Suzanne RozdebaStella Hu, owner of Stella Nail & Spa on First Avenue, and Dick Lam, 72, building owner who lives in building.
Around 5 a.m. Sunday, Dick Lam heard a tree fall in front of the building at 209 First Avenue that he owns, and where he has lived for 23 years. “I was asleep and my son and my grandson heard the tree bang,” he said. (Mr. Lam’s relatives, who live in Battery Park City, had sought shelter in his apartment.) “There was a thud. They didn’t know whether something had hit the building, or what happened. They came running down, opened the door, and it was this.” Mr. Lam looked down at a tree that had taken down the awning of Stella Nail & Spa, on the ground floor. “Luckily, it just pulled the awning out.” Read more…
Good morning, East Village, and good night, Irene.
Actually, The Local will have the last of its hurricane coverage for you later today (stay tuned!), but now that the neighborhood’s subways are running smoothly again, we’ll refrain from exacerbating your Irene fatigue and tell you what else is going on.
If that’s not gross enough: A sculptor that developed a six-story condo at 259 Bowery is feuding with his next-door neighbor, the Sperone Westwater Gallery, and according to The Post he is accused of flinging feces at the gallery. Read more…
Angela Cravens, a community contributor at The Local, has shared her photos of the neighborhood preparing for Hurricane Irene earlier today, and we want to see yours, as well. (By the way, she tells us a sign posted at Villa Della Pace tells Irene, in Italian, to go do something very not nice.) If you have anything to share with your neighbors now that the rain has driven you indoors (Gothamist has the latest on what to expect now that the Category 1 hurricane is 300 miles away), leave your comments below. Have a longer story that you’d like The Local to post? E-mail the editor. Have photos? Join The Local’s Flickr group, and we’ll add them to the gallery above. And feel free to alert us to any developments (no matter how large or small) via our Twitter page, if that’s your preference. We’re listening.
Elsewhere around the Internet, everyone from the Guardian in the U.K. (which noted lines down the block at Trader Joe’s) to the usual neighborhood blogs were eying local supermarkets today: EV Grieve reported that the Associated on Avenue C was primed to set a single-day sales record, and posted photos from Key Food and Fine Fare. A manager at Key Food told the Wall Street Journal of “chaos” there (the store was already running low on certain supplies when we checked in on grocery stores yesterday). Read more…
As we noted earlier this week, David Godlis (known simply as Godlis) began photographing at CBGB in 1976. He has captured some of the punk scene’s most influential artists, including The Ramones, Patti Smith, and Deborah Harry.
Getting ready to brawl over the last flashlight in the hardware store like the folks at the Village Voice? The Local is here to help. In the last few minutes we called up grocery stores in the neighborhood and asked for the rundown of bare essentials still in stock. Our very informal survey was conducted with whomever answered the phones at around 4:30 p.m. Read more…
At a press conference addressing Hurricane Irene this afternoon, Mayor Bloomberg issued a mandatory evacuation order for residents of Zone A, which as this PDF map indicates, includes areas of Alphabet City (Bowery Boogie has an East Village and Lower East Side detail of the map). All affected residents are ordered to evacuate by 5 p.m. tomorrow. Subways, buses, the Long Island Railroad, and Metro-North will cease operation at noon tomorrow as well.
Dentists are always memorable. Anyone who gets paid to poke around in your mouth is bound to be.
I have had two dentists in the East Village. The first was a man from the Indian state of Gujarat who chewed obsessively on the carcinogenic Indian palate-cleanser known as paan. I will call him “Dr. V.” He is gone now, put out of business after his landlord doubled the rent on his miniscule store-front clinic in Alphabet City. This was a minor tragedy for the neighborhood, for if you had a rotten tooth and no insurance – even no money – Dr. V was your go-to guy.
Dr. V had learned dentistry in India under what he called “the British system,” which he held in high regard, although his feelings about the British themselves were mixed. He was a man of small, delicate stature, about 60 years of age, and had lots of opinions and was keen to share them.
Most of the time, a dentist is someone to whom, by definition, you can only listen, not speak – your side of the conversation being confined to gagging sounds that you hope will not involve drooling. So it helps if the dentist is entertaining. (I did once have an East Village dentist – only briefly, thank God – who talked about nothing but the minutiae of politics in Albany. That was truly abysmal.)
Dr. V.’s conversational canvas was large, and he would lay down the law on every subject imaginable. But I felt he cared about me. He always gave me advice, seemed to look into my mind and soul as much as my mouth, and often he made me laugh – if not always on purpose. Read more…
Stephen Rex BrownJim Power works on a new mosaic for the soon-to-open Tompkins Square Bagels.
The Local spent some quality time with Jim Power yesterday, and the Mosaic Man let us in on a few of his upcoming projects. Mr. Power is in the process of designing mosaics for Porchetta, the new Tompkins Square Bagels coming to Avenue A, and the soon-to-reopen Exit 9.
The neighborhood’s beloved public artist was as humble as ever.
“I’m doing the city a favor with all this stuff,” Mr. Power said while taking a break from work in his basement studio. “I’m making this neighborhood one of the biggest landmarks in the world.”
That might sound arrogant, if it wasn’t for the fact that many people agree with him — including his customers. Read more…
Though she plays a high-powered studio exec on that most L.A. of television programs, “Entourage,” Constance Zimmer’s heart really belongs to the East Village. Ms. Zimmer — along with her husband, the director Russ Lamoureux, and their three-year-old daughter — divide their time between the West Coast, where work typically calls, and the East Village, a neighborhood that she feels “still has what makes New York New York.”
Here, she loves finding and frequenting “those little shops that have been there for years, and thrive because they’re local.” Though her sharp-tongued character Dana Gordon takes a bow along with the final season of “Entourage,” look for Ms. Zimmer on the season finale of “Royal Pains,” and in the bawdy comedy “The Babymakers,” due next year. Until then, you just might find her at one of these favorite spots. Read more…
According to DNAinfo and other sites, including NYC.gov’s slow-moving Office of Emergency Management page, parts of the East Village are among the “Zone A” areas most at risk should Hurricane Irene strike Manhattan: “In the East Village, Zone A extends to Avenue D from East 4th Street to East 8th Street. From there, it extends to Avenue B up to 14th Street.” If evacuations are called for, shelters opening at 4 pm on Friday include Seward Park High School (350 Grand Street) and Baruch College (East 23rd Street and Lexington Avenue). Hurricane or no hurricane, the Tompkins Square Park leg of the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival, on Sunday, has been canceled, according to a press release picked up by Brooklyn Vegan.
Both the Villager and EV Grieve have the latest on what the Parks Department is doing to fight the Tompkins Square Park rats. NY1 also ran a story, and shortly before 11 p.m. last night, The Local spotted “Inside Edition” filming a segment that a crewperson said would air in about two or three weeks. Neither More Nor Less has photos.
Police officers, construction workers, and The Local had their cell phones out for a photo op just minutes ago. The driver of a TNT Transportation bus taking an advertising firm on a company outing attempted to make a turn from Crosby Street onto Houston Street. Road barriers made the move tricky, so the driver improvised. A 29-year-old employee of the advertising company, who declined to give his name or the name of the firm, said, “The driver tried to take a shortcut. Because of the construction, he couldn’t make a turn and he got stuck. He looks like an idiot.” Have another look at the scene below and see if you agree. Read more…
Perennial indie-rock darling Stephen Malkmus, best known as the frontman of Pavement, is performing at Other Music tonight, playing acoustic songs off of his new release “Mirror Traffic” (NPR is currently streaming the album). The store will close at 8 pm for the 9 pm performance, after which Mr. Malkmus will sign copies of the LP. Other Music’s Website predicts that “this one is guaranteed to be a madhouse.” No one had started lining up as of 5 pm, but don’t be surprised if the line grows to look something like the above one for a Superchunk in-store last year. If you’re a Pavement fan and you don’t make it in, you may want to walk a couple of blocks over to Great Jones Cafe, where the band’s bassist, Mark Ibold, still puts in shifts as a bartender.
Eva OstrowskaSamantha Glovin as a café waitress and Andrew W. Hsu as Liao Chen in “The Fourth State of Matter”
In “The Fourth State of Matter” by Joseph Vitale, directed by Robert Angelini, a brilliant Chinese astrophysics student studying at an American university has murdered his beloved academic mentor, an eminent cosmologist. Loosely based on shootings at the University of Iowa in 1991, the play explores the genesis of this tragedy, finding parallels in cosmology and its exploration of the universe and its origins.
Played by Andrew W. Hsu, Liao Chen is a stranger adrift in a foreign land, dealing with the effects of his mother’s mental illness and the threat of fierce competition from fellow students for academic honors. These particles making up Chen’s existence culminate in the murder around which the play is set — the cataclysmic Big Bang, so to speak. Read more…
The suspect in the July slaying of a homeless man in Union Square is expected to be cleared of charges, DNA Info reports. The 29-year-old man, Keenan Bryce, was charged with brutally beating the homeless man to death with a bike lock and chain. But Mr. Bryce’s brother refused to accept that his mentally ill sibling was guilty, and through a good deal of research was able to prove that Mr. Bryce was in New Jersey during the time of the murder.
With the threat of another recession looming large in the markets, I can’t help but recall another steep downturn, long ago; a terrible time when work was nearly nonexistent. By the summer of 1979 most young people were broke as a joke. But this was not true of a friend of mine, who will hereafter go by the name of “M”
Until M busted a move to help me out, I didn’t have a single prospect. But I had been told, in hushed and reverent tones, that M possessed a secret method of raising cash. M by and by revealed what it was, an absurdly simple scheme, diabolically clever. It involved selling all the joys and sorrows of the world for nothing more than pocket change.
Fuse Gallery, behind Lit Lounge, has seen its share of musicians moonlighting as artists. Among others, the space has hosted artwork by the likes of Hank Williams III, Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers, Nick Zinner and Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Conrad Keely of …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead.
Last night, David Yow held court at an opening reception that drew J.G. Thirlwell, the lead singer of industrial band Foetus, as well as other admirers of Mr. Yow’s bands, The Jesus Lizard and Scratch Acid. Mr. Yow, best known for vocals that alternate between mumbling and shrieking as well as onstage antics that at one point got him arrested for indecent exposure in Cincinnati, was polite and soft-spoken. He was dressed down (or perhaps up — he has been known to favor the shirtless look, after all) in a button-down shirt and spectacles.
When Erik Foss, the owner of Fuse Gallery, bought a painting titled “Go Figure,” depicting an erect penis, Mr. Yow texted his girlfriend, “I have tears in my eyes.” She responded, “I love you. Stop crying.”
The Local sat down with Mr. Yow to talk about his new calling. Read more…
Lately, the Bowery has started to look more like Dubai and a whole lot less like a poor man’s Broadway. But for at least three hours on Sunday, old-time songs will echo on the street once again, as a connoisseur of vaudeville songs and a historian lead a walking tour of music from the Bowery’s heyday. Bree Benton, accompanied by a viola and accordion, will sing songs like “My Brudda Sylvest,” and “Yiddle On Your Fiddle, Play Some Ragtime” (which was written by one of the former Lower East Side’s most famous sons, Irving Berlin.)
“The songs are so full of life, they really speak to the people — the common people,” said Ms. Benton, who will play the character of Poor Baby Bree, a down-and-out kid from the Lower East Side. “People who couldn’t afford to be entertained on Broadway; they went to the Bowery.” Read more…
If caffeine just isn’t cutting it, dive into the above homage to Erasure that East Village resident Jason Stein, a founding partner in Laundry Service Media, created with kids from The Hetrick-Martin Institute (home of Harvey Milk High School on Astor Place). This video has been floating around for a while, but only gets better with age.
While Zagat Buzz hears that a Williamsburg pizzeria, Forcella, plans to open its outpost at 334 Bowery on September 15, Eater gets word that St. Marks stalwart Café Mogador (a celebrity hangout of sorts) may open its Williamsburg offshoot in September as well.
According to Bowery Boogie, 87 East Houston Street will soon house Bowery Coffee, serving Counter Culture coffee, brownies, and cookies. Meanwhile another coffee shop, Fab Café, got some nice exposure on ABC7’s Eyewitness News, which strangely thinks the East Fourth Street business is in SoHo.
Finally, EV Grieve has a daytime and then a nighttime look at signage for the new Ihop, now glowing on 14th Street.
For over thirty years, David Godlis, a photographer who got his start shooting punk bands at CBGB, has lived in a fifth floor walk-up at 30 St. Marks Place. After Godlis (who goes by his last name only) moved into the apartment in 1977, a neighbor clued him into its unique back story: It was once rented by Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman. Read more…
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.
East Village Sales and Rentals
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Suzanne Rozdeba Stella Hu, owner of Stella Nail & Spa on First Avenue, and Dick Lam, 72, building owner who lives in building. 
