Last Saturday, Jose Quiles spoke to a group of students at P.S./M.S. 34 on East 12th Street. Some were the age that he was when he first entered the gang world.

Responding to a recent spate of violence, Rick Del Rio, the senior pastor at Abounding Grace Ministries, had invited the man many in the neighborhood know as Cochise to a basketball tournament, barbecue, and youth outreach session, to speak about his rough-and-tumble life on the Lower East Side.

Mr. Quiles was born on St. Marks Place in 1961. He joined his first gang at the age of 13 and then in 1988, formed one of his own: the Satan’s Sinners Nomads. After attempting to kill two of his fellow gang members in 1993, he served 18 years in prison. At the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, N.Y., he began counseling gang members; he was released in January and now, as a resident of Campos Plaza, hopes to steer at-risk youth away from what he said was an assortment of gangs in the neighborhood, including the Bloods, Money Boys, and Latin Kings. Read more…

Scott Lynch The Con Edison protests continue.

Good morning, East Village.

The Jewish Week reports that Greg Wall, the jazz-playing rabbi of Sixth Street Community Center, is stepping down amid financial troubles at the synagogue and infighting among board members. “The synagogue is financially challenged (aren’t we all!), and must now raise cash to shore up their 150-year old building, and cannot afford to fund a permanent rabbi,” Mr. Wall wrote.

The Paris Review has joined the fight to help the St. Mark’s Bookshop as it considers a move to a smaller location. The magazine is offering a one-year subscription to the first five customers who spend $500 during Saturday’s cash mob.

One of The Local’s community contributors, Martin Johnson, has a review of “Love Goes To Buildings On Fire,” by Will Hermes. The book examines the city’s music scene from 1973 to 1978, a time in which “great music grew out of buildings on fire.” Read more…

Paul Defiglia The line at Momofuku today at around 6 p.m.

Paul Defiglia Yep, it goes around the corner.

Nothing is more appetizing in 95-degree weather than…a hot bowl of ramen noodles? Fans are lining up in droves outside of Momofuku Noodle Bar for a taste of guest chef Ivan Orkin’s cooking. These photos were taken at 6 p.m., a half-hour after the event was scheduled to begin. So much for “walk-in” only.

Update | 7 p.m. A Momofuku employee is now telling people that the list for Mr. Orkin’s ramen has been closed and those not on it won’t get a taste. He said the restaurant sold three times as much ramen as it had expected to during the first hour.

N.Y.U. Red lines indicate the reduction of the boomerang buildings on the northern block.

A City Council committee voted in favor of New York University’s expansion plan on Tuesday following last minute negotiations that yielded several significant reductions of the project.

The land use committee’s 19-1 vote sends the plan, dubbed N.Y.U. 2031, to the full City Council, which will vote on the plans later this month. Councilwoman Margaret Chin, a member of the committee who represents Greenwich Village, took the lead in negotiations with the university and strongly urged other council members to support the modified plan.

“I wholeheartedly believe that this proposal will allow N.Y.U.’s growth in the Village to occur at a sustainable pace, and that it will not overwhelm the wider Village community,” Ms. Chin said. “Over the past few months, I have heard a litany of N.Y.U.’s broken promises from Village residents. It is time to start a new chapter.” Read more…

Daniel Maurer Mercat

Last month The Times reported that Hung Ry had served its last bowl of noodles on Bond Street, and it now looks like Mercat may have shuttered on the same block. On June 27, we tried to watch the Spain-Portugal game and found the tapas bar closed without explanation. Same deal during several return visits, and phone calls have gone to a full voice mailbox numerous times.

Last night, we peered in to see a copy of Norman Mailer’s “The Gospel According to the Son” on the bar along with a couple of wine glasses, but not a person in site. Weird, right? Same deal this afternoon. The shelves behind the bar are mostly empty of alcohol.

An employee of neighboring Il Buco said the restaurant has been consistently dark over the past month.

The Catalan tapas bar opened in 2007 and expanded to Williamsburg in 2009 only to close after less than a year there.

Bummer, but here’s some good news: Eater reports that Mighty Quinn’s, a popular vendor at the Brooklyn Flea’s Smorgasburg in Williamsburg, is going brick and mortar in the former Vandaag space. Owner Hugh Mangum calls his style of barbecue “Texalina,” which the Brooklyn Flea blog described as “a cross between the authentic Texas BBQ he grew up with and the eastern Carolina methods he learned from his wife Laura, who hails from North Carolina.”

Stephen Rex Brown The dormant construction site next to the garden that is owned by the Educational Alliance. Green thumbs say it is a breeding ground for mosquitoes.

Alphabet City’s community gardens always feel like verdant refuges from city life, but lately Orchard Alley Community Garden has seemed downright tropical.

Stephen Rex Brown Check out the bites on Steven Matthews’ leg.

Yesterday swarms of mosquitoes forced members of the garden on East Fourth Street near Avenue D to close it indefinitely. The itchy green thumbs point to an adjacent stalled construction site owned by Educational Alliance as the insects’ breeding grounds.

“I was here playing catch with my son; after 10 or 15 minutes we had to go,” said Steven Matthews, whose legs were covered in bites from a recent visit.

Until the pools of water at the site are cleaned up the garden, which is open to the public whenever one of its 15 members is present, will remain closed.

Ayo Harrington, the head of the garden, won’t walk on the same side of the street as the garden, and said she’d been taking double-doses of Benadryl to keep the itching at bay. Read more…

On Friday, “Union Square” came to Houston Street: Nancy Savoca’s movie about estranged sisters who hash out their differences in an airy Union Square apartment opened at Angelika. The film is set just outside of the East Village: at one point, the more high-strung of the siblings, who runs a health food company not entirely unsimilar to actual Union Square company One Lucky Duck, gives her address as 886 Broadway, which would put her in the W & J Sloane Building, between 18th and 19th Streets. No wonder her sister thinks her place is “crazy awesome.”

Most of the “action” takes place inside this loft as the brash and boisterous Lucy (played by Mira Sorvino), who’s in the neighborhood to shop for tacky bags at Filene’s Basement (R.I.P.), tries to reconnect with the crunchy, cloistered Jenny (Tammy Blanchard), a vegan convert who’s so ashamed of her Bronx roots, her rough-around-the-edges Italian-American family, and her secret past as a (gasp!) smoker that she tells her hunky fiancée that she’s from Maine.

As The Times notes in its review, the movie is fairly theatrical in its contained setting and dramatic conversation. But perhaps the best bit of dialogue happens to be ad-libbed, and involves Andrew Cote, the beekeeper who a couple of months ago helped out with that Bowery swarm and then relocated some Central Park bees to the Sixth Street Community Center. Read more…

A neighbor of IHOP passes along word that last night someone was inspecting the new ventilator equipment and ventilator unit that several people said is making a loud mechanical hum around the clock. A Department of Environmental Protection inspector is also expected to check out the equipment today. Yesterday the owner of the restaurant said that the new machinery, which cost more than $40,000, may need some adjustments to alleviate the noise. Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this post referred to the ventilation unit as a “smog-hog.” That reference has been deleted since the term is a brand name and Smog Hog says that it did not manufacture the unit in question.

Matthew Kraus

Good morning, East Village.

DNAInfo reports that Il Laboratorio del Gelato has a strict two-sample limit on ice cream flavors. With all the exotic flavors, some folks tend to try lots of ice cream before making a decision, an owner says. The excessive sampling creates a long line, and also costs money. “”If a group of eight people come in, that is still 16 samples,” the owners of Il Laboratrorio tells the Web site. “”If any of my staff break it, I flip out.”

EV Grieve notes that a water cafe — that’s right, a water cafe — is open on East 10th Street. It sells “hyper-filtered, perfectly pure, eco-conscious” agua.

Booker & Dax, Death & Co., and Summit Bar are featured in Eater’s roundup of the city’s best cocktail bars.
Read more…

Sandy Berger The ventilation unit on the roof of IHOP.

Out of the bacon frying pan, into the din of the ventilation unit.

Earlier this month, neighbors of the IHOP on East 14th Street were thrilled when the smell of bacon was greatly reduced by a new ventilator unit on the roof of the restaurant. But the elation quickly gave way to frustration as they realized that the odor-eater causes an around-the-clock ruckus.

“It looks like a locomotive and sounds like a locomotive,” said Sandy Berger, who documented her life as an IHOP neighbor in The Bacon Diaries. Read more…

Melvin Felix Sunny Hoang, first in line.

“Who’s here today?” a passerby asked Sunny Hoang, the first person in line outside the Major League Baseball Fan Cave.

Mr. Hoang, 18, told him Young the Giant was playing.

“Oh. For who?” said the man, assuming Young was a baseball player.

“It’s a rock band,” said Mr. Hoang, who came in from Queens and by noontime had been waiting outside the venue at Broadway and East Fourth Street for two hours. After the man walked away, Mr. Hoang said, “We’ve had that all day. No one really knows this band as much as I thought, actually.” Read more…

Sarah Darville

If you’re the type to slurp ramen on the off-season, take note: Ramen Setagaya on St. Marks is closed until July 26. The Local spotted workers hauling bags of debris out of the restaurant this morning; head contractor Tom Kim said they were replacing the cracked wooden floor with new tile.

So where can you get your ramen fix in the meantime? Tomorrow at Momofuku Noodle Bar, Ivan Orkin will take over for the night. Mr. Orkin, originally from Long Island, made his name at his own noodle shops in Japan. Noodle Bar will serve three of his creations  – including one featuring pork neck, pork fat, chicken feet, and bacon – along with a smaller selection of their normal dinner food. The menu might be a sign of what’s to come at Mr. Orkin’s planned New York City restaurant; Grub Street reported last month that he’s looking to open a U.S. outpost by the end of the year.

The “Invader from Planet Ramen” goes from 5:30 p.m. “till the ramen runs out” and is first come, first slurp (no reservations), so get there early.

Despite the recent bad news, there are still plenty of great record stores in the East Village where you can walk in and get down with some new sounds. That’s why each week we’ll ask the clerks at our favorite shops what they happen to be listening to. Here’s what’s spinning at Turntable Lab.

Tim Schreier Left to Right: Carson DeYoung’s piece, Yok, Sheryo and Beau

Here it is! Cycle 4 of the Centre-Fuge Public Art Project, wherein curators Jonathan Neville and Pebbles Russell (a.k.a. Pebbles van Peebles) bring new art to a construction trailer on East First Street every other month. No celebrity cameos this time around, except of course for the artists themselves. Tim Schreier shot them at work between First and Second Avenues over the weekend. Read more…

Brenda H.

Good morning, East Village.

The economic woes at St. Mark’s Bookshop continue, but Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York refuses to bow to the ailing print industry. The blog has planned a cash mob on Saturday at 3 p.m. To hear the owners (and Jeremiah) tell it, the stakes couldn’t be higher. “We’re in the midst of some serious summer doldrums and could use a little lift….a shot in the arm,” one of the owners writes.

The fallout from the theft of guns from Ninth Precinct locker rooms continues. The Post reports that one of the suspects in the ring is a woman who sold her web streaming company for $70 million in 2000. She then blew through her fortune and got caught up — allegedly — in last week’s bust involving the guns and “large-scale drug deals.”

Grub Street has more analysis of the images spotted at the location of Andrew Carmellini’s new French restaurant. According to the blog, the mysterious images at 380 Lafayette Street harks back to famous silk-screened posters that “went up all over Paris after De Gaulle left France in May of 1968 during the protests.”
Read more…

Ray Lemoine Jose Collado

A couple of businesses are expanding on Avenue C.

Jose Collado is planning to open Yankee Pizza next to his current operation, Yankee Deli at Avenue C and East 11th Street, as well as a food market across the street. The 40-year-old Mr. Collado, who grew up on 14th Street and also owns Yankee Two Deli along with a couple of others in the neighborhood, said that New York Healthy Choice, in the former Monk Thrift Shop space at 177 Avenue C, would concentrate on fresh greens, meat and seafood as well as the usual canned goods.

Meanwhile, Rob Ceraso, co-owner of The Wayland, said his cocktail bar will expand next-door, into the former home of the Bite Me Best pizza parlor, so that it can add a proper kitchen, six more bar seats, and a handful more table seats. Once gas ovens replace the electric induction ovens that are currently behind the bar, the menu will expand and the bar will also begin opening earlier, at 5 p.m. Mr. Ceraso said he hoped to be able to show off the upgrades next month.

Melvin Felix 106 and 110 East 10th Streets.

It’s not the closing of Mars Bar, or the opening of another 7-Eleven, but Community Board 3 reached a milestone yesterday as the Landmarks Subcommittee held its first public hearing on proposed renovations to buildings in a historic district.

The new protocol — in which the subcommittee votes on a “certificate of appropriateness” for renovations to protected properties before sending them to the parks committee and then the full community board — will be applied to the 330 buildings in the East Village-Lower East Side Historic District if the district is approved by the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

“When Landmarks decided they were going forward with the two historic districts, we started looking at the increased responsibility because of the sheer number of buildings,” said Carolyn Ratcliff, chairwoman of the subcommittee.

But don’t expect the meetings to become as epic as the board’s S.L.A. committee meetings. Read more…

The Police Department canvassed the 179 apartments in the Seward Park Houses on Essex Street today, a show of force in the ongoing search for the suspect in last week’s shooting of an officer on patrol. The reward for information leading to the arrest of the suspect has also been raised to $22,000, as indicated in the video above.