Chester Higgins, Jr./New York Times Shamus Jones.

As you can tell by peeking at the pickle menu at East Village newcomer Boulton & Watt, pickles are popular. So popular that one of the city’s most popular pickle producers might just be opening an eatery of its own.

Shamus Jones, who co-founded Brooklyn Brine in 2009, revealed to The Local that the wholesaler will open a brick-and-mortal location in north Brooklyn.

A source told The Local that the pickler was working with Dogfish Head, the Delaware brewery that had a hand in its popular Hop-Pickle, to open a spot on Bedford Avenue. Mr. Jones wouldn’t comment on the location or the particulars of the operation because he wanted to coordinate an official announcement with the beer company, but he did confirm that the report of a collaboration was true. “It’s a brick and mortar and it’s Dogfish and Brooklyn Brine,” he said.

The project won’t be a retail shop along the lines of the one that opened in the producer’s Gowanus factory last year. “It isn’t going to be a factory and isn’t going to be a store,” said Mr. Jones.

And Dogfish Head won’t be a full partner, he added. “They don’t have a vested equity or share or whatnot, but I felt so strongly about our initial collaboration and out of respect wanted to incorporate them.”

You can get a taste of the Brooklyn Brine-Dogfish Head magic at Eataly’s rooftop beer garden on Wednesday, assuming you have a ticket. Brooklyn Brine pickles will be served at a sold-out lunch featuring Dogfish Head and Sierra Nevada beers.

Courtesy Billy Leroy

Billy Leroy has his hands full with “Baggage Battles,” the Travel Channel show in which he stars: the show just premiered in France, and tomorrow a new season begins shooting in Red Hook.

But what about the tent on the Bowery that launched him to fame in the first place? According to the eccentric antiques dealer, the store is currently in “limbo” and there’s a chance it won’t be back — at least, not on the Bowery.

Mr. Leroy buried his shop last March, with plans to reopen it in a building planned for the lot where the tent once stood (and where a coffin briefly took its place).

But that plan may have changed following the death of his landlord, Tony Goldman, in September. “I have not been approached by his family to do a new Billy’s,” Mr. Leroy told The Local. “I have heard of no plans of building since Tony passed, so we will see. Right now what remains of Billy’s is the skeletal structure, a memory of the Old Bowery.” He added of his former landlord, “He was a really great man. He supported the store and artists… it is a great loss.”
Read more…

Daniel Maurer The water is still flowing in our offices. Now will
someone please clean their dishes?

East Villagers are complaining of lack of water after a water main burst in the Flatiron this morning.

The pipe broke at 10:45 a.m. at West 23rd Street and Broadway, and caused flooding that resulted in the suspension of N, Q and R trains between Whitehall station and West 57th Street, The Post reported.

On Twitter, East Villagers have been complaining. “Water out in my building in the East Village, assuming it has something to do with the burst water main on 23rd St,” tweeted David Gillespie.

Alison Leary, N.Y.U.’s Executive Vice President for Operations, said in an-email that the disruption to the water supply was “having an impact on many N.Y.U. facilities.” Washington Square News confirmed that the Third Avenue North and Broome Street residences were “suffering water loss.”

Jonathan Krohn, a contributor to The Local and a resident of Third North, said that water went out there about an hour ago. Asked if students were freaking he said, “No one is freaking.”
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Scott Lynch

Good morning, East Village.

As you can see above and read about on Thrillist, Breads Bakery has opened in Union Square.

The city’s Commission on Human Rights has dismissed charges that Continental bar had a racist door policy. “The ownership of the bar provided us with videotapes showing customers that were going in and out,” says a deputy commissioner at the agency. “There was no indication that people of color were being turned away. People of color were being admitted.” [East Villager]

The Greenwich Village Preservation Society is upset about NYU’s plans to place physics labs, classrooms and other facilities in 726 Broadway: “What the university never revealed was that these plans would violate the special zoning restrictions for Noho and Soho, require a precedent-setting zoning variance, and involve the addition of a highly intrusive, four-story mechanical penthouse atop the building.” [Off the Grid]
Read more…

Gloria Chung

Good morning, East Village.

This afternoon a Lower East Side Unity Rally will convey a message of “no more violence!” in the wake of Raphael Ward’s killing. The rally begins at 5:30 p.m. at Avenue D and East Sixth Street. [The Lo-Down]

Alphabet City is one of 12 neighborhoods that qualify for a $200,000 grant meant to build business-improvement associations. [DNA Info]

There are still tons of bodegas in the city, “but there’s no denying that the texture of the city would be flattened if the idiosyncratic bodega became an endangered species. Not so much because of what the stores sell as because of the larger role they play in the community.” [The Atlantic Cities]

Eddie Huang on business attire: “I do a lot of meetings, whether I’m at networks or publishers, and everybody is in suits—but I don’t want to wear a suit, so I wear sweat suits.” [GQ via Eater]

“Cata, which opened on the Lower East Side last September, specializes in tapas and gin and tonics, a combination, it’s fair to say, that is not available on every corner.” [NY Times]

Daniel Maurer

The new year has brought yet more verbal volleys between New York University’s president, John Sexton, and the most vocal opponents of the school’s plan to grow its footprint in Greenwich Village and around the world.

Friday, Mr. Sexton, who in March faces the possibility of a vote of “no confidence” from the faculty members of N.Y.U.’s School of Arts and Sciences, sent an e-mail welcoming professors back from winter recess and indicating that he had been “reflecting over the break on various aspects of the University’s direction.”

“NYU has come a long way in a short time,” wrote Mr. Sexton, the school’s president of 11 years, “but one area in which I believe we have fallen far short is the level of broad faculty involvement in our decisional process. As President I take full responsibility for this, as well as the need to remedy it.”
Read more…

Kurt Cobean

Leonardo DiCappuccino is coming to a cup near you.

Tired of crafting the usual foam leafs in latte, Bushwick artist Mike Breach began blending his talent for brewing up puns with his job as a barista at the Ace Hotel.

The result? Kurt Cobean. Soy George. Ziggy Starbucks.
Read more…

Since 1996, A-1 Records on Sixth Street has attracted countless vinyl enthusiasts to its bins of hip-hop, jazz, soul, disco, and house music. On any given afternoon, disc diggers discuss what white-label 12-inches they’re going to DJ, tossing out obscure names that are foreign even to the other die-hards flipping through the stacks.

Ron Morelli, one of the four employees at A-1, has seen dramatic changes in the city’s electronic music scene during his ten years of spinning vinyl. The DJ, whose discovery of punk and hardcore started him on his journey into underground music and culture, started the DIY dance music label, Long Island Electrical Systems, in 2009 to showcase gritty, analog-based techno and house. He’s also used L.I.E.S. as a vehicle to release his own music (along with co-conspirators Jason Letkiewicz and Steve Summers) under the moniker Two Dogs In a House.

The small-run 12” records that Mr. Morelli releases (many of which feature hand-stamped track listings on the dust jacket) feel intimate: it’s clear they’ve been lovingly assembled by hand. Early releases by Steve Moore and Professor Genius started the buzz that has collectors rushing to buy the releases before they hit Discogs for quadruple their initial price.

Despite the sold-out events Mr. Morelli DJs in New York and Brooklyn and the label’s success in Europe, there’s a low-key presence to L.I.E.S. Rather than a lavish release party, L.I.E.S. artist Professor Genius first spun his latest 12″, “Hassan,” at Heathers Bar on a Thursday night. Recently, Mr. Morelli shared his thoughts on the changing face of New York’s electronic music scene and the state of record stores.
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Nicole Guzzardi

The Master: Cheryl Magliocca is the proud “grandmama” of her daughter Lauren’s pup. Lauren is an East Village resident. When Cheryl visits her about once a month from Charlotte, North Carolina, she takes her beloved grand-doggy to the dog run.

The Dog: Lily, a two-year-old Pug and Havanese mix. Jokingly called the “clearance dog,” because she was on sale for quite some time before Lauren scooped her up, saving her life and giving her a safe home.

Favorite Food: “Well, we just shared a hamburger,” Ms. Magliocca said, laughing. “So she definitely likes those.”

Favorite Spot: Lily loves to sleep right by Lauren’s head, Ms. Magliocca said, but when she comes to visit her daughter, Lily can be found sleeping by Ms. Magliocca’s head instead.

Best Friend: Casey, a neighborhood Golden Retriever. Casey will actually hold Lily’s leash in her mouth and walk her around. “She won’t drop it unless you tell her to and Lily just lets her do it,” she said.

Last week “Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg” opened at the Grey Art Gallery. The photos of Beat icons amount to a love letter to a lost New York. They prompted novelist Porochista Khakpour to look back.

Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York. © 2012 The Allen Ginsberg LLC. All rights reserved.Allen Ginsberg, 1955.

The year is 1996 — as it turns out, Allen Ginsberg’s last full year on the planet — and I’m 18 and new to New York. I attend an ill-fitting fancy liberal arts school located 20 minutes north of the city. Every semester I write letters thanking my benefactor for my scholarship and my suitemates remind me their parents pay full-price, and I spend as little time there as possible. Instead, three to four days a week, I take the Metro-North into the city — jump the train, in fact, as another scholarship kid taught me. Many nights I miss the last train back to campus on purpose and stroll the East Village streets and diners and cafes and bars until dawn when I get back to Grand Central.

I care about two things: reading and writing. As a suburban Los Angeles kid, the Beats were my first literary loves and my guide to New York’s downtown life. In my first months in the city, I try to find the corners that resemble my favorite movie (Cassavetes’s “Shadows”) and try to spot the bars and cafés Kerouac and Ginsberg and Burroughs frequented. Some were there; some were not. Cedar Tavern downtown, where Kerouac supposedly pissed in an ashtray, the West End across from Columbia where Ginsberg and Lucien Carr played chess, were all just packed full of kids my age in hooded sweatshirts, hooting over big pitchers of beer — the same set you’d see at a Midwest state school on Super Bowl weekend. I started haunting St. Mark’s Poetry Project and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, in hopes of finding my own neo-Beat scene but I felt late even to the spoken-word and slam-poetry scene of the nineties, which was approaching its own flaccid fizzle.

One thing remained: Allen Ginsberg. He was still alive and well, it seemed — living on East 12th Street near First Avenue, but you’d see him all over the East Village’s single digits and into the alphabets, often alone but looking like he was rushing to meet someone, someone I’d care about. It was through him that I discovered my favorite coffee shop — the Ukrainian diner Kiev, where 50-cent coffee and borscht became my meal of choice, after I’d encountered the poem in which he canonized the spot with “I’m a fairy with purple wings and white halo/ translucent as an onion ring in/the transsexual fluorescent light of Kiev/
Restaurant after a hard day’s work.” Read more…

Dana Varinsky

A woman thought to be 75 years old was hit by a taxi while crossing East Sixth Street at Avenue C this afternoon. According to a construction worker who was present at the time, a police car was at the corner when the accident occurred, and responded immediately. The woman was taken to the hospital with severe injuries. Her current condition is unknown.

Earlier this afternoon, East Sixth Street was closed at Avenue C: half the block to the east was sectioned off with police tape, and at least nine police cars were parked along Avenue C. The taxi was sitting inside the taped-off area while police examine the scene.

Gloria Chung

Good morning, East Village.

Sue Palchak-Essenpreis, who was forced to leave her East Village apartment when the building was sold to a new landlord, still walks by the building on a regular basis “like a jealous ex-girlfriend.” [NY Observer]

“Rumors have circulated for months that Dovetail chef John Fraser would be the chef at The Standard East Village, the former Cooper Square Hotel that was taken over by Andre Balazs. Today, folks at the property confirm that the vegetable-obsessed chef will indeed be at the helm of the kitchen.” [Zagat]

“World War 4 Report editor Bill Weinberg will be leading a weekly walking tour highlighting struggles for urban space on New York’s Lower East side over the past generation—including the squats, community centers, community gardens and Tompkins Square Park.” [WW4 Report]

At a new exhibit of Allen Ginsberg’s photographs “it does not come as a surprise that the best thing about the poet’s photos are their captions.” [Gallerist NY]

Two Boots is expanding to the newly hip town of Nashville. [Grub Street]

Mary Reinholz Drew Figueroa

A dispute is heating up between a city-supported non-profit and the for-profit bar that occupies its ground floor. The Clemente Soto Velez Cultural & Educational Center wants Drew Figueroa, a former program director and board member, to shut down the lobby bar he has operated for over a decade, but he isn’t going without a fight. Tonight, Community Board 3 will issue its final word on the matter, voting on whether or not to recommend The Suffolk for a liquor license renewal.

Founded on the Lower East Side in 1994, the cultural center, which has hosted events ranging from Latino puppet shows to Shakespearian drama, seems to regard Mr. Figueroa as a subtenant from hell. It has tried to evict him for rent arrears, and now it’s trying to keep him from selling alcohol.

Earlier this month, Jan Hanvik, the center’s executive director, called Mr. Figueroa a “rogue tenant” during a meeting of Community Board 3’s liquor licensing committee and urged it not to support a renewal of The Suffolk’s beer-and-wine license, which expires at the end of next month. Mr. Hanvik claimed that the bar had created a “laundry list of problems” that jeopardized the center, including noise complaints from neighbors, a violation for accepting fake IDs from minors, and purported incidents of violence, one involving a bloody shirt found in the bar’s toilet. (City 311 data shows 29 noise complaints at 107 Suffolk Street since 2010.)

Mr. Figueroa denounced all the charges as falsehoods. He said earlier the shirt got bloodied when he bit down too hard on a Cuban sandwich and broke a tooth.
Read more…

Scott Lynch

Good morning, East Village.

Video shows men who had been drinking at Libation beating 37-year-old Kyam Washington on the corner of Essex and Rivington Street. The defendants say Washington prompted the attack by attempting to rob one of them. [NY Daily News]

“Nearly 1,000 friends and supporters packed the Great Hall at the Cooper Union on Saturday to honor Aaron Swartz, the Internet activist who killed himself. [NY Daily News, City Room]

“A woman is in serious condition after jumping in front of a train in Williamsburg this morning, authorities said.” [NY Post]

“A woman was seriously injured after she set herself ablaze outside her lower East Side home on Saturday in a psychotic bid to ‘kill the demons inside her,’ sources said.” [NY Daily News]
Read more…

Suzanne Rozdeba

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, everyone. We’re off contemplating the windows at 7A. Barring any breaking news, we’ll see you back here tomorrow!

Holy smokes! We haven’t seen a line like this since, well, noodle nuts stormed Momofuku.

So why are all these folks waiting to get into Finnerty’s on Second Avenue when the place isn’t even serving drinks? Well, the 2012 World Series trophy is hanging out there until 6 p.m. But be prepared to wait your turn for that coveted trophy kiss (and a glimpse of general manager Brain Sabean): the queue of San Fran transplants is 140 strong. And that’s just the line to get in! There’s a second line (about half a block long) for securing tickets. A woman at the front said she had been waiting for about three hours.

Hey, at least the weather’s nice — in fact it feels downright Bay Area right now.

Daniel Maurer

The church that hosted a “Wear a Hoodie to Church” mass in honor of Trayvon Martin is now preaching and praying for gun control.

Middle Collegiate Church, located on Second Avenue between Sixth and Seventh Streets, plans to honor Martin Luther King, Jr.’s principles of nonviolence by participating in a Gun Violence Prevention Sabbath this Sunday, along with 150 other churches across the country.

Reverend Jacqui Lewis said it was important to add faith-based voices to the national conversation about guns. “Making a just world is essential to our faith,” she said. Ms. Lewis explained that joining the movement around gun control feels especially relevant now, since 2013 marks the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. “The church and faithful people everywhere are called to work for a better life, a peaceful life,” she said, adding, “’love, period’ is our motto.”

The worship will begin at 11:15 a.m. Sunday and is open to the public. Christina Fleming, Middle Collegiate Church’s Director of Communications, said several guests from Broadway are planning to participate in the “extremely musically infused” celebration.

To make sure everyone including the disabled can attend such events, Middle Collegiate is currently working to add an elevator to its building, which dates back to 1892. According to Ms. Lewis, the congregation is still raising the necessary funds, though construction is already underway.

The project has been in the works for a number of years and will be completed in October, Ms. Fleming explained: “We strive to be a very inclusive church and we wanted to make the building more accessible to all people.”

For now, Ms. Lewis is asking congregants to write to their congressional representatives and join her in a march for gun control in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 26. “We’re asking people to make a commitment to pray by writing these letters, make these letters our prayer, to pray by using our feet to march for justice,” she said.