Modestmerlin

Good morning, East Village.

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver is urging Transportation Department Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan to improve safety conditions on Delancey Street after the tragic death of Dashane Santana, who was struck by a car while crossing Delancey Street at Clinton Street. In a letter excerpted by The Lo-Down, Mr. Silver writes, “The recent accident which took the life of 12-year-old Dashane Santana is yet another reminder that we must act immediately to improve safety conditions for pedestrians at several dangerous intersections on Delancey Street.”

In an e-mail to The Local this morning, State Senator Daniel Squadron shares his thoughts on the loss of local activist Mary Spink, who died on Jan. 16. “I am lucky to have known Mary, and our community is lucky to have had her. Stories and commitment to the community like hers are rare and a unique inspiration. She will be sorely missed.”

The New York Times expands on reports that Booker & Dax, “a new bar that places technology squarely in the service of mixology,” is opening Friday in the old Milk Bar space in David Chang’s Momofuku Ssam Bar. Zagat first heard the rumors last week. It’s a collaboration between Mr. Chang and the French Culinary Institute‘s director of culinary technology, Dave Arnold.

Courtesy of Daniel Squadron Ms. Spink with State Senator Daniel Squadron

Mary Spink, a member of Community Board 3 recognized for decades of community activism, including work on sustainable and affordable housing, died yesterday morning at around 12:30 a.m. after struggles with liver and kidney failure. Her colleague at the Lower East Side People’s Mutual Housing Association, Rona Clemente, said Ms. Spink was 64. The news was first reported by The Lo-Down.

In an e-mail to The Local, Susan Stetzer, the board’s district manager, wrote, “Mary was a good friend and a hero in the community. Many people talk about making change — Mary made things happen.”

“Mary was [a] comrade in everyday battles to work for the Lower East Side and she was friends/family with many people in the L.E.S.,” Ms. Stetzer added. “She was on many boards dedicated to working for people in the community — such as the Girls Club (until very recently) and the East Village Community Coalition, as well as the Community Board — and there were no boundaries between this work and her everyday life. Mary is much loved and will be very missed.” Read more…

Noah Fecks East 10th Street. The second building from the right was approved for a rooftop addition only hours before the street was designated a landmark district.

The Landmarks Preservation Commission approved a historic district on a block of East 10th Street along Tompkins Square Park today, though a controversial rooftop addition that led to the expedited hearing also got the go-ahead literally hours before the vote.

With the designation, the exteriors of the 26 buildings between Avenues A and B will essentially be preserved as-is. But at the meeting the executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, Andrew Berman, revealed that developer Ben Shaoul’s plans for a rooftop addition to 315 East 10th Street had been approved by the Department of Buildings.

“It reflects poorly on Shaoul and the city agencies that they couldn’t get their act together,” said Mr. Berman. Read more…

Daniel Maurer

Some folks get prickly about discarded Christmas trees littering the street well after they were due to go to the evergreen graveyard (MulchFest was a week ago!), but those rogue conifers are more or less invisible to us: See, we’re fixated on some unsightly leftovers from All Hallows’ Eve. On East 12th Street between First and Second Avenues, inside of a fenced-in lot behind P.S. 19 Asher Levy School, about ten pumpkins have been squatting on a bench and a table – ever since Halloween, presumably. And as you can see from our close-ups below, these pumpkins are in desperate need of chunkin’. We’re about to roll up our sleeves and get to the gooey, seedy bottom of this mystery, but in the meantime: is anyone else similarly vexed by this? Can someone from Liquiteria, the Juice Press, or Rawvolution walk a few blocks over and juice these suckers already? Read more…

Handsome Dick Manitoba, the owner of Manitoba’s bar on Avenue B, appeared on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” last week to promote his Throbblehead doll, his upcoming reunion show with the Dictators, and his radio program. Mr. Fallon is a big fan of the jukebox at Manitoba’s, which he calls the “best in any bar in New York City.” A bold claim considering The Library, Double Down, Mona’s, Sophie’s, Doc Holliday’s, B-Side, International Bar, and Mars Bar all have fine jukes (to name just a few). What’s your favorite in the neighborhood?

Eater has a look at the menu and the interior of the Bowery Diner, the “haute diner” that Mathieu Palombino of Motorino opened just below Houston Street on Sunday.

Tim Schreier

Six protesters were arrested yesterday during Occupy Wall Street’s “Occupy the Dream” protests held at Union Square, reports The New York Observer. About 150 protesters marched around Union Square before entering several stores, according to AM New York. Around four protesters were arrested after being warned to leave a Bank of America lobby. The Wall Street Journal reports that protesters marched from the African Burial Ground to the Federal Reserve in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. “He set the benchmark,” protester Ted Actie said. “He set the blueprint as far as what Occupy Wall Street is talking about.”

In The Daily News, two Alphabet City moms sound off on Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to grade teachers. “A lot of the teachers are acting like the children. You can tell there are teachers who shouldn’t be teaching yet, and I think it should be known who they are,” Tracy Gomez, who has an 11-year-old at P.S. 34, told the paper. Yvette Hernandez, whose 6-year-old daughter attends Success Charter School, disagreed: “They shouldn’t be graded. They know what they’re doing. It’s not always the teacher’s fault.”

The Daily News also gives a shout out to Yerba Buena on Avenue A and Indochine on Lafayette Street as spots to hit up during Restaurant Week. Read more…

Taylor Mead with Wesley Eisold

Billy Leroy isn’t the only East Village stalwart who counts Lucien as one of his favorite haunts.

Chatting with The Local during his art opening at Churner and Churner Gallery last week, Taylor Mead said that he also frequents the French restaurant on First Avenue.

“I do all my interviews there,” said the 87-year-old writer and artist. “I just met some European journalists there the other day.” Read more…

Tomorrow, a public hearing by the Landmarks Preservation Commission will determine the future of East 10th Street along Tompkins Square Park. Over the weekend, The Local spoke with Andrew Berman, the executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, about the history of the strip.

293 East 10th Street

G.V.S.H.P. 293 East 10th Street

This building, like a lot of buildings in the East Village, shows in a very material way the evolution of the neighborhood from a place of single-family homes for the merchant class to the locus of immigration to New York City. It was built at the corner of East 10th and Avenue A in 1845 for James French, a boot-maker.

Only five years later it was sold to a gentleman named Joshua Varian and a Haraim Chandler leased it from him. Chandler lived with seven other families. This building very quickly became a multi-family home, or a tenement. By the late 1890s it was owned by Charles J. Smith, whose name still appears on the top left-hand side of the building. The top floor of the building was probably added by Smith as part of the tenementi-zation of it.

Interestingly, we know that Chandler worked for the N.Y.P.D. very early in its existence; it was only founded in 1845. Chandler worked as a detective and was injured during the 1863 draft riots. He died in 1881.
Read more…

Suzanne Rozdeba Joey Barbosa

In November, Andrea Truden, the adult-film actress turned singer who, as Andrea True, had a disco hit with “More, More, More,” died at the age of 68. She left no survivors, but on St. Marks Place, her musical legacy lives on in the form of Joe Barbosa, who toured the world with her as part of her backing band, the Andrea True Connection.

For years, Mr. Barbosa has sold vinyl outside of Rockit Scientist Records, first in front of the store’s former location on Carmine Street and for the past several years, on the St. Marks Place strip. Passersby who see him hawking records next to a sign that reads “Joey’s Vinyl” have no idea that he himself has a place in music history.

Mr. Barbosa, 61, began playing guitar in the ’60s. In 1976, at the age of 26, he was living in his parents’ apartment in Washington Heights and playing in a barroom cover band when Ms. Truden’s manager, through a mutual acquaintance, recruited him to play in her touring band. At the time, “More, More, More,” with its hook of “how do you like it?”, hadn’t yet risen to #4 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

“When we first auditioned for her, it was going up the charts and her manager said this was going to be a big hit,” said Mr. Barbosa. “Andrea wasn’t much of a showperson, so she hired four dancers that had all these disco moves to make it into a disco show. We traveled all over the country.” Read more…

Suzanne Rozdeba The window at 7A.

Good morning, East Village.

In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, The King Center has made available online for the first time 200,000 documents, including a handwritten draft of the civil rights activist’s acceptance speech for the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, and notes on the ending of his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech.

And if you want to toast Dr. King over brunch, 7A Cafe and Yuca Bar are among the local spots offering special M.L.K. Day menus.

The Lo-Down has a roundup of stories about the tragic death of 12-year-old Deshane Santana, a resident of the Jacob Riis Houses, who was killed on Friday when she was struck by a minivan while crossing Delancey Street at Clinton Street. Read more…

Design Observer Steve Heller as a SVA student.

Robert Hughes once described the weekly paste-up night at The East Village Other as “a Dada experience.” The year was 1970 and while none of us who were toiling into the wee hours of the morning at one of America’s oldest underground papers (founded in 1965) knew what he was talking about, we nevertheless assumed that to get Time’s then newly appointed art critic to spend some of his first weeknights in America with us, we were doing something weird and perhaps even important. “Dada was the German anti-art political-art movement of the 1920s,” he explained in his cool Australian accent. “And this is the closest thing I’ve come to seeing it recreated today. I’m really grateful for the chance to be here.”

Yet he needn’t have been so grateful. He was as welcome as any other artist, writer, musician, hanger-on and at that moment, detective Frank Serpico, the most famous whistle-blowing cop in America, was stationed at the local Ninth Precinct and would came around periodically in his various undercover costumes to schmooze with the EVO staffers. Paste-up night was open to anybody who drifted up to the dark loft above Bill Graham’s Fillmore East, a former Loews Theater turned rock palace on Second Avenue and Sixth Street, just next door to Ratner’s famous dairy restaurant, in a neighborhood that in the Thirties was the heart of New York’s Yiddish Theater. At that time it was the East Coast hippie capital.

Beginning at seven or eight o’clock at night and lasting until dawn, the regular and transient layout staff took the jumble of counterculture journalism and anti-establishment diatribe that was the paper’s editorial meat and threw it helter skelter onto layouts that were pretty anarchic. Anyone could join in whether they had graphic design experience or not, yet many of the gadfly layout artists were too stoned to complete their pages which were finished on the long subway ride to the printer deep inside Brooklyn. Read more…

On Feb. 28, the Local East Village inaugurates its exhibit “Blowing Minds: The East Village Other, the Rise of Underground Comix and the Alternative Press” at the NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at 20 Cooper Square, appropriately located in the East Village.

From 1965 until 1971, this underground newspaper struck fear into the hearts of millions of Americans. But countless other Americans welcomed it as a glorious ray of hope and joy.

Essentially the flagship of the Sixties, EVO influenced many other so-called underground newspapers in this country and around the world. While resistance to the Vietnam War was often featured, it was scarcely the only theme. Nor was EVO only about sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, though these were certainly present.

I wrote for EVO from 1968 to 1971 and before that helped out with other underground newspapers in London, Amsterdam, and Berlin. So let me confirm that other EVO topics included feminism, eastern mysticism, the commune movement, new approaches to education, practical problems of artists, the budding ecology/environmental movement, and the struggle for black and Hispanic equality. Read more…

With this special edition, The Local presents the first of seven wild, winding, weekend walks through the seven years when this neighborhood was home to The East Village Other. EVO, as the weekly soon became known, began in the imagination of the late Walter Bowart, in his fourth-floor painter’s loft at Avenue B and Second Street. He was the sole creator of Issue No. 1, a broadside, or uncut proof sheet, that was folded into tabloid size. As readers unfolded it again, the pages faced all directions. Anyone with half an eye who happened to pass a Village newsstand that October of 1965, could see that Mr. Bowart was far ahead of others in grasping the real potential of the revolution in printing techniques just getting underway: the move from costly metal plates, professional printers, and “hot type” to paper, scissors and rubber cement. Cold type — offset printing — did more than lower the bar to entry; it provided whole new means of expression in graphics and text.

By Issue No. 2, the East Village Other had a team of publishers and actual papers of incorporation. By Issue No. 3, it had its own storefront office on Avenue A between Ninth and Tenth Streets, just across from Tompkins Square Park. In 1968, Bill Graham bartered concert ads for office space on the third floor of his new Fillmore East, giving EVO daily access to the concert hall’s all-important back stairwell and the stars of rock ‘n’ roll.

By the time the Fillmore closed in 1971, EVO’s end was not far behind. It had moved to new offices on the 11th floor of 20 East 12th Street, and then to a back store room of the Law Commune offices at 640 Broadway. There, as word surfaced that, owing to unpaid bills, city marshals were coming to seize whatever assets might be, the young Charlie Frick, alone in the office with Coca Crystal, scooped up all and sundry, boxed up the files, commandeered his family truck and then hauled it all to his mother’s barn in Passaic County, N.J. There it would remain unmolested for the next few decades.

In anticipation of The Local’s exhibition “Blowing Minds: The East Village Other, the Rise of Underground Comix and the Alternative Press, 1965-72,” we asked Mr. Frick to dive back into the bounty, now variously housed in a storage unit and at his home in Montclair, N.J. Choice selections from the ephemera and artifacts he and others have unearthed will be among items to be featured.

The Local has something from the annals, too. The items in Mr. Frick’s collection included the following undated typescript that must have come into his possession at some point at least a decade after EVO’s demise. It is a xerox of a proposal for a book to be titled “The Best of the East Village Other.” Its cover page attributes it to the late Allen Katzman (most likely the proposal’s author) and the well-known creative consultant and book and magazine designer, J.C. Suares. The late Mr. Katzman, a poet and longtime publisher of EVO, was, along with Mr. Bowart and Dan Rattiner, a signatory to the founding papers. Who better than he to start us out?

Read more…

Delancey Street has claimed another victim, resulting in further outcry regarding one of the city’s deadliest thoroughfares.

Police said that Dashane Santana, a 12-year-old resident of the Jacob Riis Houses, was crossing Delancey Street at Clinton Street at around 2:36 p.m. when a minivan traveling towards the Williamsburg Bridge struck and killed her. The 58-year-old driver stayed at the scene and has not yet been charged with a crime, the police said.

Both Borough President Scott Stringer and State Senator Daniel Squadron once again urged the city to make Delancey Street safer for drivers and pedestrians alike.
Read more…

“I find the East Village to be a difficult place to take photos. Difficult because our visual world is saturated with images of these blocks. Thus, you can feel trapped in a cliché — a cliché based in an idealized past, or a gentrified, dystopian vision of what is to come. Nevertheless, I love to photograph the East Village to participate in this negotiation. The negotiation is, for me, encapsulated in this idea of ‘Everyday Abstractions.'”
Read more…

Suzanne Rozdeba The new signage at the Thai restaurant.

An outpost of Lantern Thai Kitchen, which has locations in Gramercy Park and Brooklyn Heights, opened last Thursday at 85 Avenue A, the former home of Cafetasia, another Thai restaurant.

Lantern co-owner Chris Sirisunat, 33, said that changes were in order. “I think Lantern is a better fit for this neighborhood, and the food is tastier. We have a new chef — he’s very Thai. We have more authentic Thai food.” His partner in the new restaurant also happens to be a partner in a Cafetasia location in Greenwich Village.

Still, the overhaul made sense to Mr. Sirisunat, who was actually helping manage the location before he re-christened it Lantern. “I run two other Lantern locations, and I know the food very well,” he said.
Read more…

Suzanne Rozdeba A police car at East Fourth Street and Avenue D.

Two gunshots were fired in the Lillian Wald Houses at around 2:45 p.m., a convenience store employee told The Local.

“I didn’t see anything other than people running when they heard the shots,” said Mohamed Sidi, who works at 33 Best Deal on Avenue D. “People were scared.”

A pair of police officers were lingering at the entrance to the Lillian Wald complex at East Fourth Street at around 4 p.m., but would not comment, citing an ongoing investigation. An employee at the nearby Ave. D Candy Store, Ahmedou Ould-Dahya, also told The Local he heard a pair of gunshots.

A spokesman for the police department did yet not have any information on the possible incident.