How One-Legged Terry became a member of A.J. Weberman’s circle fades into the mists of memory. Surely, he fit the mold of a Weberman associate with his good humor and dominant, eccentric personality. I met Terry along with a number of people A.J. had acquired from a series of “Dylanology” lectures he had given at Manhattan’s New School for Social Research. This was during a five-month period in 1970 in which I had crossed the country with friends in a (then almost requisite) Volkswagon bus, to spend time with the underground comix community, which by then had assembled in San Francisco.
Terry went by the full moniker of Terry Noble in the United States and Terry Ephraite in Israel, where he had gone to work on a kibbutz after finishing his education. While there, he had been assigned to work atop a hopper that loaded agricultural produce into a machine for processing. His job was to assist in moving the produce from a conveyer that lifted the material to the hopper. After a few days on the job, the platform on which he was standing collapsed, dumping him into the machinery and mangling his left leg. What was left had to be amputated just above the knee. As he remembered his thoughts at the time, they were about the loss of his shoe, one of a pair he had recently bought.
When he sought compensation for his loss, it was revealed that the platform had also collapsed in the recent past, costing another Jewish-American volunteer a leg. Terry surmised that it made more sense to assign an expendable American to the dangerous positions than to fix the underlying fault. Because of the negligence involved, Terry had won a settlement of about $50,000 for his loss. Read more…
Left to right: Steven Kohn, (on floor:) Heather, R. Crumb, Ray Schultz, (sitting behind:) Hetty Maclise, John Heys, Coca Crystal, Allen Katzman, David Walley, Little Arthur, (standing:) Joel Fabrikant, Jaakov Kohn
The end of my real involvement with The East Village Other came as something I perceived as a betrayal. I have come to think I really didn’t understand it at the time and perhaps what happened wasn’t directed at me personally. But sometimes I wonder.
I mentioned in my earlier piece that EVO was formed as a stock company, with Walter Bowart, Allen Katzman and I each owning three shares.
“We need to raise more money,” Walter said to me in the spring of 1966. “We’ve run out. I’ve called a meeting and there will be new people coming. We need to get more people buying stock.”
“It won’t dilute my one third, will it?” I asked.
“It doesn’t have to,” he said, “if you buy some more, too.” And this was technically true.
The meeting took place in our office on Avenue A on a Tuesday evening at 8 p.m. John Wilcock was there, a prized defector to The Other from the Village Voice, our designated competitor. I loved that idea. There were four new people in the room, none of whom was familiar to me, except for John.
“Okay, we’re here to buy stock,” Walter said. “Who’d like to go first?” Read more…
He was a roughneck. He certainly wasn’t politically correct and his blunt management style definitely took getting used to. In fact I really didn’t know what to make of him at first. But during the time I worked at The East Village Other, I received any number of sanctimonious promises from the people I worked with that didn’t seem to amount to much. Joel Fabrikant was no sanctimonious hippie or any other kind of hippie, but he always kept his word.
I was actually drawing comics for EVO, as it was called by most of us, before Joel got there. The first time I showed up at the storefront office on Avenue A was at the start of 1967. Allen Katzman, EVO’s nominal editor, looked at the art samples I brought. He told me they were interesting, but that EVO was looking for work that was more, “psychedelic.” Psychedelic was a buzzword of the moment. Put simply it meant, “trippy,” or drug-influenced.
I didn’t have to go far to pipe directly into that. Before I even left the office, Allen Katzman introduced me to Bill Beckman, the art editor. I knew who Bill Beckman was. In fact he was one of my initial inspirations for showing up at EVO.
Back in Westchester, where I had been employed as a child care worker, perhaps nine months prior to this, I showed a co-worker some of the artwork I’d been doing in my spare time. A curious thing about this artwork was that at a certain point, it had started morphing into primitive comic strips. Read more…
I came to EVO in late 1965. I think the paper was about three issues old. Walter Bowart had quit his job as a bartender at the Dom on St. Marks Place (Ed Sanders says it was Stanley’s, maybe it was both) and had raised some money to publish what he was soon to become fond of calling “a hippie National Inquirer.” (“Hippies don’t like to read. They like pictures and big headlines.”) I had just come to New York City from Texas. At the time I wasn’t sure if I wanted to make it uptown or downtown. All that was certain was that I needed to get some kind of employment.
I was living in the basement of Bill and Debbie Beckman’s apartment on East Ninth Street between Avenues C and D. At the time, this was decidedly a sketchy neighborhood, populated by young Puerto Rican street entrepreneurs who would have duels with ripped-off car antennae, whipping each other viciously over turf or girlfriends or whatever. The old mittel Europeans, Ukrainians, and refugees who lived in the ratty tenements would scurry to get out of their way as they crossed Houston to get a knish. It would have been maybe December of 1965 when I arrived. It was shaping up as a very cold winter, with an incredible blizzard that happened just a few weeks after my arrival. Being a naive Texan, I had innocently driven my car and tried to keep it on the streets. I lost it for almost 10 days under the snow. It was all very new to me. Snow. Hippies. The East Village Other. Read more…
The Local East Village continues its celebration of the pioneering alternative newspaper of the late 1960s and early 70s, The East Village Other. This weekend, further to last week’s piece by artist Trina Robbins, we’re keeping our attention on the paper’s trailblazing illustrations, starting with an essay from Patrick Rosenkranz, the author of “Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution 1963-1975.”
Cover of the first Gothic Blimp Works issue, by Robert Crumb
I never worked for The East Village Other but I was a captivated reader from the first time I picked up an issue in 1966. As an 18-year-old naïve Catholic scholarship student at Columbia University, I was ripe for the revolution. My roommate introduced me to smoking dope that winter and my enhanced appetite often drew me to the student cafeteria, where I couldn’t help but be attracted to the radical contingent from Students for a Democratic Society sitting around their regular table. They looked to my eyes like bomb-throwing anarchists who were having wild sex every night. They often left behind copies of The East Village Other, which I picked up. It was love at first sight.
I’d never seen a publication like this before. It was full of wild accusations and bawdy language and doctored photographs. It had President Johnson’s head in a toilet bowl. It had naked Slum Goddesses, truly bizarre personal ads, and a whole different slant on the anti-war movement than my hometown paper upstate. But best of all, it had the most outrageous comic strips. The continuing saga of Captain High; the psychedelic adventures of Sunshine Girl and Zoroaster the Mad Mouse; Trashman offing the pigs and scoring babes left and right. While I enjoyed many aspects of EVO, I liked the comics the most. Read more…
I’m originally from Paris, so I’m fascinated by New York in the snow. I’ve lived here for almost 13 years now, but like a child, I’m still the first one out when it snows. For the first storm of 2012, I left my apartment in the East Village to capture the pristine landscape before it got spoiled by traffic. The hardened conditions turned the streets into a desert, with people like the ones above looking for a warm, dry refuge. Read more…
Stephen Rex BrownFirefighters at 710 East Ninth Street.
A construction worker fell around 15 feet after scaffolding collapsed underneath him at a building on East Ninth Street at Avenue C.
Battalion Chief James Costello said that the worker was on scaffolding near the roof at around 2:50 p.m. when the structure collapsed, sending him plummeting to a stairwell landing below. Firefighters then removed him through a window on the top floor using a ladder. A Fire Department spokesman said that the worker suffered injuries to his head and was taken to Bellevue Hospital. Read more…
An opportunistic garbage collector swiped an iPad from a closed restaurant this morning after being let in to use the bathroom, the police said.
A spokesman for the police department said that the sanitation worker, Michael Maldonado, was on duty at around 11:40 a.m. when he asked the owner of a restaurant if he could use the bathroom. After the owner of the undisclosed eatery let the 38-year-old Mr. Maldonado in, police said he swiped an iPad and then went back to work. Read more…
Want to live in one of the most controversial apartments in the neighborhood? Here’s what the layout of your new pad will look like!
Earlier today, The Local got hold of the blueprints for 315 East 10th Street, the building that got the go-ahead for a rooftop extension literally hours before the Landmarks Preservation Commission declared it within a historic district along Tompkins Square Park.
The completely new, 1,523-square-foot fifth floor will feature a pair of one-bedroom apartments (accessible by elevator!). The exterior will have a new “historic” touch, too: a spokeswoman for the Landmarks Preservation Commission said that the owner of the building, Ben Shaoul, has pledged to build a replica of the existing cornice on top of the new floor. Read more…
Eater has a beer at Sophie’s, the East Fifth Street watering hole, and shares some trivia about the previous occupant: “Before Sophie moved in, the space was called the Chic Choc, owned by Virginia Chicarelli and a person named Chocolate. You can still see the words ‘Chic Choc’ (in my opinion, one of the worst bar names ever) on the cement threshold of Sophie’s.”
As Valentine’s Day approaches, The Local is celebrating East Village couples. We’ve already heard the story of Doug Quint and Bryan Petroff of the Big Gay Ice Cream Shop. Today, meet James Sanderson and Veronica Marquez.
Though born in New York, James was raised in England, and didn’t return to the United States until he was an adult. Veronica was born and raised in Venezuela, and came to the United States for college. In 2005, they met in a real estate office while they were both looking for an apartment. Four years later, James proposed at the same office; the couple now lives together, in a loft on East 13th Street.
Watch The Local’s video to hear how they turned a chance encounter into an East Village love story.
The Daily News reports that a Manhattan lawyer’s license has been suspended owing to a 2007 incident in which he assaulted his girlfriend in her East Village apartment. According to the News, Michael Zulandt “grabbed a hammer, smashed her $3,500 Cartier watch, ruined her $1,000 purse by filling it with water, poured oil on her $1,500 couch and ripped into artwork with a pen before ripping her intercom off the wall and snatching her cell phone.”
Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York notices a flyer demanding, on behalf of “The East 10th Street Protestors,” that the owner of 106 and 110 East 10th Street “clean up his mess” at two townhouses where work is being done.
The Villager profiles the eccentric CD and DVD vendor on Avenue A who goes by the name of the Birdman: “The proprietor estimates that there are more than 100,000 CD’s in a space that is much too small for them. And that’s just in the front — the back room holds another 20,000. Not long ago, The Birdman spent five hours trapped in that room when the piles collapsed, trapping him until he could dig himself out.” Read more…
An elderly man was taken to Beth Israel a little after 5 p.m. today after having difficulty crossing Avenue A near 14th Street and causing a traffic delay. The man, who said his first name was Henry, was crossing the street with the assistance of a walker when he became immobile. Concerned passersby (including this reporter) came to his aid and helped him walk to the corner, where he sat down.
The man was disoriented and his face was extremely bruised. When a small pool of blood began to form around his left leg, emergency services were called. He told police officers that he was 88 and lived alone in Stuyvesant Town but was unable to say what caused his injuries.
Photos: Noah Fecks. Cocktails, in order: Friend of the Devil (two photos), Gin and Juice (three photos), Manhattan, Lady of the Night (three photos), and J. Crusteau at Booker and Dax; I Hear Banjos (two photos) at The Wayland; Beetnick, Manhattan on Draught, Bowery Fix, and Yankee Mule at Saxon + Parole; Flor de Jalisco, 1890, Bitter Mule, and Pimm’s Tonic at The Wren; and G.P. Spritz and The Last Cocktail at Prima.
Jason Mendenhall, a partner in the new cocktail bar on Avenue C, The Wayland, knows the East Village has long been a drinks destination. “I’ve heard people refer to the neighborhood as the cocktail ghetto,” he recently told The Local. Lately, mixologists like Mr. Mendenhall have been raising the proverbial bar on tired old speakeasy drinks, with twists that have nothing to do with lemon rinds: we’re talking red-hot pokers, smoke capsules, and centrifuges.
Take Mr. Mendenhall’s most popular creation, I Hear Banjos. The mixologist roasts apples to make bitters for the corn-whiskey and applejack drink (he’s also working on umami bitters, made from various mushrooms). But that isn’t the impressive part. For campfire effect, the drink is capped with an upside-down snifter full of applewood smoke. Mr. Mendenhall is planning an entire line of smoked drinks (and a line of drinks incorporating vegetables like kale and beets, as well), and he also hopes to create smoked ice.
At Booker and Dax, the recently opened bar at Momofuku Ssam, partner Dave Arnold is going one step further than using a smoking gun – he’s wielding a red-hot poker. “It has an internal temperature of 1,500 degrees Farenheit,” he said. “We shove it into the drink to create burnt-caramel flavors that you can’t get by making a hot drink on the stove.” Read more…
The East Village has Fringe Festival (applications for next summer’s are due next week), and in the winter it has Frigid Festival. Founded in 2007 by San Francisco’s Exit Theatre and our own Horse Trade Theater Group, it runs from Feb. 22 to March 4 this year. Earlier this week, “snapshots” of 13 of the festival’s 30 shows – all produced by independent theater companies – debuted at Under St. Marks. Five of them stood out.
“Rabbit Island”
Chris Harcum was without his cast, but if his charisma is any indication, his play in which a talkative Canadian mime navigates New York will be one to watch. Of Frigid, Mr, Harcum said, “I think it’s better than the New York Fringe festival, personally, because you get to see five shows each night and all the money goes back to the artists.” Many in the room echoed his sentiments. Read more…
Clayton Patterson joins other CBGB regulars, as well as Rob Sacher, in expressing doubts about the revival of the rock club. In The Villager, the photographer and videographer, who documented many a CB’s show, writes, “A venue without a scene attached to it is only a place where bands play and not the creative crucible where legends are forged.” And later: “The most that a new CBGB’s will be is a corporate venue. It will not be a scene, it will not be a hangout, it will be corporate.”
Of course the party didn’t stop after yesterday’s ticker tape parade. The Post reports that the New York Giants Super Bowl victory celebration continued into the night, with Justin Tuck, Mario Manningham and other G-Men taking a party bus to the Village Pourhouse and then heading to SideBar at Union Square.
The area around the Village Pourhouse was flooded with carousers after the big game on Sunday, as the above YouTube video shows. Other videos show hooting and hollering at the 13th Step and outside of Croxley Ales.
The owners of Tompkins Finest Deli say they hope to open the store sometime in the next ten days, and about two months from now, they’ll open a Middle Eastern café at the corner of First Avenue and Second Street.
Adeeb Ghamem, a resident of Park Slope, Brooklyn, and Ahmed Alzabair, of the Upper West Side, were busy stocking shelves with Vitamin Water and PopChips earlier today, in a space that has been considerably gussied up from the time it housed Avenue A Mini Market. Mr. Ghamem, who is also a partner in East Village Finest Deli (on Avenue B) and First and First Finest Deli (you can guess where that is), said that he was opening another store in the East Village because “people are nice. Nobody gives nobody a hard time. Everbody’s polite here.” Read more…
Moving is a drag; as Off the Grid pointed out yesterday, even Allen Ginsberg had to do it a whole bunch (heck, your editor lives in one of his old apartments – found it on Craigslist). Maybe you’re looking for new digs in the neighborhood? The Local would like to show you some! Don’t worry, our apartment tour won’t take long; and you’ll get to tell us what you think of each place on camera. Fun, right? Okay, so send an e-mail telling us what you’re looking for and let’s talk. Who knows, maybe you’ll snag Iggy Pop’s old place…
The Local was a journalistic collaboration designed to reflect the richness of the East Village, report on its issues and concerns, give voice to its people and create a space for our neighbors to tell stories about themselves. It was operated by the students and faculty of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, in collaboration with The New York Times, which provides supervision to ensure that the blog remains impartial, reporting-based, thorough and rooted in Times standards.
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A.J. Weberman, Yossarian, Vincent Titus
