There’s an air of serenity about Anna Sheffield as she works at a small desk in her studio on Lafayette Street. On a recent Thursday evening, the jewelry designer spoke to The Local over a cup of tea, away from the buzz of her workroom and kitchen, in a well-lit corner room filled with her designs, art books and warmly worn wooden furniture. Her hair was pulled back and tattoos of hearts, flowers and birds covered both her arms.

Ms. Sheffield started her Bing Bang line (available at Cloak & Dagger, Warm, and Reformation) in 2002 in San Francisco and launched her fine jewelry line, Anna Sheffield, (available at Love, Adorned and coming to ABC Carpet & Home in a couple of weeks) in 2007. Before that, she grew up Catholic in northern New Mexico. Her influences are evident in the Madonna, crucifixes and feathers that adorn some of her works. Read more…

Shira Levine

For every East Village business that’s opening or closing, dozens are quietly making it. Here are two of them: Village Kids and Foot Gear Plus.

While in high school, Tony Scifo worked part-time for a shoe guy. In 1980, at the tender age of 19, he bought Foot Gear, the shoe shop across the street at 131 First Avenue. Two and a half years ago, he and his big sister Linda Scifo-Young opened Village Kids, selling children’s kicks just a block away at 117 First Avenue. Ms. Scifo-Young used to work in corporate real estate, so she wasn’t scared of going into business during a financial crisis. “As a real estate broker, I knew that the only time I could get a decent lease for the second store was when the market was bad,” she said. The Local spoke to her at Village Kids about whether her gamble paid off.

What influences your business the most?

The funny thing is that in actuality we’re in the weather business. If the weather cooperates, we’re good. If it’s cold when it’s supposed to be cold, then we have a good season. If it’s hot when it’s supposed to be hot, then we have a good season. If any of those things don’t work, you have no season. This year was hard with how the weather cooperated. Read more…

Photos: Daniel Maurer

The Sixth Street Community Center got approximately 15,000 new tenants yesterday: about three and a half pounds of bees that may make honey for its café, opening next month. The hives on the community center’s rooftop are among many in the East Village, according to the beekeeper who brought the swarm down from Central Park.

On Wednesday (the same day he dealt with a mass of bees on the Bowery), Andrew Cote helped capture another swarm attached to a lamppost near Harlem Meer Lake, near 110th Street. He offered them up on the New York City Beekeepers Association’s Facebook page. Ray Sage, a member of the Sixth Street Community Center CSA who has tended to four hives on the former synagogue’s roof for the past three years, was the first to respond. Read more…

Yesterday we profiled Food Not Bombs, which feeds East Villagers such as the homeless group we visited on Wednesday. Street Life Ministries also helps the needy in Tompkins Square Park. This is the story of one of the group’s volunteers.

A decade ago, police officer Glenn Ferro’s life fell apart. Caught in the grips of alcoholism and clinical depression, he was forced to resign from his job, went through a divorce, and lost his home. Today, the 61-year-old volunteers with Street Life Ministries in Tompkins Square Park, assisting homeless individuals with their everyday needs. His mission is to change the live of those who suffer from addiction, like he did.

Scott Lynch

Good morning, East Village.

Scott Lynch got the above shot of a new mural by L.A.-based street artist Alec Monopoly, on a plywood shed at 199 Bowery.

St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery tells The Local it has reprinted a must-read letter from W.H. Auden on its Facebook page. Responding to the church’s new liturgy, the poet asks, “Have you gone stark raving mad?” and goes on to say, “I implore you from the bowels of Christ to stick to Cranmer and King James.” The posting is meant to promote the church’s bid for a Partners in Preservation grant. It’s currently 19th in the running, and the Duo Multicultural Arts Center is 39th.

Alistair Economakis tells The Villager that he and his family have moved into the so-called “Economakis mansion” at 47 East Third Street, defying suspicions that he pushed out the building’s tenants under a false premise in 2002. Read more…

Yesterday, The Local visited a homeless encampment on Avenue A. Just a block away, in Tompkins Square Park, several groups – like this one, this one, and this one – are working to feed the needy. Here’s one of them.

Stirring a shiny mix of Portobello mushrooms, sweet yellow peppers, and other vegetables, Su Wang scooped up a piece of white radish for a taste. “Five more minutes,” she said.

During the week, Ms. Wang is a 19-year-old student of political science at Hunter College. On weekends, she serves as a member of the Manhattan chapter of Food Not Bombs, a group that feeds the homeless with surplus food rescued from grocery stores and dumpsters.

The anti-poverty movement, which encourages countries to cut the amount they spend on war in order to insure that food is available to all, has more than 1,000 active chapters around the world, including a dozen sub-organizations in New York State. The Manhattan chapter rescues 50 to 100 pounds of food per week, to serve mostly as vegan and vegetarian meals. Read more…

The East Village lost one record store this month and is losing another, but several remain. The Local visited a couple of them, A-1 Records and Turntable Lab, to talk to DJs from the spin-centric “I Love Vinyl” party, which celebrates its third anniversary at Le Poisson Rouge in Greenwich Village on May 26. Watch the video to hear why vinyl will never die.

Philip Ross Norman Isaacs

Norman Isaacs, the owner and namesake of Norman’s Sound and Vision, said that he’s moving his record store from the East Village to Williamsburg because (you guessed it) his landlord is raising his rent.

The 65-year-old, who opened the shop at 67 Cooper Square in 1994, said that he received a call from the building’s management company, Levites Realty, informing him that his rent of $7,000 a month would go up to $11,000 once his 20-year lease expired.

“They called and said, ‘We’re raising the rent,’ and I said, ‘Can you come down at all?’ and they said no, and I said ‘I’m leaving,'” recounted Mr. Isaacs, who said his initial rent at the shop was around $4,000. Read more…

Gothamist catches wind of a Beastie Boys fan who’s organizing an “MCA Day” in celebration of the late Adam Yauch. No word on what exactly the May 19 event in Union Square will entail, or whether State Senator and Beastie Boys fan Daniel Squadron will be rocking the mic.

The New York City Beekeepers Association Officers of the Ninth Precinct with Andrew Cote.

The bees that swarmed on the Bowery yesterday will find a new home in Queens today. But where did they come from in the first place? The beekeeper that relocated them points to the rooftop of the Bowery Poetry Club.

Andrew Cote, a founder of the New York City Beekeepers Association who tends to around fifty bee hives around the city and sells honey at the Union Square Greenmarket, said he was summoned to Bowery and Bleecker Street yesterday by Anthony “Tony Bees” Planakis, the police department’s go-to guy for bee incidents.

After Mr. Planakis removed the swarm from a tree branch and placed it into a bucket, he and Mr. Cote received a police escort to a fenced-off area of Tompkins Square Park. There, Mr. Planakis transferred the bees from his container to Mr. Cote’s, so the beekeeper could transport them first to the Upper West Side, where he spent the night, and then to the hives of a wine distributor and novice beekeeper in Queens, who will be their new owner.

Mr. Cote, who said he had assisted in 12 similar incidents in the past five days, thinks the bees belonged to the Bowery Poetry Club. “They were bees who were mistreated, I’ll say, and who became in a sense homeless,” he said, pointing to a May 6 incident during which a neighbor of the literary bar reported a swarm above her building. Read more…

Scott Lynch

Good morning, East Village.

Sacha Baron Cohen’s new movie, “The Dictator,” opened last night. Anyone else notice that when the titular despot is driving up Third Avenue, Blue 9 makes a brief appearance as Haffezi’s Burgers?

Speaking of the East Village on the big screen, Broadway.com reports that the CBGB biopic starring Alan Rickman as Hilly Kristal will begin production June 25 in New York and Georgia and should be released next year. Theater Mania adds that “the film will focus on the life of Kristal, who died in 2007, during the club’s early years in the 1970s. Several rock figures with ties to the club are expected to make cameo appearances.”

The Post reports that the unidentified man who was stuck and killed by an L train at Union Square yesterday was relieving himself on the tracks when it happened. Read more…

Jared Malsin D, right, and other members of her encampment.

Half a dozen homeless people have taken shelter under the awning of the shuttered East Village Farm, and police are allowing them to stay even as neighbors complain of unsanitary and potentially dangerous conditions on Avenue A.

Outside of the former grocery store, which closed in February, the group of black, white, and Latino men and women in their 30s to 50s makes do with a handful of blankets and a couple of sheets of cardboard laid on the sidewalk. They pass cigarettes to each other and sometimes pool small amounts of money, most of it acquired through panhandling. “We’re a family,” said one man.

“D,” a 49-year-old former clerical worker from Brooklyn, who like other members of the group wished to remain anonymous, said the police had tentatively allowed them to remain on the stretch of sidewalk between Sixth and Seventh Streets, provided they keep the area in order. Read more…

Photos: Philip Ross

Police were called to the area of the Chase Bank on Bowery around 1:30 p.m. today, but not because of another robbery: in a tree in front of the bank was a watermelon-sized cluster of bees.

A group of about 20 bystanders congregated near the taped-off tree between East First Street and Bleecker Street, snapping photos of the teeming, light-brown mass sagging from the tree branch. Some grumbled about the bees receiving so much attention (a squad car, a police van, and an emergency service vehicle blocked a lane of traffic).

Sans protective gear, a beekeeper called in to remove the swarm climbed on top of the emergency vehicle and, with a pair of hedge trimmers, cautiously removed the branches around it.

When it came time to extract the swarm, a police officer joined the beekeeper on the roof of the emergency vehicle. He extended a white Styrofoam box directly underneath the swarm as the beekeeper cut the branch that supported the mass. A lid was placed over the box. A couple of observers clapped in approval.

Watch our slideshow to see the drama unfold.

Stephen Rex Brown Capt. John Cappelmann

At last night’s meeting of the Ninth Precinct Community Council, Capt. John Cappelmann shared the latest on the early-morning shooting on May 12. “The guy didn’t wait for police,” Capt. Cappelmann said of the 29-year-old who took himself to Bellevue Hospital after being shot in the lower right leg. “Usually that means they were up to no good in the first place.”

He added that the victim is “no surprise. He’s known to us very well.” Surveillance cameras captured people fleeing the scene following the shooting, and police officers are dedicating manpower to preventing retaliation for the incident.

While that investigation is ongoing, Capt. Cappelmann singled out a few notable collars and said that crime in the neighborhood has decreased overall by 13 percent in comparison with the same 28-day period last year. Here’s a roundup of recent arrests and other items of note. Read more…

Stephen Robinson Mural on East First Street.

The New York State Senate has adopted a resolution honoring the late Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys, drafted by State Senator Daniel Squadron. That’s right: it seems the advocate for greater community control in liquor licensing is a fan of “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!)”

The resolution, adopted yesterday afternoon and reprinted below, notes (as The Times did) that the Beastie Boys had ties to the senator’s district. The group “became well-known in the innovative music scene in Manhattan’s East Village and Lower East Side with a sound and a style all their own,” it states, adding that the Beasties “exemplified New York through a period in which grassroots creativity and a community of iconoclastic artists helped redefine and rejuvenate a city on the ropes, with iconic imagery from Brooklyn to Ludlow Street.” Read more…

Gothamist reports that a man was struck and killed by an L train at Union Square this morning. According to the MTA’s site, Manhattan-bound service has been suspended from the Bedford Avenue station to the Eighth Avenue Station.

Ria Chung

Good morning, East Village.

To kick off your day, dig Joey Ramone’s new posthumous album, currently streaming on Rolling Stone’s site. Pyramid Club and Save the Robots, the legendary after-hours on Avenue B, get shoutouts in a song with the chorus “I’m proud to make my home in New York City.”

Speaking of gritty hangouts, Bowery Boogie has a look at Max Fish’s new Asbury Park outpost. Needless to say, the blog has an opinion about what’s more punk rock, skee ball or pool tables.

Commercial Observer reports that Edward Minskoff, who personally invested over $100 million in equity in his 51 Astor Place office building, is closing in on a deal with its first tenant: “Hult International Business School is in talks to take 51 Astor’s entire second floor, a roughly 55,000-square-foot space. Sources say the school could pay rents that begin in the $60s per square foot but escalate to around $100 per square foot over the life of a long term lease at the roughly 400,000-square-foot property.” Read more…

Daniel Maurer The car’s windows were shattered and its hood discarded.

A car mysteriously caught fire this morning on East Ninth Street between First and Second Avenues.

The Acura TL was parked on the quaint tree-lined block in front of the Meg boutique and across from the Mud Spot. A firefighter said the engine area of the unoccupied car caught fire shortly before 7:30 a.m. The cause was unknown.

Mike Sipser, a Boston resident visiting the city, witnessed the event. “I came out, and there was already smoke coming out of it and then the front of the car just burst into flames,” he said. The owner, he said, was nowhere to be seen.

According to a mechanic, Pablo Maurer, fires in unattended vehicles are rare, but in urban areas are usually the result of rats gnawing on insulation to create a nest; exposed wires can then short circuit.