John Penley

Before today’s May Day festivities kick off, let’s turn the clock back 22 years, to May 1, 1990. That’s when an affordable-housing festival in Tompkins Square Park ended in a riot in which 28 police officers were injured and 29 people – some of them activists, anarchists, and squatters who had participated in the better known riots two years earlier – were arrested.

In this account reprinted from Clayton Patterson’s book, “Resistance: A Radical Social and Political History of the Lower East Side,” Ellen Moynihan, a writer and photographer who lately has been documenting Occupy Wall Street, describes how the melee began, and offers historical context going back to the 1800s, when May 1 was the time when many Lower East Side tenement dwellers’ leases would expire, causing mass migration. Read more…

Scott Lynch

Good morning, East Village.

Stay tuned for The Local’s comprehensive coverage of May Day. With major Occupy protests set to begin across the city later today, a number of smaller protest activities have been scheduled for points across the East Village. Among them is a demonstration touted by GOLES via Twitter: “This MAY DAY, LES Public Housing Residents take their struggle to the streets! Meet Up: 2pm Houston & Ave. D”

From 3 p.m. to 4 p.m., workers at The Strand plan to stage a picket outside the bookstore as a part of the 99 Pickets, which are taking place across the city on Tuesday.

And later, at 5:30 p.m., rent reform activists plan to hold a “Tenants’ General Assembly” outside Cooper Union’s Great Hall.

Before all that pops off, here, care of the Allen Ginsberg Project, is the poet waxing revolutionary in Prague, where he had been elected May King thirty years earlier. Read more…

Daniel Maurer Walker Fee at work.

Over the weekend, Walker Fee continued work on the mural he’s painting on the wall of The Bean’s forthcoming location on First Avenue. When it’s done, it’ll be studded with mosaics courtesy of – who else? – Jim Power. But there’s a slight chance the steam-themed mural will evaporate: the landlord is said to have voiced concerns that it doesn’t jibe with a hotel that’s set to open above the storefront.

Mr. Fee – who painted the murals inside of The Bean’s Second Avenue location along with Nicolina and other members of their artists’ collective, the Free Arts Society – is using housepaint to create a java-themed riff on Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss.” Taking a break from his work on Saturday, he told us, “This building just got painted over, and I’m anxious to see if I can do a cool atmosphere-changing mural to make it seem like the place is being held up by columns of smoke.”

But has his work changed the atmosphere a little too much? Read more…

Paula Litsky Bob Rosenthal at Ginsberg’s funeral.

It’s the last day of National Poetry Month, so here’s the final installment of our interview with Bob Rosenthal, conducted at Allen Ginsberg’s old 12th Street apartment, where Mr. Rosenthal worked as his secretary for nearly two decades. (Parts one, two, and three of this leisurely conversation ran last week.) As Ginsberg grew older and ill, his assistant followed him to a 14th Street loft purchased from the painter Larry Rivers; when Ginsberg died in 1997, Mr. Rosenthal became executor of the poet’s estate and guardian of one of his last meals.

Allen’s Addictions
Allen always had some pot around – he was a pot propagandist and so if a joint was being passed around and someone was going to take a photograph he would grab the joint so he’s got it. But actually, I rarely ever saw him smoke. He had pot for boyfriends – it’s a good line: “Oh, you want to come up and smoke?” It was really for them. He would go to LSD conventions with the big guys – the Fitz Hugh Ludlow Library guys, Huxley and all those guys. They would give him acid and he would come home and put it in the refrigerator and that was cute. There was a little vial of LSD and it said “Do not take without permission of Allen or Bob” – so I guess Bob had permission. So that was nice. But I never saw him on LSD. Read more…

A new six-story building with condominiums on each floor is coming to Alphabet City.

Stephen Rex Brown 227 East Seventh Street.

The building, expected to be completed in the summer of next year, will replace a vacant one-story building at 227 East Seventh Street, near Avenue C. Plans to demolish the existing building, which was built around 1980, were approved by the Department of Buildings late last month.

The new structure also spells the end of a big Jim Joe tag. An email to the ubiquitous artist seeking comment bounced back. Read more…

Photos: Lauren Carol Smith

Today, Noah Bernamoff and his wife Rae Cohen, the owners of Montreal-style deli Mile End, opened their first Manhattan venture – a sandwich-only storefront on Bond Street near Bowery. Don’t be surprised if it ends up luring fressers away from the lines at Katz’s.

The menu reprises many of the deli sandwiches (including the classic: smoked meat) that quickly gave the small restaurant instant golden-child status when it opened in Boerum Hill in 2010. There will also be hand-held twists on plated classics: instead of in a bowl, chicken liver will come loaded onto rolls with pickled eggs, duck jus and parsley salad. Read more…

Photos: Tim Schreier
The reopening of First Park wasn’t the only thing washed out on Earth Day. The rain also put a damper on the Polar Bear Bike Ride, an annual fete organized by East Village-based organization Time’s Up. Lucky for us, it was rescheduled and took place yesterday in Union Square. The group has a knack for decorating bikes to send a message – as you can see from our slideshow it was on full display at the event, meant to encourage others to reduce their carbon footprint by cycling.

Michael Natale

Good morning, East Village.

With May Day around the corner, the Cooper Square Committee announces in an e-mail that tomorrow at 5 p.m., as the Rent Guidelines Board makes its annual vote about raising rent-stabilized rents, there will be a “Tenants General Assembly” at 7 East Seventh Street: “It will be like an OWS general assembly, where you talk about your experiences with the RGB using the ‘people’s mike.’ People will also talk about the origins of tenant protections, the peoples’ struggles to protect them, and the roots of the dreaded RGB.” More info here.

Runnin’ Scared hears rumors that hundreds of police are training on Randall’s Island in preparation for tomorrow’s festivities. Mayor Bloomberg doesn’t say anything about the rumors but tells the blog, “We are prepared for everything we can think of all the time. Our tactics are something that we don’t talk about in advance for obvious reasons.”

Tomorrow will also be the 79th anniversary of Dorothy Day’s founding of the Catholic Worker Movement. The Times visits a resident of one of the Catholic Worker’s two East Village buildings: “Megan Fincher, who, at 29, having completed college (at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where Day studied) and graduate school, decided to devote herself to the movement.” Back in October, The Local also paid a visit to the residences  – which, according to The Times, offer “lessons in the kind of radical empathy we rarely get to witness.” Read more…

Allen Ginsberg Bob Rosenthal, front. Back, from left: Gregory
Corso, Shelley Kraut, and Peter Orlovsky holding
Aliah Rosenthal. 1980. .

As National Poetry Month winds down, let’s hear more from Bob Rosenthal. Earlier, in the first and then the second installment of our interview conducted at Allen Ginsberg’s former apartment on East 12th Street, where Mr. Rosenthal worked as his secretary for nearly two decades, we heard about Ginsberg’s daily routine, his social sphere, and his love of the East Village. Now, Mr. Rosenthal recalls the poet’s romantic life, his way with strangers, and his tumultuous relationship with Peter Orlovsky – fellow poet, former lover, and longtime companion.

Allen and Peter
Harry Smith would be living here and walking through and making films, and Peter Orlovsky’s brother Julius would be here. I would listen to music and then Julius would say, “Bob, would you like me to turn the music off?” and I’d say, “No, Julius, I’m enjoying this music,” and then 30 seconds later he’d say, “Bob, would you like me to turn this music off?” And after a couple of times I’d say, “Okay, Julius, I have an idea: why don’t you turn the music off?” Denise [Mercedes] and her bandmates would try to get Julius to swear and they’d try to trick him but he was so smart and they could never trick him into saying a swear word. It was really kind of zany. Read more…

Rosenthal and Ginsberg.

Earlier this week, Allen Ginsberg’s secretary of 20 years, Bob Rosenthal, shared memories of his former employer – some of which will be included in a memoir he recently completed, “Straight Around Allen.” Speaking to The Local at Ginsberg’s former apartment on East 12th Street, where the two worked alongside each other for so long, he recalled the great poet’s daily routine, his tastes in literature and music, his mail and telephone communications, and his ways with money. Today, in our second installment, Mr. Rosenthal talks about Ginsberg’s social sphere during his two decades in the so-called poets building. Check back tomorrow for still more from this candid interview. 

Allen’s East Village
People would always call Allen and say, “Allen, come to my shangri-la in Hawaii,” and here or there. He would never go. A vacation for Allen was coming back and having nothing to do in the East Village. He would often go to the poetry readings at St. Mark’s. He loved the mushroom barley soup at the Kiev. And The New York Times – he just loved it. He hung around Tompkins Square, wrote a lot of one-line poems about skinheads there. And he was a natural. I think because he always felt free here. Read more…

New York City is a place where nothing seems to be without life. Lately, I have been interested in the impressions that all of the moving objects in the city leave behind. By playing with time lapse and panoramas, I hope that I can share a bit of the shadows that we leave behind in the space we occupy.

Read more…

Daniel Maurer

Organic Modernism, a modernist furniture store with locations in Manhattan and Williamsburg, has closed its shop at 43 Avenue A. James Bekbemir, the brand’s operational manager,  told The Local, “We opened several new locations so we decided to close that one.” The store on the corner of Avenue A and Third Street was smaller than the chain’s seven other stores, and its rent was going up, Mr. Bekbemir said, so the owners decided not to renew the lease.

It’s the third recent home-furnishings store closure in the neighborhood after Elan Antiques in January and Art & Industry earlier this month.

A pair of items offer a rare bit of good news for those who rent. First, a change in policy in the New York State Unified Court System will eliminate easy access to so-called tenant blacklists, The Village Voice reports. Landlords have been able to buy the lists of people who participated in housing court cases from a third party as a way to weed out troublesome tenants. Now, plaintiffs and defendants in court cases will remain in the public record, but the lists of names in bulk will no longer be available for purchase online. Concern over the blacklists is real: it even came up in the comments of our coverage of the landlord-tenant fight brewing on East Third Street. In other news, the Post reports that the annual rent increase for rent-stabilized apartments will likely be the smallest its been since 2002.

The police have announced an arrest in the case of a man said to have inappropriately touched himself while staring at a woman on an L train bound for Union Square last week. Kyle Brown, a 23-year-old Bushwick resident, has been charged with public lewdness. The train rider who is alleged to have taken a photo up a woman’s dress on the same day is still at large.

Suzanne Rozdeba

May Day is almost upon us, and with it will come a citywide carnival of Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.

But what will May Day actually look like in New York City and in the East Village? Will we see orderly marchers proceeding peacefully between police barricades? Or will Wall Street burn, as the graffiti on Avenue A warns? Or should we expect, as Jerry Rubin predicted for the 1972 Democratic National Convention, “ten thousand naked hippies” marching on Wall Street?

Asked to predict the size of the demonstrations, Occupy organizer Marisa Holmes, 25, told The Local that May 1 will be on par with the movement’s fall protests or larger. “It won’t be a general strike but it will be substantial,” said the freelance film editor and graduate student at Hunter College. Read more…

joanrrose

Good morning, East Village.

The Post reports that four 9mm guns – along with cash, jewelry, two bulletproof vests and an iPad – have disappeared from inside lockers at the Ninth Precinct station houses. Officers suspect an inside job.

An East Village man who was in a coma for two weeks after an air conditioning unit fell on him on Second Avenue has suddenly disappeared, possibly walking away from a rent-dispute settlement that would’ve netted him $25,000 and a lawsuit that might’ve brought in another $21 million. According to the Post, his lawyer is perplexed.

Writing for the Washington Square News, N.Y.U. student Ben Miller says the school doesn’t seem to be as frat-driven as others: “N.Y.U. has its flaws, but this kind of widespread Nihilistic violence, against others and against ourselves, is not one of them.” Read more…

Daniel Maurer

Here’s your first look at new art on the walls of The Bean’s forthcoming location at First Avenue and Ninth Street (more shots here and here). An employee at the Second Avenue store says it should open in a month or two.

Also turning heads just a block away: the plywood signage at Iconic Hand Rolls has been crudely defaced (hint: it’s no longer hand rolls that are being offered). Owner David Ravvin can’t be happy about that, but Joe Dobias, whose sandwich shop JoeDough is next door, likes what he sees.

Update: Nicolina, the East Village artist who has contributed to the Bean’s other locations and is currently painting a harbor of boats in Brazil, tells us the artist behind this latest work is Walker Fee.

Daniel Maurer Bob Rosenthal in the hallway of
437 East 12th Street, with Ginsberg
over his shoulder.

With just a few days left of National Poetry Month and a movie about the Beats in the works, it seems an appropriate time for Bob Rosenthal, former secretary to Allen Ginsberg, to share some memories of his former employer. After all, Mr. Rosenthal, an East Villager and a poet in his own right, recently completed a memoir titled “Straight Around Allen” (it’s being shopped to publishers) and he appears in “Passing Stranger,” a recently released audio tour of the neighborhood’s poetic landmarks.

It just so happens that the editor of The Local lives in Allen Ginsberg’s former apartment on East 12th Street – or rather, the portion of the apartment that contained the poet’s bedroom, bathtub, and the home office where Mr. Rosenthal worked alongside the literary legend for nearly two decades. Yesterday, Mr. Rosenthal, who these days teaches Beat literature to high schoolers, paid his first visit to his old workplace in some years, and spoke candidly about his time there.

Bob Moves to 437 East 12th, Allen Follows
My wife and I moved to New York from Chicago in 1973. We were living on St. Marks Place and met people in this building [437 East 12th Street]: Rebecca Wright, a poetess who was actually living with John Godfrey upstairs, was going back to somewhere in the Midwest where she’s from with her son and she was leaving me the apartment. It was like $125 per month and she said, “I’ll leave you these books” – all of them Allen Ginsberg books. She said, “I don’t need them anymore.” That’s when I started reading him. It was serendipitous. Read more…

Lauren Evans, Cafe Press The CBGB jersey spotted at REI and the snuggie from Mosaic Man’s Cafe Press line.

While rumors continue to swirl about the return of CBGB, we recently spotted a way to indulge one’s punk nostalgia and comfortably ride a bicycle. A CBGB cycling jersey is on sale at REI.

Here’s the write-up for the jersey: “The retro image CBGB performance bike jersey takes you on a ride down memory lane to the days when punk rock ruled high and mighty at New York’s famous CBGB underground rock club. Polyester mesh fabric wicks away sweat and dissipates it for quick drying-airy mesh weave allows excellent breathability.”

So, what’s more bizarre? This punked-out polyester that’s only $70? Or the warm and cuddly Mosaic Man snuggie?