Ladies of the East Village, it’s time to stash your stilettos away and save your flip flops for the beach. This season is all about chunky heels, whether they are giving some lift to a pair of gladiators or height to your favorite strappy sandals. On the street, the wedge is a walking shoe with the height of high heels and all the glitz too. It’s sure to be seen as summer rolls around.

NYU Journalism’s Rachel Ohm reports.

Tim Schreier

Today we begin a recurring series of interviews with local experts who will offer their takes on cultural issues, trivia questions and current events concerning the neighborhood.

On Tuesday, American songwriting legend Bob Dylan celebrated his 70th birthday.

In a career that’s spanned 40 years and has had more than its share of mystery, one of the most enduring questions concerns Dylan’s disposition toward the Village and the meaning of the song, “Positively 4th Street.”

Some say the song was meant as a rebuke of all the plastic folkies Dylan met while living in the Village, while others claim it was Dylan’s way reacting to being booed, after leaving his fan-base to go electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, and still others say Dylan was merely talking about the “many 4th streets of his life.”  In any case, the song provoked a widespread feeling of individual unease by directing it’s accusations toward a universal “you:”

“You got a lotta nerve
To say you are my friend
When I was down
You just stood there grinning”

The Local East Village contacted Jeff Conklin, co-content Director for East Village Radio to provide his take on the song and Dylan’s relationship to the East Village.

What’s your interpretation of the song “Positively 4th Street?”

Quite simply jealousy. The song reminds me of a bucket full of crabs, where one crab is inching to get out and all the other crabs are trying to pull him back down. That’s my example of what happened to Dylan, anyway.

“You got a lotta nerve
To say you got a helping hand to lend
You just want to be on
The side that’s winning.”

He had to be angry when he wrote it. It’s a great song.
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Earlier this week, we told you about plans to expand the boundaries of the proposed historic district for the East Village; under the proposal the number of buildings receiving landmark protection would grow to 287 from 270. We’ve just learned that the Landmarks Preservation Commission will vote June 28 regarding whether to hold a public hearing about the creation of the district; a commission spokeswoman told us that the final vote to determine whether the buildings are landmarked will likely not be held this summer. Check The Local often as we continue to follow developments in this story.—Stephen Rex Brown

A would-be message from the East Village, in 140 characters or less and inspired by photography.

Brendan Bernhard

Pansies at Night (E. 9th St.)

Angry old men is what they look like, with eyes
like eyebrows and in-your-face mustaches. Purple
quiffs! Yellow noses! From drinking what?

Kyle Terwillegar After initially announcing that a water main project in Cooper Square would be finished by the winter, city officials now say it won’t be completed until spring 2012 at the earliest.

If you’ve walked around Cooper Square for the past few weeks, you’ve probably seen how it’s been turned into a labyrinth of construction barricades and detoured traffic due to the replacement of water mains in the area.

Well, the excavation overtaking much of the intersection of the Bowery and Fourth Avenue will not be finished anytime soon. After originally announcing that the project would be finished this winter, officials now say that the work won’t be completed until spring 2012 at the earliest.

Ray Martin, the operating engineer at the site, which stretches from Cooper Square to East Fourth Street, said on Thursday that the work wouldn’t be finished until summer of next year.

“The timeline changes all the time, there’s a lot of utilities in the ground,” Martin said.

A spokesman for the Department of Design and Construction, Craig Chin, took a more optimistic view, saying that work could be completed by spring 2012. But he did not dispute that the $10.8 million job, which involves replacing antiquated water mains up to Astor Place, is a tough one.

“If you look at the open trench, it’s a tangled web of wires,” Mr. Chin said. “Things have to be moved from one side to the other so they can put in water mains. It’s a painstaking process.”

Kyle Terwillegar contributed information to this post.

Michelle Rick

Good morning, East Village.

The trial of two East Village officers accused of raping a woman concluded yesterday after almost two months of testimony. Officers Kenneth Moreno and Franklin Mata, formerly of the Ninth Precinct, were acquitted of rape charges but convicted on three counts of official misconduct; all other charges were dismissed. According to DNAinfo, the officers will lose their jobs as a result of the convictions and could face up to two years in jail. However, some members of the community are bemoaning the verdict, declaring that the officers’ acquittal on more serious charges damages the credibility of the police and could prevent rape victims from coming forward in the future.

During a speech in Cooper Union yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg cautioned opponents of same-sex marriage not to be on the wrong side of history. In his speech, he likened the struggle for marriage equality to several other historical civil rights movements and called for a vote on the issue in the current legislative session, rather than waiting until 2012, citing that as the birthplace of the gay rights’ movement, New York had a duty to lead.  DNAinfo has the story.

And finally, after 20 years as the host of Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade on WBAI-FM 99.5, Bill Weinberg was let go from the self-described “Free Speech Radio” station in March for “denigrating other programmers on the airwaves.”  Mr. Weinberg claims his departure came after he began openly criticizing the radio station’s support of right-wing commentators and conspiracy theorists.  For more on the story head to the City Room blog at The Times.

A day after preservationists held a vigil for the demolished 35 Cooper Square, The Local takes a look back at the historic building with archival photographs provided by David Mulkins of the Bowery Alliance of Neighbors, one of the leaders of the campaign to maintain the building.

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Two East Village police officers were found not guilty today of raping a drunken woman after helping her home to her apartment. The officers, Kenneth Moreno and Franklin Mata, were convicted of official misconduct for entering the woman’s apartment but acquitted on all other charges; Mr. Moreno and Mr. Mata, who worked in the Ninth Precinct, had been indicted in 2009 and their trial lasted almost two months. Visit The Times for complete coverage.
—The Local

Kenan Christiansen P.S. 122, 150 First Avenue.

In the late 1970’s, the East Village was “a neighborhood about to become something,” queer performance artist Tim Miller told The Local.

“Previous generations had established, in terms of cultural stuff, their foothold in SoHo, so it was already too expensive and certainly in my mind not nearly as radical in its politics or cultural stance” as the East Village where, he said, the feeling “was so different.” Attracted by this, Mr. Miller and other artists like him began to seek out East Village’s real estate with performance space potential.

Though performance art was not new to the area, with already active venues like popular visual artist hang-out Club 57, experimental art venue the Electric Circus, and theater space La Mama, a new wave of influential artists put down roots in the neighborhood during this time and, in particular, established queer performance spaces that would become recognized cultural institutions and cornerstones of the performance art world.

In 1980, Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver, founding members of lesbian performance art group Split Britches, organized the first annual Women’s One World Festival or WOW, a showcase plays by women authors, at the now defunct Electric Circus Club. Ms. Shaw and Ms. Weaver mounted the festival, “to fill this big dark hole. It was this big vacant space of nowhere for lesbians to perform,” according to Ms. Shaw. To advertise, she told an audience at a queer spaces forum last December, she hung huge banners along St. Marks featuring hand-drawn pictures of naked women.
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Michelle Rick

Good morning, East Village.

Wake up feeling a strange sense of vindication?

Well, if you:  a.) have a bike, b.) rode it this year, c.) became one of the unhappy recipients of one — or more — of the13,843 tickets handed out to cyclists since January; then you may have cause to celebrate. Gothamist reports that a group of cyclists are suing the city for tickets that were issued to riders for infractions that they say do not qualify as violations under city law. The law firms Oliver and Oliver Law and Rankin & Taylor are gearing up to represent the cyclists in a class-action lawsuit that should be underway in a couple of months.

Natividad Zirate, the East Village’s premier curbside bike repairman, was forced to relocate yesterday, due to construction at his normal location near Sara Delano Roosevelt Park. Mr. Zirate has provided bargain-rate repairs to passing cyclists for at the location for the past couple of summers and almost without incident. However, this season has proved different. Two weeks ago, park enforcement officers confiscated Mr. Zirate’s tools and destroyed them while he was away, claiming that by being on the sidewalk the tools presented hazardous conditions for patrons of the park. And now the new construction has pushed his business across the street to the northwest corner of Houston Street and Second Avenue. Despite these setbacks, Mr. Zirate appears intent on continuing his sidewalk operation, but is sorely in need of tools. The Bowery Boogie compiled a list of items.

And finally, while preservationists paid their final respects to 35 Cooper Square last night, the Community Board 3 listened to a variety of proposals that would allow the Essex Street Market to continue operating, though some would involve uprooting the market and moving it to a new street. Bowery Boogie has the details.

Stephen Rex Brown Preservationists gather at the site of the now-demolished 35 Cooper Square.

About three dozen locals dressed in black held what they called a vigil at the ruins of 35 Cooper Square on Wednesday, lamenting the loss of the 19th century building that was built by a descendant of Peter Stuyvesant and once hosted the likes of Diane di Prima, William Burroughs and Cecil Taylor.

“This is truly a day of sadness, said Victor Papa, the president of the Two Bridges Neighborhood Council. “It was as precious as the White House, and it’s gone forever.”

Mr. Papa and at least a dozen others spoke in front of the plot of land that only two weeks ago featured the two and-a-half story home noted for its Federal-style architecture.

Now it was nothing more than a pile of rubble.
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David Jarrett Details from a few of the buildings that would gain protection under the revised historic district plan.

The effort to grant historic landmark status to parts of East Village recently received an unexpected boost.

In an apparent response to residents’ concerns, the city has decided to expand a proposed historic district to include an additional block.

The district, which was originally designed to encompass broad swaths of properties along Second Avenue and on 10th Street, now also includes Second Street between First and Second Avenues, as well as new buildings at the corner of Sixth Street and Avenue A.

“The buildings were almost crying out to be included in the district,” said Richard Moses, a member of the Lower East Side Preservation Initiative. “It makes sense to include them, they’re very strong architecturally, and there is a lot of cohesion in the streetscape.”

The decision by the Landmarks Preservation Commission to add the buildings came as State Senator Tom Duane endorsed preservationists’ push for the expanded district.

“Many other buildings not far outside the study areas have architectural, cultural and historic significance and, with neighboring structures, a cumulative ‘sense of place,’ which makes them worthy of consideration,” Mr. Duane wrote in a letter to the commission earlier this month.

If approved, the landmark designation would essentially preserve buildings within the district. Property owners would have to win approval from the commission before making changes to the exterior of their buildings.
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Kenan Christiansen The former capital of rats at 33 East First Street.

“It’s the most ratted place around,” the neighbors used to say, but that’s no longer true.

On May 13, a construction crew arrived at the empty lot of 33 East First Street with heavy gear and a back-hoe. Rubble and rock was dumped into the sink hole, jack-hammers hammered, ply went up all around, and by the hour of noon the capital of rats in the southern East Village had fallen.

For some 20 years the rats held sway there, and built up a mighty empire from the lowly abandoned lot. Even the taxi drivers who stopped to refill at the gas station across the street were careful not to venture too close to their lair. They seemed invincible, but now it’s all over.

On the construction permit posted on the fencing, it states that a concrete slab will cover the place, and as The Local reported back in February, that the Guggenheim intends to erect a temporary urban lab at the location. The locals will not soon forget the hoards that lived in burrows under the property. But rat lovers can rest assured that their furry friends are quite alright, and have simply moved on, probably into that collapsed building at Houston and Second Avenue.

From there they will likely intensify their operations, and continue to enjoy their favorite pastime: scaring the tourists.

Photo Illustration by Tim Milk

Stephen Rex Brown Four fire trucks were on the scene.

It was a busy morning for firefighters in the East Village.

After an earlier incident involving shaken-up students on a school bus, four fire trucks responded to a defective oil burner inside of a building near 14th Street and First Avenue, according to a Fire Department spokesman.

The trucks were on the scene for about 15 minutes, beginning at around 9:30 a.m. Fortunately, firefighters didn’t face a long drive back to the station house: the garage for Engine Company 5 was directly across the street. —Stephen Rex Brown

Michael Natale

Vivienne Gucwa

Good morning, East Village.

We begin this morning with a reminder that tonight at 6, residents will gather for a vigil for 35 Cooper Square. The photo above depicts workmen demolishing the building earlier this week; the photo at right was taken earlier this year. EV Grieve has more photos of what’s left of the historic building.

Yesterday, the Rent Guidelines Board voted on a series of proposals affecting rent increases. The board backed plans that could increase rent for some tenants by as much as 6.75 percent. The Indypendent has the tally, but overall, rent hikes are on the horizon.

And there’s another event concerning possible development tonight: Community Board 3 will meet to discuss the fate of the Essex Street Market.

And in other neighborhood news, Bowery Boogie shined a light on one woman’s mission to catalogue the city’s neon signs before they become replaced by more energy efficient versions. For Kirsten Hively — who concludes her letters to fans of her project by signing “neonistically yours” — this characteristic brand of advertising is worthy of it’s own digital museum. She’s currently raising funds to create a free iPhone app that provides pictures and locations of the city’s glowing ads.

And finally, Off the Grid has some street scenes from yesteryear. Take a tour of the neighborhood via some music videos from the 1980’s.

Twelve people sustained minor injuries this morning when a school bus struck a speed bump on 12th Street near Third Avenue jostling the passengers, the authorities said. None of the injuries appeared to be serious and no one was transported to the hospital, the authorities said. The Local has reporters on the scene and will provide more information as it becomes available.—Kenan Christiansen