Inspired and framed by the opening monologue of Woody Allen’s
“Manhattan,” Phillip Kalantzis Cope tells an East Village story through his images and Mr. Allen’s words.

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Nathaniel Page Carole Pope.

Carole Pope was lead singer of the Toronto New Wave rock band Rough Trade in the 1970’s and early 1980’s. In 2008, Ms. Pope moved to the East Village, where she is recording a new solo album, due out early next year.

After releasing their album “Avoid Freud” in 1980, Rough Trade traveled from Toronto to perform in New York City. Ms. Pope loved the edginess of the East Village 30 years ago. Now that she lives here, the noise makes her edgy.

“I just want to kill all the Carrie Bradshaw wannabees,” she said. “They don’t know how to hold their liquor. We did.”

In the spring, Ms. Pope is scheduled to be honored with an OutMusic Award, for a career in which she has been cited as an influence by such artists as k.d. lang and Divine. And Ms. Pope is scheduled to perform Saturday at the Brooklyn Museum.

Ms. Pope recently met with The Local at Vandaag on Third Avenue and Sixth Street. When a worker started pounding on the wall above the front door to the restaurant, Ms. Pope jumped and said “Sounds like my place.”

“If I was rich I’d definitely move to the West Village,” she added.
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Colleen Leung The author at the end of the East River esplanade construction project just south of Delancy Street. The project is expected to be completed in July.

The East River Waterfront Esplanade and Piers Project was conceived in 2002 as part of Mayor Bloomberg’s “Vision for Lower Manhattan,” yet almost 10 years later, the plan to extend the esplanade from East River Park down to the Battery Maritime Building on the southern tip of the city, creating attractive open space and exercise opportunities for East Village and Lower East Side residents, has not made much progress.

With estimated completion dates that continually get pushed back, the completion of the East River Waterfront Esplanade sometimes seems like a mere pipe dream.

The mayor’s plan promised new bike paths, more seating areas and even a dog run along the water. Yet during a recent excursion to East River Park, I instead noticed a sign with a new projected completion date: July 2011.

According to the official government Web site, Phase I of the the project was scheduled for completion in fall 2010. However, sticking the small piece of paper on the sign over the old scheduled completion date seems to be the only work that has actually gotten done lately.

I proceeded to walk alongside the torn-up rubble next to the water for over a mile, hoping to possibly speak to some workers about the project, but there wasn’t even anyone there.

Perhaps one day the mayor’s plan will allow runners and cyclists to go all the way around lower Manhattan along the east side without taking a detour around the construction. Until then, I’ll get my exercise doing scaffold pull-ups and running back and forth on the small section of Esplanade that ends just South of Delancey Street.

Al Kavadlo is a personal trainer, freelance writer and author of the book, “We’re Working Out! A Zen Approach to Everyday Fitness” (Muscle-up Publications, 2010). For more information visit www.AlKavadlo.com.

Michelle Rick

Good morning, East Village.

One of the most important ongoing stories in the neighborhood is the continuing evolution of small businesses. The Wall Street Journal offers its take on the issue with a look at the neighborhood’s transformation into a hub for nightlife by focusing on a stretch of East Third Street between Avenues A and D.

Framed around the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the article looks at the businesses that have come and gone in recent months. The piece – in an observation that could be applied to many parts of the neighborhood – describes how East Third “has become a destination for young bards, students and — often — tourists. Indeed, much of the gentrification that surrounds it today was inspired by the foot traffic the café attracted in the first place.” It’s a story well worth reading.

In other neighborhood news, EV Grieve posts a follow-up to an earlier interview with the new owner of the Polonia Restaurant, in which he further defends some of the changes that he’s made at the restaurant. “I have no plans, whatsoever, of trying to scare off Polonia’s long time patrons,” the owner says.

And The Villager profiles one of the neighborhood’s centenarians, Rose Padawer, who recently celebrated her 105th birthday.

Seeking The Next Community Editor

Today is the deadline for applications for our next community editor. If you live in our coverage area – 14th Street to Houston, Broadway to the East River – have editing experience, are familiar with WordPress and are interested in the paid position please e-mail us by the end of the day.

Meredith Hoffman Top: Jacqui Lewis, left, and Tricia Sheffield grasp a red cloth dedicated to victims of AIDS during a Wednesday night ceremony at Middle Collegiate Church commemorating World AIDS Day.

Debbie Totten knows about loss.

Four years ago, her brother Frank committed suicide after learning that he had contracted AIDS. “He had the beginnings of AIDS but he took his own life,” said Ms. Totten, a 53-year-old native of the East Village. Two years later, her brother’s friend also committed suicide when he learned that he, too, had AIDS.

On Wednesday night, Ms. Totten and 25 fellow congregants silently held candles in Middle Collegiate Church during a worship service to commemorate World AIDS Day.

And though the service’s message was of hope, the story of Ms. Totten and many others was of loss, with entire past communities gone, because of AIDS.

“There’s nobody here anymore I grew up with. Most of them passed away from the virus,” said Ms. Totten. While most of her friends contracted HIV back in the 70’s, she said that she’s known even more infected people in the neighborhood in recent years.

Every Monday with Middle Church Ms. Totten volunteers, giving hot dinners and groceries to people with AIDS. She volunteers at another food pantry on Wednesdays, but came to last night’s service instead, to reflect.
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Darla Murray This holiday season may be the last in which some New Yorkers are able to offer their apartments for short-term stays because of new regulations governing sublets.

As the holiday season approaches, Web sites like Roomorama, Homeaway and Craigslist will be flush with temporary vacation rental listings. According to Jia En, founder of Roomorama, a company specializing in short-term rentals, East Villagers are among the most active users of vacation rental sites.

“People in this neighborhood tend to travel a lot,” says Ms. En, who adds that they are also business savvy because “instead of leaving their place empty, they use it as a way to earn some extra money.” The holiday season can be especially lucrative.

“New Year’s Eve is one of the most popular times for visitors,” says Ms. En.
Unfortunately, for both residents wanting to make some extra cash and tourists hoping to save some, this will be the last holiday season that tenants will be able to sublet their apartments for short stays. In July, Governor David A. Paterson signed into law a bill that makes it illegal to rent out apartments for less than 30 days in New York.

The Local consulted veteran East Village subletters to draft a list of the Dos and Don’ts of subletting, just in case you’re hoping to take advantage of your last holiday season of short-term leasing:
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In years past, John Lesko led a frenetic, nomadic lifestyle. The 60-year-old native New Yorker — originally from Hell’s Kitchen — has had, in his own words, “a million different jobs.” Mr. Lesko has worked as a machinist, marine, Greyhound bus driver, cabbie, and real estate agent.

But despite this unpredictable career path, his passion for the written word has remained a constant. For the last four decades, his “thrust has been the poetry.” Mr. Lesko, who writes under the pseudonym, Giron d’Agate, draws inspiration from historical events and figures, as well as personal experiences. He currently self-publishes more recent works on his blog.

NYU Journalism’s Sarah Tung reports.

Phillip Kalantzis Cope

Good morning, East Village.

The local blogosphere this morning is dominated by items about neighborhood real estate. EV Grieve takes a look at some of the neighborhood’s priciest apartments. Grieve also has an interesting then-and-now take comparing the price of an apartment at 224 Avenue B today – about as much as $2,400 – versus its price in 1909 – $25. Grieve notes that, according to inflation calulators, $25 in 1909 is equivalent to about $600 today. But, Grieve writes, “Inflation calculators don’t take into account East Village inflation.”

Earlier this week, we wrote about the roughly year-old concert venue known as Extra Place on the street of the same name. Bowery Boogie reports on the opening of a new restaurant nearby to give the party people “someplace to quell their munchies.”

And DNAinfo has a post detailing 14 building code violations at the recently opened Hotel Toshi on East 10th Street.

Seeking The Next Community Editor

And we at The Local would like to remind you that Friday is the deadline for applications for our next community editor. If you live in our coverage area – 14th Street to Houston, Broadway to the East River – have editing experience, are familiar with WordPress and are interested in the paid position please e-mail us.

In a neighborhood where everything is changing, Ray’s Candy Store remains refreshingly unchanged. Faded posters line the walls, many of which depict smiling teenage girls in 80’s headbands enjoying Lime Rickeys. Since buying the shop in 1976, Ray Alvarez and his candy store have become fixtures in the East Village.

“Ray’s is the last real thing left in this neighborhood,” said Clemente Valguarnera, owner of the nearby Café Pick Me Up.

This sentiment is echoed by most of Ray’s patrons. That is why the community joined together to raise money when Alvarez began having problems making rent payments.

Open 24 hours a day, Ray’s is the late night gathering place for local regulars, bar-hopping visitors and those who just like the consistency of the frozen yogurt.

NYU Journalism’s Alexandra DiPalma reports.

Rhea Mahbubani Kate Goldwater specializes in using discarded or secondhand items to craft new fashions.

In a neighborhood that is chock-full of chic boutiques, Kate Goldwater is doing her best to stand out. Ms. Goldwater, 26, a self-proclaimed “social justice crusader” designs an environmentally-friendly clothing line for AuH2O, her East Village boutique. All her designs are made from recycled items. Ms. Goldwater gets discarded or secondhand clothing wherever she can ̶ including the Salvation Army, Goodwill, clothing swaps – and transforms them into one-of-a-kind pieces.

Ms. Goldwater has been running AuH2O (the chemical symbols for Gold and Water) since October 2006, but last month she took on three business partners; Rachael Rush and Alexandra Sinderbrand, who sell vintage and thrift store clothing, and Rose Kennedy, a jewelry designer who creates trinkets from salvaged items. Now all four women sell their gently-used finds and original designs in the boutique and split the monthly rent.

In the past Ms. Goldwater received attention for creating unconventional clothing, including a tie made from credit cards and a dress made from MetroCards, which earned her a cease-and-desist email from an MTA lawyer. However she has recently turned her attention to more wearable clothing saying, “I want to make recycled clothes that people wear for a long time. People thought of the unusual designs as novelty items that they wore once. That isn’t so eco-friendly.” She also produces tailor-made items for customers by updating clothing that they no longer wear.

Ms. Goldwater spoke with The Local about three of her recent sartorial transformations:

Custom-Made Tuxedo Tie Vest, $180

Kate Goldwater Before: A pile of men’s ties.

Kate Goldwater After: Safia Karasick Southey, 12, in the vest she plans to wear for her Bat Mitzvah.

“I made this for a 12-year-old girl’s Bat Mitzvah. Her mom gave me the ties that they liked and I decided what order they would look best in. The toughest part was that the girl’s waist is only 24 inches and my mannequin has a 28-inch waist, so I had to eyeball it.”

“It took me six hours to make and I charge $30 an hour for custom-made pieces. I wouldn’t make this for the store because I prefer that everything in AuH2O is under $100. I want my clothing to be affordable for artists and students. I did make similar tie skirts that I sold in the store for $55 each. They were faster to make so I was able to set a lower price.”
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Kim Davis.

It’s understandable, to me anyway, that East Village residents are concerned about NYU’s ambitious expansion plans and how they will affect the architecture and ambience of a treasured neighborhood. After all, it was the East Village which was landed with the enormous Founder’s Hall dormitory on East 12th Street, and although NYU might consider University Hall on East 14th Street part of the Union Square neighborhood, it supplies a steady stream of student revelers to the avenues running downtown from that location and into the heart of the East Village.

Even so, I read Rob Hollander’s post today on Save the Lower East Side with some puzzlement. “East Villagers ought to be alarmed by NYU’s decision not to build on its own campus,” he writes.

That’s something which might well give rise to concern, but as The Local recently reported – and even the The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation agrees – that’s not the decision which has been made at all. As the preservation group put it, “NYU is insisting that they will move ahead with seeking permission to build on the adjacent non-landmarked supermarket site instead.” In other words, the university is at this time pressing ahead with its original core plan.

Nobody can deny that the East Village may have plenty to worry about further down the road if the core plan does fail, but that hasn’t yet happened. So far, we are still chasing shadows. One irony which Rob Hollander’s post does highlight is that success in opposing the university’s plans for the Washington Square campus is indeed likely to have repercussions for other neighborhoods.

Kim Davis is the community editor of The Local East Village.

Simon McCormack Bars around the East Village, including The Continental (top) and the 13th Step, regularly offer promotional deals on alcoholic drinks. Research has found a link between those promotions and instances of binge-drinking.

Kelly Kellam and Michael Russinik were walking on Third Avenue near St. Marks Place when something caught their eye.

The sign over the door of the Continental bar where Mr. Kellam and Mr. Russinik found themselves one early Wednesday evening read simply: “5 shots of anything $10 all day/all night.”

“We said jokingly, ‘Hey, let’s each go get five shots’ and then there was that awkward pause,” Mr. Russinik said. “Then we were, like, ‘Let’s do it.’”

Mr. Kellam and Mr. Russinik said they would not have come into The Continental if it weren’t for the prominently advertised drink special. But do bargain drink prices at bars encourage people to drink too much?

Susan Foster, vice president and director of policy research and analysis at The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, said bars have a major impact on drinking culture.

“The research finds a significant link between price-related alcohol promotions, easy access to alcohol and binge drinking,” Ms. Foster said in an e-mail message. “Study findings suggest that an environment that is not only conducive to drinking, but encouraging of drinking, and in which alcohol is inexpensive and easily accessed, makes excessive alcohol use seem normal.”
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Rachel Wise

Good morning, East Village.

With NYU’s decision to abandon plans for a new tower on Bleecker Street, Save the Lower East Side ponders what the move might mean for the prospects of future development by the university in the East Village. EV Grieve notes that the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation is one of the participants in a town hall meeting about the university’s plans at 6:30 tonight at Our Lady of Pompeii, Carmine and Bleecker Streets.

Grieve also has detailed posts about the new “greenstreets” construction projects on Avenue D and along East First Street.

Ephemeral New York offers a quick riff on the turn of the 20th century trend of naming tenements for presidents and mentions two buildings in the neighborhood – the McKinley and the Roosevelt. EV Transitions offers a lesson in more recent neighborhood history with a look at some behind-the-scenes photos of the Rolling Stones filming their “Waiting On A Friend” video at the St. Marks Bar & Grill and along St. Marks Place in the 1980’s.

And DNAinfo has photos of the just-completed mural at Bowery and Houston Street. Bowery Boogie, Gothamist, and Grieve have details on the project, too.

Gloria Chung Vandaag, 103 Second Avenue.

This past summer, I arranged to meet my friend Clemence at Belcourt, a restaurant on Second Avenue and Fourth Street. But the place was locked, with the chairs up on the table. Another one bites the dust, I thought. (Actually, I later learned, they had stopped serving lunch — the equivalent of dead for those of us who work, but do not live, in the East Village.) On my way down, though, I had walked past Vandaag, a restaurant which hadn’t existed the last time I had been on the block. So we ate there instead, and very happily.

The marketplace principle which the economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction” rules the restaurant world in New York City, and above all in the East Village, where low rental costs allow anyone with a half-baked idea to take a flyer. For the rambling diner, this means something new every week; but it also means hardening yourself to the loss of beloved haunts. Over the last few months, and just on the two blocks between Vandaag and my office at Second Avenue and St. Marks, the blindingly white Thai restaurant Rhong Tiam has disappeared, ditto an obliging falafel place; in their stead we have Vandaag and the Vietnamese Le Dan Ang — a net gain, I would say.
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Jamie Newman The stage at Extra Place, a venue located in the basement of what was once C.B.G.B.

The burgeoning private-event and music space Extra Place — known to those in the know as EP — has already hosted hot ticket events. Designer John Varvatos celebrated his 10th year in fashion with a party here. “Oakazine,” the edgy design and fashion magazine, held a new issue release event. The CMJ music festival programmed performances on the Extra Place stage. Situated in what was the basement of legendary rock club CBGB (the John Varvatos store occupies the main part of the former CBGB space upstairs), Extra Place by the Max’s Kansas City Company is quickly declaring itself a destination for New York’s entertainment elite.

“We’re striving to re-create the wildness and the lifestyle that the old CBGB space used to breed,” Brett Kincaid, the venue’s manager, told The Local. “We want to recapture that time period and all of the revelry that comes with it, but add a modern twist, some relevancy.”
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Maria Popson could talk for hours about any topic. Among many things, Ms. Popson is philosophical — she’s a naturalist, a healer, a chef, a storyteller, an East Village resident and a former Brazilian supermodel.

During her years in fashion, Ms. Popson went by the name “Neneca Moreira.” In 1994, Ms. Popson moved to the East Village – in large part, she says, because of the relative anonymity she enjoys while living in the neighborhood. Her ground-floor apartment on East Fourth Street looks more like an eclectic storefront — displaying colorful fabrics, tribal masks and tons of exotic trinkets.

Now Ms. Popson, 59, focuses her attention on making and packaging honeybee propolis – a residue derived from bees, which she says has a variety of health benefits.

NYU Journalism’s Rachel Wise and Sarah Tung report.

Gloria Chung

Good morning, East Village.

We’d like to encourage you to check out the exploration of liquor licensing issues in the neighborhood over at Capital. The piece is framed around the demise of Superdive and describes how the East Village has become “a nightscape” in which bar owners have clustered together in the neighborhood. “A century ago, that meant the creation of a Garment District,” the Capital piece reads. “Now it means the creation of a Party District.” It’s a piece that it well worth reading and it has already generated its share of discussion in the blogosphere.

In other neighborhood news, The Daily News has an interview with Thomas Grant, a volunteer at an East Village soup kitchen who blacked out and tumbled onto the path of a subway train Sunday before being rescued by another man on the platform.

The community contributor known as eastvillagedenizen discusses three decades of taking photos in the neighborhood.

“The East Village was a different world when I first encountered it 48 years ago. Rents were cheap (really cheap), there were great bars (Stanley’s and The Annex on Avenue B, Rocky’s across the Broadway divide), double features at the Charles movie theater on Avenue B. St. Marks Place didn’t have souvenir shops for tourists (no tourists). It had Stan Brakhage and Kuchar brothers movies (they were called “underground” films) and jazz, and rock ‘n’ roll.”
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Courtesy of The Library of Congress A 19th century poster of Peter F. Dailey.

On the East River at 12th Street, where today we find a promenade, there used to be piers where steamships would dock. It was there that a mischievous kid from the East Village hung out and took in the colorful banter of the minstrels and stevedores. From them, Peter F. Dailey learned all the twists that make this life funny.

They became part of his style, and by the 1890s Pete Dailey was a music hall sensation like none before. He practically invented improvisational comedy, using miscues and accidents to pull unscripted gags. For instance, one night the lights went out in the crowded theater. The audience spooked. But Mr. Dailey averted a panic by appearing onstage with a brakeman’s lantern as if it were a train wreck.

During another performance, in a kitchen scene, a heavy and gaudy necklace fell from the throat of his leading lady. He didn’t miss a beat, but calmly arose, took up the coal scoop and shoveled it into the icebox. It was, of course, the way he did it, complete with body language, that made him a star.
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