Sarah C. Tung Sign at EV Shoe Repair

After drafting a letter to landlords promoting retail diversity in the face of a nightlife glut, Community Board 3 has formed a subcommittee that may take some of its cues from San Francisco legislation.

On Tuesday, Community Board 3 announced that it had drafted a letter to local landlords asking them to respond to a “high demand for more daytime retail business such as grocers, butchers, shoe stores, stationery stores and other businesses that serve our local residents” rather than moving further in the current direction of “too many bars and eating/drinking businesses.”

During a meeting of the Economic Development committee last night, Mary DeStefano, an urban fellow for the board, outlined several strategies to insure such growth, including formula business restrictions, a measure that she said had proved successful in San Francisco. The move would limit the amount of chains by requiring a “formula business,” defined as “a restaurant or store that has 11 or more locations nationally,” to apply for a special permit, she said. Read more…

Gabrielle Lipton A performance at the Moldy Fig.

After opening in May, the Moldy Fig quickly made a mark on the East Village-Lower East Side jazz scene. By booking both highly regarded veterans like Bertha Hope and swashbuckling newcomers like Zachary Lipton, it revived a local tradition of mainstream jazz clubs with an openness to experimentation. But on Nov. 23, a posting on the club’s Facebook page announced that Charles Brown, the owner, was ill and in the hospital, and the club would be closed while he recuperated.

It’s uncertain when the Fig will reopen, but its closure puts venues like Mona’s, The Stone, and Nublu at the center of the jazz scene in the East Village – a neighborhood that has often been overlooked in the conventional histories of New York City jazz, but has played a vital role. Read more…

Phillip Kalantzis-Cope

Good morning, East Village.

First, the celebrity news: The New York Post mentions that Uma Thurman was at Liquiteria buying an all-greens juice as well as a fruit-and-wheatgrass mix.

The Daily Mail has action shots of “American Idol” star Katharine McPhee filming scenes for “Smash” in the East Village. The Local warned parkers that the NBC show, also starring Anjelica Huston, would be filming.

EV Grieve finds Department of Buildings records indicating that the latest outpost of Subway will occupy a space on First Avenue between Sixth and Seventh Streets, right near the shuttered Polonia restaurant. Read more…

Daniel Maurer East Village Meat Market

At the East Village Meat Market on Second Avenue, tiny firs, pots of poinsettias and ringing bells greet customers gearing up to celebrate the birth of Christ on Jan. 7 (which corresponds with Dec. 25 in the Julian calendar) – evidence that in the neighborhood once known as Little Ukraine, Christmas is coming.

Andrew Ilnicki, the store’s 50-year-old manager, spoke as customers shopped for smoked meats, breads, borscht mixes, pierogi, and jellied pigs’ feet. “On Christmas Eve,” he said, meaning Jan. 6, “people serve non-meat food, which can be dairy; a lot of fish; and kutya, which is a pearled wheat with poppy seeds.”

“You can make kutya richer with honey and walnuts and raisins,” he said, describing one of 12 dishes that make up a traditional Ukrainian Christmas Eve supper. “On Christmas, there will be hams. They’re very popular with people. We cure them, smoke them, bake them and sell them.” Read more…

The police arrested a man suspected of robbing a convenience store on First Avenue, but his accomplice — who is wanted for at least 16 other heists — is still at large.

The police said that 30-year-old Duwayne Bascom and another man entered the store at 111 First Avenue on Nov. 21 at around 8:40 p.m., demanded an unknown amount of money and then fled with the cash. But Mr. Bascom has not yet been tied to any of the other robberies, three of which occurred around the East Village.

In the first, the suspect entered a Subway on Second Avenue between St. Marks Place and Ninth Street on Nov. 9 at around 2:25 a.m., brandished a knife and demanded money from the cashier. Police did not say how much money he received.
Read more…

Renata Jurczyk spent Dec. 29 with her family, cleaning out Polonia, the restaurant she had owned for 28 years and shuttered on Christmas Eve.

“I feel bad for the people who came here. They felt like this is their home and it’s a big part of their lives. And it’s gone,” she said.

Ms. Jurczyk abandoned her career aspirations to run the restaurant, which first opened at 126 First Avenue (it moved a block down six years later). “I finished law school in Poland,” she said. “I never dreamed about having a restaurant. I came here when I finished school. I started to go to school here to become a paralegal, but I didn’t finish because I had too much work in the restaurant and small kids.  It was too much.”

The Local spoke to Ms. Jurczyk and her daughters as they packed up last week.

Photos: Noah Fecks
In this week’s “Off the Menu” column, Florence Fabricant announces a couple of local openings – L’asso EV at 107 First Avenue and Bobwhite Lunch and Supper Counter at 94 Avenue C. When The Local alerted you to L’asso’s opening last week, we promised a look at the interior and at the menu. Enjoy the former above, and the latter below. And, of course, a close-up look at the pies. Read more…

On Sunday, Billy Leroy shuttered Billy’s Antiques & Props, the tent on East Houston Street that will be replaced by a two-story building. The store’s most expensive item in the days before it closed was a $3,500 Coney Island boardwalk sign, but its keeper said he would sell some pricier merchandise at the new location: “The tent limits the price we can charge. You can’t charge $5,000 for something a boutique could easily get. It’s going to change. It’s going to be an upscale Billy’s.”

Before packing up and heading off to vacation in Paris (he’s half-French), Mr. Leroy showed The Local his five favorite relics of the old neighborhood – places that might just be considered oddities or antiques in what he said was a new era of mom jeans and flip-flops.

Phillip Kalantzis-Cope

Good morning, East Village.

EV Grieve notices two store closures: Vampire Freaks on Avenue A and Autumn Skateboard Shop on East Ninth Street, next door to the recently shuttered Itzocan Cafe.

Bowery Boogie notices that Teany Café on Rivington Street has been shuttered by the Department of Health. The eatery, formerly co-owned by singer Moby, garnered a whopping 90 violation points during a Dec. 28 inspection. The Local reported in November that Teany was serving beer without a license.

In happier news, Grieve hears that Bobwhite opens today on Avenue C near Sixth Street with southern-style fare (the owner is shown handing out fried black-eyed peas). And Bowery Boogie writes that two women who work in fashion are opening a bar called Wisemen at 355 Bowery. Read more…

Kathy Grayson

The owners of Bowery Beef, the sandwich shop inside the Bowery Poetry Club that closed during the summer, are returning to the neighborhood and opening a café at 125-127 First Avenue, near St. Marks Place. Ray LeMoine and Michael Herman are teaming up with Jamie Manza, an architect who also runs an upstate farm with his father, to open a restaurant that may source some of its ingredients from the farm, as well as shellfish from Gloucester, Mass. A former Bowery Beef customer, Mitch Zukor, will also be involved in the project.

Mr. Manza, 32, said that he and Mr. LeMoine, who is an East Village resident and a contributor to The Local, were previously business partners in a t-shirt company, started in 1999, that sold “Yankees Suck” shirts at Fenway Park. The business proved lucrative, and the duo traveled the world together – an experience that helped turn Mr. Manza into a confessed foodie.

“In 2000 we went to Paris,” he said. “We saw a restaurant where there was $100 lobster on the menu. We were standing outside this place and we were like, ‘Oh my God, there’s such a thing as $100 lobster. We have to eat $100 lobster from now on.”

Still, Mr. Manza said he wanted the as-yet unnamed café, where he will be the general manager, to be an “every-day eatery,” adding, “we want writers to be able to read and write and work in there during the day.” Read more…

Bowery Boogie spotted the renderings of a new hotel planned for Orchard Street between Rivington and Stanton Streets — and the blog’s reaction isn’t too favorable. They call the design, which towers over neighboring buildings, “gut-wrenching, vomit-inducing.” Boogie also notes that the long-stalled property is already up for sale for $26 million and is being marketed as having a hotel that will be “delivered complete” in 2013.

axoxnxs

Readers are reacting to the possible disappearance of two neighborhood long-timers. The first, Polonia, is already gone, as The Local reported last week. Renata Jurczyk, who owned the Polish restaurant with her husband for 28 years, said she couldn’t afford the rent after her landlord more than tripled it. Last week also brought news that Steve Cannon, the owner of A Gathering of the Tribes, was ordered to move out of his East Third Street space by the end of the month. Readers have responded by expressing sympathy for the local institutions, but also for their landlords. Here’s what they had to say. Read more…

“Smash,” the NBC show starring Anjelica Huston that filmed at Cafe Orlin in September and on the Bowery in November, is back in the neighborhood. Flyers indicate that vehicles parked on the following streets must skedaddle by 10 p.m. tonight (okay, the word “skedaddle” wasn’t used): East 12th between Third and Fourth Avenues, plus part of the block between Second and Third Avenues; Third Avenue between East 12th and East 10th Streets; and East 11th Street between Second and Third Avenues, plus the north side of the block between Third and Fourth Avenues. Expect to see lights, cameras, and action tomorrow from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m.

Patti Smith completes a trio of local performances tonight with a reading from her recently released book, “Woolgathering,” at the St Mark’s Bookshop.

On Saturday, the writer and musician, who had turned 65 the previous day, helped rock in the New Year at her fourteenth annual series of concerts at the Bowery Ballroom, where it was announced that she was ending what had become a tradition. “It’s just time to move on,” said Lenny Kaye, her longtime lead guitarist and collaborator.

The next day, she joined a lengthy roster of poets at the 38th annual St. Mark’s Poetry Project New Years Day Marathon Reading. Last February, she marked the fortieth anniversary of her first reading at the venue by returning for a rousing event.

Tonight at the St Mark’s Bookshop, she’ll read from “Woolgathering,” her phantasmagorical record of episodes from her distant past. Much of this new edition was originally published in 1992, as part of Hanuman Press’ influential series of miniature books. The event starts at 7 p.m.; if you’re hoping to get in and snag a signed copy, you better get there early.

>Phillip Kalantzis-Cope

Good morning, East Village.

The Post reveals the identity of the man who, as The Local first reported, was struck by a motorcycle in the early hours of the new year. Daniel Hiwale, 33, was said to be intoxicated when he fell into the street.

Around the same time on Sunday, reports The Post, a man pushed a woman into her apartment building on East Seventh Street and tried to force her up the stairs, but was stopped after witnesses flagged police officers. Anthony Griggs, 42, is charged with attempted rape, burglary, strangulation, robbery and sexual abuse.

DNA Info and The Post report that on Dec. 24, the police caught a man at an East 12th Street building with a bag full of laptops, fur coats, and digital camera. According to DNA Info, Reginald Qualls, 19, is also being eyed in connection with a string of Greenwich Village burglaries, and was arrested along with two others for assaulting a 76-year-old man in Union Square ten days earlier. Read more…

Daniel Maurer Medics treat the motorcycle accident victim.

Two incidents marred New Year’s celebrations in the East Village during today’s early morning hours. At Second Avenue and 13th Street, around 3 a.m., dozens of police officers moved to detain Occupy Wall Street protesters as helicopters circled over the neighborhood; about an hour later at 12th Street between Avenues A and B, a man was struck by a motorcycle and taken to the hospital in critical condition.

The motorcycle accident occurred around 4:20 a.m. When The Local arrived on the scene, a man lay facedown, bleeding onto the street, having been struck by a BMW with Maine plates as he crossed the street well away from the intersection at Avenue A. Paramedics transported him to Beth Israel Hospital, where the police said he arrived with severe head trauma and is currently in critical condition. The driver of the motorcycle, a 38-year-old male, is not suspected of criminality.

The earlier incident at Second Avenue and 13th Street occurred after protesters clashed with police at Zuccotti Park shortly before midnight. The Post reported that one officer was stabbed in the hand with a pair of scissors then, and City Room reported that just before 1:30 a.m., police officers entered the park to clear it of about 150 people, five of whom were led off in handcuffs. After a group marched north, 60 to 100 people, eyewitnesses told The Local, arrived at Second Avenue and East 13^th Street around 3 a.m. There, their progress was stopped by a wall of police officers. Read more…

Happy New Year, all! Barring breaking news, The Local will return next Tuesday. In the meantime, enjoy community contributor Tim Milk’s tale of a New Year’s Eve we can only hope to match.

Illustration: Tim Milk

“You’ve got to go,” my friend insisted. She thrust the invitation into my hand. New Year’s Eve, 1979: It was touted as the celebration to end all celebrations. The glitterati of the art scene were due to attend, as the hostess had connections to all the dealers, artists and buyers. As for myself, who was still quite new to New York, the specter of beautiful people closing in around me gave me the willies.

“Okay,” I said. “What will we wear?”

“Wear what you want. I’m not going. I’ve got a date. But you’re going,” my friend commanded. “Get out there. Do it! Meet people!” She then gave me that look. “Don’t you dare stay at home.”

I’m shy by nature, and this was especially true in my 24th year. Nonetheless, my courage was bolstered by the thought that there might be something to eat at this place. I may not always succeed in working the room, but eating is always an easy fait accompli.

Like any new-to-town rube, I arrived too early. Alone, I crossed a great empty ballroom, decorated like a sultan’s palace. This was clearly an affair for the fortunate few. Studding the walls were tables swathed with satin: the cocktail bar, the champagne station, and then the oasis where canapés and wine awaited. The hostess, in a glittering gown, was all hither and thither with last minute arrangements, so I was able to pass unobserved to the table of food.

“Felipe” was the name emblazoned on the tag of the fellow who was guarding the sumptuous spread. He looked me up and down and narrowed his eyes. Who let this scruffy punk inside?, they seemed to say. As I shrunk from his malevolence, the hostess called out, “Felipe! Quick! Over here!”

With a snort, Felipe departed, leaving the spread of goodies to tempt me. My hand drew close to snatch a morsel, when something suddenly took hold of my ankle. I jumped. Read more…