Phillip Kalantzis-Cope

Good morning, East Village.

City Room reports that a homeless woman, Liz Hooper, was found dead at Avenue B and East Seventh Street on Saturday, in the same spot where the body of Grace Farrell was found in February. The Local will have more on the death, the cause of which has yet to be determined.

Some celebrity cameos on the Lower East Side over the weekend: Bowery Boogie has video of Jim Carrey doing “Rock n Roll Karaoke” at Arlene’s Grocery on Friday night. The blog also spotted Lady Gaga at Welcome to the Johnson’s on Saturday. Meanwhile according to Global Grind, Rihanna made an appearance on the Bowery – The Local saw paparazzi waiting for her outside of a photo studio at 222 Bowery (which also houses William S. Burroughs’s old “bunker”) last night. And Rihanna’s East Village tattoo artist, Bang Bang, inked up “High School Musical” stars Ashley Tisdale and Vanessa Hudgens, according to the Daily News.

DNAinfo has more crime stats today: “The neighborhood’s 9th Precinct arrested a huge 141.4 percent more suspected drunk drivers in 2010 compared to the year before. That’s 140 incidents compared to 58.” Read more…

Daniel Maurer

Good morning, East Village. It was a busy holiday weekend, so let’s get right to it.

First, a sign in the door of Ave. A Mini Market indicates the mysteriously shuttered deli will return after a renovation.

Over the weekend, a local lounger, Heryk Tomasini, set up hammocks at Astor Place, Houston Street, and some other East Village and Lower East Side spots. According to Bowery Boogie, two of them were promptly stolen. Meanwhile a more renowned public artist, Chico, painted a new mural on Houston Street (EV Grieve has a photo), but was upstaged by actor-comedian Jim Carrey, who according to the Post “tried his hand at tagging yesterday by spraying the outside of a multimillion-dollar East Village home.” Contact Music says the home was Mr. Carrey’s own.

Another celebrity made an appearance at the much anticipated opening of the Big Gay Ice Cream Shop on Saturday, where the line stretched all the way to the park. Robert Sietsema of the Voice posted photos on Fork in the Road, and Bob Arihood, on Neither More Nor Less, pointed out that the line wasn’t unlike the bread line over at the park. EV Grieve posted video, then returned later to spot Anthony Bourdain in a priest’s costume, and then returned still later in the weekend to see the line was still going strong. Read more…

Courtesy of Angelo Fabara Angelo Fabara at age 18.

Earlier today we reviewed “Limelight,” a film about the travails of club king Peter Gatien, who owned Palladium on East 14th Street (now an NYU dorm). Now Angelo Fabara recounts manning the door at Mr. Gatien’s most infamous club, Limelight, when he was a 18-year-old NYU freshman.

I started working at Limelight in 1992 (my freshman year at NYU) after two promoters from Bay Ridge, Mark Anthony and Michael Francis, spotted me dancing at an afterhours at Tunnel. They invited me to hand in a weekly guest list and offered to pay a commission for every person I got into the club. Around the same time, another club promoter, Alan Sanctuary, who was transitioning from Goth parties to raves, saw something in me and paired me with Sidney Prawatyotin, to tend the VIP ropes to The Chapel in the back of Limelight. Sidney would later appear in “Kids” and was mutual friends with Chloe Sevigny, a regular on the scene. He now runs a downtown fashion PR agency. Soon enough, I became a regular doorperson manning the VIP ropes of the main room’s life-size House of Cards. It was as cool a job as a 18-year-old NYU journalism student could have. Read more…

If you’re seeing this post a little after 7 p.m., then you’re watching David Simon, creator of “Treme” and “The Wire,” do his thing at the BMW Guggenheim Lab. If you missed the live stream, check back here soon for an archived video of higher quality.

Daniel Maurer

Mark your calendars: A call to IHOP HQ reveals that the outpost at 235 East 14th Street will open on Sept. 20. Earlier today, a visit to the location (the city’s second) found boxes of newly delivered spray bottles on a counter and a “WE ARE NOT OPEN” sign on the door, which didn’t dissuade flapjack fanatics from walking in. One bystander, upon being informed of the opening date, told another, “Maybe I’ll see you here in three weeks.” Will you too “make it an IHOP day,” as the pancake house’s slogan goes, or do you agree with the bloggers and tweeters who think a Rooty Tooty Fresh ‘N Fruity in the East Village spells the end of civilization?

Now that Ryan Gosling has left town, Astor Place needs a new viral-video vigilante, and rapper Kid Lucky might just be him. Check out Daily News footage of the street performer meting justice out to a man who tried to swipe his donation box.

Good evening, East Village.

Angela Cravens, a community contributor at The Local, has shared her photos of the neighborhood preparing for Hurricane Irene earlier today, and we want to see yours, as well. (By the way, she tells us a sign posted at Villa Della Pace tells Irene, in Italian, to go do something very not nice.) If you have anything to share with your neighbors now that the rain has driven you indoors (Gothamist has the latest on what to expect now that the Category 1 hurricane is 300 miles away), leave your comments below. Have a longer story that you’d like The Local to post? E-mail the editor. Have photos? Join The Local’s Flickr group, and we’ll add them to the gallery above. And feel free to alert us to any developments (no matter how large or small) via our Twitter page, if that’s your preference. We’re listening.

Elsewhere around the Internet, everyone from the Guardian in the U.K. (which noted lines down the block at Trader Joe’s) to the usual neighborhood blogs were eying local supermarkets today: EV Grieve reported that the Associated on Avenue C was primed to set a single-day sales record, and posted photos from Key Food and Fine Fare. A manager at Key Food told the Wall Street Journal of “chaos” there (the store was already running low on certain supplies when we checked in on grocery stores yesterday). Read more…

Good morning, East Village.

If caffeine just isn’t cutting it, dive into the above homage to Erasure that East Village resident Jason Stein, a founding partner in Laundry Service Media, created with kids from The Hetrick-Martin Institute (home of Harvey Milk High School on Astor Place). This video has been floating around for a while, but only gets better with age.

While Zagat Buzz hears that a Williamsburg pizzeria, Forcella, plans to open its outpost at 334 Bowery on September 15, Eater gets word that St. Marks stalwart Café Mogador (a celebrity hangout of sorts) may open its Williamsburg offshoot in September as well.

According to Bowery Boogie, 87 East Houston Street will soon house Bowery Coffee, serving Counter Culture coffee, brownies, and cookies. Meanwhile another coffee shop, Fab Café, got some nice exposure on ABC7’s Eyewitness News, which strangely thinks the East Fourth Street business is in SoHo.

Finally, EV Grieve has a daytime and then a nighttime look at signage for the new Ihop, now glowing on 14th Street.

Contrary to previous reports, The Bean is the one taking the “Crazy Landlord” space at Second Avenue and East Third Street, EV Grieve discovers. A call to the coffee shop’s First Avenue location confirms it will open an outpost there; but first, yet another location will open in the next week or so, at Broadway and 12^th Street.

Good morning, East Village.

A couple of jazz fixtures are back in Tompkins Square Park: While DNA Info previews this weekend’s Charlie Parker Jazz Festival (Sunday’s East Village installment will be headlined by Archie Shepp), EV Grieve notes that Giuseppi Logan, who recorded for the legendary ESP label and went on to live a life checkered with homelessness, is back to playing sax on his bench after hip surgery. The Local caught up with Mr. Logan last November, as you can see in the video above.

Ephemeral New York points to an entry in “The Inside Guide to Greenwich Village” indicating that the fabled St. Marks club The Dom only made it six months before it was invaded by “another element” with “absolutely no cool whatsoever.”

Gothamist points out that “On The Bowery,” Lionel Rogosin’s vérité portrait of the Bowery circa 1957, will return to Film Forum in November.

It’s just about quitting time — today, that means earthquake happy hours. On Twitter, La Lucha announced a “happy hour after shock” of two-for-one beers, while Hop Devil Grill invited followers to an “earthquake party” featuring $1 tacos. Even Butter Lane touted an “earthquake special”: “Mention the #earthquake and get BuyOneGetOne cucapkes, cakepops and Blue Bell ice cream!” Is Village Voice editor Tony Ortega taking advantage of these deals? Earlier today he tweeted, “@villagevoice editors: let’s cancel the 4 pm editors meeting because I want to have a drink — er, I mean, because there was an earthquake.”

Stephen Rex Brown

Last week we reported on Nublu’s fight to stay open on Avenue C, despite the State Liquor Authority’s ruling to cancel the nightclub’s liquor license owing to its location less than 200 feet from a Kingdom Hall of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Now owner Ilhan Ersahin, who is currently traveling, tells us over e-mail, “Our only way to return is to get beer and wine at this point. Our lawyer says it is impossible to get liquor back.” Meanwhile, the comments section of our original post continues to buzz with outrage over the club’s shuttering, though one person, T.M., did defend the move: “People like Ersahin, who laugh in the face of community standards, should just have their license revoked.” The rest of the comments, as you can see below, varied between between praising Nublu and chastising the SLA. Have a different opinion? Throw it into the Chatter Box. Read more…

Stephen Rex Brown The rowhouse at 316 East Third Street.

Last week, preservationists doubled down on their last-minute effort to protect a 177-year-old row house that the owner hopes to demolish and replace with a seven-story, 33-unit apartment building.

A quartet of local preservation groups began pressing the city Landmarks Preservation Commission early this month. In a letter you can read below, the coalition cited the building’s historic qualities, which are reminiscent of 35 Cooper Square, another Federal-style row house that was demolished in May amid much controversy.

“The significance of this and the handful of other surviving pre-Civil War rowhouses to Alphabet City cannot be underestimated,” the preservationists wrote in a letter to the commission on August 2, referring to 316 East Third Street. “Built for merchants associated with the East River’s thriving shipbuilding industry, they recall the neighborhood’s formative years and are all that remain from its heyday as the dry dock neighborhood.”

The letter also noted that the commission had singled out the property as being “eligible for historic designation” in a 2008 study assessing the impact of rezoning in the area. Read more…

Photographer David Schmidlapp shares photos (his own as well as a couple by Marlis Momber) from the archives of El Jardin del Paraiso on East Fourth Street between Avenue C and Avenue D, where he has volunteered for nearly 30 years. His work can currently be seen in the Nepenthes New York Gallery on 38th Street.

Marlis Momber The garden in the winter of 1982 or 1983.

They demolished a lot of buildings in the neighborhood around the mid-1970s. This is how it looked east of First Avenue back then. You could see all the way to Seventh Street, and from Seventh Street you could see all the way to the Con Edison plant. There was plenty of parking back then. Read more…

Check out Fast Company’s Co.Design blog for some photos that Peter Ross took of possessions that were left, after the death of William S. Burroughs in 1997, inside of the Beat guru’s Bowery apartment, known as “The Bunker.” You may have seen these before, but if you haven’t, they’re on view at the Conde Nast building until Monday.

First Vandaag loses its chef, and now Northern Spy Food Co.‘s co-owner Christophe Hille tells Eater that chef Nathan Foot has left “to pursue other projects.” So will the interim chef Brittanny Anderson be nicer about cooking the lamb burger medium-well?