Daniel Maurer At Eighth and Avenue B.

In a show of solidarity for Occupy Wall Street protesters arrested in Oakland, a group marched from Washington Square Park, as far north as 29th Street, and then back south to Tompkins Square Park – with a symbolic stop at the former Charas/El Bohio community center. Witnesses reported smashed bottles and arrests in the East Village last night.

Shortly before 10 p.m., protesters who had gathered at Washington Square Park three hours earlier made their way to the former P.S. 64 building on East Ninth Street, which was at the center of demonstrations last month. As The Local has reported, some residents want the developer who owns the vacant building to use it as a community center again.

After hearing a few words about the building’s history, the group – escorted by a column of police officers in the street – walked down Avenue C, then Eighth Street, and then Avenue B before stopping at East Seventh Street, at the entrance of Tompkins Square Park. Read more…

Here, Ray Schultz, an East Village Other contributor, remembers editor Jaakov Kohn, as well as a famous incident involving R. Crumb and EVO publisher Joel Fabrikant. Though the publisher’s name often appears as Fabricant, we’re told by his onetime roommate Peter Leggieri, among others, that it was Fabrikant. Likewise, Jason Katzman, nephew of EVO editor Allen Katzman, confirms that the Ginsbergian spelling of his uncle’s given name, which also appears in the editor’s book proposal, is correct. We have seen it, even on EVO mastheads, as Alan or Allan, too. Anyway, as Charlie Frick pointed out, things like grammar and punctuation were quite fluid in those days. Mr. Schultz put it this way in an e-mail: “I wouldn’t trust my spelling from 1970, or anyone else’s.” And now, over to him.

Allan TannenbaumJaakov Kohn

Maybe it wasn’t the same as Gertrude Stein telling Hemingway, “You are a lost generation.” But the defining moment of the 1960s for me came when Jaakov Kohn said, “Think of The East Village Other as your Jewish mother.”

Boy, did I need to hear that. I was penniless and had bronchitis when I ran into him that snowy morning. He bought me a coffee, then suggested a cold treatment: “Buy a nickel-bag of heroin, divide it into six lines, snort two lines and go to sleep. Wake up, snort two more and go back to sleep. Then get up and snort the last two.”

Later, when we hit the office, I finished off the food left over from a photo shoot: fried chicken carved into genitalia.

Thus did EVO nurture “talent that other publications could not absorb,” as Jaakov Kohn put it.

And I was awed to be there. Founded in 1965 as the “newspaper of patarealism,” EVO was one of the best underground papers in the country, but it was different from most, run not by New Left types, but by old Beatniks like Jaakov Kohn. Read more…

Raeanne Rubinstein Claudia Dreifus

Sometime in the late 1960s, I was working, unhappily, for Local 1199 of the Drug and Hospital Workers Union here in New York City.  There were dozens of reasons why I was miserable with the job; the main ones being that I wasn’t particularly good at it and that I really wanted to write. But whenever I asked the union leadership if I could transfer to their news magazine, the answer was always, “Organizers organize and writers write.” In other words: No.

I finally left 1199 to take a job as the editor of another union’s newspaper, a post from which I was fired after producing a “1968 Election Special” without ever once mentioning the name of Hubert Horatio Humphrey.

So there I was: 23 and unemployed.

I had a pal from 1199, a writer/photographer named Joe Walker, who’d left the union to become the editor of Muhammed Speaks, the newspaper of the Nation of Islam. One day he phoned to say that he’d just done a story for The East Village Other and that they were looking for writers and that I ought go down there and talk to them.

“Nice bunch of guys,” Joe promised. “They’re open to all kinds of stories.” Read more…

EVO poster showing Mr. Frick.

Charlie Frick was a rock n’ roll writer and photographer for The East Village Other. He was a network television cameraman and in more recent years has become an independent media consultant. An original light box is among the artifacts he rescued from EVO’s last office in the Law Commune at 640 Broadway. Writing in 1979 for an Alternative Media Syndicate publication (hence at least one instance of “alternative” language), he described the “controlled artistic anarchy” of psychedelic design.

Tripping the Lightbox Fantastic

For more on “Blowing Minds: The East Village Other, the Rise of Underground Comix and the Alternative Press, 1965-72,” read about the exhibition here, and read more from EVO’s editors, writers, artists, and associates here.

Steve Kraus

As documented in a DNA Info video, Steve Kraus has been publishing the New York Good News since the 1960s. Now 82, he has lived just above Café Mogador on St. Marks Place for the past 37 years. He also volunteers for the Jewish Foundation of the Righteous. The following piece appeared in a 1979 booklet produced by the Alternative Press Syndicate, titled “Alternative Media: How the Muckrakers Saved America,” published by Bell and Howell. It is reprinted here with the author’s permission.

Steve Kraus – How Green Was My Underground

For more on “Blowing Minds: The East Village Other, the Rise of Underground Comix and the Alternative Press, 1965-72,” read about the exhibition here, and read more from EVO’s editors, writers, artists, and associates here.

Last weekend, in one of our posts celebrating The East Village Other, Ed Sanders wrote that poet Ted Berrigan may have named the alternative newspaper after the Rimbaud line “I is an Other.” Mr. Sanders acknowledged, “Another account has Ishmael Reed coining the name.” In the comments, EVO editor Peter Leggieri wrote that Allen Katzman (who founded the paper along with Dan Rattiner and Walter Bowart) “always gave the impression that he had suggested the name ‘Other.'” After citing the reasons, Mr. Leggieri wrote, “However, if the question of origin came to a vote, I’d probably pull the lever for Ishmael Reed.” Here, now, is Mr. Reed himself, on his role in shaping The East Village Other.

Isamu Kawai Ishmael Reed, 1967

My receiving a job as the editor of a newspaper in Newark, N.J., led to the origin of The East Village Other. I worked a number of temporary jobs from the time I arrived in New York in the fall of 1962 until I left for California in the summer of 1967. One of those jobs was that of  a pollster for The Daily News. So when I went to the Department of Labor to get a temporary job, after the poll was completed, I was informed of an opening for a reporter for a new newspaper in Newark.

I had written for a newspaper in Buffalo called The Empire Star, edited by the great A.J. Smitherman, who was the target of mob violence during one of the worst riots in American history, the Tulsa riots of 1921, which left 300 blacks dead.

Smitherman believed in armed self-defense against lynching. After an interview with the investors, it was decided that I would be the editor of a newspaper that I named Advance. Although I had watched the production of a newspaper using the old linotype method while working for the newspaper in Buffalo, I hadn’t a clue about offset printing.

Walter Bowart was a bartender at Stanley’s, which was our hangout. It was owned by Stanley Tolkin who was a patron of the arts and our benefactor. Read more…

Jared Malsin Portraits of Gregory Foster and Rocco Laurie.

Earlier today, the Police Department marked the 40th anniversary of the murder of two young police officers – one black, one white – who were gunned down by alleged black militants outside an East Village diner.

The officers, Gregory Foster, 22, of the Bronx, and Rocco Laurie, 23, of Staten Island, had fought together as Marines in Vietnam. When they returned to New York, they asked to be placed on patrol together in the East Village, which was then a high-crime neighborhood. They were shot dead after walking out of a diner at Avenue B and 11th Street just before 11 p.m. on Jan. 27, 1972.

Speaking at a re-dedication of two plaques honoring the slain officers at the Ninth Precinct, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly described a grim atmosphere at the time of the murders.

“This was a violent neighborhood, no doubt about it, and radical groups like the Black Liberation Army were specifically targeting police officers for assassination,” said Commissioner Kelly, who responded to the scene of the shooting as a young sergeant. Read more…

Natalie Rinn

Earlier this afternoon, Carlos Severino, a member of the Laborers Local 78, stood near an oversized, money-grabbing, cigar-chomping rat that had been conspicuously inflated in front of the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary on East 14th Street. The labor union, which specializes in the removal of asbestos, lead and other hazardous materials, is protesting Continuum Health Partners, which operates the Infirmary along with three other hospitals. Mr. Severino held up flyers complaining that an “irresponsible” private company was performing “deadly asbestos removal” at one of the company’s facilities, St. Luke’s Hospital on the Upper West Side.

Richard Weiss, a spokesperson for the union, said the protests began a couple of weeks ago. Mr. Severino said they would continue for some time: “We’ll stay another week, a month, until they do what they’re supposed to do.”

In addition to the rat on East 14th Street, members of Laborers Local 78 are displaying an open coffin in front of Beth Israel Hospital on First Avenue, just a couple of blocks north – a move that Jim Mandler, a spokesperson for Continuum, said was unacceptable. Read more…

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

The news that both Bleecker Bob’s Records and the Holiday Cocktail Lounge would close amounted to a brutal double-whammy for many locals living around the Village. But there’s a silver lining: Jennifer Kitzer, a longtime partner of Bleecker Bob’s, told The Local that if worst comes to worst, the store will move to the East Village or Lower East Side.

For now, though, she and the staff are focused on remaining in their current location. “We’re not closing permanently — we’re not running out of there anytime soon,” said Ms. Kitzer, who later added, “I’m not looking to shut the name down, shut the store down. There’s going to be a fight in us.” Read more…

Rachel Ohm Left to right: Garrett Ford, Adam Toepfer, and
Jessica Garner.

Yesterday we discovered the trailer for “The Angelheads,” an indie flick that takes its title from “Howl” and is set in the East Village. To find out who’s behind the production, The Local stopped into a fundraiser at the Phoenix last night.

Turns out the film, set to be finished in February, is produced by a group of friends from Marymount Manhattan College. According to its writer and director, Garrett Ford, it follows two couples – one gay and one straight – living in the East Village.

“It’s about changing your identity based on who you’re with,” said Mr. Ford. “New York can chew people up and spit them out, but the message is ultimately about optimism and that it’s worth pursuing big things.” Read more…

Stephen Rex Brown Louis Fugazy kept the drinks coming last night at Holiday Cocktail Lounge.

Word had gotten around by the time the regulars started arriving: after 47 years, the Holiday Cocktail Lounge will close on Saturday. Not surprisingly, the shots just kept coming.

“Everybody that ever stepped foot in this bar is going to come through in the next three days,” said bartender Louis Fugazy. Over the years, those characters have included W. H. Auden, Leon Trotsky, and Allen Ginsberg, when they lived on the block. And urban legend has it that Madonna named “Holiday” after the bar (this much is certain: punk-pop band the Bouncing Souls immortalized the dive in a song that shares its name).

Over drinks, many of the regulars sitting around the semicircular bar bemoanded the state of the neighborhood, which recently has endured the loss of Mars Bar, another beloved dive. “Gentrification is moving out all the old standbys,” said Jeff Tendler, who was working the door. “The neighborhood is becoming full of chains, and the little guy is getting pushed out.” Read more…

Millennium Film Workshop may have to give up only some of its space rather than being forced to vacate the East Fourth Street building that La MaMa owns. Tamara Greenfield, the Executive Director of Fourth Arts Block and a mediator between the two parties, tells Runnin’ Scared that the document that was taken for an eviction notice Wednesday night “didn’t mean ‘You have to leave immediately.’ This is one step. [Millenium] will walk away from an old lease and develop a new lease.” Meanwhile La MaMa issues a statement: “Since December 2010 La MaMa has been talking and meeting with Millennium Film to try and understand how we can help them as they continue to find ways to stablize their organization. We will continue to do so. We believe and support the mission of Millennium Film and consider it a very important cultural institution.”

Scott Lynch

Good morning, East Village.

According to Curbed, the price of Adria Petty’s apartment at 325 East Ninth Street has been trimmed from $1.995 million to $1.85 million. The Local toured the condo when it went on the market in November.

DNA Info catches wind of an East Village resident who gives $10 astrology readings three nights a week at the Scratcher bar.

Still fighting eviction from his St. Marks Place apartment, Jimmy “The Rent Is Too Damn High” McMillan now wants a recount of votes in the 2010 gubernatorial election. According to the Daily News, he’s hoping for a bump up to 50,000 votes so that he can be placed on the ballot for the upcoming presidential election. Read more…

Tomorrow after a public hearing, the City Council’s Committee on Civil Rights and the Committee on Veterans will vote on a resolution prompted by the death of Danny Chen, the East Village soldier who committed suicide in Afghanistan after he was allegedly abused by his peers. Resolution 1188 “calls upon the United States Department of Defense to closely examine its policies around cultural diversity and sensitivity and to impose more effective and comprehensive training regiments for military personnel in cultural awareness, diversity and sensitivity to prevent the discrimination and harassment of all military personnel, including servicemen and women within its ranks.” The hearing will take place at 250 Broadway, on the 16^th floor, at 10 a.m.

Meanwhile, The Villager reports that during Community Board 3’s meeting on Tuesday, the board voted to support a resolution, brought by Borough President Scott Stringer, calling for an investigation into the police department’s stop-and-frisk practices. Mr. Stringer has blamed the controversial policy for “creating a wall of distrust between people of color and the police that makes it harder, not easier, to solve crimes.”

First John Legend put his pad up for sale and now The Observer reports that Scottish singer-songwriter K.T. Tunstall has sold her duplex at 525 East 11th Street for $1.5 million, about $75,000 less than what she bought it for in 2008. The 2-bedroom, 2.5-bath home with 540-square-foot terrace went to one Farsad Golnaz.

The above teaser for “The Angelheads” was just posted to YouTube, and a bit of internet sleuthing reveals there will be a fundraiser for the “romantic serio-comic independent feature film” at Phoenix Bar tonight at 7 p.m. True to the titular Ginsberg line about angelheaded hipsters, the film’s four protagonists seem to be burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night – mostly in cramped East Village apartments, though occasionally they get some air on a sun-splashed tenement rooftop or in Tompkins Square Park.

Per the film’s Twitter stream, shooting locations also included the Ninth Ward and East Side Ink, and the poster (tagline: “Love. Art. Ink.”) was shot at the Astor Place cube. We’ll have more about this local production as it nears its summer release date; in the meantime, enjoy the first look.

Related: More on ‘The Angelheads,’ a Film About Relationships in the East Village

Stephen Rex Brown A member of the Just For Kicks adult softball league (left) testifies at today’s hearing.

The proposed changes to the system governing ball fields in city parks drew around 140 people today, many of whom expressed concern that a new priority for youth leagues would end up pushing adult games out.

If the reforms by the Parks Department are approved, youth leagues will be given priority when considering new ball-field permit applications.

“It’s silly to think this can’t lead to adult leagues being pushed out entirely,” said David Nierenberg, who plays in the Mundys Softball League in Brooklyn. “I don’t think that’s fair.” Read more…

The plot thickens: Another intriguing sign has gone up in the window of the law office of Zenon B. Masnyj, on East Seventh Street between Second and Third Avenues. The Local is still trying to get to the bottom of these leading questions; in the meantime, click on our photo to read the latest.

Joel Raskin

Good morning, East Village.

Runnin’ Scared reports that La MaMa E.T.C. is evicting Millenium Film Workshop from the building it has occupied at 66 East Fourth Street since 1975. Millenium board member Jay Hudson admits that the film collective, which has been hurt by steep cuts from the New York State Council for the Arts, hasn’t paid rent in about ten months.

Rumors that CBGB will stage some sort of return swept the internet yesterday after Gothamist said it had it “on good authority that the legendary venue is still alive in spirit, and angling to take over a new space in Manhattan.” Brooklyn Vegan noted a tweet from a CBGB Twitter account claiming to be official: “who would you like to see at the #CBGB Music Festival this summer? No band to big or to small.” And this morning, Bowery Boogie, without explaining much about its origin, posts a flyer indicating that “CBGB is Coming” July 3 to 7.

DNA reports from the funeral of Dashane Santana. Her middle school principal told tearful mourners, “We’re broken in the sense that one of our angels is no longer with us.” Read more…