Stephen Rex Brown The future location of The Bean, in the former “crazy landlord” building.

Add The Bean to the list of East Village businesses that will feature Jim Power’s signature artwork. The Mosaic Man told The Local last night that he had just signed on to do his colorful tile work at the upcoming location of the cafe at Second Avenue and East Third Street. The Bean is the latest addition to the Mosaic Man’s portfolio, which also includes — in addition to numerous light-poles — Porchetta, Tompkins Square Bagels, and Exit 9. Mr. Power said that the management of The Bean had been very generous to him and his dog through the years, and he was happy to be working for them alongside several other collaborators. After a quick chat, the Mosaic Man had to get back to work. “Not bad, huh? I was homeless six months ago,” he said.

Stephen Rex Brown The moving truck outside of Life Cafe.

Kathy Kirkpatrick, the owner of Life Cafe, was spotted moving kitchen equipment out of the beloved eatery this afternoon — the latest sign that her business remains in limbo.

Ms. Kirkpatrick, who closed down the cafe in September because of the condition of the building, told The Local she remained frustrated with her landlords.

“Significant work still needs to be done,” she said. “There is scaffolding; a pigeon coop with [crap] falling on the sidewalk; they ripped down my awning; no one can see the cafe; there are sloping floors; they ripped off frontage, exposing ugly brick.”

But one of the landlords of the building, Bob Perl, said that the repairs should only last around 45 more days. “She could have been in possession all through this time,” Mr. Perl said. “Construction to repair the building is ongoing right now.”
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A performance of “Golem.”
This month, the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater will perform “Golem,” which retells the Jewish legend about a golem created by a revered rabbi to defend the Prague ghetto from anti-Semitic attacks.

Vit Horejs, the director of the musical, which features eight performers handling puppets that are roughly four-foot tall, said that the story is a classic in the Czech Republic. He expected a big crowd for the performances, starting Nov. 17 at La MaMa theater on East Fourth Street.

“Every Czech child will know it,” said Mr. Horejs, 61. “People come from all walks of life to see it. A lot of people are interested in Golem.” Read more…

Cyn Darling Ariel Palitz with Darryl McDaniels from Run DMC.

The owner of the neighborhood’s hip-hop haven is looking to expand her brand and open a new business that goes beyond the club scene.

Ariel Palitz, the owner of Sutra Lounge on First Avenue, put her club on the market last week — only a few days before she celebrates its seventh anniversary.

While insisting that her business was making as much money as ever, Ms. Palitz admitted to The Local that she has been mulling over a new endeavor in the East Village.

“It’s a unique idea. It will have food, alcohol, there will be unexpected services — it’s going to be an unexpected twist on what I think the future of nightlife is,” she said, without going into further details. Read more…

Who’s this walking south on First Avenue, just one face among thousands enjoying the East Village on a crisp fall evening? Here’s a hint: The native New Yorker (recently seen at Café Orlin) got her start as an actress at La MaMa before going on to achieve global fame alongside Matt Damon in the Bourne trilogy. Global fame or not, Julia Stiles went largely unnoticed as she waited at a traffic light on 12th Street and First Avenue at about 8:30 p.m. on Saturday night.

Paul Defiglia A box that used to be loaded with rat poison.

Paul Defiglia Another broken box.

Someone broke open a handful of bait boxes loaded with rat poison along Houston Street last night, leaving the deadly pellets scattered on the sidewalk, a reader tells The Local.

Our tipster said that she noticed the turquoise poison on the sidewalk on Houston Street between Second Avenue and Avenue A (once “the most ratted place around”) this morning. A visit to the site later in the day revealed that the boxes had indeed been broken open — including ones on First Street — but no poison was anywhere to be found. The tipster had pressed officials from the Fire Department and the Department of Environmental Protection to clean up the mess.

Still, be alert when walking your pets in the area.

Seen something like this? E-mail us about it, and add your photos to The Local’s Flick pool.

“As someone whose history with photography consists of shooting street, photojournalism, and fashion, I’ve always looked at photography as a way to see reality. Some people think that all photography is art. I feel that art is only one aspect of photography. A sub-genre if you will.” Read more…

Jamie Larson Owner of St. Mark’s Bookshop Terrence McCoy, along with Borough President Scott Stringer, Cooper Union President Jamshed Bharucha and others.

Cooper Union has eased the St. Mark’s Bookshop financial burden — somewhat.

A day after students from the school protested the possibility that they would have to pay tuition for the first time in more than a century (we’ve now added video of that demonstration to our initial post), politicians, community activists, school officials and the bookshop’s owners officially brought the two-month rent dispute to an end at a press conference this morning.

Under the agreement for the next year, Cooper Union will, as reported by The Times last night, cut the bookshop’s rent by $2,500 from its current rate, $20,000 a month.

Cooper Union will also forgive $7,500 of the shop’s debt and send a team of students to work with the owners on creating a new business plan. The agreement, which only last week seemed dead in the water, should save the store $40,000 over the next year, according to Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, who took credit for bringing an end to the standoff.
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Suzanne Rozdeba Inspectors look for signs of the longhorned beetle.

Climbers from the federal Department of Agriculture were spotted today inspecting trees on Avenue A for signs of the dreaded Asian longhorned beetle, an invasive species that virtually guarantees the death of any tree it infests.

The Parks Department confirmed that the climbers were between Fourth and Fifth Streets at around 11:30 a.m. inspecting the trees for the circular, pencil-diameter holes that indicate the presence of the Chinese beetle that first appeared in the city — and in the U.S. — in 1996.

Since then, the beetle has been spotted in Central Park, Staten Island, parts of Brooklyn, and even as far away as Chicago. Typically, when a tree is found to be infested it is cut down, chopped up and burned. Trees in its immediate vicinity may also be felled in an attempt to quarantine the pest. Trees within a wider radius may be treated with an insecticide, as well. Read more…

Stephen Rex Brown The Cabrini Center at 542 East Fifth Street.

The six-story building that houses a medical center catering to the elderly is on the market, raising concerns that a new landlord will give low-income patients the boot before the center can build a new location.

Last night, Community Board 3 sounded the alarm on the possible closure of the Cabrini Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation, sending a formal letter to the lawyer of the mystery buyer of the building at Avenue B and Fifth Street. Read more…

Stephen Rex Brown Board Member Alexandra Militano discussed October’s applications for liquor licenses.

Community Board 3 approved Jane’s Sweet Buns application for a beer and wine license last night, paving the way for the bakery to pair alcohol with its desserts.

“Literally 75 percent of our clientele that comes in after 8 p.m. wants to have a glass of wine with their sweet bun or tart,” said Ravi DeRossi, the owner of the business on St. Marks Place between First Avenue and Avenue A. “Wine and dessert go so well together.”

The business was met with skepticism by some members of Community Board 3, however.

“I hear we’re all dying to receive this: A bakery that sells booze,” joked board member Joyce Ravitz.
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Eater sits down with Jason Wang, the manager of Xi’an Famous Foods (a favorite around The Local’s offices) and gets the latest on plans for the popular noodle joint’s expansion. Mr. Wang said that a new location should be opening in East Williamsburg soon, and that an expansion into Washington D.C. or Boston is likely. Given Mr. Wang’s grand ambitions for Xi’an, it should come as no surprise that one of his idols is the man behind McDonald’s, Ray Kroc.

Suzanne Rozdeba

A scuffle at 7A reported by EV Grieve earlier today resulted in a shattered window at the cafe, which remodeled earlier this year. William Day, an employee there, told The Local that the fight broke out at around 5:30 a.m. “It happens every now and then – it’s a 24-hour restaurant,” he said. A police spokesman had no further information regarding the incident. The window had already been fixed by 4:30 p.m.

I’ve never crossed an empty Cooper Square — there are always people coming up out of the entrance for the 6, in line at the Mud Truck, messing around with the cube. Homeless guys, fruit cart guys, drunk college students. It’s not where I would have thought to look for a clean, minimalist image, but a few weekends ago when I was standing at the corner of Eighth Street, across from the Starbucks, I pointed my camera down and found an abstract geometry in the lines formed by crosswalk paint and the edge of the curb. Then the light changed and there were people walking through my photograph.
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Stephen Rex Brown The blinds are drawn at the preschool, which abruptly closed earlier this month.

When Devon Eisele took her 4-year-old daughter to Love A Lot preschool on Clinton Street on July 1 and Con Edison had cut the power, that was the last straw. While teachers did their best to improvise, taking the tykes to playgrounds and out for lunch, Ms. Eisele and her husband decided to withdraw their child from the financially struggling school.

As it turned out, they left at just the right time. Days later, the Clinton Street space closed, and the school was consolidated into the original location on Suffolk Street.

On October 5, that location abruptly closed, leaving parents scrambling to find a new preschool, and teachers fuming about months of unpaid wages. That day, the Department of Health revoked Love A Lot’s operating permit, citing “lack of an educational director, inability to provide documentation of staff medical records, and failure to screen staff,” according to a spokeswoman. Previously, the same location had been cited by city health inspectors for a variety of violations, including not having a staff member trained in CPR on site, lack of working fire and carbon monoxide alarms, and problems with hot and cold water — all of which were resolved, according to the spokeswoman.

The owner of Love A Lot, Olga Bosio, is named in two lawsuits, one from a former teacher seeking $6,500 in back wages, and another from former parents seeking $10,500 for tuition paid up front, as well as deposits for the school year. (According to Ms. Eisele, tuition at the school was around $2,000 a month.)
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Stephen Rex Brown The shuttered store at 64 East Fourth Street.

Sara’s Vintage and Handmade Jewelry on East Fourth Street closed over the weekend, and the landlord says it is being evicted.

The store, which opened in 2008, sold vintage and antique jewelry as well as handmade jewelry by local designers, according to Yelp.

The store’s landlord said that it was far from an ideal tenant.

“They didn’t pay the rent for roughly the last six months,” said Valerio Orselli, the executive director of the Cooper Square Mutual Housing Association. “They are being evicted.”
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Okay, so we were a little surprised to hear that Beyoncé gets her nails done in the East Village, but Brendan Bernhard might not have been. In his latest essay, he points out that ours is a neighborhood that caters to the body.

Susan Keyloun The nail paint at Susan Nail & Spa at 149 Avenue A.

It’s one of the things I love about the East Village (and miss when I’m gone): the amount of attention to which your body can be paid (if you’re willing to pay for it) on almost any street.

Take the venerable Russian & Turkish Baths on East Tenth Street between First Avenue and Avenue A (forever and ever the hottest place in the neighborhood in the literal sense), where in under twenty minutes, a lifetime’s worth of clogged pores can be brutalized into unleashing rivers of salt.

Susan Keyloun

On weekdays after work the place can be as packed as a subway car, filled with the Ordinary and the Beautiful. You see boxers and dancers and models and performance artists and India-rubber yogis and other aristocrats of the physique, not excluding exhibitionists, dowsing themselves with ice-cold water in rooms ramped up to temperatures Satan would balk at. There are people who spend hours there almost every day of the year; after a decade or so, they start to look like steamed fish. In the afternoon it can be quite empty: I once shared the “Turkish Room” with a heat-loving rat. Read more…

Jamie Larson St. Mark’s Bookshop owners Terrence McCoy and Bob Contant say Cooper Union will not reduce their rent. The university, however, says no decision has been made.

The St. Mark’s Bookshop’s fate may still hang in the balance — at least according to Cooper Union. Though the beloved bookstore’s owners have abandoned hope of getting a $5,000 rent reduction, a Cooper Union spokeswoman insisted today that no official decision has been made.

After a meeting yesterday with top administrators from the school, bookshop co-owner Terrence McCoy was left with the clear impression that a reduction of the $20,000-a month rent was not in the cards.

“They said they couldn’t do anything — that all they could do was defer one month’s rent,” Mr. McCoy said. “I don’t want to have more debt.” Read more…

The East Village boasts the city’s oldest non-sectarian graveyard, its oldest ghost, its biggest costume store, its coolest Goth and Day of the Dead shops, and (let’s face it) its very best doggie costume parade. Obviously, this is the place to be on Halloween, so click any of the stories below to see how to celebrate this year.