Bob Arihood, friend and photographer of the East Villlage’s misfits, free spirits and longtime locals died yesterday in his Fourth Street apartment. He was 65.
A spokesman for the fire department said that the cause was cardiac arrest at around 7:45 p.m.
Many of Mr. Arihood’s photographs on his blog, Neither More Nor Less, had an unmistakable air of grit and nostalgia. But others, many of them snapped in the wee hours of the morning, carried legitimate neighborhood news overlooked by other outlets. His blog began as a way to document the plight of the Mosaic Man Jim Power, who was evicted from an apartment on St. Marks Place. Later, Mr. Arihood would expand his blog to cover the ups and downs of Ray’s Candy Store, as well as the constant goings-on in Tompkins Square Park. Read more…
A fire broke out in a stove at 107 St. Marks Place at around 6:25 p.m. today, and was under control within 20 minutes. According to a fire department spokesman, 60 firefighters responded to the fire in an apartment on the first floor of the six-story building between First Avenue and Avenue A. Only one fire hose was needed to extinguish the blaze and there were no injuries.
From 1994 to 1995 I lived in a converted storefront on the Lower East Side, at 112 Suffolk Street between Delancey and Rivington Streets. Back then the neighborhood was not yet gentrified and was somewhat rough around the edges. I was a new father and even though I was pushing my baby daughter around in a stroller it took the drug dealers a couple of weeks before they realized I lived there and wasn’t there to buy heroin. I worked part-time waiting tables and working as a photographer’s assistant whenever I could; I was rarely without a camera.
I always found the temperance fountain in Tompkins Square Park to be quite out of place — not many of the park’s residents practiced temperance.
Kim BhasinPhotos from Guy Fieri’s shoot on 12th Street.
Guy Fieri, the peroxided Food Network star, was spotted filming at John’s of 12th Street yesterday for his show, “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives.”
Mr. Fieri spent about three hours in the afternoon shooting at the Italian restaurant between First and Second Avenues, and co-owner Mike Alpert was thrilled.
“He learned about us through the grapevine. I was amazed that he’d never heard of us; an Italian restaurant that’s been around for 103 years,” said Mr. Alpert. Read more…
Two of the most comprehensive documentarians of the late-1970s East Village punk scene will give a screening of their rare no wave footage at the BMW Guggeinheim Lab on Sunday.
The neighborhood’s renegade documentarian, Clayton Patterson, filed a dispatch from the Occupy Wall Street protests to Bowery Boogie. In a photo essay, Mr. Patterson writes that he snapped pictures of an officer trying to start a fight with protestors as an excuse to lock them up. Other shots capture the tension between the police and protestors as Occupy Wall Street approaches its second week.
Liv BuliMichael Moore addresses the crowd at St. Mark’s Bookshop.
A book signing at St. Mark’s Bookshop by Michael Moore turned into a rally for the embattled store on Thursday, as the champion of the left exhorted patrons to continue buying literature in person.
“At some point you just have to stop and stand up and say: ‘No more,’ ” Mr. Moore shouted to the roughly 100 people packing the store on Third Avenue.
Mr. Moore’s appearance reaffirmed the sudden swell of affection for the Bookshop, which has gone from a store struggling to turn a profit into a symbol of the rapidly changing neighborhood in only one month.
“It comes down to a simple bookstore here on the corner of Third Avenue and Ninth Street in the East Village in New York City,” Mr. Moore said in between criticism of corporate executives and appeals to the store’s landlord, Cooper Union. Read more…
Ian GordonA street performance by the Theater for the New City.
Good Morning, East Village.
Hot on the heels of Michael Moore’s rallying cry for St. Mark’s Bookshop, the East Village book scene notches another victory. The New York Post reports that East Village Books owner Donald Davis helped apprehend a notorious New York City library thief in a sting that included the use of wrestling moves. This would make a great movie or, well, book.
City Room has run a collection of photographs by Leland Bobbe, a regular in the Downtown scene of the 1970s who shot the likes of Patti Smith, Mink DeVille and The Ramones.
The International Business Times takes a look at the Occupy Wall Street protests and finds a few similarities with the Tompkins Square Park Riot of 1988. Do you think the two have much in common? Read more…
Here comes the cavalry. The embattled St. Mark’s Bookshop is gearing up for the arrival of the liberal icon Michael Moore, who just announced on Twitter that tonight all royalties from sales of his book, “Here Comes Trouble,” will go to the Occupy Wall Street protests. Mr. Moore is expected to arrive at 7 p.m. at the store on Third Avenue at Stuyvesant Street. The Local’s intrepid reporter, Liv Buli, will be on hand to get his opinion regarding the bookshop’s predicament. If you spot her, say hello!
If Steve Herrick, Carl Siciliano and the late Bea Arthur have their way, a long-neglected, city-owned house at 222 East East 13th Street will be converted into a refuge for gay, lesbian and transgender kids living on the streets.
The respective executive directors of the Cooper Square Committee and the Ali Forney Center hope that their proposal for a transitional housing center — funded by a $300,000 donation from the late “Golden Girls” star — will resonate with the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which has owned the dilapidated property since 1993. As part of the effort to generate community support, representatives from both groups will pitch their idea for the Bea Arthur Residence For L.G.B.T. Youth at next month’s meeting of the Community Board 3 Land Use Committee. Read more…
Stephen Rex BrownSeptember’s Community Board 3 meeting was an overcrowded “disaster,” according to District Manager Susan Stetzer.
Community Board 3 general board meetings — known throughout the neighborhood for heated debates that go on at least four hours — just got a lot more uncomfortable.
Last month, the Department of Education stopped allowing the board to use its facilities for free, leaving District Manager Susan Stetzer searching for a space that can accommodate the scores of people that attend the monthly meetings.
The consequences of the Department of Education’s new policy was on full display on Tuesday at a standing-room-only general board meeting at the Ukrainian Museum. People had come out in droves in regards to Heathers Bar and Basketball City on Pier 36 in the Lower East Side, leaving the roughly 100 attendees flooding into the stairwell and lobby. Other people in the audience leaned in between historic Ukrainian paintings while struggling to hear the goings-on at the other end of the art gallery-turned-meeting space. Read more…
The Lo-Down spotted a hawk devouring a pigeon in Seward Park yesterday — and so did much of the Lower East Side, apparently. The bird of prey dined unperturbed as a gaggle of excited onlookers took pictures of nature in all its brutality. When The Local spoke to the executive director of New York City Audubon last week regarding the hawks in Tompkins Square Park, he said that it was likely the newborns were venturing far beyond the green space where they were raised. Might this hawk in Seward Park once have nested in Tompkins?
The New York Post reports that John Legend has put his posh two-bedroom condo on the market for $2.95 million after moving in only two years ago. The smooth crooner is reportedly a big fan of his space in 52E4 on the Bowery, but is looking to upgrade. Maybe he should go house hunting with David Schwimmer?
Ella ZhangScenes from last night’s opening of the “WTC” exhibit on East Fourth Street.
A longtime photographer of Lower Manhattan has taken close-up photos of the World Trade Center and mounted them on a scaffolding on East Fourth Street, just out of reach.
Brian Rose, the photographer behind “WTC,” said he was inspired to prepare the outdoor exhibit after cleaning negatives of World Trade Center photos he took as long as 30 years ago. In the process of ridding the film of dust, he zoomed in on it and became mesmerized by the architectural beauty of the towers’ details.
“’WTC’ was never a project, it was found,” Mr. Rose said. Read more…
Good morning East Village, and happy Rosh Hashanah.
The National Review’s Katrina Trinko checks out Ron Paul’s speech at Webster Hall on Monday and finds a crowd that “skews more hipster than hip replacement.” In her piece, she dubs the contrarian Libertarian the “The President of the East Village.”
Further south, City Room has the latest twist in the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests: Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna may have used pepper spray in a second incident.
Back in our neck of the woods, EV Grieve spotted a noise complaint outside of UCBeast, the Upright Citizen Brigade’s recently opened East Village outpost. Anyone else think noise in front of the club is no laughing matter? Read more…
Earlier today, we caught “Mosaic Man” Jim Power decorating a light pole on the southwest corner of St. Marks Place and Second Avenue. He said his latest creation – which includes tiles representing a Japanese flag (a nod to the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami) as well as shout-outs to MosaicMansTrail.com, Neither More Nor Less, and Neighborhoodr: East Village (the employer of Mr. Power’s social media guru) – is his 71st standing mosaic in 26 years of bringing local color.
Community Board 3 has just released its calendar of meetings for October. On the docket for October 17’s SLA Licensing committee is Fonda, a restaurant that EV Grieve noted earlier today is coming to the former Octavia’s Porch space at 40 Avenue B. A call to the Park Slope restaurant of the same name, opened in 2009 by former Rosa Mexicano culinary director Roberto Santibañez, reveals that it is planning an outpost. See the rest of the CB’s planned topics of discussions here.
So you want to land another kickflip just like the good old days, but you’re too scared of being singled out by the young skateboarders at Tompkins Square Park as an outsider. Now, thanks to Enclave Skate Shop in New Haven, you’ll be able to fit right in. The shop’s rundown of skate decorum covers flow of traffic, where to have a meltdown over not landing a trick, where to get $1 pizza (Mamani, naturally) and places to avoid (it’s a shocker: the public bathroom.)
The Local was a journalistic collaboration designed to reflect the richness of the East Village, report on its issues and concerns, give voice to its people and create a space for our neighbors to tell stories about themselves. It was operated by the students and faculty of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, in collaboration with The New York Times, which provides supervision to ensure that the blog remains impartial, reporting-based, thorough and rooted in Times standards.
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Steven Hirsch Bob Arihood.
