Emily Canal The SLA and DCA Licensing Committee. Ariel Palitz and Alexandra Militano, second and third from left. David McWater, third from right.

Last night, a rancorous debate between committee members exposed the internal tensions of Community Board 3’s SLA and DCA Licensing Committee, as Jane’s Sweet Buns, a pastry shop that opened on St. Marks Place this summer, managed to clinch the board’s support for a beer and wine license application. A Southern restaurant on Avenue C and a Mexican newcomer on Avenue B also got nods from the board.

The tension began at the start of the meeting when Susan Stetzer, the board’s District Manager, asked those present to abstain from eating or drinking anything but water. She said people complained about messes after meetings.

“I’m not going to sit here for six hours and not have anything to eat or drink,” Mr. McWaters said, adding, “I won’t spill.” Read more…

Suzanne Rozdeba

Neighbors tell DNA Info that Donovan Keith Salgado, who was killed near 12th Street and Avenue C early Sunday, was sociable, sweet, and a “good kid stuck in the wrong crowd.” A vigil is planned tonight.

The Cooper Square Committee informs the Lo-Down and EV Grieve that, at noon, it will be singing a song and handing out an open letter in support of St. Mark’s Bookshop, outside of today’s inauguration of Jamshed Bharucha, Cooper Union’s new president.

EV Grieve notices that Mars Bar has finally been shrouded behind a construction shed. “What this means for the rest of us?” asks Bowery Boogie. “Construction headaches for at least the next two years and the resultant gentrification.” Read more…

Daniel Maurer Lisa Burris and Paul Said.

The truck that the Bean debuted in front of its former storefront last month has been taken off the road – in fact, it only lasted a day. “It was a great idea,” manager Guy Puglia told The Local today, “but we couldn’t do it. It cost us too much money.”

Meanwhile, a half-block away on Third Street between First and Second Avenues, Khufu, a hookah lounge that opened about four and a half years ago, has started operating as a café during the day. Happy news for displaced Bean customers in need of a cappuccino, a croissant, free WiFi, or one of thirty varieties of organic tea? Not necessarily, according to Lisa Burriss, an employee of the cafe and a former director of organizing at Good Old Lower East Side. She said that she had encountered resistance from the coffee shop’s loyalists, in part because – coincidentally, she said – Khufu opened for coffee and brunch service on the day the Bean closed. Read more…

DNA Info reports that at a Community Board 3 committee meeting last week, local residents complained to Deputy Inspector Kenneth Lehr, the commander of the Ninth Precinct, about a bottle redemption center outside of the Fine Fare on Avenue C and Fourth Street that they said was a hub of fighting, public defecation and urination, and other “beyond disgusting” behavior. A year ago, The Local reported that the redemption center in front of Key Food Supermarket at Fourth Street near Avenue A was also the site of fights, including one in which “one lady punched another lady in the face and knocked her out cold,” according to a store employee. Read that story here, and watch the accompanying video –  about a few of the can collectors, who can make $800 to $1,300 per month – above.

Suzanne Rozdeba Mr. Penley at Zuccotti Park

Local activist John Penley said the occupation he’s organizing at Tompkins Square Park tomorrow is going to last 24 hours – regardless of whether or not the cops kick them out.

“We’ll be at the park until midnight. If the police force us out we’re going to leave and take over Avenue A,” Mr. Penley said while camped out at Occupy Wall Street. “If people don’t want to leave, I’ve been asking them to lay down and be arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience. We don’t want another riot, but we will be either in or out of the park for 24 hours.” Read more…

Jacob Sugarman Talia Lugacy speaks at FAB! Festival’s groundbreaking ceremony for 64 East Fourth Street.

Last month, as The Local noted, Fourth Arts Block broke ground on a new not-for-profit center at 64 East Fourth Street. Beginning next fall, the East Village can add film production to the building’s growing list of artistic enterprises. 64E4 Films is the brainchild of Paradise Factory founder Tom Noonan and his fellow board members, including luminaries such as Christopher Walken, Susan Sarandon and Charlie Kaufman. While Paradise Factory has produced films in the past, the group hopes to turn its building into a state-of-the-art film production and exhibition center using its own funds as well as nearly five million dollars in public funds it has raised with fellow non-profits Teatro Circulo and Teatro IATI.

Leading the venture is Brooklyn-born film director Talia Lugacy, who first began her business relationship with Mr. Noonan, 60, when she offered him a supporting role in her 2007 feature “Descent.” Read more…

A feared confrontation between the police and Occupy Wall Street protesters was averted this morning after the company that owns Zuccotti Park postponed a planned cleaning of the plaza.

The morning was not without incident, as a smaller group of several hundred protesters announced their intention to “celebrate” their continued occupation of the park with an unpermitted civil disobedience march through the streets of the Financial District. The group pushed through a police line onto Broadway chanting “Whose streets? Our Streets!” Police on foot and riding motor scooters forced the protesters back onto the sidewalk, only to have the demonstrators spill again into the streets.

As The Local’s cameras rolled, one man fell to the ground screaming after a police scooter moved into a cluster of people. The man was struck with a baton and arrested moments later as witnesses called out, “You ran over his foot” and chanted, “The whole world is watching.” One bystander hurled a bag of trash at police officers as they pushed protestors back onto the sidewalk. Read more…

Susan Keyloun, who contributes photographs to The Local, decided to start shooting video for us as well. Her first outing proved plenty eventful. Here’s her story, involving a hot pursuit, a surrender, and another foot race in four-inch heels.

Yesterday afternoon, I stopped by The Local’s headquarters at Cooper Square to pick up a video camera. I had volunteered to be their April O’Neil, keeping a camera strapped to me at all times in case of breaking news. After a quick video tutorial, I hit the streets wondering what I might shoot: Maybe the occupation of Tompkins Square Park in a couple of days? Actually, I didn’t have to wait nearly that long for a good story.

Not five minutes after I had secured the camera, around 4 p.m., a man wearing a red sweatshirt and blue backpack rushed past me on East Eighth Street with a mob in hot pursuit. From what they were screaming, it seemed he had stolen a cell phone from one of them. I reached for my video camera, suddenly transforming into “Scoop Keyloun.” (Except that it took me almost a minute to get the lens cap off. What can I say? The tutorial hadn’t covered that.) Read more…

Here’s a little something to steal the thunder of CMJ, which hits the neighborhood Oct. 22: The online music magazine Pitchfork is planning a festival in Manhattan for next February that, according to ArtsBeat, will consist of “visual artists and game designers at galleries, museums and unconventional performance spaces around the city, along with four days of performances at clubs run by Bowery Presents.” Mercury Lounge and Bowery Ballroom are among the planned venues.

On a rainy Saturday afternoon at the BMW Guggenheim Lab, about 12 people volunteered for “Testing, Testing!”, a tour created to measure the psychological effects of urban design. Dr. Colin Ellard, a psychologist who directs the Research Laboratory for Immersive Virtual Environments in Waterloo, Canada, attached sensors to the wrists of about half of the group and gave them BlackBerry devices preloaded with a program designed to record their feelings. Others received a paper survey with pictures depicting a spectrum of moods from “Comfortable” to “Agitated.” The survey also had spaces for volunteers’ ideas about alternative uses for the six spaces visited, which included a restaurant, an apartment building, and an intersection. Read more…

Clint McMahon

Good morning, East Village.

Save The Lower East Side thinks that The Times piece about the changing of the Bowery is evidence of “journalistic fraud, and plain deceit,” since it doesn’t go into detail about the fight for 35 Cooper Square.

According to a Facebook message spotted by The Local, Runnin’ Scared, DNAinfo, and EV Grieve, John Penley and others involved in the Occupy Wall Street protests may camp out in Tompkins Square Park this weekend. Meanwhile, Bowery Boogie notices that gift shop Exit 9 posted a OWS schedule on its chalkboard.

City Room points out that on the MTA’s new subway map, an error has been fixed so that Tompkins Square Park correctly appears to the east of Avenue A. Read more…

Countless white slips are currently littering the bike lane on First Avenue near 11th Street. Wondering whether a ticker tape parade had passed through, The Local turned one over to find this extraordinary plea. License plate numbers have been redacted so as not to out any G-men.

Seen something like this? Add your photo to The Local’s Flickr pool and tell us about it.

Stephen Rex Brown The violation at 331 East Sixth Street.

The construction site at 331 East Sixth Street — rumored to be the future home of “Friends” star David Schwimmer — received a violation from a Department of Buildings inspector today.

The notice cites the developer for failure to post the required permits for an eight-foot-tall fence at the front of the lot.

Much speculation and anger has surrounded the site since it was reported in July that the townhouse built in 1852 would be demolished to make way for a new dwelling.

The Local made numerous attempts to find out who the owner of the building is, as well as what the new building will look like. The accounting firm handling the property has remained tight-lipped about the identity of its client, and the architecture firm designing the building has not returned several phone calls.

Meanwhile, an apparent anarchist and architecture critic has left a note at the lot letting the developers know what he thinks about their “ugly, yuppie, ghetto catering to monied transients.”

If you thought IHOP’s “beyond obnoxious” sidewalk canopy (per a EV Grieve commenter) was the most conspicuous signage going up in the neighborhood, take a look at what the recently revamped Sidewalk Café is putting up today. This photo comes from a reader of The Local who asks “Really?” How do you think it compares to the red “ALWAYS OPEN” awning of old?

A venerable literary journal is voicing its support for the embattled St. Mark’s Bookshop today. “We at ‘The Paris Review’ have a stake in St. Mark’s Bookshop,” writes Lorin Stein. “The store sells between 150 and 200 copies of each issue of ‘The Paris Review.’ That’s more than we sell in most cities. It’s more than we sell off our own Web site. Magazines like ‘The Paris Review’ need good bookstores, where the staff knows how to spread the word about good writing, face to face, hand to hand.” The petition has now garnered over 42,600 signatures.

Bowery Boogie points to an interesting piece on This Recording about “authentrification.” Author Alexandria Symonds defines it as “seizing on elements that represent the area’s past and repurposing them as a design scheme,” in the way the John Varvatos store nods to CBGB and its neighbor DBGB nods to kitchen supply stores. Needless to say, local bloggers aren’t exactly big fans of authentrification, even calling it “ghoulish,” but a neighboring shopkeeper insists that “John Varvatos is the best thing that could have happened to CBGBs.”

Guy Fieri, the peroxided Food Network star, was spotted filming at John’s of 12th Street yesterday for his show, “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives.”

Mr. Fieri spent about three hours in the afternoon shooting at the Italian restaurant between First and Second Avenues, and co-owner Mike Alpert was thrilled.

“He learned about us through the grapevine. I was amazed that he’d never heard of us; an Italian restaurant that’s been around for 103 years,” said Mr. Alpert.
Read more…