.
Woo your date with a romantic evening of classical music, as the Bond Street Euterpean Singing Society performs the works of 19th-century composers like Rossini, Schubert, Liszt, Brahms, Stephen Foster, Amy Beach and more in the Greek revival double parlor of the Merchant’s House Museum. Reservations required: $30 general admission, $20 seniors and students, $15 members.

“Aphrodisiacs & Music at Jimmy’s No. 43”
Jimmy’s No. 43, 43 East Seventh Street, (212) 982-3006; noon to 2 a.m.
Skip all the pre-fixe meals and head to Jimmy’s No. 43 for a la carte dishes featuring aphrodisiacs like oysters and chocolate. Plus there will be plenty of craft beer, cider and sparkling wine. If the booze and food don’t get to your lover’s heart, then hopefully the music will. SisterMonk is performing in the back room at 9 p.m. No cover, but reservations are recommended.

“Pancake Special at Clinton Street Baking Company”
Clinton St. Baking Company, 4 Clinton Street, (646) 602-6263; 6 p.m. to 11 p.m.
Indulge in breakfast for dinner with your sweetheart. Sharing will help stave off the sugar coma from the chocolate chunks, fresh raspberries, and raspberry caramel sauce that the special pancakes are drowning in.
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This might be the quirkiest song about the neighborhood since the Magnetic Fields penned “The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side”: an Italian band, Honeybird and the Birdies, just posted this video for their song, “East Village.” It was actually filmed in Italy (presumably in their hometown of Rome) but it’s pretty clear they’re singing about the East Village of New York, not the ones in Vancouver or Chicago. After all, the lyrics go “Have you ever been to the East Village? … I have only been to Brooklyn… How long is the subway ride from Brooklyn to the Lower East Side,” and then the song breaks into a balalaika-backed rap about rabbis and bagels and cream cheese. (The band has songs in English, Italian, Mapudugun, Catanese, German and Macedonian, by the way.)

But so anyway, the fun part comes at the end, when an East Village institution makes an appearance. We won’t spoil the surprise: just give it a watch.

Still can’t decide how to spend Fat Tuesday? One thing’s for sure: with New Orleans spots a’plenty, you needn’t leave the East Village to “laissez les bon temps roulez.” Here’s our last-minute guide to local bars and eateries celebrating the holiday.

Scott Lynch

Coyote Ugly
153 1st Avenue, between East 9th and 10th Streets
In addition to the dive’s usual Bourbon Street-worthy antics, Hurricane Maya drinks and $3 whiskey sours will be served.

Back Forty
190 Avenue B, between East 11th and 12th Streets
The southern-inflected comfort-food spot is hosting a three-day festival to celebrate Mardi-Valentino, which chef Michael Laarhoven describes as “a new holiday between Mardi Gras and Valentine’s Day.” Reserve online (the ticket price goes toward your meal) for a special menu of smoked Andouille sausage, gumbo, blackened snapper, BBQ shrimp, and crawdads. There’ll be Delta blues, Dixieland jazz, and zydeco music.

Billy Hurricane’s
25 Avenue B, between Second and Third Streets
Every day is Mardi Gras at one of the city’s best bars for hurricanes, but tonight it’s “Padi’ Gras,” according to the Facebook page. The bar promises to keep it “rockin’ all night” with drink specials.
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Nicole Guzzardi

Nicole Guzzardi

The Master: David Joffy, who has lived in the same East Village apartment for over 35 years, likes to take his dog to the park two to three times a day, snow or shine.

The Dog: Cookie, a nine-year-old Collie-Shepherd mix. Nickname: Cookarino. Cookie can be found there most days, even when the dog run is a sheet of ice. “If there was a nuclear explosion, she’d still want to be outside,” Mr. Joffy said.

Favorite Food: Chopped liver. Mr. Joffy often tops Cookie’s dry food off with it.

Favorite Hobby: Frequenting The Bean. Mr. Joffy takes her a few times a week and the people there love her. “I drop her leash while inside” he said, “and she walks over to people and they will pet her.”

Claim to Fame: Guarding the park. Cookie will guard the fence, barking at signs of trouble — even if to her that means anyone on skates.

Lila Selim Standing, left to right: Mark Birnbaum, Robert
Bookman and Eugene Remm

Mark Birnbaum and Eugene Remm — owners of buzzy new nightspots The General, Bow, and Finale at 199 Bowery — faced the music last night at a meeting of Community Board 3’s liquor license committee. Alexandra Militano, the committee’s chair, introduced the dapper duo by announcing that Finale had received no less than twenty-seven 311 complaints in November and December between the hours of 3:30 a.m. and 4:30 a.m., and that leading up to the meeting, the committee had received about a half dozen letters of opposition from residents or groups of community members. The one letter of support was from the NYC Hospitality Alliance, of which EMM’s attorney Robert Bookman is a founding member. That produced a cynical chuckle from the audience.

Mr. Birnbaum and Mr. Remm (together EMM Group) were seeking the board’s approval to move the location of their dance floor from the basement to the ground floor, where they would be able to install proper soundproofing. Though by their own admission, they were asking for retroactive approval: the upstairs club has been operational since November.

Of the eleven speakers to comment, Danielle Schwob, an upstairs neighbor, spoke first, saying that the music from the club doesn’t end until 5:30 a.m., construction starts at 7 a.m., and the incessant noise has “seriously derailed my life.” The work-at-home composer said she hadn’t been able to work since the club opened. Other residents had similar complaints about noise, and said that Finale’s management was uncooperative.
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Opening of Unplugged Mondays at Bareburger’s Second Floor lounge

The founder of the popular spoken-word series, The Inspired Word, is up to something new. Last week, Mike Geffner launched an open-mic night for up-and-coming musicians at Bareburger’s East Village location.

So how will Unplugged Mondays hold its own against the well established Monday-night open mics at Sidewalk Café and Nuyorican Poets Café? First off, by cultivating a sense of camaraderie. “Other series you get up, get off, and go home,” said Mr. Geffner. “At my series you get up, get off, and hang out. We’re a real family, a community,” he said.

During the launch of the series last Monday, a total of nine artists performed in front of the second-floor picture window that looks out over the corner of Fifth Street and Second Avenue. (Those signing up for the open mic pay a $10 cover and featured artists get a cut of the amount charged at the door.) One of them, Formerly Fone, transcended the boundaries between spoken word and hip-hop: she delivered symbolic, heart-felt euphemisms enveloped in old-school r&b beats. Another artist sang a 15th-century a capella piece, “O Death!”
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A woman was struck by a car while trying to cross FDR Drive last night, authorities said.

The incident, which occurred in the southbound lane at East Houston Street, was reported at 6:45 p.m., a fire department spokesperson said. The woman was found bleeding from the head and was rushed to Bellevue Hospital.

No criminal activity is suspected, the police said.

This is the second case in a week of a pedestrian being struck on FDR Drive. On Feb. 3 at 5:30 a.m., a 28-year-old man drunkenly tried to sprint across the freeway, the New York Post reported. He suffered a “severe leg injury and head trauma.”

Rachel Citron

Saturday we asked you to send us your photos from the storm. Boy, did we get a flurry of them. Our favorite may have been the one of rat tracks in Tompkins Square Park. “If you look close, you can see impressions left by the tails,” wrote Brian Reardon. “Lovely.” But let’s face it, it was next to impossible to top the NSFW snowman in Tompkins Square Park. And so Francisco Valera is the winner of our contest. Now check out some of the best photos posted to The Local’s Flickr group, below. And send us your rain/slush photos!
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Francisco Valera

Photographer Francisco Valera sends us what might be the photo of the storm. “Last night in the middle of the snow storm a group of kids made this very funny sculpture in the middle of Tompkins Square Park,” he said. “It was a sensation as every one that passed by laughed and took pictures of it.”

You can see more in our photostream.

Got some snow photos of your own? E-mail them to us, or better yet share them with The Local’s Flickr group, where Vivienne Gucwa, Bahram Foroughi, Joann Jovinelly and beau-dog have already shared photos from last night and this morning. We’ll post them here later and the best shot gets $150.

The Space at Tompkins Andrea Stella

Earlier today the Bowery Mission and Catholic Worker told us they were gearing up for an influx of homeless men and women seeking shelter from the storm. Andrea Stella started The Space at Tompkins in 2009, to serve “travelers” that were too old for the city’s youth drop-in centers and who normally don’t take advantage of adult shelters. She said many would be staying at squats or group apartments in Brooklyn tonight. “We got two people a motel room because they had nowhere to go,” she said. “There’s not too many people in town right now.”

Ms. Stella’s volunteer organization helps transient individuals secure a variety of goods and services, including mental health counseling, clean needles, GED prep, college counseling, cell phones, medical care, methadone, and food stamps. We asked her where “travelers” and “crusties” go during cold weather, and what the difference is between the two, anyway.

Where do the people you work with go in the winter?

Most people travel south or west, but the ones who stay are still on the streets. We’ve been able to move our PBJ dinner inside from Tompkins Square Park to Judson Memorial Church on Thursday nights (thank god they donated the room for free, it’s saving us). The people who stick around are mostly people who want to stay in New York, and it’s nice in the winter because without as many people, we can make some headway with individuals (like housing). Read more…

Collection of Coca Crystal

Underground cartoonist Yossarian (a.k.a. Alan Shenker, Captain Stanley, Mr. Buddy) died on Jan. 14 at Beth Israel Hospital. He had a rare cardio-pulmonary condition known as pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH). “Only about 900 cases of PAH are diagnosed in the US each year,” he had told me. “So the pharmaceutical company, specialty pharmacy, and pulmonary clinic all treat you as a big fish that they’ve caught and don’t intend to let go. This means they are highly motivated to keep you going, but it’s an all encompassing program that feels sometimes like joining Scientology.”

A few years ago a PAH sufferer had only about a 15 percent chance of survival for five years, and it amused Yossarian that the drug they used then was Sildenafil—Viagra. “It was PAH patients taking sildenafil having erections that caused Viagra to be prescribed for erectile dysfunction.”

Yossarian was switched to a new drug, Tracleer, which raised the survival rate to 64 percent. But it too had side effects. Although it was keeping him alive, it also made him feel awful most of the time. His head was constantly swimming from the drug’s effects. When he got a pacemaker last summer, he had to stop taking Tracleer and things seemed to go downhill from there.

He wasn’t complaining, though. “Too many people we knew didn’t get to live in my state of disrepair,” he wrote in an e-mail.

Yossarian lived on St. Marks Place for the last 35 years, and before that on Second Street, between B and C, for several years. An audacious and sharp-witted cartoonist for the East Village Other (EVO), New York Ace, Screw and many other underground papers in the late ’60s and ’70s, he had stopped drawing several years ago—but he was writing. He wrote a piece last year about One-Legged Terry for The Local in honor of the East Village Other (EVO) exhibit at NYU. Read more…

Gloria Chung

Good morning, East Village.

Borough President Scott M. Stringer has announced proposals for the East River Blueway that include “development of a new public beach and kayak launch directly beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, where a naturally occurring sand beach forms a rock-strewn crescent that is now fenced off; the creation of two boat launches at Stuyvesant Cove at the ends of 20th and 23rd Streets; the installation of marshlands and sea walls in especially vulnerable flood zones, and the planting of trees and greenery all along the F.D.R. Drive to provide shade and absorb storm water runoff. ” The bike path at 14th Street would also be elevated. [NY Times]

“Thousands of residents in Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village are flummoxed by a lease clause that allows their landlords to hike their rent in the middle of their lease, the Wall Street Journal reported.” [Real Deal]

An elderly woman was in critical condition after being hit by a minivan at Bowery and Bayard. [Gothamist]
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Mel Bailey Shamus Jones and Sam Calagione

Earlier this week we caught wind that Brooklyn Brine would be teaming up with Dogfish Head Craft Brewed Ales in north Williamsburg. Now we can reveal the mystery project will be a sandwich joint specializing in fried pickles. It will open in Williamsburg in May.

At a tasting at La Birreria at Eataly today, Shamus Jones of Brooklyn Brine and Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head said the collaboration had been a long time coming.

The two brands last worked together on a Hop-Pickle made with Dogfish Head’s IPA. Here, they’ll serve those hop-infused pickles as well as “a whole menu of grilled sandwiches with different rotating seasonal pickles and pickles infused in beer and an a la carte menu for pickles,” said Mr. Jones. All of it will amount to “a house built around a fried pickle environment, with quality ingredients and products.”

“This restaurant is going to be used as a pickle beta-testing area for food products and whatnot,” said Mr. Calagione. “It’s going to be more of a test kitchen.” At play will be Randall the Enamel Animal, a custom-made device that infuses beer with the taste of whatever hops, spices, herbs, and fruit are added.

Mr. Jones said he first started frying pickles while working at a high-end vegetable restaurant in Seattle. “As cooks and fat kids, we said, ‘Hey, let’s fry Snickers, let’s fry this, let’s fry that, and eventually we fried pickles. And pickles and beer just worked so well, clearly,” he said.

As 51 Astor Place nears completion, Cooper Square is getting another dose of minimalism, and the Bowery is getting another chain retailer: Muji, a Japanese home supplies and knickknack store, is moving into 52 Cooper Square.

This will be the international chain’s fifth New York City location, including stores on Broadway in SoHo, and at JFK. The brand is also carried at MoMA’s Design Stores.

According to Yoko Kaku, a corporate representative, the outpost near Astor Place will open in mid-April.

The total cost of the renovation, which includes the ground floor and the cellar, is estimated to be $233,120, according to a construction permit application filed with the Department of Buildings.

Muji has stores in 23 countries throughout the world, according to its Website.

In the latest chapter of an ongoing saga, a lawyer representing Faculty Against the Sexton Plan is asking N.Y.U. professors to come forward if they’ve been harassed or intimidated by the school’s administration.

“Some faculty members believe that their promotions have been blocked or stalled since speaking out against the Sexton Plan,” wrote Jim Walden, an attorney at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, in an e-mail encouraging victims to come forward. “Others have reported sudden interference with their plans to move their families into larger faculty apartments. Such retaliation is inappropriate and potentially illegal. The surest way to stop such tactics is to expose them.”

Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of Media, Culture and Communication at N.Y.U. and a spokesperson for Faculty Against the Sexton Plan, said the e-mail was intended to encourage open discussion. “It’s all the more difficult to have that rational conversation when people are afraid to disagree with their superiors,” he told The Local. “We would like people to break this nervous silence and talk honestly and openly about this kind of intimidation, which I think affects people on a broad range of issues.”

Though the e-mail, sent yesterday, doesn’t identify the school’s president as the source of the alleged intimidation and harassment, Mr. Miller was more blunt in conversation with The Local. “It obviously comes from John Sexton,” he said. “Who could it come from but the leader of the institution?” Read more…

Mary Reinholz

A tribute in the window of the Strand quotes remarks that the late Ed Koch made at the bookstore’s 80th anniversary: “I have lived in the Village since 1956, so I grew up with the Strand,” he said with his usual aplomb. “I am actually two years older, so I am in a sense their mentor.”

Fred Bass, owner of the bookstore, told The Local that Mr. Koch was only an occasional visitor, but his appearance in 2007 was a memorable one. “You don’t have to be born in New York City to be a New Yorker,” he told the crowd. “If you lived here for six months and at the end of six months you find that you walk faster, you talk faster and you think faster, you’re a New Yorker.”

Mr. Koch was quite the New Yorker, and quite the Villager, as the Times, the Post, and Off the Grid have pointed out. We can recall seeing the mayor-turned-movie-critic alone at Cinema Village, catching a showing of “The Extra Man,” and then alone again at the Regal Union Square. We spotted him dining at Japonica. In 2011 we filmed him reading his children’s book, “Eddie Shapes Up,” to a group of East Village schoolchildren.

The mayor told students of P.S. 64 that the East Village had gone from an “awful” place that was “very sad,” to a “marvelous place” that was “one of the neighborhoods people want to live in and pay a lot of money to live in,” DNA Info reported. An interactive graphic produced by The Times shows the degree to which the neighborhood’s population grew wealthier in the years since he took office in 1978.

On Facebook, East Village residents didn’t give Koch much credit for that change.

Feminist and journalist Susan Brownmiller called him “a creepy Mr. Magoo who sold out New York to real-estate developers. He was a hater, a baiter.”
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Daniel Maurer The East Village location, still open.

The East Broadway location of Xi’an Famous Foods has quietly closed.

Of course, East Villagers still have the location at 81 St. Marks Place, but if your first bite of the place’s pungent, offal-happy Shaanxi cooking was at the hole-in-the-wall in Chinatown, you’re probably making a sad-face now.

Rest assured, Xi’an has told its Facebook fans that it’s determined to “open up more stores, all while doing our best to stay true to our original concept.” A Facebook post indicates it’s scouting the Upper West Side (which would make it easier for uptown fan Anthony Bourdain to get to the place), but the next outpost will actually be in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, at 86 Beadel Street.

“It is a small storefront attached to our central kitchen facility,” Jason Wang, the owner, said of the fairly remote location. His Facebook post links to a coupon for a free burger or noodle dish during the grand opening on Saturday.

Upward and xi’anward!

Joanna Marshall

The longtime home of Village Scandal was finally seized by its landlord yesterday, but the owner of the 17-year-old hat store is fighting to get it back.

“We’re trying to get the eviction reversed,” Ms. Barrett’s lawyer, Ronald Podolsky, told The Local this morning. On Jan. 25, the shop on East Seventh street was served with an eviction notice demanding it leave by Monday. Mr. Podolsky said he is waiting for word from a city Supreme Court justice regarding the order. He is arguing that the eviction is invalid because lawyers for the landlord, 19 East 7 Group, refused to accept a court order yesterday morning for a stay of eviction.

“They claim the order was a forgery,” said Mr. Podolsky, still in disbelief. “I never saw such a ridiculous situation in my life. They claimed that no orders are signed on a Sunday. Well, the weekend Supreme Court justice signed the order on Sunday. The order is valid. And it’s signed by Wendy.”
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