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?

Students and faculty opposed to Cooper Union charging tuition for the first time in 110 years have released a detailed 32-page document dubbed “The Way Forward” that proposes a variety of methods to get the cash-strapped institution out of debt. “We would like to propose here that to consider introducing tuition is to consider selling out Cooper’s most precious asset: its ethos of equality and equity. There are alternatives,” it reads. The document’s release comes only hours before a “community summit” regarding the future of Cooper Union, which university president Jamshed Bharucha is expected to attend. Given yesterday’s protests, the meeting could get interesting.

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.

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…

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.

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 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.

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.

Kevin Farley

Opponents of tuition charges at Cooper Union are voicing disappointment at the school’s decision to begin asking tuition of graduate students. The move comes just days before a meeting in which students and faculty members will unveil their own strategies to bring solvency to the financially strapped school.

As The Times reported, Jamshed Bharucha, the school’s president, announced today that starting next year, graduate students will have to pay tuition fees currently covered by scholarships. Undergraduates enrolled for this fall and next year, he assured, will not be charged tuition, as some had feared would happen.

Alan Lundgard, the student council president who recently convinced media outlets that Cooper Union had sold its new academic building to NYU, welcomed the news that undergraduates were off the hook for the time being, but worried that they might be charged tuition in the future. “It’s a step in the right direction,” he told The Local, “but one step in the right direction and a step in the wrong direction don’t really get us anywhere.” 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…

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…

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…

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 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…

Laura Edwins

Less than a year ago, David Moster, a Ph.D. candidate at N.Y.U., paid a $5,625 broker fee to move into his apartment at 50 East Third Street. “It was a huge hassle moving last summer,” he recalled. Now he’s getting ready to deal with the headache again. Earlier this month, his landlord, Abart Holdings, sent him a letter informing that the building would be sold within a few months and that his lease would not be renewed.

Mr. Moster and his two roommates, who pay $3,000 per month for their three-bedroom unit, are among an estimated 17 residents of the building and of two neighboring ones at 54 and 58 East Third Street who were given 60 days to find a new place to live. Yesterday, many of those tenants met to discuss their options. Read more…

Daniel Maurer

Thought the Hole’s indoor garden was wild? Fuse Gallery may just give it a run for its money when its latest exhibit, “XOS / SOX” opens May 2. Skullphone, the Los Angeles-based street artist last seen purdying up construction containers on East Fourth Street, is piling 1,000 “custom produced” socks in the gallery behind Lit lounge, for everyone to take. Street-art inspired footwear sure is a thing lately. Is this going to hurt business at Sock Man and Sox in the City? Dunno, but we’re definitely snagging a pair to toss in the drawer with those pink tiger-print aNYthing socks…

“XOS / SOX,” opening reception May 2, 7 p.m.; through May 30, Fuse Gallery, 93 Second Avenue, (212) 777-7988