Photo courtesy David Bellel1959 Little League: David Bellel, middle row, second from left.

In the second part of a two-part story, Mary Reinholz speaks with some former residents of Knickerbocker Village.

According to some former residents, free speech became muted at liberal leaning Knickerbocker Village with the onset of the cold war with the Soviet Union, the United States’ former ally against Nazi Germany. During the height of anti-communist fervor, tenants shied away from joining the National Committee to Secure Justice for the Rosenbergs, which author David Alman and his wife Emily helped to co-found while they were living at KV.

“We wanted a new trial for the Rosenbergs, and if not that then clemency,” he said, “But that was a very hot potato in 1951 and we couldn’t get anyone (at KV) to join us. It’s not that people were running from us, just not to us. One tenant,a lawyer and his wife were very sympathetic and contributed (money) to the committee. For us, it was matter of trying to help two people whose lives were at stake.”

David Bellel, 64, a former classroom teacher and retired social studies coordinator for District One on the Lower East Side, lived at Knickerbocker Village from 1952 to 1964. He was an only child, the son of a garment worker. Because his father didn’t belong to any political group, young David wasn’t always aware of the fear that gripped his friends’ parents during the communist hunting years of the Cold War era.

“I was there at the height of the McCarthy era and everybody who was (political) kept their mouths shut or moved away,” he said. “I wasn’t aware of the Rosenbergs until I was an adult. Friends would tell you that their parents belonged to the communist party but never told their kids until it was later revealed them. It wasn’t a matter of being ashamed but a fear of what could happen. I wasn’t aware of the fear because my father never belonged to any organization,” he added. “But you would be hard pressed to find anybody in New York City with a pulse who grew up during the Depression as my father had who didn’t talk politics. I only remember as a kid that he would get into heated discussions with a cousin who was a communist and my father would say, ‘If you don’t like it here, go back to Russia!'”

Photo courtesy David BellelHallowe’en 1959: David Bellel in red bow-tie.

Otherwise, Mr. Bellel, who now lives in Brooklyn with his wife, described an idyllic childhood at KV. He remembers joining, at age ten, a Little League team associated with the LMRC, which stands for the Lower Manhattan Republican Club, and learning what it was like to be part of a team. “For me and my friends it was a time of innocence, collegiality and good times around sports,” he said. “We didn’t have the Internet or video games, so we lived our lives in the streets and in the parks. It was a wonderful opportunity to mingle with all the racial and ethnic groups on the Lower East Side. It was a time when we are all baby boomers and there were lots of kids. If you didn’t like one group, you could find another bunch to hang out with. You had the freedom and knowledge that you were safe within your neighborhood and didn’t have to worry about somebody mugging you for lunch money.”

For the past six years, Mr. Bellel has been in touch with some 100 former KV residents through his KV blog, and has joined in annual reunions with people who attended public school with him, or played on his Little League team. Read more…

N.Y.P.D. are reporting a confirmed sexual assault at East River Park. The suspect is described as a black male of stocky build with facial hair. He was wearing a grey hoodie and green pants.

–Kim Davis

For the last twenty years, the Tenement Museum has been telling the stories of the residents of 97 Orchard Street. Now, in a new exhibit, “Shop Life,” it introduces us to four of the retail businesses which inhabited the building’s ground floor.

Kevin Farley

Good morning, East Village.

If you were expecting to wake up to a belated white Christmas — well, at least be assured that the MTA was really ready for it this time.

On an acknowledged “quiet news day,” the word is out on Mighty Quinn’s, the new barbecue restaurant on Second Avenue — the word being “pretty good”.

And in the absence of anything new to report, let’s take you back thirty years to “rockers, rappers, breakers & scratchers”–and the Lower East Side Girls Choir–at East 10th Street’s Limbo Lounge.

With severe weather threatened for the city this afternoon, please let us know of any problems you experience around the neighborhood — or share your snow photos with us. You can post comments below, or share photos at the Local East Village Flickr group.

–Kim Davis

Laura KupersteinReunion of former and current KV residents, 2012.

In the first part of a two-part story, Mary Reinholz speaks with some former residents of Knickerbocker Village.

Although hard hit by Hurricane Sandy, Knickerbocker Village still looks like an urban fortress, with its aging collection of 13-story brick buildings spanning one full city block. As lower middle income residents once again consider the option of going co-op, it’s worth noting that this sprawling complex, a precursor to the Mitchell-Lama Housing Program, was once a hot bed of tenant activism and radical politics during the Depression era on the Lower East Side.

This was a time when the gangs of New York held sway in impoverished immigrant neighborhoods, and mobsters controlled the docks on the East River nearby. An infamous “lung block” on which the complex sits between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges got its name because so many tenants there had died from tuberculosis in squalid living conditions.

“It used to be all alleys and tenements, the worst kind of tenements you can imagine,” said Hal Kanter, 83, a retired restaurateur and former owner of Manhattan’s Broadway Joe steak house who lived at Knickerbocker Village from 1935, a year after it opened, to 1948. “Knickerbocker Village cleaned all that up. I was a tot when it opened and it seemed so safe. It was like a prison–with walls and gates so high you couldn’t scale them.”

Photo courtesy David AlmanlRosenberg author Dave Alman

Author David Alman, 93, who grew up in a tenement on Rivington St., moved into KV in 1941, noting “It dwarfed anything we had ever seen before.” It struck him, he said, as a kind of working-class paradise. Some seven decades later, in 2009, he published a book with his late wife Emily Arrnow on an episode in KV history. It was called, “Exoneration: the Trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and Morton Sobell.“

The Rosenbergs, who were convicted for conspiring to pass atom bomb secrets to Russia, and executed at Sing Sing prison in 1953, remain Knickerbocker Village’s most notorious former tenants. Both were communists who had been living with their two young sons in a modestly priced apartment. Read more…

The Bureau of General Services–Queer Division is the last gay bookstore in Manhattan. It’s currently in a temporary home at the Strange Loop Gallery on Orchard Street, but it’s fund-raising for a permanent home.

Scott LynchSecond Avenue

Good morning, East Village.

From where we’re sitting, it looks like a quiet Christmas break in the East Village. No turkey shoots on the Bowery — since 1897, in fact.

If you can even face looking at more food and drink, here’s a tenement-shaped ginger cake from the Tenement Museum. Also, it looks like The Third Man on Avenue C is open for cocktails at last, but judging by the work continuing in the space before the holiday, it might be worth calling ahead to check.

And hey, guess what? Here comes the winter weather.

If all goes according to plan, we’re hanging out the closed sign until December 26. Stay warm, safe, and festive.

Michelle RickSkilled, unemployed, homeless, on The Bowery.

At exactly 4:45 a.m. everyday, Albert Alston flicks on the lights to rouse the men asleep on what passes for a dormitory annex at the Bowery Mission–its chapel floor and pews. “I do it the same way I did it as a platoon sergeant,” he said. “I know I just have to get them up.”

Sometimes the men wake weary-eyed and waspish, but not usually. “Sergeant” Alston’s gruff voice and wide grin are part of a routine they’ve come to expect when sleeping at the Mission this winter, as temperatures drop and it’s become too cold to stay outside.

They turn to the Mission for shelter in extreme weather-induced emergencies, too, as we saw last month, when it became a refuge for many neighborhood residents without power during Hurricane Sandy, as well as when the Nor’easter dropped that thick coat of snow soon after. But even before the storms, the staff was braced for its annual winter increase in homeless patrons, which can mean up to 50 percent more than the usual 700 meals to serve, and twice as many men to lodge.

“The elements can kill them,” Matt Krivich explained. He’s the mission’s director of operations. “We’ve lost a couple of our guests before to hypothermia. That’s why we open up our chapel.” Krivich and the Mission’s other staff–many once homeless themselves–have an open-door policy for anyone seeking shelter from the cold.

When temperatures drop below 40 degrees, the Mission provides regular shelter to 80 men in its residential recovery program and emergency shelter to up to 80 more, making room for 30 in the dining room in addition to the 50-plus it can handle in the chapel. During some snowy weeks last winter, the Mission even allowed community members to sleep in the serving line near the kitchen.

“How can you turn somebody away when you’ve got space?” Krivich said. “If it’s just up on stage, if it’s in the serving line?”

As the chapel usher, Alston helps organize the emergency housing guests, part of the group known here as the “community.” Though other staff caution that the community can be “rough,” Alston gets along with them.

“That’s only because I give them the same respect they give me,” he said.

It might also be because the 56-year-old Alston, soft-spoken with bright eyes, is down on his luck, too. He lost his job at a Canarsie metal yard in September because “they decided to keep all them younger guys.” Shortly after, Alston’s landlord decided to sell his apartment building in Brooklyn. Not wanting to burden his mother, Alston went to a veteran’s organization in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn looking for a place to live. The organization connected him with the Mission, which had a spot free in their residency program.

Alston’s been here for two months, living in the actual dorm above the chapel. As part of his new job, he shepherds the community into pews for service three times a day before the kitchen opens. Read more…

Suzanne RozdebaBarbara Shaum in her workspace on East 4th Street.

When you’ve been in business as a ‘solopreneur’ since 1962, you find you’re known for a few things, and you pay no mind about taking your time to relay all the details to anyone within earshot. For Barbara Shaum, 80-something, the legend behind the institution that is Barbara Shaum Ltd. on 60 East 4th Street, that means noting she was the very first woman officially to enter the male-only McSorley’s Bar, and that she hand-makes what fashion icons view to be some of the very best leather sandals and belts in the city. These days, it is rarity to enter a shop where there is a craftswoman who cobbles the very item you plan to slip on, right there in the store. Ms. Shaum, but she doesn’t have plans to retire either. Too many people are depending on her to outfit their feet.

How did you make your way into this business?

I was doing wholesale and living in a loft on West Broadway. I was working for a wonderful sandal-maker who taught me so much of what I know. This was back in the 50s. Then I went on my own in 1962, opening up a shop on 7th Street between Bowery and Second Avenue.

Right next to McSorleys! That must have been interesting.

Absolutely. It was for men only until 1970 when the Civil Rights Bill was passed and they could no long discriminate against women patronizing their establishment. I was the first woman in there and that’s the kind of person I am.

Was there a benefit to being in the location next to such a legendary place?

I sell to men and women and the bar was enormously popular. It was the 60s so there were hippies wearing a lot of belts and sandals so I was making a lot of sandals and belts. That was a good time for me. Lots of off-beat people with style.

People weren’t really worrying about making their rent so much then were they?

In those days things were not so much focused on real estate and money and that sort of thing. My rent was very low. It was $75 a month for quite a large place. I had a front part and a back part where I put up a wall and I lived back there. I also had a backyard and I’d have these big backyard barbecues with like 75 people coming by. Read more…

Annie FairmanSteve Torres with family, after winning a bicycle in a “Gangnam Style” danceoff

Last Saturday got off to an early start at the Ninth Precinct.

At 2:30am, police were called to Beth Israel Hospital after an 18 year-old man entered the emergency room claiming to have been shot in the hand in Campos Plaza. When the building’s management, as well as Ninth Precinct officers posted to the NYCHA property that evening, disputed the account, the man admitted to having been shot accidentally in FDR Park when handed the gun by a friend. The young man, who lives on East 13th Street but is not a resident of Campos Plaza, was arrested for criminal possession of a weapon.

Annie FairmanJaylynn, 9 and Santa

In the meantime, organizers of the Ninth Precinct’s Annual Christmas Party Giveaway arrived as early as 4am to set up for the event. Local families began lining up in the early morning hours for the chance to receive a gift from none other than Santa Claus himself, on loan from Macy’s.

Three and a half year-old Alicia Pagan waited in line with her mother, Teresa Mojica, for nearly two and a half hours to see Santa, who gave her a doll. Members of the NYPD Explorers youth program served hot cocoa to families as they waited on a line wrapping around the playground across the street and extending down to the corner of East Fifth Street and Second Avenue. Read more…

Picture courtesy Sarah Shanfield.Sarah communes with the globe

While there are good reasons to be skeptical about the Mayan calendar prediction that the world will end today, The Local decided to ask journalist, savant, thought-leader, and Local contributor Sarah Shanfield for words of advice and comfort.

Sarah, the end of the world seems to be predicted with frightening regularity these days. How have you felt in the past when it turned out to be a false alarm?

No one was more upset at the failure of the rapture than me. I had not even started my taxes and was going to wait until the last fiery demon rode away in a chariot made of rabid wolves to see if I’d be alive enough to have to actually sit down and file them. Boy, was I wrong! I have learned not to put too much belief in these human predictions. Still, I won’t do any Christmas shopping until acid-filled pigs stop falling from the sky on Friday and then, only then, will I venture to the Union Square holiday market.

Coming from California as you do, we know you’re an earthquake expert. Do you expect the end of the world to involve earthquakes, as well as other disastrous phenomena, or not necessarily?

Humans – and living organisms in general – are very smart. We defy the laws of nature time and time again (like you said, I’m from California. Nature, gravity and logic are all defied by the faces of my mother’s friends). Especially after Sandy, I don’t question the power of a humankind to be able to survive whatever the earth or the forces that be will throw at him or her. Read more…

While robberies remain lower than expected for this time of year, a pattern has emerged in the last 28-day period.

On November 20th, police say a Hispanic male in his late twenties dressed in a baseball cap and dark jacket approached a male victim from behind and put him in a choke hold on East 13th Street between First and Second Avenues. The victim’s wallet and cell phone were then stolen. At Tuesday’s Community Council Meeting, Deputy Inspector John Cappelmann said that the attack was caught on surveillance video taken outside of the Verizon building on East 13th Street. The suspect is believed to be roughly six feet tall and two hundred pounds.

Police believe the suspect is also linked to a robbery outside of 65 Second Avenue between Third and Fourth Streets on December 5th, as well as in two other robberies committed in Stuyvesant Town, that fall under the jurisdiction of the Thirteenth Precinct. All of the forced robberies took place after midnight. In the December 5th attack, the suspect approached another man and punched him in the face before robbing him.

Police arrested an initial suspect who was later released. – Annie Fairman

Scott Lynch

Good morning, East Village.

Make we merry, yes, but maybe not too merry. Look at the calories in this stuff.

But before the party starts, Lucky’s Famous Burgers is feeling out of place on East Houston–imagine–and is looking to “Houstanize” (sic) its design.

If there was ever a reason to scamper across neighborhood boundaries: heart-throb Zac Efron is filming in Little Italy today and tomorrow.

Still making plans for the holiday week? Consider “music from the Carpathians, a Baroque Nativity folk opera and carnivalesque Goat Songs by a punk group from Toronto” brought to La Mama by Yara Arts Group.

Finally, we turn to courtesies of the season. Happy fifth birthday today to EV Grieve, and to all our readers–those who celebrate these holidays and those who do not–may your days be merry and peaceful until The Day returns again.

Dana VarinskyArtists Nicolina Johnson and Perola Bonfanti at “Portal 0”

Two abandoned doorways got a touch up this week, thanks to artists Nicolina Johnson and Perola Bonfanti.

The artists told The Local that the new installations at Avenue C and Seventh Street, and Second Ave and Third Street, are the first of a series of thirteen interactive “portals” that will be completed this summer. The portals will be numbered starting from zero, with each painted according to the numerology symbols associated with its number.

A QR code painted on the bottom of every portal directs the participant to the project’s website, which requires answers to riddles in order to move on to the next portal. The link for “Portal One” asks, “the more you look at me, the less you see. Who am I?”

Dana Varinsky“Portal 0”

“When you get through the final portal, the 13th portal, the mystery will be revealed,” Ms. Johnson said. “We think it will be well worth the effort.” Those without a smart phone will also be able to participate via the project’s website, which will be incorporated into the art in each panel.

Ms. Johnson is the creator of The Bean’s window art, so she said the location of “Portal 0” over an abandoned elevator shaft outside the café was an easy choice. The three panel doorway is painted with Babylonian images, and the circular zero figure represents a particle accelerator. “It mixes the newest science and the oldest civilizations,” Ms. Bonfanti explained. Read more…