Linking to NBC New York’s coverage of The Bean’s impending death by Starbucks, Bowery Boogie points out that the location once held Little Rickie, a gift shop that, along with others, was sued by the ‘Bucks for selling “F*ckoffs Coffee” stickers. Meanwhile Gothamist has a run-down of “7 East Village Coffee Spots To Try While You Wait For The Bean To Reopen.”

Courtesy of Robert Sestok. “First St. Iron.”

What will happen to the BMW Guggenheim Lab once it packs up its video screens and moves on to Berlin? Members of First Street Green – the community group that for years lobbied the city to renovate the lot at Houston Street and Second Avenue – held a brainstorming event at the Lab on Saturday to answer just that. This much is certain: They’ve secured approval from the Parks Department, which owns the land, to install a new sculpture by Robert Sestok, a Detroit-based artist who has been visiting New York for three decades.

Mr. Sestok, who said he has been involved with Detroit’s influential Cass Corridor art movement since the 1970s, called “First St. Iron,” his welded steel sculpture, “a tribute to my past associations with the city of New York.” The piece was inspired by the wrought iron fences lining the streets near a friend’s house in the East Village. Read more…

Khristopher J. Brooks

Yesterday, as planned, the owners of St. Mark’s Bookshop met with officials at Cooper Union to request a rent reduction. As previously reported, the 30-year-old bookstore is in the third year of a $20,000-per-month, 10-year lease agreement with the school, an amount co-owner Terence McCoy says is unfeasible in light of the bad economy. At 4:30 p.m. yesterday, Mr. McCoy, along with partner Bob Contant, asked for a break of $5,000 per month. “It was cordial,” Mr. McCoy said of the encounter.

According to Mr. McCoy, their proposition will be taken to the school’s Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees. In the meantime the owners were instructed to gather their financial numbers for the committee.

Mr. McCoy said they went to the school with their rent concerns and financial records last year, to no avail. Now the shop is taking a different approach, proposing to their landlord that it is an East Village landmark. Read more…

Rachel Citron

Good morning, East Village.

According to the Greenwich Village Society for Historical Preservation, the Landmarks Preservation Commission has rejected a hearing about 316 East Third Street, the 177-year-old rowhouse the GVSHP has been fighting to save from demolition. In a letter to the preservation group, the LPC writes, “The changes to the building are too numerous and from many different periods, resulting in a lack of architectural significance necessary to be considered an individual landmark.”

Preservationists, take comfort: To celebrate its 160^th birthday, Kiehl’s is introducing a “Limited Edition New York Heritage Collection” of scents that date back over fifty years. The Star, out of Malaysia, has a Kiehl’s history lesson.

EV Grieve sneaks a peek inside Tompkins Square Bagels. Still no sign of the Mosaic Man’s artwork.

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Since 2007, Clayton Patterson, the photographer, documentarian and gallery owner who is the subject of the film “Captured,” has been collecting essays for an anthology, “Jews: A People’s History of the Lower East Side.” Earlier this week, he launched a Kickstarter campaign to get the book published –  with 57 days to go, his promotional video (which you can see above) has raised almost $2,500. We spoke to Mr. Patterson about the project, which he says currently totals 160 essays and 1,500 manuscript pages. In case you’re curious to see which East Village and Lower East Side luminaries will be featured, we’ve posted the table of contents below.  Read more…

A new citywide bike share program will debut next summer, and the Department of Transportation is asking for input regarding where the distribution stations should be set up. The map, which went live today, shows that people have already suggested bike share spots at Tompkins Square Park, Cooper Square, and Sixth Street at Avenue C. Where would you like to see stations in the neighborhood (if anywhere at all)?

Huffington Post has a write-up of The Moth’s storytelling event featuring East Villagers David Chang and Padma Lakshmi. Padma recently told Daily Intel that the Tompkins Square Park rats are her least favorite part of living in New York, and now HuffPo has a fun fact about the Momofuku impresario: “When he knows that someone important in the food world is dining at his restaurants, Chang and his chefs chant ‘kill, kill, kill’ before serving food.” Outgoing New York Times critic Sam Sifton is apparently an exception: “Congratulations on new job,” Mr. Chang tweeted yesterday. “Now I’m panicking, we just got used to having you around.”

Echoing what The Local reported back in June, Edward Minskoff, the developer of the office building set to go up at 51 Astor Place, tells Real Estate Weekly that the Cooper Union Engineering Building will be demolished by the end of the year so that his futuristic Fumihiko Maki-designed office tower can be built by the end of 2013.

Daniel Maurer

This’ll blow your mind, man: This morning, The Local spotted this groovy telephone booth on East Fifth Street near Avenue A, where a scene for “Greetings from Tim Buckley” is being shot.  A look inside Sophie’s revealed that the bar had been redecorated to evoke what a location assistant said was 1966 – the year of Tim Buckley’s debut album (Penn Badgley of “Gossip Girl” fame will play the hippie-era singer in the biopic). Across the street were extras wearing bellbottoms, turtlenecks, Afros, and other period attire. According to the location assistant, who asked not to be named, the film will be shooting there for the rest of the day, and shot at A-1 Records last week. (That scene was set in 1991, the time of Tim’s son Jeff Buckley.)

Next time you see something like this around the neighborhood, tell The Local.

The death of Liz Hooper – the cause of which has still not been determined – rattled the Tompkins Square Park transient community this week. “Things like this scare me,” said Jocelyn, 33, a mother of three who lives on the streets of the East Village. “It makes me really want to change the way I live. It could have been me.”  The Pasadena, Calif. native grew up in New Orleans; like Ms. Hooper, she entered the transient community after she began dabbling in drugs. She now spends most of her days panhandling on Second Avenue, in Tompkins Square Park and around Union Square – at night, she sleeps on East 4th Street and occasionally stays in a squat house in Brooklyn.  Her two daughters (7 and 4) stay with their grandmother in New Orleans while her 4-month-old son is in foster care. “I want to change my life so that I can be with them,” she said. “The fact that I am not with them is so painful.” Last month, The Local asked Jocelyn to tell us about a typical day.

Phillip Kalantzis-Cope

Good morning, East Village.

According to Eyewitness News 7, a 22-year-old man fleeing police was struck and killed by a livery cab while crossing FDR Drive near 6th Street last night.

While the Bean opens two new outposts, its original location at Third Street and First Avenue is being taken over by a Starbucks, according to The Times. The Bean isn’t taking this sitting down – they plan to move right across the street. East Village baristas are quite stubborn, after all – though the owner of Ninth Street Espresso tells the Post he has loosened up on his rule of no espresso to go.

With St. Mark’s Bookshop now getting attention from the Daily News, Vanishing New York pens an open letter to landlord Cooper Union, threatening to boycott whatever replaces the store should it go out of business. Meanwhile Save the Lower East Side writes, “Frankly, I’m not convinced this neighborhood deserves to have a great bookstore… [The East Village] is a youth destination for children of means, not an intellectual or countercultural destination anymore.” Read more…

Daniel Maurer

It’s primary election day, and across the East Village that means a Democratic scrum for district leader positions in two of the three assembly districts that carve up the neighborhood. In the 64th Assembly District, Part C, which includes the Financial District as well as a southern section of the East Village, Linda Belfer and Jeff Galloway are running against incumbents Paul Newell and Jenifer Rajkumarand. To the west, in the 66th District, Part B, the race is (as the Villager noted) between John R. Scott and David B. Reck. The female leader, Jean Grillo, is running for reelection unopposed.

Turnout is typically low for primary elections, and afternoon indicators showed that today’s contests are no exception. Read more…

Dan Kedmey

On Sunday night, John Leavitt sat in the back room of the Bowery Poetry Club, surrounded by students holding sketchpads, pens, and pencils. Their subject: Penthouse Pet Justine Joli, wearing a replica of Princess Leia’s iconic gold and lavender bikini from “Return of the Jedi.” Soon, she would shed the bikini.

Yes, this is what passes for a drawing class at Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School, founded in 2005 by two art school drop-outs, Molly Crabapple and John Leavitt. “We both hated life drawing,” explained Mr. Leavitt. “Instead of boring models sitting in a room, we wanted to have music and burlesque and drinking.” Read more…

Rachel Arons

There’s no sign on East 3rd Street to mark the Upright Citizens Brigade’s second New York City theater, but neighboring Two Boots offers a hint: today the pizzeria is premiering a “Hot Chicks” pie in honor of UCBeast’s arrival – controversy be damned! The 100-seat theater (which forms an L around Two Boots and opens onto both 3rd Street and Avenue A) soft-opened last Tuesday and is already hosting a full line-up of storytelling, improv and sketch shows featuring house comedians, students of UCB’s respected improv school, and big-name acts. Last week saw performances by popular stand-ups Todd Barry and T. J. Miller as well as UCB founding member Horatio Sanz. Next Saturday at 9 p.m., Janeane Garofalo will headline a show called “If You Build It.” Read more…

Mark Burton Mike Iveson, Frank Boyd and Ben Williams

After their highly acclaimed production of “Gatz” (based on “The Great Gatsby”) at the Public Theater last year, Elevator Repair Service has returned to the stage with Ernest Hemingway’s “The Select (The Sun Also Rises)” at New York Theatre Workshop. The group’s third adaptations of a classic of American literature (William Faulkner’s “The Sound and The Fury” was the first) tells the story of expatriates living in Europe after World War I. They’re members of Gertrude Stein’s “lost generation” – left numb by the atrocities of war. Read more…

Daniel Maurer A damaged police car near Cooper Square.

The Local spotted a damaged police cruiser being hauled away on a truck bed this morning at Cooper Square and Sixth Street. The side air bags had been deployed, and the passenger-side of the car was dented. A spokesman for the police department said that the car was involved in a crash with a black car at around 5:20 a.m. There were no major injuries from the accident, and no one was arrested. The spokesman had no further information. Do you? <a href=”mailto:leveditor@nytimes.com”>E-mail The Local</a> whenever you see something like this and give us the what, who, where, and when.

Lauren Carol Smith The aftermath of a collision between a cyclist and pedestrian at Astor Place.

A cyclist ran into a pedestrian at Lafayette and Eighth Streets yesterday at around 6:30 p.m., a fire department spokesman said.

The 30-year-old woman, who was conscious and not bleeding, was treated at Bellevue Hospital, the spokesman added. The cyclist was not hauled to the hospital.

A bystander on the scene told the Local that the woman had stepped into the path of the cyclist, though that could not be confirmed.

Chain stores are not an unfamiliar sight in the East Village. According to the Center for an Urban Future, a public policy organization focused on the city’s low-income and working class neighborhoods, the 10003 zip code saw a 9.93 percent growth of national retail chains from 2009 to 2010. Last year, the East Village had the greatest number of retail chain stores of any neighborhood in the city. Now, 7-Eleven is expected to join the chain gang on October 5.
Read more…