Matt Logan A view of the Brown Building, formerly the Asch Building, site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.

One hundred years ago today, on a Saturday afternoon just before closing time, a waste basket caught fire on the eighth floor of the Asch Building, between Greene Street and Washington Plaza. The fire spread soundlessly. Beneath the methodical whir of sewing machines it swept across the floor and upwards and, ultimately, caught 500 packed-in workers in a panic. Those that fled to the ninth floor stairwell found the exits shut fast. Those that packed into the elevators found that only so many could fit. And those that the fire herded to windows found the ladders too short to reach the ground.

Fifty-four jumped.

Within half an hour, 146 workers perished in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. Most of the victims were young, female immigrants, who had crossed over oceans in search of opportunity. What they found was a world that lacked adequate safety restrictions, wage requirements, and worker representation; all those things came after, when the public became galvanized by the blaze, setting the basis for legislative action and labor reform.

Roughly one out of three victims of the fire – 53 people – resided in the East Village. Every year descendants and union members alike gather at the former site of the Asch Building to recite their names along with the others as a gesture of respect and remembrance. This centennial anniversary will mark the first year that all the victim’s names are spoken. For decades, six victims of the fire were unknown until Michael Hirsch, an amateur historian, identified them earlier this year.

Now, their names will join the others after nearly a century of silence.

A Deadly Toll

This map, which lists the names and addresses of the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire who resided in the East Village, offers a stark illustration of the devastating toll that the blaze took on the neighborhood.

View 1911 Triangle Factory Fire: East Village Victims in a larger map
Map compiled by Kenan Christiansen.

Read comprehensive coverage of the anniversary of the fire in The Times.

Gloria Chung

Good morning, East Village.

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, which claimed the lives of 146 victims. The Times offers comprehensive coverage of events commemorating the anniversary of the disaster.

In other neighborhood news, we hope you’re thirsty because according to DNAinfo, nine East Village eateries plan to go before Community Board 3 to apply for liquor licenses.  If we thought the Village was already alcohol drenched, perhaps we’ve haven’t seen anything yet.

Gothamist offers a glimpse at city history, noting that Thursday was the 111th anniversary of the construction of New York’s first subway tunnel. The day was once known as Tunnel Day. Such a celebration naturally brings to mind the Second Avenue Subway, which will finally bring the East Village into New York City’s world of underground transport.

Just-released census data indicates the city’s population has risen by 3 percent; for Lower Manhattan, the population has increased more than 97 percent.

The weekend’s weather? The forecast calls for it to be sunny and cold with highs in the 40’s.

Phoenix Eisenberg A pair of retrospectives at The New Museum – one from sculptor and video artist Lynda Benglis, the other by painter George Condo – create a dialogue about the schism between body and mind.

Currently at The New Museum on The Bowery, retrospectives from sculptor and video artist Lynda Benglis and painter George Condo explore what it is to be human.

Known for challenging conventional gender roles, many of Ms. Benglis’s sculptures explore sexuality and the complicated politics of the body. Yet, whereas Ms. Benglis focuses on the corporeal, Mr. Condo operates in the realm of the abstract, with portraits that delve into the inner psyches of his subjects. Housed a floor apart from each other, the the works of these two equally provocative artists create a dialogue where soul meets body.
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To simply call Obscura Antiques and Oddities another East Village antique store might not do justice to the offbeat and slightly macabre aesthetic that co-owners Evan Michelson and Mike Zohn have spent years cultivating in their small curiosity shop.

Carrying everything from Victorian dolls to monkey skulls, the store has become a magnet for both serious collectors and curious passerby lured in by the stuffed animal heads leering from the shop’s front window on East 10th Street.

“There’s really nothing that comes in that’s too weird but there are things that are inexplicable,” Ms. Michelson said.

The store, which has been a part of the neighborhood for almost two decades, moved to its current location between First Avenue and Avenue A in 2001.

“The energy down here is amazing,” Ms. Michelson said. “It’s the heart and soul of this business to me. It wouldn’t be right if we moved it anywhere else.”

When they’re not collecting, Ms. Michelson and Mr. Zohn are busy taping the second season of “Oddities,” a TV show that premiered on the Discovery Channel last year (it will run on the Science Channel for its second season) featuring some of the duo’s stranger finds.

NYU Journalism’s Kathryn Kattalia reports.

C. Ceres Merry

Good morning, East Village.

Spring is missing in action again today, but there are clear skies in sight for the weekend.

Girls Prep, the all-girls charter school long in search of a home and enmeshed in disputes over school space, will be moving into permanent digs soon enough. According to DNAinfo, the city recently approved the school’s move into the vacant East Side Community High School on 12th Street, located between First Avenue and Avenue A.

Recent confusion over Central Park signage, and outrage on the part of Borough President Scott Stringer who recognized misleading East-West confusion, has led to further questions about the identity of Fifth Avenue. Does it belong to our east side?

If you’re curious about a couple of new murals popping up in the neighborhood in recent weeks, namely the ones on Eighth Street between Avenues B and C, and on East Third Street between the Bowery and Second Avenue, EV Grieve explains the development.

With the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire just a day away, David W. Dunlap at The Times City Room blog ponders why the disaster is engrained in our memories so vividly. He looks to news coverage at the time for answers here.

If you have any striking photos of last night’s thunderous hailstorm, or results of its fury, please share them with us by submitting them to the blog’s Flickr group.

Courtesy of N.Y.U. An illustration of a revised development plan by N.Y.U., which includes the construction of a new 14-story building at Bleecker Street and LaGuardia Place.

At a crowded public meeting in Grace Church’s Tuttle Hall Monday night, Greenwich Village greeted New York University’s revised core expansion plan with its own version of a Bronx cheer.

Since withdrawing the proposal to add a fourth tower to the landmarked Silver Towers site, the university has consistently said that it could create some 2 million square feet of new usage in the Washington Square district by developing sites it already owned. The audience seemed surprised, nevertheless, that the university had not looked elsewhere.

A slide presentation by university spokeswoman Alicia Hurley was greeted by hostile interruptions, catcalls and hisses as it became clear that the square footage lost through the cancellation of the so-called “Silver Sliver” had been redistributed to the Morton Williams supermarket site and the block-length “zipper building” on Mercer Street between Bleecker Street and West Houston.

The university has undertaken to donate the bottom seven floors of a new 14-story building at the Morton Williams location to the city for use as a public school. The rest of the building will house almost 200 university students. Existing plans for the “zipper building” have been bulked up to include the hotel development originally planned for the Silver Towers site.
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Vivienne Gucwa

Good morning, East Village.

Make sure to spend time in the great outdoors today as spring will be on hiatus tomorrow.

The heavily relied upon Chinatown bus circuit is subject to crack downs after two fatal crashes killed 17 people, according to DNAinfo. Senator Charles E. Schumer is spearheading the call to audit drivers’ licenses.

More details have emerged in the case of two East Village police officers who have been charged with sexually assaulting a 27-year-old East Village woman they escorted home. DNAinfo tallies the criminal counts against the officers at 26, up from the original 15.

In news affecting the entire city, landlords may see limits on rent hikes and deregulation for vacant apartments, according to The Wall Street Journal, with the current standards under review. Nearly 100,000 apartments lost their rent regulation from 1994 to 2009.

Next time you’re passing a phone booth — yes, they still exist — check out its advertisement panel. You might be surprised to find street artist Katsu’s name beneath the protective glass. No, companies haven’t teamed up with this alternative artisan. Rather, Katsu has been swapping his artwork for advertisements, Bowery Boogie reports.

This post has been changed to correct an error; an earlier version misstated the effects of rent regulation.

Claire Glass Pulino’s, 282 Bowery.

I am old enough to remember when the immediate association with “Bowery” was”bum.” The Bowery was New York’s Skid Row from the late 19th century, and its reputation was so pervasive, and so dismal, that homeless folk everywhere were known as Bowery bums. And so it’s very strange to reconfigure “Bowery” in one’s mind to denote “trendy.” It’s strange to walk past the terribly glamorous Bowery Hotel, and Daniel Boulud’s DBGB, and Peels, and to cross Houston and to find, immediately adjacent to a Chinese store which sells restaurant furnishings, Keith McNally’s rollicking pizzeria-bar, Pulino’s.

At the moment, Pulino’s is a pioneer on the desolate stretch south of Houston; but if McNally, who practically invented TriBeCa with the Odeon restaurant 30 years ago, thinks his customers will go there — which they do, in droves—you should consider investing in local real estate. I made the mistake of dropping by one weekday evening at 8:30 to have a pizza at the bar. Ha! I couldn’t even see the bar for the crowd surrounding it, and quickly fell back before the tidal swell of noise.
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Rachel Ohm Lunch is served at Lillian Wald Senior Center on Avenue D on a recent afternoon. In the last year the number of lunches served at Wald has doubled to accommodate the closure of the nearby Jacob Riis Senior Center. “We don’t have enough chairs,” said Betsy Jacobson, the center’s director.

Earlier this month, the Department of the Aging released a list of 105 senior centers in the city that may be closing this year because of proposed budget cuts in Albany.

This could mean an influx of older New Yorkers into centers that remain open, fewer resources and less accessibility to services for those without transportation.

Last year, the city slated Lillian Wald Senior Center on Avenue D for closing, but it has remained open with funding from Community Council District 2 and private donations. To accommodate older East Villagers from Jacob Riis, another neighborhood center that closed, the 25 meals a day that Wald was serving last year has now more than doubled to around 50 to 55. Wald is now the only senior center in Alphabet City. “We don’t have enough chairs,” said Betsy Jacobson, the director of Wald. “We have people standing and eating and our numbers are probably going to continue to grow.”
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Tim Schreier

Good morning, East Village.

Don’t forget your umbrellas this morning. Reports say the rain will persist until early evening. But when things do clear up, perhaps you’ll want to take advantage of the new ping-pong table in Tompkins Square Park. DNAinfo reports that tension arose over the table’s placement near the dog park, but the addition will likely be popular come spring.

One East Villager abandoned the traditional staircase in favor of an aluminum slide to connect his penthouse purchases, NY Curbed reports. These digs, located inside notorious party pad called A Building may belong to a professional poker player who moved into the 13th Street space in 2008.

And if you missed the stunning moonscape during the weekend, check out these photos from Tim Schreier, one of The Local’s community contributors, here and here and here. Community contributor Tim Milk captured another view and Bowery Boogie also has some images of the spectacle.

As spring begins, The Local offers a quick tour of the East Village at dawn as the neighborhood shakes loose its slumber and begins its daily routines.

NYU Journalism’s Rachel Ohm reports.

Rachel Citron on photographing quirky New York.

“This, in a nutshell, is my New York. Quirky, unexpected, crowded…The image was taken during one of my many walks through Central Park last spring.”
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Tim Schreier

We at The Local try to provide a rich pastiche of news, commentary and creativity. The work of one of our community contributors, Brendan Bernhard, the author of “East Village Tweets”, has quickly gained a wide following.

Readers have found Mr. Bernhard’s work humorous, evocative, poetic, and quintessentially of the East Village.

In an e-mail exchange with The Local, Mr. Bernhard shared some insights about how he works and what moves him to write (he also passed along a photo of the dog that inspired one of his most popular “tweets,” “A Serious Mutt“):

“I am a journalist but poetry has always been my first love. I started these ‘tweets’ – they’re not real tweets, of course – because I had begun writing for this blog and wondered if I could come up with something a different which would allow me to express my feelings about the East Village. As it turns out, I have ranged from the fantastical to the concrete and various shades in between. It’s been great fun for me, it has made me look at my neighborhood in a different way (I’m practically thinking in tweets) and I hope at least a few of them have resonated with readers.”

If your comments are any indication, they have:

Leslie Monsour wrote:

“These are a new kind of super contemporary baroque haiku. Very amusing. I could go on reading.”

Marilyn Widrow said:

“Brendan has captured the essence of the East Village through imagery, poetry and sheer beauty. I feel its pulse beat.”

Janet offered:

“I don’t live in the East Village or even in Manhattan, but it’s a treat to read such elegant, evocative poesy. Please, may we have more?”

brenda cullerton asked:

“who is this furtive genius roaming around my favorite streets? The David Markson of Tweets, that’s who he is.”

“West of Broadway” said:

“These are lovely, smart, funny, delightfully observant and far more intelligent than one has a right to expect from the form. Call it poetweetery.”

Join the conversation: Have you seen other attempts at a similar form? What about the East Village does Mr. Bernhard’s poetweetery evoke for you?

Fans of the English soccer team Liverpool make the East Village their home base, meeting here every week at the 11th Street Bar to watch games. The club has used the bar, located near Avenue A, as a headquarters since 2003, and scores of fans show up for big games — even at 7 a.m. on a Sunday. Club members include both Americans and ex-pats from England, though at least once a week they’re all Village residents.

NYU Journalism’s Grace Maalouf reports.