Paul Simon has called Philip Larkin one of his favorite poets; tonight at Cooper Union’s Great Hall, the musician will join an illustrious group honoring the “archetypical English poet of the second half of the 20th century” (per Sunday’s review of the newly published “The Complete Poems”). Joining Mr. Simon will be readers from both sides of the Atlantic, including  Zadie Smith, Billy Collins, Adam Gopnik, Mary Karr, and Jonathan Galassi.

Larkin, who died in 1985, is often referred to as a poet’s poet, publishing a scant four volumes of poetry during his life. He was also a jazz aficionado, serving as music critic for The London Daily Telegraph. Tonight, The Queens College Jazz Band will perform some of Larkin’s favorite jazz compositions. More info here.

A couple of weeks ago, a tenant of 50 East Third Street complained that her landlord declined to renew her lease as well as those of about 17 neighbors because the building was being sold. “Enough is enough! These are our homes! We pay a fair rent! How much is too much?”, wrote Sue Palachak-Essenpreis, who subsequently formed a tenant’s organization.

Hers was an impassioned argument for renter’s rights, but we’d like to hear the other side of the story: are you a landlord who thinks your profession gets a bad rap? Want to air your frustrations about the business of owning property, maintaining a building, and managing tenants? Agree that rent control is an unfair burden? If you’d like to write about it for The Local, e-mail the editor. We want to publish your story. To get you thinking, here are excerpts from just some of the comments our two stories about 50 East Third Street have received. Read more…

Jared Malsin

After standing vacant for over a year, the First Street storefront that was once a raucous saloon frequented by Emma Goldman and other radicals has finally found a new tenant.

According to members of the coop that owns the building at 50 East First Street, the ground floor will soon be home to the offices of the photography magazine Fantom.

Coop member Christin Couture said of the new tenants, “They’re really nice people. They’re really sensitive aesthetically.” She added, “We’re happy to have something mild mannered and just low key.”

Not only is the building getting the sort of booze-free tenant the coop had hoped for: it’s also getting a historical marker. Read more…

Rachel Citron

Good morning, East Village.

Big Think talks to Richard Price about his novel “Lush Life,” which was inspired by a shooting on the Lower East Side. Describing changes in the neighborhood, he says, “It had a neighborhood identity. That identity has gotten lost, that sense of community has gotten lost. But also what’s gotten lost is about a million junkies. Now, do you want to replace junkies with yuppies? Maybe the truth lies in the middle.”

DNA Info attends an open house for a penthouse on Third Avenue that, with its solarium and “three-bridge view,” is going for a little over $4.5 million.

Playbill touts two new productions at the New York Theatre Workshop: Paula Vogel’s “A Civil War Christmas” looks at the war through the eyes of President Lincoln, Union and Confederate soldiers, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Walt Whitman; and “Sontag: Reborn” is “a tender look at the prolific essayist before she was a world-renowned author and activist.” Read more…

The Times reports that the Supreme Court has refused to hear a challenge to rent control laws brought by the owners of an Upper West Side brownstone who say they are being unconstitutionally forced to subsidize their tenants’ below-market rents.

Want to show off your rent-stabilized pad to the market-rate masses? E-mail us: The Local would like to photograph your apartment and hear about how you scored it.

Stephen Rex Brown

The neighborhood’s top shop for photocopies, the Source Unltd., is one of 11 business in the Lower East Side and East Village that scored grant money to make environmentally friendly upgrades.

Thanks to the money from the Lower East Side Ecology Center — $1,000 is the maximum grant available — the copy store bought a new awning that will decrease its air conditioner use. It went up last week.

“We’re on the sunny side of the street here, so it makes the air conditioner run a little less, especially with the summer coming up,” said Santo Mollica, who opened Source Unltd. in 1982. “From noon to four we get bombarded, you know.” Read more…

Photos: Lori Greenberg/Bergworks GBM (final photo courtesy Robert Sestok)

Yesterday’s rain washed out the dance performances and children’s events that were to kick off the inaugural season of programming at the former home of the BMW Guggenheim Museum. But that didn’t stop a few die-hard supporters of First Park from clustering around a newly installed sculpture by Robert Sestok.

The Detroit artist was in high spirits as he unveiled First Street Iron, a ten-foot-tall work of welded steel that he said was a “tribute to the city” he often visited. It will remain on display at the plaza between First and Houston Streets, near Second Avenue, until Oct. 22.

As The Local previously reported, Mr. Sestok first became aware of the restoration at 33 First Street well over two years ago because a close friend lived on the block. He was asked to create something for the park before the BMW Guggenheim opened in the once rat-infested lot. Read more…

Want to write for The Local? Good! We want you to write for us! Whether you’ve witnessed something amazing or amusing, we’d love to hear your East Village story. And we’d also like to know what you think we should be writing about. So, e-mail us – often!

And are you a high school or college student interested in reporting the neighborhood this summer? Then register for our Summer Academy. This summer, you can live in the East Village and learn the basics (if you’re a beginner) or the finer points (if you already have some experience) of multimedia community journalism from faculty members of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, which produces The Local in collaboration with The New York Times. You’ll be immersed in a professional newsroom environment and may even have the opportunity to appear in these pages. For more about the program, and to register, see here.

Around the time he moved from SoHo to East 12th Street in 2004, Nikolas Kozloff – author of three non-fiction books about Latin America and numerous pieces about Occupy Wall Street for Al Jazeera and Huffington Post – was writing a novel loosely based on his brief tenure as an adjunct professor at CUNY. “Post-Academic Stress Disorder,” which Mr. Kozloff, 43, finally self-published last month, is the story of a young, socially vexed young man attempting to carve out a niche for himself in academia, latching onto subcultures in his new East Village neighborhood, and desperately seeking love and companionship – all while dodging a nefarious plot hatched by a fellow faculty member. The Local asked Mr. Kozloff, who now resides in Brooklyn, just how much of his novel’s wry observations about the anarchists, spiritualists, health nuts, pet lovers, and pie-throwers of the East Village were based on his six months there.

To what degree does your novel portray an exaggerated version of the East Village? The scene where the narrator, Andy, visits A&H Dairy (an exaggerated version of B&H) and is told that his grandfather had an affair with the neighborhood’s great anarchist, Emma Goldman, is pretty over the top.  Read more…

Phillip Kalantzis-Cope

Good morning, East Village.

The Times looks back on what made Lakeside Lounge so special (“once, while Joey and Dee Dee Ramone played, audience members watched the police raid a nearby crack house and line suspects up against the picture window beside the stage”) and gives a clue as to why it’s closing at the end of the month: “[Owner Eric] Ambel said rent and expenses had more than quadrupled since the mid-1990s, forcing him and Mr. Marshall to face the prospect of deviating from the formula that had served Lakeside, its musicians and its patrons so well.” According to WNYC, the rent was $9,000 a month.

Flaming Pablum uses the closing of Lakeside as an excuse to look back on five other bygone dive bars, including Alcatraz on St. Marks Place, an “endearingly seedy joint that catered to acolytes of all things loud, boozy and rude.”

With the average rent in Manhattan at $3,418 a month and the vacancy rent at just 1 percent despite the lagging economy, The Times lays down some real talk: “For those who find buying a home in New York City is not an option — whether because of bad credit, tougher lending standards or lack of a down payment — the choices are limited and often unappealing.” If you are buying, the Daily News points out that there are still deals to be found in the Lower East Side. Read more…

Daniel Maurer Firefighters wheel this morning’s fall victim to an ambulance after hoisting him over the front fence.

A man fell off of the roof of the five-floor building that houses Girls Prep and East Side Community High School around 4 a.m. this morning, the fire department said. The man, whose identity is unknown, was transported to Bellevue Hospital in serious but stable condition. The fire department was unable to reveal more about the circumstances of the incident, but a representative of the police department said criminality was not suspected.

Firefighters used a ladder to gain access to the school’s courtyard on East 11th Street and hoisted the fall victim, strapped to a gurney, over its front fence. The man, who appeared to be in his 20s, was conscious when he was wheeled toward Avenue A. “My head is so uncomfortable right now,” he groaned on his way to a waiting ambulance.

Laura Edwins

When Seolbin Park took over the tiny storefront next to her equally tiny East Fourth Street advertising and design firm in 2008, she invested $3,000 in converting the former barber shop into a modest art gallery. She planned to support the non-profit art space with the money she made at her day job next-door. But last August, she said, her landlord put a “Store for Rent” sign up in the window of SB D Gallery, and refused to take it down even as the gallery presented its annual 9/11 show in September. That month, Ms. Park was asked to surrender her keys.

Ms. Park kept her small office at 125 East Fourth Street, and was surprised when the next-door space (same address) sat vacant for five months. Tomorrow, it will reopen as a new incarnation of Ultra Nail Beauty Salon, formerly at 123 Essex Street. The owner, Isabel Arauz, told The Local she had worked in nail salons on the Lower East Side for the past 15 years. Read more…

Khristopher J. Brooks

The owners of the perennially embattled St. Mark’s Bookshop posted another plea yesterday for its supporters to put their money where their mouth is and buy some books.

“We know you value St. Mark’s Bookshop. We’re counting on you to help keep us here,” the owners wrote. “We need an increase in business in order to rebuild our inventory to the level most people have come to expect.” Read more…

The Wall Street Journal sits down with longtime East Villager Richard Hell, who will introduce a screening of Robert Bresson’s “The Devil, Probably” at BAMcinématek next Thursday. The film was released in 1977, when Hell’s band the Voidoids also put out their album “Blank Generation,” and the writer-rocker sees some parallels between the two: “The complete hopelessness? The contempt for the revolutionaries and the hippies? That was exactly how I felt. ‘Please Kill Me’? That’s what that whole movie is about. Looking for some kind of compensation in obsessive sex? All my work is filled with that—hopelessness, despair and burying yourself with sex.”

The Times grabs a bite at B&H Dairy with the composers who started Bang on a Can in the East Village 25 years ago. David Lang says the experimental music company, which is preparing for a trio of performances, is “not particularly nostalgic” but fellow composer Michael Gordon remembers the old neighborhood nevertheless: “This area was the hot arts center for the Pyramid Club and punk bands and CBGB. Philip Glass lives two blocks down, and we used to see Allen Ginsberg walking around the neighborhood.”

Shira Levine From left, Jason Brickman, his father, Paul Brickman, and in the backgroudn the store manager, Ruben.

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

Want to stay in business for seventy-nine years in the East Village? H. Brickman & Sons at 55 First Avenue owe their success to two valuable business decisions that Great Grandpa Hyman Brickman made in 1933 when he opened the first location of the hardware store. First, be your own landlord. Second, keep it in the family. Now, the store has employed four generations of Brickmans, and has two other locations at 125 West Third Street and 312 First Avenue near 18th Street. Making It spoke to Brickman’s third generation owner, Paul, about keeping things familial and when it’s time to pass the torch.

How was it decided that this would be a family business?

My grandfather ran it for three decades and then he had my father take it over in the 1960s. Business was too good to let it go. When my father retired about 17 years ago it was my turn. My cousin’s husband and I took it over. Now I’m grooming my son and my cousin’s son who will be the fourth generation to take over. Read more…

Daniel MaurerLucille Carrasquero, a resident, speaks
as BP Stringer looks over
her shoulder.

Earlier this morning, Borough President Scott M. Stringer gave away 16 energy-efficient refrigerators to low-income residents of Cooper Square – part of a “model block” initiative meant to promote environmental sustainability on Fourth Street between Second Avenue and Bowery.

The free fridges are the first in a series of appliance upgrades for participating residents of the Cooper Square Mutual Housing Association, a low-income housing management company that oversees 23 buildings in the area. Other measures include improved weatherization and lighting as well as new boilers.

With a stroller at his side (it was “daddy Friday,” Mr. Stringer explained), the Borough President described the greening efforts as a community-led campaign. Read more…

Rachel Citron

Good morning, East Village.

In The Villager, the neighborhood’s radical comic book artist, Seth Tobocman, describes the arrest of two men at the Sixth Street Community Center on Saturday. “They unquestionably had been beaten,” he says. “They looked totally f—– up. They’d been on the ground with a bunch of guys on top of them for about 10 to 15 minutes. They got beat up. You would not want to be them.”

By the way, anarchists aren’t anything new: Studio 360 puts in a good word for the East Village poetry tour created by one of its former producers, Pejk Malinovski, and posts a snippet in which “at St. Marks Church, we hear the ‘benefit shooting’ of 1968, when Allen Van Newkirk and some fellow anarchists interrupted Kenneth Koch with a fake gun, seizing poetry for the revolution.”

Perhaps surprisingly, the East Village doesn’t make Curbed’s list of the 10 neighborhoods with the highest number of rent-regulated units. The Lower East Side and Chinatown place tenth on the list. Citywide, the number of rent-controlled units has gone down from 285,733 in 1981 to 38,374 in 2011. Read more…