Kathryn Doyle Toby Salkin painted these religious Jews, which
she calls “Boychicks,” based on a photo she took
in JFK two years ago

Every year in April, Allen Salkin, a onetime East Village resident and former staff writer for The New York Times, throws a spring frolic for an eclectic group of friends and colleagues. This year, it will double as his 70-year-old mother’s downtown art-world debut.

Mr. Salkin, who now lives on Forsyth Street, asked a friend who owns a gallery in his building if he could use it to give his mother a one-woman show. Yesterday, Toby Salkin filled the walls of the modest space with as many of her oil paintings as would fit. Among the bright blues and rusty oranges was the face of a conspicuously mustachioed cowboy: Randy Jones of the Village People. Read more…

Stephen Rex Brown A tag on the crane outside of what’s said to be David Schwimmer’s future abode.

The star of “Friends” sure isn’t getting a friendly welcome to the neighborhood. Someone tagged “a butcher” on the crane outside of what’s said to be the future home of David Schwimmer — a likely reference to the townhouse built in 1852 that used to sit on the site.

A previous tag at the site referenced the “destruction of an irreplaceable historic building” to make way for “another ugly, yuppie, ghetto catering to monied transients.”

Of course, close followers of proceedings at 331 East Sixth Street will recall that this isn’t the first time the crane has made headlines. Earlier this month the contraption knocked over scaffolding, injuring a pedestrian below.

Evan Bleier

The former home of Vishwa Dharma Mandalam, a Hindu temple, may soon be getting some less austere residents. The two-story mixed-use building at 96 Avenue B will double in size if an application filed on Tuesday with the Department of Buildings is approved, and the two additional floors will house a duplex apartment with a penthouse overlooking Avenue B.

Armand Pierro, an owner of the building, said the units would be strictly rentals, although he has no takers as of yet. “They’re going to be high-end rentals, whatever that means,” he told The Local. Read more…

Daniel Maurer

Community Board 3 just released its new agenda that, as always, is chock full of tantalizing tidbits regarding new restaurants and bars bound for the neighborhood. A few highlights from the State Liquor Authority licensing committee: a new “Empanadas Bar” is seeking a beer and wine license in the space formerly occupied by Itzocan Cafe on East Ninth Street. Shervin’s Cafe on East Seventh Street near Avenue A will also seek the board’s approval for beer and wine, though its Facebook page is already advertising new summer cervezas.

One of the neighborhood’s most frequented bars, the 13th Step, will seek approval for a renewal of its liquor license. On several occasions at least two neighbors of the popular bar have pleaded with officers at the Ninth Precinct Community Council meeting to do something about the boisterous behavior of its customers. Read more…

Natalie Rinn

Critics and supporters of N.Y.U.’s planned expansion in Greenwich Village pleaded their cases before the New York City Planning Commission yesterday. The exchange was a critical one, since the controversial project must be approved by the Commission and then by the City Council before construction can begin.

For more than seven hours at the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian, speakers gave three-minute testimonies in response to the university’s pending build-out of the school’s core campus south of Washington Square Park. With the museum’s stadium-style seating filled to capacity, President John Sexton faced hissing and intentional coughing as he explained why the university was in “desperate” need of additional space, and why so much of it needed to be located in Greenwich Village. Read more…

Scott Lynch

Good morning, East Village.

The Daily News reports that Jesse Kreuzer, the student who faced off with police atop the Peter Cooper monument yesterday, has been charged with reckless endangerment, criminal trespass and obstructing governmental administration. A student who tried to duck under a police line was also arrested.

There was also discontent at N.Y.U. yesterday, as three faculty members penned an op-ed for The Times about N.Y.U. 2031. “Our graduates are among the most indebted in the nation,” they write. “We’d rather see such misery ended than prolonged. This brings us to the academic impact. While Mr. Sexton has said often that his plan will make N.Y.U. strong, it will very likely have the opposite effect. This expansion of the university will eventually degrade our student body.”

According to The Post, “The Occupy Wall Streeter accused of dumping buckets full of urine and feces around the Financial District last month has been deemed mentally unfit to assist in his own defense, officials said yesterday.” Read more…

Photos: Tim Schreier

The Cooper Union student who climbed atop the Peter Cooper monument earlier today is still there, and has attracted the attention of a couple dozen police officers who have placed a ladder against the monument and are telling him to get down. “I’m just trying to bring attention to a cause,” he said while holding a sign reading “No Tuition It’s Our Mission.” The student assured officers, “I’ll come down eventually” as his fellow students cheered from a balcony of the school’s Great Hall. The police have taped off the area in front of the hall facing the statue and have told crowds to stand back. One bystander yelled his support to the student: “Epic scene, dude!” We’ll update as the situation unfolds.

Update | 6:48 p.m. Jesse Kreuzer, a 23-year-old graduate of the school, has now been taken into custody. He voluntarily stepped into a police cherry picker around 6:44 p.m. The Local spoke to Mr. Kreuzer via cell phone just minutes before he was taken by police. He told us he had reached the top of the monument by scaling the bronze statue of Peter Cooper. There, he shuffled to music while wearing headphones and made telephone calls as police officers told him to come down and students occasionally erupted in applause. Mr. Kreuzer told us that he was making the stand because he very much appreciated the free education he got at Cooper Union and wanted others to experience the same. He said he had never been arrested before.

Stephen Rex Brown

Sylvan Solloway Man on a monument.

A couple of hours after our initial report from Cooper Triangle, where Cooper Union students were getting ready to join a 4 p.m. protest in Union Square, we spotted the Peter Cooper monument being wrapped in red fabric. How’d they get that top corner?, you ask. Well, one student actually climbed to the very top of the granite canopy, 25 feet above the ground – a feat possibly more impressive than mounting George Washington’s horse. The red tape (a commentary on school bureaucracy?) is already gone.

The monument, carved by former Cooper Union student Augustus Saint-Gaudens and featuring columns designed by Stanford White, turns 115 on May 29.

Update | 5:44 p.m. An “epic scene” (according to one bystander) is playing out at the statue right now, as police and firefighters try to convince the protestor to get down from the top of the statue. Check here for further updates.

When we spoke to Grace Sull, she mentioned that “Law & Order” filmed in her laundromat. Well, the show is back in the neighborhood and taking up a heck of a lot of parking spaces. Click on the flyer if you’re a “Law & Order: SVU” fan and want to know where they’re filming today.

For every East Village business that’s opening or closing, dozens are quietly making it. Here’s one of them: Avenue A Laundry King.

Shira Levine

When Grace Sull, or, Eun Sook Han as she’s known to her Korean friends, had the first of her two daughters, she and her husband, a computer programmer, realized one income wasn’t enough. So she quit her job as a secretary at a travel agency and opened Avenue A Laundry King at 97 Avenue A. Twenty-one years later, she still loves what she does.

“It’s a very good business making people’s clothes clean, because we also clean their mind,” she told The Local. “I have no special skills, but I like doing laundry. It calms me; I like keeping things clean and organized for people. I like all these young people who come in, especially all the good-looking beautiful people, the handsome men and the beautiful models.” We asked the laundry queen to come clean about how she’s managed to make it all these years. Read more…

Cooper Union students outraged at the university president’s decision to charge tuition to graduate students are staging a walk-out of classes that coincides with nationwide protests of the country’s massive student debt.

At around 4 p.m., students from Cooper Union will march to Union Square and join others from N.Y.U., CUNY, the New School and other nearby universities who are commemorating today’s milestone of $1 trillion in student debt.

Just before noon today around 30 students were mingling in Cooper Square, occasionally chanting “No tuition is our mission” and “Hey hey, ho ho, student debt has got to go,” and snacking on fresh veggies and bread. Read more…

The Wall Street Journal reports that Moby is putting his 3,000-square-foot, loft-style penthouse at 7 Bond Street on the market for $6.5 million – $2.75 million more than what he paid for it in 2009. Why’s he unloading it? The real-estate-savvy musician, who has also owned a small condo on Mott Street, tells The Journal, “I moved to L.A and recognized the absurdity of having two apartments in New York City two blocks away from one another.”

The cafe is closed, but at least there will be an online refuge for “Rent” fanatics. Owner Kathy Kirkpatrick announced yesterday on Life Cafe’s Facebook page that she is nearing a “soft launch” for Rentheadregisters.com, a digital version of the tomes full of the signatures of “Rent” fanatics who made a pilgrimage to the restaurant where the musical was written. “An estimated 10,000 ‘Rent’ and Life Cafe fans left messages in these books. We will eventually have all the pages scanned and available to read on the site,” Ms. Kirkpatrick wrote.

Phillip Kalantzis-Cope

Good morning, East Village.

Curbed reports that the Landmarks Commission has approved a more modest version of the controversial rooftop addition planned for the Hotel Chelsea. As The Local reported, the developer and architect behind the remodeling are also planning a hotel for the East Village.

Pete Wells of The Times awards two stars to Empellon Cocina, calling it “an exciting restaurant where even the dishes that don’t quite add up can be fun.” Ryan Sutton of Bloomberg is even more bullish on the Mexican newcomer: he gives it three stars, and recommends the yucatan tamal colado.

Prima also scores a rave from The Times, this one from Oliver Strand: “Order the arctic char ($18) at Prima, a small East Village restaurant that opened last November in the old Elephant space, and you’ll receive a generous serving of fish cooked so that the skin is as crispy as crackling, the flesh flaky and succulent. It’s flawless, a master class in fish.” Read more…

New York Police Department The suspect

On the same day that a man is alleged to have taken a photo up a woman’s skirt as their train pulled into Union Square, another man is said to have been photographed inappropriately touching himself on his way to the same station.

The police said that on April 18, a man thought to be in his early twenties boarded an L train at Montrose Avenue and, sometime before deboarding at the Union Square station, fondled himself while staring at a 34-year-old woman. The victim snapped a photo of the man and showed it to police officers.

The suspect, who is thought to be around 6-foot-tall and 175 pounds, is wanted for public lewdness.

A housing court judge ruled last week that the eviction of Gathering of the Tribes should be settled in State Supreme Court. The decision led the founder of the homegrown art and performance space, Steve Cannon, to express guarded optimism that he could reach an out-of-court settlement with his landlord, Lorraine Zhang, because the scope of the case now goes beyond a standard eviction proceeding. Ms. Zhang had no comment on the latest development in the case, which hinges on the validity of a written agreement she signed when Mr. Cannon sold her the East Third Street building that houses Tribes in 2004.

New York Police Department The suspect.

A man took a photograph up a passenger’s skirt while they rode a southbound 4 train arriving in the Union Square station on April 18, police said.

The 24-year-old victim approached officers in the station at around 4:10 p.m. and showed them a photo she had taken of the voyeur. The suspect, who is said to be around five-foot-five and 150 pounds, is wanted for unlawful surveillance.

Karl Fischer The building bound for 74-84 Third Avenue.

Stephen Rex Brown The site at Third Avenue and East 12th Street.

Karl Fischer may be many armchair architecture critics’ favorite target, but in the eyes of the developer behind the nine-story building bound for Third Avenue, he’s a consummate professional.

“I think he’s a tremendous value-add to our developments,” said Eli Weiss, a partner in YYY Third Avenue, the company behind the new building. “From a developer’s point of view, an architect offers so much more than the façade: making sure that the building is efficient, structurally sound, that it’s livable. The façade is one very small aspect of what an architect does, and in some ways the most subjective.” Read more…