Sarah Darville Councilwoman Margaret Chin, behind the podium, spoke to the press about the compromises she had made with N.Y.U. before the Council’s vote. To her left is Speaker Christine Quinn and land use Committee chair Leroy Comrie. To her right is Councilman Robert Jackson.

The City Council gave New York University a final green light to build four new buildings south of Washington Square Park, but opponents tossed out of City Hall today vowed to file a lawsuit against the controversial expansion plan.

As The Local’s video shows, calls of “shame on you” and “corruption and greed” caused Speaker Christine Quinn to eject all of the spectators from the balcony, meaning university administrators weren’t around to see the City Council vote 44-1 in their favor.

Still, Alicia Hurley, N.Y.U.’s Vice President of University Relations and Public Affairs, seemed to anticipate the outcome. “This is a terrific day for us,” she said as she awaited official word in front of City Hall.

The expansion, dubbed N.Y.U. 2031, will add significant space for classrooms, dorms, and research — though not quite as much space as the university wanted. The plans were reduced by about 21 percent by the City Planning Commission and the City Council’s land use committee, though neither round of changes drastically altered the plan’s overall character. Today’s vote allows the university to build just under 1.9 million square feet across two blocks. Read more…

Courtesy Leigh Stein

At 7:30 tonight, Leigh Stein, a novelist and former editorial staffer at the New Yorker, will read from her new book of poetry, “Dispatch from the Future,” at Bar on A. We spoke to the Brooklynite about bad dates in the East Village and an awkward shopping trip to the St. Mark’s Bookshop.

The trailer for your new poetry collection begins, “I can’t go to the East Village anymore…” How do you feel about coming back to the neighborhood for your book reading?

I love the neighborhood but I avoided it for years because it brought back weird, painful memories. Now I’ve grown up a bit, and can enjoy life again. Bar on A is actually one of my favorite bars in the area. I had a “Where the Wild Things Are”-themed birthday party there a few years ago. I wore a faux fur stole. Read more…

MiLES

Imagine the graffitied lot at 35 Cooper Square hosting free theater by La MaMa. Or how about food vendors setting up at the corner plot where a historic row house was demolished over a year ago.

That’s what Eric Ho has in mind for some of the 212 empty lots and storefronts he has identified in the East Village and Lower East Side.

“How can we transform these underutilized spaces into valuable resources for local residents?” Mr. Ho, an architect, asked in a mission statement for Made in Lower East Side (MiLES). The project, dedicated to filling vacant lots with community groups, artistic events and small vendors, has been in the works since February and is still in its nascent stages. Earlier this month, Mr. Ho received what he said was a positive response from Community Board 3’s Economic Development committee, and last week he met up with graduate students from New York University’s Wagner School to gauge their interest in becoming involved. Read more…

The blog of the Museum Of The City Of New York has a nice examination of the Bowery since the days when it was known as “Bowerij Road” and thought of as “an idyllic countryside.” Photos from the late 1800s through 1946 capture the thoroughfare’s oft-romanticized days as skid row, when a bar nicknamed Paresis Hall referenced the symptoms of late-stage Syphilis. The blog notes that the Bowery of today bears little resemblance to the 20th century version, but that’s shouldn’t come as a shock: “Even as early as 1905, the New York Times was lamenting the death of the Bowery.” The one thing missing from the post? A soundtrack provided by Poor Baby Bree.

For every East Village business that’s opening or closing, dozens are quietly making it. Here’s one of them: Figlia & Sons.

Melvin FelixRyan Figlia with employee Leonard “Lee” Hills.

If he could, 23-year-old Ryan Figlia would spend the steamiest summer days cooling off atop his surfboard, rather than helping run the air-conditioning sales and service business his grandfather started nearly 50 years ago on Avenue A. But his brother is off in Florida – “he’s pursing a golf career and a girlfriend,” Ryan explained – and his father will eventually hand over the family business, now located at 746 East Ninth Street. “My plan is to retire and for him to send me a check every week,” said Ryan’s father, George, “but first this guy has to start making me some money already!” Actually, business has tripled in the last year, according to Ryan: this summer they’ll install a record 5,000 cooling units around the city. We asked the father-and-son team why they aren’t sweating the economy.

At 23, you are pretty new to this.

Ryan: I started three or four years ago and started developing a company that mainly focuses on cooling the lobbies in the buildings that we already do the residential for. The market for commercial air-conditioning is a lot bigger than residential. So far it’s doing all right. That’s what I want to focus on growing and do more. Read more…

Time for the latest installment of What’s That You’re Playing?, where we ask a clerk at one of the neighborhood’s record stores to tell us what’s spinning. This week, Mike Cobbs of A-1 Records helps a DJ pick out tunes for a five-hour set.

Good morning, East Village.

Above, watch Marky Ramone give a tour of his food truck for Fuse TV.

Gallerist brings word that Audio Visual Arts Gallery on East First Street near Second Avenue is planning a 60-hour marathon of German artist Conrad Schnitzler. According to the site, the event is part of Con-Mythology, “a whole slate of Schnitzler activities in New York over the next week.” It starts at 6 p.m. on Friday.

Zagat takes a peek in Extra Place and Heidi. The former will feature a “Mediterranean menu with a focus on döner, a type of German-meets-Turkish Street food,” according to the blog. The latter is a “tiny Swiss eatery that will serve fondue.” EV Grieve reports that both are opening today. Read more…

A tag photographed by one of our eagle-eyed community contributors, Scott Lynch, reveals plans for Tompkins Square Park riot reunions on July 29, and August 4 and 5. The former and latter dates correspond to Tompkins Square Park Live! events, which feature music, spoken word and other types of performance. Meanwhile, The Lo-Down brings word that the Sierra Leone Refugee All-Stars will headline a concern in the East River Park amphitheater on August 23.

Courtesy of N.Y.U. A rendering of N.Y.U.’s plans for two blocks south of Washington Square Park that features the newly reduced buildings.

Opponents of N.Y.U.’s expansion are hinting that they will announce new legal maneuvers to derail the project should it be approved the City Council tomorrow as expected.

An e-mail from the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation notes that lawyers representing faculty opposed to the plan will speak tomorrow after the vote at City Hill “regarding their next steps.” Those opponents have long spoken about the possibility of challenging the land-use review process in court.

N.Y.U. A slide depicting the reduction of building’s in
the proposed project footprint.

The executive director of the Greenwich Village Society, Andrew Berman, would not comment on the organization’s specific legal plans until tomorrow, but added, “Should they vote to approve this plan, we and our partners on the N.Y.U. faculty will be working closely with our counsel, Gibson Dunn, to look at every remedy available to right this wrong.” Read more…

NBC’s “Smash” will be filming at Cafe Orlin on St. Marks Place today. This morning the show’s crew was spotted bringing equipment into a closed set on Lafayette Street, between East Fourth Street and Astor Place; a spokesperson for the locations department confirmed that filming will move to the cafe between First and Second Avenues this afternoon. The show filmed at Orlin in September and has been seen around the neighborhood a few times since then. If a sign on a trailer is any indicator, Anjelica Huston will make an appearance today as her character Eileen.

Update | 4:30 p.m. No sign of Anjelica Huston, but as you can see in our spy footage above, Katharine McPhee, who plays Karen on the show, and Jack Davenport (Derek) were on site.

Daniel Maurer

Death & Co., the perennially packed cocktail lounge on East Sixth Street, has sold its first book for what an agent in the deal confirms is over $250,000.

The as-yet untitled book will gather over 500 recipes, according to agent Jonah Straus, who said a handful of publishers were interested in it before Aaron Wehner at Ten Speed Press pre-empted an auction with a six-figure offer. (Ten Speed published the People’s Pops cookbook last month.)

Nick Fauchald, a former Food & Wine editor who founded Tasting Table, will share writing duties with David Kaplan, an owner of the bar that Mr. Fauchald said is hugely influential in the cocktail world. “When I’m researching a cocktail trend or a bunch of recipes for something and you start tracing the recipes back to their origin, more often than not it ends up at Death & Co.,” he said, citing a recent trip to a prestigious bar in Amsterdam where the barkeep surprised him with drinks from the lounge’s stable. Read more…

Courtesy Alphabet City Brewing Jason Yarusi with half-barrel kegs in Garretsville.

The owners of Alphabet City Brewing Company breathed a sigh of relief last week as Governor Cuomo signed into law a tax credit – supported by State Senator Daniel Squadron – for New York’s craft breweries.

“We’re small enough that anything like that affects our margins drastically,” Jeffrey Simón told the Local. Small, yes, but growing: Mr. Simón and his business partner and former roommate, Jason Yarusi, are currently expanding their brewing operation and planning an East Village beer garden.

The duo started the company in their third-floor apartment on Seventh Street and Avenue A. During those home-brewing days of searching for the perfect recipe, they could often be seen crisscrossing Tompkins Square Park and carting sacks of hops or malt, or test tubes full of yeast.

“Pushing a keg in a cart through Tompkins will get you attention,” said Mr. Simón. Read more…

Courtesy B. Dolan B. Dolan in full regalia.

This Sunday, the Church of Love and Ruin Tour returns to the East Village, bringing with it a kaleidoscopic array of acts ranging from independent rap sensation Sage Francis to a marching band to the gender-bending practitioners of sissy bounce. The tour’s headliner and mastermind, B. Dolan (Bernard Dolan), hopes to get the New York audience – “which can stereotypically be very stoic and non-responsive,” he said – wiling out with the help of a new host, a drag queen by the name of Yekaterina Petrovna Zamolodchikova. “I predict that she is about to become a hip-hop legend,” he told The Local, adding that “what she’s going to do to these audiences will be remembered by their children’s children.”

You heard it here first. Mr. Dolan recently sat down with us to discuss his East Village origins as well as the significance of bringing the tour back to where he got his start.

What inspired you to make a name for yourself in the East Village?

I grew up in an old mill town outside Providence, R.I., and hip-hop culture was nowhere near me really. I discovered rap via an older cousin, and then scavenged for what I could find. I knew shortly after that I wanted to be a writer-rapper and that my favorite hip-hop came from New York City. So that’s where I headed in 1999, as soon as I finished high school. I discovered the scene in the East Village and started performing there. Read more…

Stephen Rex Brown

After interviewing embattled ex-Cro-Mag Harley Flanagan, Steven Blush, author of “American Hardcore: A Tribal History,” believes that the man accused of stabbing two current band members was set up. “To accept Harley’s ‘beatdown’ scenario is to accede to a not-totally-unlikely conspiracy involving his long-standing beefs with the intimidating DMS street gang (mostly over who did what to whom back in the day) as well as other NYHC elements. Anyone who knows the tough new punk subculture around DMS realizes nothing is beyond the pale,” Mr. Blush writes for Papermag.

EV Grieve notes that construction has commenced at the Mystery Lot on East 13th Street, and neighbors are already using words like “nightmarish” to describe it.

ArtsBeat has first word on PS 122’s upcoming fall season, which will be a collaboration with the French Institute Alliance Française and the Chocolate Factory in Long Island City. The renovation of its headquarters on First Avenue will soon be underway. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal attends “Uncle Vanya” in the Lincoln Center Festival with PS 122’s artistic director, Vallejo Gantner.
Read more…

There was another “cash mob” at the St. Mark’s Bookshop on Saturday; the store’s co-owner Terry McCoy told organizer Jeremiah’s Vanishing NY that the event brought a bump in sales of more than 30 percent. The Local’s cameras were rolling during the spending spree: watch our video to see the books flying off the shelves, and hear co-owner Bob Contant tell the story of Allen Ginsberg playing security guard.

Stephen Rex Brown Dina Leor

After weeks of uncertainty, Dina Leor, the owner of La Sirena, has learned that she’ll face a 42 percent rent increase if she decides to stay in her Third Street store, Tower Brokerage president Bob Perl confirmed to The Local.

Last week, Mr. Perl — who is negotiating on behalf of Ms. Leor’s landlord, the Cooper Square Mutual Housing Association — said the rent increase would likely be around 30 percent.

Currently paying $1,580 per month for her small Mexican folk art store, Ms. Leor had said she couldn’t afford the increase to $2,250 per month. But despite sending out an e-mail last week indicating she would close the store, she said today that she had no immediate plans to do shutter, since she didn’t have anywhere to relocate. “I’m still in a kind of limbo. I’m not going to say I’m going to close my doors — I feel like something will happen to allow me to stay,” she said. She wasn’t sure what that would be, but floated the idea of a fundraising campaign.

With across-the-board rent hikes looming, other commercial tenants of the Mutual Housing Association worried last week that they too would face tough decisions.

Sarah Darville Radouane Eljaouhari beside his new clay tandoori oven.

When Radouane Eljaouhari moved into his new location on East Sixth Street, he told contractors clearing out a shuttered Indian restaurant to not completely gut the kitchen. Now, what was once a lark for Mr. Eljaouhari and his chefs at the new location of his Moroccan restaurant Zerza has turned into a permanent cross-cultural twist.

Instead of a traditional Moroccan grill, meat dishes are cooked in a clay tandoori oven leftover from Angon on the Sixth, which closed in 2010. (Another Indian restaurant briefly occupied the space after Angon).

The clay oven gets twice as hot as the Moroccan grill, and “makes the meat cook without burning it,” Mr. Eljaouhari said. “It’s juicy, and that’s not the case with the grill, where it touches the flame sometimes. So this is a treat.” Read more…

A critical public hearing on a proposed hotel next-door to the Merchant’s House Museum has been postponed for the fourth time. A spokeswoman for the Landmarks Preservation Commission said that the presentation, originally scheduled for tomorrow, had been put off at the request of the developer, who needed more time to prepare. The museum’s administration has fiercely lobbied against the nine-story hotel, saying it would ruin the 180-year-old building’s aesthetic and could potentially undermine its foundation, as well. A new date for the hearing has not yet been scheduled. Update | 3:56 p.m. An earlier version of this post said the public hearing had been delayed for the second time. According to the Merchant’s House Museum, it is the fourth. “We want to believe it is because the Commission is taking this very, very seriously. As well they should,” the museum wrote in an e-mail.