Joanna Marshall

Hot on the heels of Cadet, more menswear is coming to the neighborhood: An outpost of Inventory, a Vancouver-based shop, is set to open next week on Extra Place.

Ryan Willms, a native of British Columbia, founded Inventory in 2009 after the success of his online fashion magazine, h(y)r collective (he has also contributed to Monocle and Apartamento). What began as a blog and biannual magazine reflecting the editor’s tastes in menswear, culture and lifestyle evolved, in 2010, into a store in the Gastown district of Vancouver. Mr. Willms said he and his partners curate “pieces that are timeless classics, well-made so that they last a lifetime.”

Inventory New York will sell menswear by brands like The Real McCoy’s, Ebbets Field Flannels, and Engineered Garments; shoes by Clarks, Red Wing, and Yuketen; and accessories for the home, like Japanese paper products and handmade ceramics. Read more…

Daniel Maurer

Federally-mandated lower-case street signs have arrived on the Bowery. Yesterday, we spotted a lone lower-case Bowery sign across from Bleecker Street (adjacent the old CBGB, appropriately enough), and today: upper-case Cooper Square signage is coming down. Say goodbye to the all-caps Bowery while you can. Here’s a look at the old and the new.

Daniel Maurer CAPTION

Beau-Dog

Good morning, East Village.

The ’90s are calling and if you pick up a pay phone you’ll hear from the era of crushed velvet and “Kids.” The New Museum has recorded an oral history of NYC in 1993 and all you have to do to hear it is dial 1-855-FOR-1993 from any pay phone. Who knows, maybe it’ll be James St. James on the line telling you about club kids in the East Village, or Angelo Fabara recounting his days at the Limelight. [GalleristNY]

L.E.S. Dwellers are throwing down against the SoHo House’s expansion to the Lower East Side. The group sends an e-mail declaring that “L.E.S. dwellers scream NO MEANS NO to the 1,800 love letters sent to selected residents on the L.E.S. extolling the virtues of the Soho House franchise and its ‘inclusive’ nature, bringing the creative locals together. Only a certain “public” is welcomed, the rest will be left outside on the street with the riffraff who overtake our neighborhood Wednesday night through Sunday morning.” [L.E.S. Dwellers]

Pangea writes in to say it’s launching an East Village Film Series dedicated to showing “award-winning works from local and international filmmakers, and to celebrate the silver screen. Aiming to take cinema off the computer, and back on the big screen, the EVSF is dedicated to sharing important, entertaining, and challenging works of art with New York City.” [Pangea]
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As you may have heard, the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, which produces The Local, is teaming up with New York magazine to launch a new site, Bedford + Bowery. We’ll still be covering the East Village and Lower East Side but we’ll also be jumping on the L train to cover Williamsburg, Bushwick and Greenpoint – where, of course, the East Village already has a strong presence.

Are you an experienced blogger or reporter who knows and loves these neighborhoods? We’re currently seeking contributors as well as a full-time deputy assistant editor. If you’re a lively storyteller who can break news, recruit fellow writers, and sniff out the best and latest in arts and culture please send your resumé over to Daniel Maurer at editor@bedfordandbowery.com.

We’re excited about this next venture. If you are too, sign up for The Local’s newsletter and follow us on Twitter and Facebook, where we’ll announce our launch in the next weeks.

Fourth Arts Block and Made in the Lower East Side have announced the rates for their FABWorks Storefront, opening next Monday. $40 gets you part-time access to the co-working space, which will offer free printer access, coffee and WiFi weekdays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. You can also rent the space to use as a classroom ($40 every two hours), event space ($120 per night) or pop-up shop ($90 to $400 per day). Check out the details here.

Michael Natale

Good morning, East Village.

Some specifics on the homeless man who caught on fire in a Noho subway station Friday: “The man was playing with a lighter when he accidentally set his leg on fire at 7:10 a.m. inside of the Bleecker Street 6-train subway station, police and the FDNY said.” [NY Post]

Warhol star and poet Taylor Mead is “in a game of chicken with real-estate mogul Ben Shaoul, who bought his Ludlow Street building with other tenements last summer for $16.5 million and has begun converting them to market-rate apartments. The Lower East Side legend’s tiny fifth-floor pad is filled with dust and cockroaches, and the building is now a noisy construction site — but he refuses to leave.” [NY Post]

Celebrity chef Bobby Flay is reopening his Spanish-Mediterranean restaurant, Bolo, at 324 Lafayette St., between East Houston and Bleecker streets.[DNA Info]
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Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong continue sorting through their archives of punk-era concert footage as it’s digitized for the Downtown Collection at N.Y.U.’s Fales Library

Nicole Batchelor Regne

Well, it is officially Richard Hell month. His newly published book, “I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp,” has enjoyed a glowing review in The New York Times. There has been a flurry of personal appearances in bookstores and a string of interviews in print outlets and on the radio.

It has probably reminded this self-deprecating and essentially very private man why he dropped from the public eye to begin with. The tension between his introversion and the will to perform has always been Hell’s biggest conundrum. And what better way to help relive that dichotomy than a book tour? Maybe it’s a form of therapy. We have the feeling he would rather chew glass.
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Courtesy Oh, My Nails!

Courtesy of Oh, My Nails!

All the single ladies, take note: a manicurist who did Beyoncé’s nails when she was manager at Sakura Nail and Spa has opened her own place.

Mo Qin, known to most of her customers simply as Momo, has quietly opened Oh, My Nails! at 117 East Seventh Street.

Why did the artist who has jazzed up the nails of Serena Williams, Mary J. Blige, Kelly Rowland, and Solange set up shop a short walk from her old employer? “I like the neighborhood and the people here are more into art so they know what is real good art,” she said.
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Anthony Pappalardo

Anthony Pappalardo

The East Village has lost quite a few backyard gardens in recent years: the back patio at Bull McCabes is still closed, the ones behind Le Souk and I Coppi sit dormant, and what used to be the beer garden of Croxley Ales is now a construction site where a six-story building is due to rise. But a newcomer is filling the void with rock footbridges and waterfalls. That’s right: at Slide, you can now enjoy booze-infused milkshakes, fried green tomatoes and bulgogi sliders to the soothing sound of water dribbling into a koi pond.
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Mary Reinholz

A well-known East Village pacifist, who burned his draft card in the 1960s, was out running errands last month when a fire erupted in his apartment of more than 50 years and turned it into something resembling a war zone.

David McReynolds, the retired longtime field secretary of the War Resisters League and the first openly gay man to run for president, said he spotted fire trucks outside his block on Feb. 24, and then was stunned to discover a small army of firefighters and police officers in his flooded studio. There was broken glass on his floor and water damage on the walls; his books were charred and his DVDs were ruined. Even his cellphone was destroyed.

Fortunately, however, negatives from photographs that have “historic value” survived, including snapshots that Mr. McReynolds took a half century ago of social-justice luminaries like Martin Luther King, Jr., Bayard Rustin, Norman Thomas, and A.J. Muste. He also learned that a ground floor apartment in his building on East Fourth Street was empty and ready to rent.

“God looks after atheists,” said Mr. McReynolds, 83.
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Scott Lynch

Good morning, East Village.

“A homeless man set himself on fire in the Bleecker Street subway station during Friday morning rush-hour, FDNY said.” [DNA Info]

The Neighborhood Preservation Center on East 11th Street will screen “The Domino Effect,” a documentary about the Domino factory redevelopment that “everyone concerned about gentrification should see.” [Save the LES]

East Village band The Virgins will play Bowery Ballroom with Har Mar Superstar on April 1. [New Yorker]
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Daniel Maurer

“The better you take care of your breasts, the less stress and more confidence you will have,” promises Pearl Chan.

Ms. Chan, a self-proclaimed “body-slimming lingerie specialist,” opened Healthier Life to help put some pride in the chests of East Village women. The rail-thin Fashion Institute of Technology grad isn’t shy when talking about the beauty of brassieres: a recent interview turned into an episode of “Shopkeepers Gone Wild” when she lifted up her shirt to show how well her own bra fit.

“See, no double boob!” she proclaimed, referring to the fold of fat that forms between the breast and armpit due to an ill-fitting bra.

You may or may not have noticed Ms. Chan’s shop, a sparse cinder-block space tucked just below street level at 291 East Fourth Street. “Lose 10 lbs in 5 days” promises a sign outside of the brassiere bunker. Read more…

If you’ve ever walked by Wendigo Productions back when it was on Avenue B or now that it’s on Avenue A (with a new art gallery!) and wondered what the heck the place was all about, well here’s your answer.

The purveyors of local music, clothing and jewelry and promoters of local music, burlesque and comedy shows are featured in the pilot episode of “NYC Rocks,” a web-based reality show that launched a Kickstarter campaign earlier this month. Parts one (above) and two (below) follow the guys at Wendigo as they put on a 50th birthday bash for their tattooed C.E.O., Wendy Scripps, at Irving Plaza.

“We want to bring back the old New York City scene to what it was back in the ’80s and early ’90s — what it used to be, what we all grew up with,” says promoter Ed Farshtey in part one, which features a rockin’ montage of East Village scenes culminating in a symbolic smash cut between CBGBs and the John Varvatos store.
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Kavitha Surana

Kavitha Surana

Chanting “Public housing under attack! What do we do? Fight back!”, members of the Alfred E. Smith Houses’ tenants association urged residents to boycott a meeting in which the New York City Housing Authority pitched its plan to lease land to private developers.

Representatives of the housing authority appeared at P.S. 126 last night to promote its contentious new scheme to raise much-needed capital for building maintenance by leasing out parking lots and playgrounds at eight of its developments, including Smith Houses.

Earlier in the day, housing authority employees had knocked on doors to encourage residents to attend, but members of the tenants association said they felt ambushed by the plan and bewildered by a lack of communication with the housing authority. The tenants group wanted to postpone the meeting until next month, both so that it would have more time to organize and to accommodate members who could not attend on March 20 or might be away for Passover or Easter holidays in the coming weeks. According to Aixa Torres, the group’s president, the housing authority eventually agreed to an April 11 meeting, but it also refused to cancel the March 20 meeting.

“This has become a power play between N.Y.C.H.A. and me. They have said that I am being unreasonable. I don’t think I am,” said Ms. Torres, who organized the boycott last night after the agency refused to change the date. “I think my residents deserve a 10-day notice. Instead they got three days.”
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Phillip Kalantzis Cope

Good morning, East Village.

Martin Scorsese wants to see the Bowery protected from highrises. “The former Elizabeth Street resident wrote to the City Planning Commission on March 13, urging it to support the East Bowery Preservation Plan, which includes limiting new development height to 85 feet on the infamous strip’s eastern flank.” [DNA Info]

The folks at 7A tell us Lenny Kaye of the Patti Smith Group will perform with folk legend Cindy Lee Berryhill at the cafe’s upstairs Treehouse on March 24 at 8:30 p.m. They’ll be opening for Tom Clark, who opened the venue in July of 2011 and will perform with his high-school bandmate Brian Halverson in a tribute ot the Everly Brothers.

“With thousands of feral cat colonies in New York City, a nonprofit organization is training volunteers how to care for the stigmatized felines through workshops on humanely trapping, fixing and then releasing the animals.” [DNA Info]
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Don’t feel like staying in tonight? Head out to the opening of “In and Out and In Between,” an exhibition of ceramic-on-wood works by Julia Chiang, a Brooklyn artist who recently held court at the New Museum. You can view some of her brightly colored creations online, or if you prefer to admire them with booze in hand, head over to Fuse Gallery at 93 Second Avenue from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. The show will be up through April 17. And by the way, happy 40th birthday to Fuse owner Erik Foss.

Daniel Maurer

After nearly five years on First Avenue, jewelry designer Lisa Linhardt is moving her showcase to Nolita.

A sign on the window of Linhardt Gallery, at 156 First Avenue, indicates the by-appointment shop will close April 1 and move to 211 Mott Street, between Prince and Spring Streets.

“We are truly humbled by all the great exposure the East Village has given us — with our jewelry adorning the covers of magazines such as Elle and Vogue, to celebrities wearing Linhardt pieces, such as Alicia Keys, Gisele Bundchen and Jennifer Lopez,” reads the goodbye message.

The designer specializes in jewelry made from recycled precious metals and organic stones, including a $140 “Loisaida” bracelet. “An ‘insider’ term — this is the neighborhood that Linhardt resides in – and we wear our ‘Loisaida’ with pride,” reads a description of the item.

Not anymore: the Nolita store’s opening party is April 12.

Courtesy of N.Y.U.

Chances are “very good” that rent-stabilized tenants of Washington Square Village will appeal the dismissal of their lawsuit against N.Y.U., said their attorney.

“We’re very disappointed with this decision,” said Lawrence Goldberg. “The judge put the burden on the poor and elderly instead of on N.Y.U., where it belonged.”

Monday, a judge ruled that the state supreme court wasn’t the appropriate venue for the lawsuit, which alleged that, by redeveloping a park-like courtyard at Washington Square Village in order to make way for high-rise buildings, N.Y.U. was depriving tenants of a “required service” in violation of rent stabilization law.

Mr. Goldberg rejected as a “red herring” the notion that the project was still “in its infancy,” as the judge put it in a ruling that suggested the matter was the domain of the Department of Housing and Community Renewal. “We’re reviewing our options as to whether or not we wish to appeal, go to the D.H.C.R., or do both simultaneously,” said the attorney. Read more…