Natalie Rinn

Could new zoning help bring mom-and-pop businesses to the East Village and Lower East Side, and keep them there? Community Board 3’s Economic Development Subcommittee met last night to continue a discussion about retail diversity.

Mary DeStefano, the Urban Planning Fellow from Hunter College who has been working with the board, again raised the possibility of Special Purpose Districts, 20 of which have been created in Manhattan by the City Planning Commission in order to meet the specific needs of their neighborhoods. In Community Board 3, such a district would likely put a cap on chain stores and curb operating hours. Ms. DeStefano clarified that S.P.D.’s are “not banning anything, just seeking a way to preserve it, and it’s just giving the community some level of control.” Read more…

Jared Malsin Author Wayne Price, left, makes a comment.

Three days after alleged anarchist protesters ran amok in the East Village, an anarchist meeting on Sixth Street was disrupted by a verbal altercation between an organizer of the event and a man he later accused of being a police spy.

Nine people were in attendance at Tuesday’s Anarchist Forum at the Sixth Street Community Center. The meeting featured coffee in paper cups, vegan cucumber sandwiches, and a polite discussion of how health care services might be organized in a future anarchist society.

The forum is a social event that has taken place once a month since November, according to organizers Evan Courtney, 36, who works in an import-export business, and Walter Williams, 60, a retired software developer residing in Washington Heights.

The tension occurred during its second hour when Mr. Courtney confronted an attendee named Leo, who had arrived over an hour late. Read more…

Stephen Rex Brown The film crew outside of the Holiday Cocktail Lounge.

“Kill Your Darlings,” starring Daniel Radcliffe along with Jennifer Jason Leigh, former local David Cross, and Michael C. Hall (also no stranger to the neighborhood) is filming at the vacant Holiday Cocktail Lounge right now.

A couple of weeks ago, The Times looked back at the incident on which the film is based: 68 years ago, Beat muse Lucien Carr, then 19 years old, stabbed an older suitor with his Boy Scout knife and dumped his body in the Hudson River. Mr. Carr (played by Dane DeHaan in the film) confessed to his friends William S. Burroughs (played by Ben Foster) and Jack Kerouac (played by Jack Huston) before eventually turning himself in and being convicted of manslaughter. Mr. Radcliffe plays Allen Ginsberg, who was well familiar with the Holiday while it was open.

Stephen Rex Brown Capt. John Cappelmann

Last night’s meeting of the Ninth Precinct Community Council featured several interesting details regarding recent crime in the neighborhood. Here’s a roundup, and check back later for more detailed posts about other recent arrests.

Capt. John Cappelmann, the new commanding officer of the Ninth Precinct, reported that four new officers started patrolling the neighborhood on Monday, as he promised in January. Four to six more officers should start in the next couple of weeks, some of whom will focus on quality of life issues. “It’s a tremendous boost for us in personnel numbers,” Capt. Cappelmann said. Read more…

Suzanne Rozdeba

Good morning, East Village.

The Local snapped the above shot a day before longstanding vegetarian spot Kate’s Joint was seized by its landlord yesterday, presumably due to the back rent it owed.

Gothamist reports that a National Lawyers Guild observer is suing the NYPD for wrongfully arresting him on Second Avenue between East 12th and 13th Streets during an Occupy Wall Street march back in the early hours of New Year’s Day.

A real estate broker tells The Voice that you can still get a deal in the East Village. “You could get a small, two-bedroom apartment [in a walk-up], with a kitchen you could cook in for $3,000 a month,” she says. “I’m not saying the rooms are going to be the size of Texas, but I think that’s a bargain. And you have fantastic restaurants.”
Read more…

Arne Svenson Barney Rosset in 1986.

The family of late publishing legend Barney Rosset, who died in February at the age of 89, has planned a public memorial for next month.

A representative of Grove/Atlantic – the parent company of Grove Press, which Mr. Rosset sold in 1986 – told The Local that the memorial, organized by the publisher’s wife Astrid Myers along with his four children and described as “a celebration of his life and work,” will take place at the Great Hall at Cooper Union, a short walk from the literary iconoclast’s loft near Cooper Square. Read more…

Stephen Rex Brown Investigators outside of the HSBC.

A robber flashed a gun and stole an undetermined amount of cash from the HSBC at Broadway and East Ninth Street at around 9 a.m. this morning.

A police spokesman said the suspect, a white man in his 40s carrying a blue knapsack, was last seen running west on East Eighth Street.

At 10:30 a.m. investigators were still mingling outside of the bank, which was closed.

Jared Malsin

Local anarchists are planning to hold an “Open Forum” at the Sixth Street Community Center Tuesday night, just days after alleged anarchist demonstrators broke a window at a 7-Eleven on St. Marks Place.

According to a flyer spotted by The Local on Avenue A last week, the New York Anarchist Forum is “a gathering where we meet other anarchists and discuss anarchist ideas, events projects and whatever else comes up.” Past notices for the forum indicate the meeting is a monthly event.

Police arrested three people after Saturday night’s violence, in which demonstrators also attempted to break windows at the Astor Place Starbucks using metal pipes. At least one of those arrests took place outside the Sixth Street Community Center, where an after party for the NYC Anarchist Book Fair was taking place. Two police officers suffered minor injuries while scuffling with protesters.

Yesterday, the owner of the 7-Eleven that’s due to open on St. Marks Place tomorrow jokingly offered Saturday’s vandals a “peace treaty Slurpee.”

Stephen Rex Brown Scaffolding went up at Second Avenue and Sixth Street yesterday.

Good morning, East Village.

If you missed our coverage earlier this morning of Community Board 3’s S.L.A. committee meeting last night, well then here it is. The Standard East Village didn’t show up to pitch its dining overhaul, but a couple of iconic bars, Joe’s and Nice Guy Eddie’s, got nods of approval for new ownership.

The Mosaic Man tipped us off to his latest work outside of the Bean on Second Avenue. This one is a tribute to the building’s notorious “crazy landlord.”

While organizers of the Anarchist Book Fair disavowed Satuday’s violence, Salon tackled the question of just how much the mayhem had to do with Occupy Wall Street. Natasha Lennard witnessed the impromptu march: “It was rowdy, energetic and fast. Barricades and trash cans were dragged into the street to stop traffic and impede the police cars that eventually arrived on the scene. At one point, two young women watching the surge of people winding through stalled traffic asked me whether this was an ‘Occupy thing.’ I answered ‘yes.’ But, as I soon appreciated, it’s more complicated than that.” Meanwhile, the Daily News digs in to one suspect’s arrest record.  Read more…

Kevin Farley A fake letter reported that Cooper Union had leased its new building to N.Y.U.

The student behind the hoax that duped Gothamist and EV Grieve into writing that Cooper Union had leased its gleaming new building to N.Y.U. told The Local that he pulled the prank out of frustration that the university had not yet pledged to remain a tuition-free institution.

The fake letter from Cooper Union President Jamshed Bharucha described 41 Cooper Square as “a reminder of past ill-planning and fiduciary neglect,” and said that the top administrator would leave his home on Stuyvesant Street for academic housing on Third Avenue as a cost-cutting measure.

Alan Lundgard, the 23-year-old student council president of the school of art who wrote the letter and designed the site where it appeared, told The Local, “The community feels they’ve been excluded from the decision-making processes at a time when it’s so crucial to have input from the community.” Read more…

Rob Miller performs.

Anarchists weren’t the only oft-maligned political group to convene in the East Village this weekend. The Socialist Party USA, which has about 1,000 members nationwide, hosted a regional conference that drew a modest 15 people from New York City, Long Island and New Jersey to the party’s third-floor offices in the building known as the Peace Pentagon.

The Muste Building, a rundown three-story loft structure on Bleecker and Lafayette Streets, was named after a Dutch-born Pacifist clergyman, and has gone by its alternate name since the 1970s. Radical groups like the Granny Peace Brigade, Global Revolution TV, and the War Resisters League (which once owned the building) are among about 10 non-profits currently maintaining low-rent offices plastered with posters, announcements and pictures of New York anarchist icons like Emma Goldman.

On Saturday, entry into the Socialist Party USA’s quarters was $5, which got attendees music, a talk from a French leftist, dinner, a protest rally and plenty of lively conversation. Read more…

Stephen Rex Brown Norman Jemal, the owner of the soon-to-open 7-Eleven on St. Marks Place, is ready to bury the hatchet with whoever smashed the window of his store.

The soda machine is already operating, the fridge is getting stocked with Gatorade, and the 14 coffee dispensers are in place. The new 7-Eleven on St. Marks Place is set to open on Wednesday with a new window pane on its storefront, following vandalism during Saturday night’s anarchist-fueled mayhem.

Stephen Rex Brown The cracked window.

“People have the right to express themselves, hopefully non-violently and without property damage,” said the owner of the convenience store, Norman Jemal. “Everyone has the right to their own opinion — though I’m not exactly sure what their opinion is.”

Mr. Jemal had heard rumors about the rowdy goings-on at Astor Place and off of Washington Square Park that likely led to his window getting cracked, but said he was unaware of the details. After hearing about the attack on Starbucks, he sought to distance himself from other corporate businesses. “This is not a standard powerhouse chain store. They’re all franchised to people like me,” he said, adding that the replacement window is “not cheap.” Read more…

Noah Fecks

Thought the bagel burger was unorthodox? L’asso EV is getting into the bagel business, and the restaurant and pizzeria plans to offer hemp-seed, gluten-free, and even vegan varieties.

The ingredients aren’t the only thing of note: the all-organic orbs will be baked for 10 to 12 minutes in the restaurant’s wood-fired oven at the beginning of the day and then toasted in the same oven, to order. Greg Barris, a co-owner of the restaurant, said the bagels will be a whole different story from the traditional kettle-boiled variety. “They’re not as puffy and they have that wood flavor to them,” he told The Local, going on to liken them to harder, flatter Montreal-style bagels. Read more…

Kathryn Doyle A beach under the Brooklyn Bridge is
inundated with sewage waste and runoff
from South Street in rainy weather

Swimming pools in the East River? Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer floated the idea in a video introduction to the Blueway, a project that would revitalize a stretch of the East River from the Brooklyn Bridge to Midtown East. And it’s not as farfetched as you’d think: the historically polluted waterway is perfectly swimmable by Environmental Protection Agency standards. There’s just one problem: sewage overflows.

Dan Tainow, education director at the Lower East Side Ecology Center, explained the issue to local residents yesterday during a tour of the East River that doubled as a discussion of the Blueway project. Due to the age of New York City’s sewer system, he said, wastewater from household sinks, showers and toilets shares the same set of pipes as runoff from city streets.

Most of Lower Manhattan’s wastewater travels through this pipe system to the Newtown Creek plant in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where it is cleaned, filtered and released into the East River. But during the fifty to sixty rainy days per year when gushes of street water could overwhelm the pipe system and force sewage back up into homes, the sewage is diverted directly into the East River by Combined Sewage Outflows, or CSOs. Read more…

Daniel Maurer The Starbucks at Astor Place, hours
before the attack.

Last night’s riotous atmosphere resulted in a sergeant and lieutenant suffering minor injuries while scuffling with anarchist protesters at the Astor Place Starbucks, the police said.

According to police, around 25 people tried smashing the windows of the cafe with eight-foot long steel pipes at around 8:45 p.m. after attending the Anarchist book fair earlier in the day. “Patrons fearing that they would be hit by flying glass hid under tables,” the police said in a statement. “Several” officers were assaulted with pipes and bottles, the police added.

Eric Marchese, a 24-year-old from Brentwood, N.Y., and Nicholas Thommen, a 30-year-old from Salem, Oregon were arrested at the scene. The former was charged with criminal mischief and disorderly conduct, the latter faces a variety of charges, including inciting to riot, criminal possession of a weapon and assault. Read more…

Woo hoo! We’re looking at highs of 79 degrees this weekend. Will the Tompkins Square Park drummers come out to play? Here’s hoping! The Local stopped by one of the longstanding group’s recent jam sessions: here’s our video to warm you up for the weekend.

Jared Malsin Occupy Wall Street protesters denounce Bank of America.

Earlier today, local Democratic Party official Paul Newell and three other people closed accounts at Bank of America with plans to move their money to local banks as part of a protest organized by Occupy Wall Street activists.

Mr. Newell, the Democratic district leader for New York’s 64th Assembly District, Part C, which includes parts of the East Village, wore a blue athletic headband with a pin displaying a version of the Bank of America logo altered to read “FU.”

As Mr. Newell and his girlfriend Marissa Brostoff, a doctoral student in English at the CUNY Graduate Center and instructor at Brooklyn College, approached a Bank of America branch across from Zuccotti Park on Broadway, a security guard asked them if they were involved with Occupy Wall Street and locked the door, refusing them entry. Read more…

No more bumping elbows with the person next to you while gobbling noodles. The new location of Rai Rai Ken is open and roughly double the size of the previous space just a couple doors down on East 10th Street between First and Second Avenues.

Acting manager Yo Katsuse said that the restaurant was in soft-opening mode, and that the official opening date is April 29. “We need to get used to operating in a place this size,” said Mr. Katsuse, 35.

The previous location, which has now closed, only had room for 15 seats at the counter facing the kitchen. The new Rai Rai Ken still has a counter — a feature popular with many customers, Mr. Katsuse said — but also has tables for larger groups. All told, the place can seat 31 people. Read more…

After catching a rent break in November, the St. Mark’s Bookshop isn’t quite in the clear. “We’re hanging in there, barely,” co-owner Bob Contant tells Publisher’s Weekly in an item noticed by Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York. “It’s a difficult April. Traffic is down. Without an increase, we can’t rebuild our inventory. We’re 20 percent short of where we need to be.” According to Publisher’s Weekly, “a few landlords have come forward offering the store lower rent, but moving would be costly and the store’s business credit cards are already maxed out.” Hey, The Local did its part last night by springing for copies of Clayton Patterson’s neighborhood histories, “Captured” and “Resistance.”