Emily Canal

At Community Board 3’s transportation committee meeting last night, local residents were given a second chance to plea for a speed bump on East Seventh Street.  As noted last week, a traffic-flow study conducted at the urging of Daniel Squadron had convinced the Department of Transportation that the block didn’t need a bump (“there is little speeding occurring,” said representative Colleen Chattergoon at the meeting last night). However, after the committee pointed out that St. Brigid School was on the corner of Avenue B, Ms. Chattergoon said she could take another look. “Just because we denied it now, doesn’t mean that we would not revisit down the road,” she said, adding that the School Safety division would have to be brought in and that a more likely measure would be additional speed-reducing signage.

Alexis Lamster

After a brief closure by the Department of Health, Butter Lane has once again fired up the ovens and is preparing to serve cupcakes. A spokeswoman for the Department of Health confirmed that the bakery was shut down yesterday for “extensive rodent infestation,” and that it passed a reopening inspection today. The Local just put in a call to Butter Lane, and an employee said that vanilla cupcakes should be ready by 2:30 p.m.

Phillip Kalantzis-Cope

Newly released data of crashes involving pedestrians and cyclists reveals that Bowery and East Houston Street was the city’s most accident-prone intersection for bicyclists from 1995 to 2009.

During that time span, there were 41 accidents at the intersection, according to the advocacy group Transportation Alternatives, which has compiled new data from the New York State Department of Transportation in an interactive map called Crashstat.

Transportation Alternatives said the new statistics pointed to the need for further reforms that would make the city more pedestrian-and-cyclist-friendly.

“As long as the default response to a motor vehicle crash is that it’s an accident, the behavior that’s killing and injuring people will continue,” wrote the group’s director, Paul Steely White, in a press release.
Read more…

Daniel Maurer

The movement to honor late councilwoman Miriam Friedlander by renaming the street she lived on is gathering strength: last night, Community Board 3’s Transportation and Public Safety committee unanimously voted to recommend the name change.

Among others, councilwoman Rosie Mendez made an appearance at Tuesday night’s meeting to lend her weight to the proposal, toting letters of support from government representatives and more than 330 signatures from residents and local restaurant owners. “Miriam was a councilwoman for 18 years,” Ms. Mendez said. “I think this would be a fitting tribute to a woman who loved this community so much, and gave so much of herself.” Read more…

Alexis Lamster

Good morning, East Village.

Despite Community Board 3’s disapproval, Heathers managed to snag a renewal of its liquor license from the State Liquor Authority, according to a Facebook post picked up by EV Grieve.

Apparently there’s a new hawk in Tompkins Square Park. Grieve has photos.

Since Times critic Charles Isherwood might be taking a break from Adam Rapp, L magazine chimes in with a review of the playwright’s latest, “Dreams of Flying Dreams of Falling.” They’re certainly bigger fans than Mr. Isherwood is: “The terrific ensemble finds empathy in even the most caricature-compatible characters, so that by the end we share their long-defered dreams of flight and too-real fears of falling.” Read more…

Courtesy of Doubleday

Luckily for East Villagers, James Wolcott’s memoir of his days as a young culture critic in a now nearly vanished city, “Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York,” places much of its meat and potatoes (along with plenty of gravy) right here in our very own backyard. Steering a middle course between the sometimes overly concentrated, every-word-counts prose of his Vanity Fair columns, and the more loosey-goosey style he deploys in his blog at the same publication, Mr. Wolcott reconfirms his position as New York’s wittiest critic.

Despite its pleasing portability (the book, out later this month, comes in at about 270 pages), “Lucking Out” covers plenty of ground, bopping from Mr. Wolcott’s mice-ridden “man-cave” on East 12th Street, down to CBGB, and back up to the Village Voice, where he made his name. It slides west for a gawk at the gay heyday of the West Village, then uptown for some quality time among the balletomanes of Lincoln Center (with a pause for skuzzy “Taxi Driver”-era Times Square porn along the way), and includes countless screening room séances with his mentor and muse, the late New Yorker film critic, Pauline Kael, to whom large portions of the book can be seen as an extended and touching valentine. Read more…

In a New York Post story about his show “Bored to Death,” Jonathan Ames said, “It used to be that I walked around the East Village and went, ‘There’s someone I went to an artist colony with.’ But now, no oddball writer types are really left in Manhattan.” Mr. Ames isn’t the only writer who has watched the neighborhood change. On Sunday, Oct. 2 locals gathered at the BMW Guggenheim Lab to share their stories during an event, “Growing Up and Old on the Lower East Side: 5-minute stories from locals on making a home in a place of flux.” Among the speakers was former New York Times staff writer Allen Salkin. Watch a clip from his talk and tell us what you think.

On a rainy Saturday afternoon at the BMW Guggenheim Lab, about 12 people volunteered for “Testing, Testing!”, a tour created to measure the psychological effects of urban design. Dr. Colin Ellard, a psychologist who directs the Research Laboratory for Immersive Virtual Environments in Waterloo, Canada, attached sensors to the wrists of about half of the group and gave them BlackBerry devices preloaded with a program designed to record their feelings. Others received a paper survey with pictures depicting a spectrum of moods from “Comfortable” to “Agitated.” The survey also had spaces for volunteers’ ideas about alternative uses for the six spaces visited, which included a restaurant, an apartment building, and an intersection. Read more…

Clint McMahon

Good morning, East Village.

Save The Lower East Side thinks that The Times piece about the changing of the Bowery is evidence of “journalistic fraud, and plain deceit,” since it doesn’t go into detail about the fight for 35 Cooper Square.

According to a Facebook message spotted by The Local, Runnin’ Scared, DNAinfo, and EV Grieve, John Penley and others involved in the Occupy Wall Street protests may camp out in Tompkins Square Park this weekend. Meanwhile, Bowery Boogie notices that gift shop Exit 9 posted a OWS schedule on its chalkboard.

City Room points out that on the MTA’s new subway map, an error has been fixed so that Tompkins Square Park correctly appears to the east of Avenue A. Read more…

Countless white slips are currently littering the bike lane on First Avenue near 11th Street. Wondering whether a ticker tape parade had passed through, The Local turned one over to find this extraordinary plea. License plate numbers have been redacted so as not to out any G-men.

Seen something like this? Add your photo to The Local’s Flickr pool and tell us about it.

Lauren Carol Smith For Sale signs in the window of Zee’s Pet Store on Avenue B, between 9th and 10th.

The space housing Zee’s Pet Store, the pet supply shop closest to Tompkins Square Park, is up for grabs. The owner, Zee, who declined to give a last name, said his rent had been raised, and a sign in the window solicited a hair or nail salon for the storefront on Avenue B between Ninth and Tenth Street.

At the Tompkins Square Dog Run, reactions varied. Read more…

Want to see the very latest from the occupation? Dave Winer, the RSS pioneer responsible for The Local’s “News River,” has now created a site where you can see Flickr photos from Zuccotti Park and elsewhere as they’re posted. To add to the stream, simply tag your photo with #occupywallst and it’ll show up at occupyweb.org within ten minutes.

The Lo-Down has a reminder regarding Tuesday’s important meeting about the redevelopment of the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area in the Lower East Side. The swaths of property, near Delancey and Grand Streets, have long been eyed by the city as a site for major new development, and have also caused much anxiety about the future of the Essex Street Market. Tomorrow’s public hearing will present opportunities for public comment on the project as it begins the environmental review process. The meeting starts at 3:30 p.m. at 184 Eldridge Street. There is an evening session, as well.

At 6 a.m., before the sun had cleared the horizon, the members of U TOUGH Bootcamp met around the jungle gym at Tompkins Square Park. Their trainer, a former army sergeant known as Sergeant D-Train, laid his equipment out on the pavement: hooks, ropes, carabiners, and resistance weights that looked like gigantic rubber bands.

Over the next hour, the students strained themselves in a series of army-style drills, while Sergeant D-Train offered firm instructions.

“Kate, you’re moving like pond water,” he said to one sprinting student. “Pond water don’t move! Let’s go!”
Read more…

Folks, we’ve added a half-dozen new photos to our gallery and the time has finally come to vote for the neighborhood’s sweetest ride.

Browse the slideshow above and then pick your favorite from among our hastily improvised monickers below (feel free to suggest better names!) Once we have a set of winning wheels — voting will close around this time next week — we’ll do our best to track down its owner. Then you’ll get the story behind that nutty paint job or that gleaming set of rims.
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Suzanne Rozdeba

Good morning, East Village.

Did you see this mysterious sky writing on Sunday? City Room explains that it was part of an art project sponsored by Friends of the Highline.

WNYC shows some love for Filipino spot Maharlika and offers up their barbecue sauce recipe.

The Times casts an eye on the state of the Bowery, noting that preservationists are requesting that two blocks be labeled a historic district.

City Room profiles Jason Shelowitz, the man behind all those urban etiquette signs.
Read more…

Lauren Carol Smith Shots from the aftermath of the accident.

A black Ford S.U.V. ran into a Fire Department ambulance on the Bowery at East Fourth Street yesterday, and passengers from both vehicles were taken to the hospital.

A spokesman for the Fire Department said that the accident occurred at around 5:30 p.m., and that a two people were treated at Bellevue Hospital for minor injuries. Roughly a half-hour later the driver of the Ford — which belonged to the Delancey Car Service — was spotted dislodging the front of his S.U.V. from the rear bumper of the F.D.N.Y. ambulance by throwing it in reverse.