Daniel Maurer

Shortly after 2 a.m. this morning, police sirens sounded on 12th Street after a report of a male shot near Avenue C. Police tape sealed off the eastern half of 12th Street as well as Avenue C at the southwest corner, where a taxi cab, stopped mid-turn in the street, was part of the crime scene.

Police officers on the scene declined to give details of the shooting, but the cab driver, who asked not to be named, described the incident. “I was here at the red light,” he said. “There was a kid walking with another kid, about to cross. I tried to make my turn; he crumbled and he fell down.” Read more…

Carolyn Sun Left to right: Roberto Hernandez, John Penley, Joan Moossy, Jerry Levy, and a student.

Occupy Tompkins Square Park started out as small group of four — John Penley, Joan Moossy, Robert Hernandez and Jerry Levy,  all over the age of fifty.

“We’re geriatric protestors,” Mr. Penley joked.

All had been protesting at Occupy Wall Street since its first week in September, and today, as planned, they met at noon on a grassy knoll in the middle of the park. Protestors trickled steadily in as the day wore on; by mid-afternoon, they numbered a modest dozen. Read more…

Ray LeMoine

Nevermind that “private” bike rack. This afternoon, the Department of Transportation showed that sharing is caring by setting up a preview station for the city’s forthcoming Bike Share NYC program along Avenue A. The program launches next summer, when 600 similar stations will open across the city.

“It’s cheaper for a full year than a monthly MetroCard,” said Al Silvestri, a Department of Transportation representative, to a group of East Villagers outside of Tompkins Square Park. For just $95 per year ($105 less than the tennis pass for city parks), participants are allotted unlimited 30-minute rides, with a sliding scale for longer jaunts. Read more…

Suzanne Rozdeba Mr. Penley at Zuccotti Park

Local activist John Penley said the occupation he’s organizing at Tompkins Square Park tomorrow is going to last 24 hours – regardless of whether or not the cops kick them out.

“We’ll be at the park until midnight. If the police force us out we’re going to leave and take over Avenue A,” Mr. Penley said while camped out at Occupy Wall Street. “If people don’t want to leave, I’ve been asking them to lay down and be arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience. We don’t want another riot, but we will be either in or out of the park for 24 hours.” Read more…

Scott Lynch

This weekend marks the end of the three-month run of the BMW Guggenheim Lab, and the think tank has an assortment of events lined up to commemorate its closure. Yoga classes, a salon with Clayton Patterson, and plenty of “What have we learned?”-type lectures are scheduled, along with a closing reception Sunday night. Here’s a look back at The Local’s coverage. Will you miss the Lab? The burgers, at least? Read more…

Speaking of East Fourth Street, La MaMa Experimental Theatre is having a blowout block party this Sunday, Oct. 16 from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. to celebrate its 50th anniversary. Expect food from Momofuku (which just debuted its quarterly magazine “Lucky Peach”) and neighbor Cucina di Pesce, along with performances by Blue Man Group and a gospel choir. For more, click on the image of the poster.

Jacob Sugarman Talia Lugacy speaks at FAB! Festival’s groundbreaking ceremony for 64 East Fourth Street.

Last month, as The Local noted, Fourth Arts Block broke ground on a new not-for-profit center at 64 East Fourth Street. Beginning next fall, the East Village can add film production to the building’s growing list of artistic enterprises. 64E4 Films is the brainchild of Paradise Factory founder Tom Noonan and his fellow board members, including luminaries such as Christopher Walken, Susan Sarandon and Charlie Kaufman. While Paradise Factory has produced films in the past, the group hopes to turn its building into a state-of-the-art film production and exhibition center using its own funds as well as nearly five million dollars in public funds it has raised with fellow non-profits Teatro Circulo and Teatro IATI.

Leading the venture is Brooklyn-born film director Talia Lugacy, who first began her business relationship with Mr. Noonan, 60, when she offered him a supporting role in her 2007 feature “Descent.” Read more…

A feared confrontation between the police and Occupy Wall Street protesters was averted this morning after the company that owns Zuccotti Park postponed a planned cleaning of the plaza.

The morning was not without incident, as a smaller group of several hundred protesters announced their intention to “celebrate” their continued occupation of the park with an unpermitted civil disobedience march through the streets of the Financial District. The group pushed through a police line onto Broadway chanting “Whose streets? Our Streets!” Police on foot and riding motor scooters forced the protesters back onto the sidewalk, only to have the demonstrators spill again into the streets.

As The Local’s cameras rolled, one man fell to the ground screaming after a police scooter moved into a cluster of people. The man was struck with a baton and arrested moments later as witnesses called out, “You ran over his foot” and chanted, “The whole world is watching.” One bystander hurled a bag of trash at police officers as they pushed protestors back onto the sidewalk. Read more…

Noah Fecks

The city’s Department of Transportation confirmed late yesterday what seemed obvious: you can’t claim a bike rack on a sidewalk as private, even if you installed it yourself.

The Local submitted the oddball inquiry yesterday after reporting on the mystery of the “private” rack on East Fourth Street. A local plumber told The Local he installed the rack at the request of Flash Courier Service, and assumed it would be available to the public. But as it turned out, someone has claimed the rack as his own, and left notes warning that the “trespassing” bikes will be forcibly removed.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Transportation said that the rack did not appear in city records. “Still, even if a permit is issued for installation, that does not mean the bike rack is for the exclusive use of the owner if it is installed on a public sidewalk,” the spokeswoman added. Read more…

Suzanne Rozdeba L.E.S. Jewels and John Penley at Occupy Wall Street.

Runnin’ Scared interviews the bloggers behind EV Grieve and Save The Lower East Side to get their thoughts on why, as Save The Lower East Side pointed out yesterday, Grieve’s commenters are so dismissive of John Penley’s plans to occupy Tompkins Square Park this weekend.  Says Grieve, “Some of the newer residents seem to be more interested in finding the perfect drunk brunch, tweeting about cupcakes and going out and watching, say, the Oklahoma-Texas game in sweatshirts and jerseys. Social movements are for the history books.”

Brooklyn Based notices, as have we, that Williamsburg is becoming “East Village East,” with outposts of Mama’s and Vanessa’s Dumpling House due to open later this month, and an offshoot of Cafe Mogador planned as well. “The recession really hit the East Village pretty hard and we saw our clientele dropping,” explains Jeremiah Clancy, the owner of Mama’s. “It pushed the last notion of young people out because the rents were so high.”

Speaking of Mama’s, the southern food trend continues: EV Grieve notices a Facebook update indicating that Double Wide, a “bar and southern kitchen” will open this weekend at 505 East 12th Street. Their sloppy Joes “bear only the finest ingredients.” Read more…

From Oct. 1 to 10, the annual Art in Odd Spaces festival turned all of 14th Street into an impromptu art gallery and performance space. Watch the audio slideshow above to hear more about the festival from its founder, Ed Woodham, who started AIOP in Atlanta in 1996 and then brought it to the East Village and Lower East Side as “a response to the dwindling of public space and personal civil liberties,” according to the website.

Additional photography by Heather Holland, Sasha Sumner, and Art in Odd Places.

Andrea Huspeni Jamie Graber outside of the cafe.

Next month, the East Village’s latest vegan (and gluten free!) café will make its debut at 130 East Seventh Street, between First Avenue and Avenue A. Will Gingersnap’s Organic sell gingersnaps? Not necessarily. “My friends call me Gingersnap because they joke that I’m a redhead,” explained the owner, Jamie Graber.

A native New Yorker, Ms. Graber spent a few years in Los Angeles where she did marketing for Juliano’s Raw and was a manager at Euphoria Loves Rawvolution, which now has an outpost in the East Village. When she returned to New York, she continued working with raw supplements at Live Live & Organic on East 10^th Street.

“The East Village is the mecca of health. It is my favorite part of the city,” Ms. Graber said, describing Seventh Street (which has, of course, become a foodie strip of sorts) as “magical.” Read more…

Susan Keyloun, who contributes photographs to The Local, decided to start shooting video for us as well. Her first outing proved plenty eventful. Here’s her story, involving a hot pursuit, a surrender, and another foot race in four-inch heels.

Yesterday afternoon, I stopped by The Local’s headquarters at Cooper Square to pick up a video camera. I had volunteered to be their April O’Neil, keeping a camera strapped to me at all times in case of breaking news. After a quick video tutorial, I hit the streets wondering what I might shoot: Maybe the occupation of Tompkins Square Park in a couple of days? Actually, I didn’t have to wait nearly that long for a good story.

Not five minutes after I had secured the camera, around 4 p.m., a man wearing a red sweatshirt and blue backpack rushed past me on East Eighth Street with a mob in hot pursuit. From what they were screaming, it seemed he had stolen a cell phone from one of them. I reached for my video camera, suddenly transforming into “Scoop Keyloun.” (Except that it took me almost a minute to get the lens cap off. What can I say? The tutorial hadn’t covered that.) Read more…

Noah Fecks

Someone is leaving menacing messages on a bike rack on East Fourth Street, warning cyclists that they are not allowed to park on the u-shaped steel he claims as his own.

Four days ago, photographer Noah Fecks sent a snapshot to The Local, of two bikes parked at the rack between Avenues A and B with notes attached to them saying “This is a private rack — remove your bike or it will be done for you!” Yesterday, one of the bikes remained, bearing the same note.

But this is not just a run-of-the-mill case of an over-assertive cyclist claiming a parking space. A longtime local who identified himself as a plumber and welder, but asked not to be named, told The Local that he installed the bike rack for the landlord of 211 East Fourth Street, who he said ran Flash Courier Service out of the building. (The courier service indeed has an East Fourth Street address on Foursquare, but is said to be located on East Fifth Street on YellowPages.com and elsewhere; today, an employee who said he did not have time to speak to The Local brusquely told us the company was located on Lenox Avenue before hanging up.) Read more…

Carly Okyle

In an Alphabet City apartment, Antonio Garcia, better known as Chico, showed off his latest works, gesturing with fingers stained black from spray paint and Sharpie markers. The four canvases – each three square feet – depict the corner of Eighth Street and Avenue C from the 1970s to today, with bright hues and cartoon-style figures.

“I like doing buildings, cars, city scenes – not too much of people,” explained Mr. Garcia.

The series was delivered to Speakeasy, a bar on Avenue C, last night. Along with illustrations for Bulldog Gin and a forthcoming mural at the New Amici Pizza restaurant, they are among the artist’s latest (and for now, his last) New York-based creations.

Mr. Garcia has spent nearly 50 years living in the East Village, and more than 30 beautifying buildings, awnings, and walls with his colorful murals. His most recent creation, adorning Ray’s Candy Store, nods to the loss of blogger Bob Arihood. Now Mr. Garcia, 48, plans to leave the neighborhood himself. He said he would depart for Tampa, Florida on Oct. 28. Though he has left town for stretches of time before, this time the absence is indefinite.

“I don’t think I’m going to come back,” he said, “but you can never say never.” Read more…

Susan Keyloun

Save The Lower East Side pens a lengthy thought piece about why exactly the “new breed” of East Village resident feels threatened by Occupy Wall Street: “This new breed of Lower East Sider comes to enjoy a sense of urban authenticity in Manhattan. Of course, it’s not authentic at all, but a kind of faux authenticity, pretend authenticity: the EV feels like it’s hip, it imagines itself to be hip, it has lots of youth who style themselves as hip, but in reality, they are just children of wealth seeking $700 a month more hipness and urban pretend-authenticity than they would get in Queens.”

Speaking of “the never-ending push and pull between New York’s past and present,” The Times tours Bowery House, a shabby flophouse turned chic hotel where some of the old residents are still bunking up for $10 per night. One of them (who may or may not know that he has a room named after him) apparently isn’t a fan of the conversion, and is said to have twice smashed the hotel’s neon sign.

Elsewhere on the Bowery, Bowery Boogie finds out that Bowery Coffee, the café from the owner of the adjoining lighting shop B4 It Was Cool, will open on Monday.

Oh, and The Local noticed, as did EV Grieve, that a new clothing boutique, Riff, now occupies the space that once held Morrison Hotel Gallery. Read more…