Phillip Kalantzis Cope

Good morning, East Village.

The big headlines of the weekend were all about the stores and buildings that are coming and going in our neighborhood. Famed Second Avenue dive bar, Mars Bar, is being torn down in August to make way for a 12-story luxury apartment complex — a sign many see as the destruction of the East Village of Yester Year. Adding fuel to the gossip fire, Joe’s Locksmith, located next to Mars Bar, announced that they will be closing on June 30, leaving residents wondering what else will be leaving the corner of First Street and Second Avenue.

After wandering aimlessly with no where to call home, those in search of the late night pancake can soon take a seat at IHOP. An EV Grieve reader was the first to notice the new signage on 14th Street between Second and Third Avenues. While it is unknown as to when the restaurant will open, it is expected to be one of many to come to Manhattan, making the clear connection between New York’s international appeal and the international culinary experience that is the International House of Pancakes.

NYC Icy also found a semi-permanent home, for the summer at least, in front of Badburger on Avenue A near 11th Street. Badburger’s owner said that the iced delicacy will be found there until at least October and then he will incorporate it into the dessert menu afterwards.

The former funeral home on Second Avenue between Ninth and 10th Streets is in the market for a facelift, or complete gut job: an application has been placed to allow for substantial changes to the building, including a possible expansion adding three floors on top of the existing three-story building. While the building does not have landmark status, some hope that it will be granted before the permit application is actually granted. The building, originally constructed in 1937, once was home to Gramercy Park Memorial Chapel, which was where Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were memorialized.

The police are looking for a man suspected of robbing three Chase bank locations since May, including one on Broadway near 13th Street. The man reportedly gets the cash by passing notes to tellers, but this plan only allowed him to end up with cash in two of the three instances.

Chelsia Rose Marcius Nick Corbin, 24, of Hoboken, during the race.

Grab, bite, chomp, chew, drink, swish, swallow, run.

That was Miriam Weiskind’s strategy today at the second annual New York City Pizza Run in Tompkins Square Park.

“I took really quick bites and washed it down with a little water,” she said, raising an imaginary slice to her mouth, showing just how she did it. “People who shoved the entire thing in just choke.”

Nearly 100 runners registered for the 2.25-mile run that required three pit stops for one slice of Margherita pizza, said race founder Jason Feirman, 26, of the East Village.

Ms. Weiskind, 31, of Park Slope, came in first for the women, clocking in at 18 minutes and 6 seconds. Peter O’Rourke took men’s title with a time of 15 minutes and 24 seconds.

While a dim weather forecast kept some participants from showing, those who live for saucy pieces of dough had no problem wolfing down 40 pizza pies from Pizza by Certe in Midtown.

To prepare for inhaling mouthfuls of basil leaves and mozzarella, triathlete Jonathan Blyer, 29, of Park Slope, spent three weeks chewing saltine crackers without water. He said what ruined him last year was a dry pallet.

“My main problem was getting my salivary glands going,” he said.

Most runners gave the choice of pizza a standing ovation — except perhaps Erin McInrue, 27, of the West Village.

“It was good but a bit crusty,” Ms. McInrue said. “That’s no good when I’m trying to eat for speed.”

Rachel Citron on life and benches in the city.

“The great equalizer – benches afford both natives and visitors free space to mingle while simultaneously allowing each of us to sit down, lie down, or simply have a moment to ourselves. The NYC Bench has continued to thrive in spite of a world consumed by Twitter updates and blog postings that could have rendered the bench obsolete, even quaint. That being said, today’s New Yorker is just as likely to be found reading a book as she is to reading text on her Blackberry.”
Read more…

Laura E. Lee Demonstrators marched through Tompkins Square Park this afternoon to protest the mayor’s proposal to dismiss 4,000 public school teachers.

Around 45 parents, teachers and children gathered in Tompkins Square Park this afternoon to protest Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s plan to fire more than 4,000 teachers, saying the measure would have catastrophic consequences for the city’s public school students.

The protesters, many from nearby schools like the Earth School and the Children’s Workshop School, convened in the park shortly after class was dismissed at 3 p.m., chanting “No budget cuts, no layoffs” and carrying signs mocking Mr. Bloomberg. Some young students had even made their own signs in support of teachers. As the protest came to a close, parents and teachers pulled out their cellphones and flooded 311 with calls, telling operators that they were opposed to any teachers losing their jobs. Others filed their protest with 311 via text message.

“We know there’s money in the budget, it’s a question of priorities,” said Lisa Donlan, 51, who brought a megaphone to the park. “Everyone can come up with savings if we just reprioritize the education budget.”

Teachers opposed to Mr. Bloomberg’s plan were also among the crowd.

“I’m one of the teachers who will not be working next year if Bloomberg’s budget goes through,” said Stephanie Schwartz, a 27-year-old teacher at the Neighborhood School. “It’s stressful, I love my children as if they were my own. And after work I have to go and fight and make sure students will have enough teachers next year.”

Scenes from the Protest

Kaitlyn Bolton, of NYU Journalism’s Hyperlocal Summer Newsroom Academy, shares video of the demonstration.

Khristopher J. Brooks The committee is an organizer of the trip.

Leaders of the Cooper Square Committee and the Good Old Lower East Side are organizing a free bus trip to Albany Monday so East Villagers can speak out in favor of changes to New York City rent laws.

“We’re planning to have a rally inside the Capitol,” said Georgina Christ, housing chairperson for Cooper Square Committee. “We’re just gonna make noise and try to talk to the elected officials.”

At issue is how and at what rate landlords will be allowed to raise rent in future years. Rent prices are a particularly hot-button issue for locals since the East Village is the home of some of the city’s most expensive rental properties.

As the law stands, Ms. Christ said, landlords are allowed to dramatically raise the rent of a property after a tenant has moved out, a practice known as “vacancy decontrol” that prevents future tenants from paying the same price for rent. Wasim Lone, the housing services director for Good Old Lower East Side, said vacancy decontrol is responsible for tens of thousands of vacant units around the East Village and the Lower East Side.
Read more…

Laura E. Lee Extra Place.

Construction is scheduled to begin Monday on a new plan to turn the historic Extra Place alley into a pedestrian walkway for retail patios and a new local arts venue.

The art space is a collaboration between developer Avalon Bay and Fourth Arts Block, a non-profit coalition of arts organizations.

“We’re really excited” said the arts block’s director Tamara Greenfield. “We think it is a fantastic opportunity.”

The vacant alley, tucked off First Street between Bowery and Second Avenue, has special historical significance. In the 1970’s, the backdoor for the legendary music club CBGB opened to the alley and bands like The Ramones were photographed in the space.

“It managed to make garbage look beautiful, in its context,” said Rob Hollander of the Lower East Side History Project.
Read more…

Meghan Keneally The food pantry has reopened.

St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery started its annual food pantry last week, providing much needed food options for homeless and hungry in the East Village.

While there are two existing soup kitchens that provide hot meal options throughout the week, St. Mark’s is the only food pantry that is open mid week, allowing visitors to bring home fresh produce and non perishables so their supplies last till the weekend.

“There just aren’t enough services in this area, and people slip through the cracks,” said the Rev. Winnie Varghese of St. Mark’s.

After a previous relationship with Trader Joe’s ended in late 2009 due to rising costs on the supermarket’s side, Ms. Varghese partnered up with GreenMarket last year and they agreed to donate any remaining produce from the farmer’s market that they hold in the church square on Tuesdays. The food pantry at St. Mark’s will run every Wednesday at 6 p.m. and they hope to continue it through the winter if funding allows.
Read more…

Ian Duncan Ada Xie, 9, holds a petition calling on Mayor Michael Bloomberg not to cut library funding.

With residents mounting a citywide campaign to stave off budget cuts and The Observer coining the term “bibliopocaplyse” to describe the future of New York’s libraries, the Tompkins Square branch has deployed its secret weapon: cuteness.

Yesterday afternoon, 9-year-old Ada Xie was stopping library users just inside the entrance and confidently presenting them with a petition. “The library could close because there’s not enough money,” she told The Local.

Ada added that it was her second day on the job and that she had collected “quite a few” signatures.

According to a New York Public Library campaign Web site, 533 Tompkins users have written to elected officials protesting the cuts. Across the city, more than 90,000 letters have been written.

Daniel Maurer.

The Local is pleased to announce that Daniel Maurer, co-founder of the New York magazine restaurant blog Grub Street, has been named the blog’s next editor, effective in August.

“Daniel emerged from a field of well over a hundred highly qualified candidates,” said Brooke Kroeger, the Institute director. “He impressed us with his ideas, his digital sophistication, his passion for this neighborhood, so often featured on Grub Street, and his proven know-how in mining information at the local community level.”

Mr. Maurer was an online producer and editor of nightlife listings at New York magazine before co-founding Grub Street, one of New York’s pioneering restaurant blogs, in 2006. While writing more than 7,500 posts over five years, Mr. Maurer grew the blog’s traffic steadily and helped expand it to five other cities. Grub Street New York was nominated for three James Beard Foundation Journalism Awards — it won in 2008 (for Multimedia Writing on Food) and then again in 2011 (for Group Blog) when Mr. Maurer was chief editor. It has also been nominated for a National Magazine Award and won a MIN Best of the Web award in 2007.
Read more…

Michelle Rick

Good morning, East Village.

DNA Info previews this Sunday’s Middle Feast, a hummus making competition that will official crown the city’s best. Turns out, making hummus is a good two-day process: one contestant soaks Bulgarian-grown chickpeas for a day before cooking them for six hours. As we reported earlier this week, popular East Village spot Chickpea will be closed until July, eliminating one potential competitor for the prize.

The Times profiled Nublu, the eclectic Avenue C venue, calling it a club where anything goes (at least musically). It is also, it seems, a popular place for musicians such as Norah Jones and Moby to enjoy a quiet evening. Run by Ilhan Ersahin, the space is also home to a record label of the same name that produces records by artists who have developed their style at the club.

BBC radio host Richard Bacon was at 7A yesterday to interview David Simon, the creator of HBO series “The Wire.” Mr. Simon said nothing significant has changed in Baltimore’s poorest neighborhoods since he made the show. “The drug war is still the drug war,” he said.

And, in case you haven’t seen it yet, watch TV producer Casey Neistat receive a ticket for not cycling in a bike lane on Second Avenue. He then proceeded to demonstrate the futility of sticking to the designated lanes by crashing into anything in his way. The video had around 200,000 views early yesterday and is now pushing a million, thanks to coverage from New York magazine, The Huffington Post and TV networks.

Laura E. Lee Participants at tonight’s meeting.

The State Liquor Authority Task Force of Community Board 3 approved a resolution tonight that clarifies the terms under which liquor licenses can be transferred when bars and restaurants are sold in the East Village.

The action, which will go to a vote of the full board at its next meeting, allows for “grandfathering” — a process in which the buyer of a business is allowed to assume the license owned by the seller, provided that the business had its license prior to June 28 and other criteria are met.

Before tonight’s meeting, it was unclear how policy changes enacted by the full community board in February would affect applicants who requested a “grandfathered” transfer.

The “grandfathering” provision is not used by other community boards, according to Susan Stetzer, the district manager of Community Board 3. But Community Board 3 allows businesses to apply as transfers, provided they meet other criteria like being deemed responsible business owners — a status evaluated by a review of liquor authority reports, police violations and complaints to the 311 city services information hotline.
Read more…

Locals will soon be able to surf the web while lounging in Tompkins Square Park, thanks to a new initiative that will install free Wi-Fi service at 20 city parks. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced the measure at a news conference at Battery Park today alongside executives from AT&T, which will administer the service. The free wireless signal for smartphones, tablets and old-fashioned computers will be available in Tompkins Square Park by the end of the summer, according to Mr. Bloomberg.—Stephen Rex Brown

Khristopher J. Brooks Teofilo Olivieri is an artist who uses discarded hardcover books as a canvas. Below: One of his pieces adorns a copy of James A. Michener’s “Chesapeake.”

As a child, Teofilo Olivieri practiced drawing by sketching comicbook superheroes. Today, Mr. Olivieri uses hardcover books as a distinctive canvas for his art.

Mr. Olivieri, 46, has no formal training in art, but his paintings are becoming popular in the East Village because of their unusual presentation.

“I’ve been very visible in New York City for the past 10 years, but the book covers have gotten the most response of any of the things I’ve worked on in my entire career,” Mr. Olivieri said.

He sells his work near an office building at University Place and East 11th Street but he can also be found at Union Square, along the Bowery and near Sixth Avenue and West Fourth Street.

Mr. Olivieri moved to New York City in 2001 after working as a commercial illustrator in Boston. The Hoboken native moved to Manhattan to focus on creating art from scraps and throw-aways found across the city. “When I was little, I used to sit by the river and look over and dream of me, one day, living in New York,” Mr. Olivieri said.
Read more…

Ian Duncan A 1930’s farm thermometer.

With predictions flying of record-setting temperatures this week, I wanted to test some thermometers. Not just any temperature gauges, though, I was looking for veterans which, if they had memories, would remember the sweltering June of 1933. With that goal in mind, I dropped in to Archangel Antiques on East Ninth Street (thank you Yelp). Inside, the little store was crammed with all manner of trinkets and a handsome collection of pocket watches.

“Bit of a weird one,” I told Michael Duggan, one of the store’s proprietors, “I’m looking for a thermometer from the 1930’s.”

Mr. Duggan screwed his face up slightly in an expression that suggested I might be out of luck. “That’s tough,” he said, before quickly rounding up three different instruments: one from the 1930’s, one from the 20’s and another from the 1870’s.

That last was beautiful. Enclosed in a case of tortoise shell and with a bone back plate, the bulb and column of the thermometer measured the temperature using real mercury. “People would travel with these to see how miserable they would be,” Mr. Duggan explained.
Read more…

We took to the towpaths of Tompkins Square Park this week to ask locals about their new and offbeat summer reads.

Kim Fuerth, 21
Student, New York University
Reading: Ishmael

“It’s about a man having a conversation with a gorilla about nature. I studied abroad in Ghana and all of my friends there recommended it. I’ve been really into reading in shady parks lately like Tomkins; it’s good because you don’t sweat.”

Hank Dreve, 62
Jeweler
Reading: Bob Dylan Chronicles

“I’m saddened by the fact that the world he describes no longer exists. Right now I’m reading a part that takes place in New Orleans; he writes it so colorfully that I feel like I got to see it before the hurricane.”
Read more…

Phillip Kalantzis Cope

Good morning, East Village.

Seems like everyone’s looking backward today. Performer Edgar Oliver will be doing a show in Savannah, Georgia about his time living in rooming house on East 10th Street in the late 1970’s. Charleston City Paper has a preview. Mr. Oliver lived with a wheelchair-bound man, who, having no use for the upper stories of his house, rented them out. On the top floor were some people that possibly tried to kill Mr. Oliver, but, he told the paper, he developed a fondness for them nonetheless.

Santa Fe-based travel writer Billie Frank offered a different sort of trip down memory lane, recalling her 1950’s escapes from “middle-class prison” Stuy Town into the hurly-burly world south of 14th Street.

DJ Josh Sparber found a stash of old gay news-weeklies on Second Avenue, buried among a pile of less salubrious publications. He was rewarded with early photos of some of today’s biggest night life personalities, which he promptly posted to his blog.

Popping — as they say — on Twitter yesterday was DNAinfo’s interview with style blogger Scott Schuman, aka The Satorialist. The influential fella slid east from his Greenwich Village home to promote a tie-in with skin care brand Kiehl’s at its Third Avenue store. He said he likes shooting young women in Tompkins Square Park because they mix “vintage with designer.” That’s as opposed, presumably, to the rest of the park’s denizens who merely are vintage, and rarely find themselves on the blog.

The tabloid story of the day was The Post’s news that NYPD officers are encouraging East Village barkeeps to put themselves on the front line in the fight against international terrorism. By using ID-card scanners the police apparently hope to track would-be attackers who are also fond of a tipple. Gothamist casts a quizzical eye over the story so you don’t have to.

If you’ve yet to find out, it’s going to be another hot one, with a heat advisory still in force and temperatures forecast to reach 100 degrees. Take care.

Meghan Keneally I-V Electronics Corporation, 108 First Avenue.

I-V Electronics Corporation at 108 First Avenue will close its doors for good this evening. And unlike some recently shuttered businesses, it doesn’t blame its demise on rising rents, bike lanes, or a difficult landlord.

“It’s not our landlord — we have the best landlord in all of New York,” said the store’s owner, Richard Serowik. “It’s Netflix, its ordering online that killed us in the competition.”

The store, which rents DVDs and repairs electronics, has been at its First Avenue location between Sixth and Seventh Streets for the past 16 years. Mr. Serowik, however, has been in the video business for longer, having run a store of the same name in Chelsea prior to coming to the East Village.

But his foray into our neighborhood coincides with the rise of video-on-demand services such as Netflix, which started about a decade and a half ago and streams videos into viewers homes through a device known as a Roku box.

As part of the store’s closing sale, all DVDs are $2.99 until they close at 10 p.m., and, at 5 this afternoon, there was easily more than a hundred still on the shelves. But Mr. Serowik isn’t too worried: anything that he doesn’t sell tonight, he’ll just sell online. If you can’t beat the competition, join ‘em.