Sandy Berger The new machinery.

Can the neighbors of IHOP breathe easy?

Sandy Berger, a watchdog of the chain restaurant that she dubbed The International House of Putrid Odors, just sent over photos of a new piece of equipment that seems to have eliminated the overwhelming odor of bacon that has tormented her and many others for months.

“I can smell something now, but it doesn’t assault you. It would be the same as if you were walking down the hallway and you smelled a neighbor’s cooking,” Ms. Berger said. “That’s livable. It’s nothing like it had been before. Nothing.”

Ms. Berger added that three or four workers installed the machine on Tuesday using blowtorches and jackhammers.
Read more…

Tomorrow, as part of the CBGB Festival, Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong will discuss the Downtown Collection’s recent acquisition of their Nightclubbing archive of punk-era concert footage. In this week’s installment of their column for The Local, they speak with Tish and Snooky Bellomo, who will be playing with the Sic F*cks tonight at Bowery Electric and tomorrow at Fontana’s. That band was hardly the only one the Bellomo sisters had a hand in.

Courtesy Manic PanicTish and Snooky Bellomo

In the beginning, there was the Stillettos: Debbie Harry, Elda Stilletto and Roseanne Ross. As flashy and trashy as glam bands got, they played CBGBs so early in the game that the Ramones opened for them. By 1975, Debbie Harry had gone on to form Blondie. Elda transformed the Stillettos into the Stilletto Fads, with Tish and Snooky Bellomo as back up singers.

The Bellomos were no strangers to the CBGB scene. “We used to come down to the city from Riverdale,” said Tish. “We would hide our ‘subway’ shoes in some hedges outside of Max’s and CBGB and change into our cool stilettos and rock-and-roll wear before we went in, then change back on the train on our way back to the Bronx so we wouldn’t scare the neighbors.” Their fashion sense paid off: realizing how hard it was for New Yorkers to get the cool tight black pants that English kids wore, they used $500 to open Manic Panic on St. Marks Place in 1977. “Sometimes, we only made a $2.50 sale all day,” recalled Snooky, “but everyone would drop by, so you almost didn’t care. It was a while before we started making any money.”

Meanwhile, they sang with the Sic F*cks – at CBGBs, Max’s, Mudd Club theme nights, and wherever fun was to be had – and with the Stilletto Fads. Read more…

Melvin Felix Steve Rose in the garden.

On May 26, less than three weeks after the Creative Little Garden was touted as the best community garden in the city by readers of the Daily News, a message appeared on the garden’s Facebook page: “Without new volunteers our garden may close at the end of this summer.”

For the past five years, Steve Rose, a “semi-retired” 62-year-old resident of the block, has opened the garden’s green gates every morning at 11 a.m and watered its azaleas, hydrangeas and ferns. He closes the park at sundown — to prevent vagrants or late-night partiers from entering — and when it’s used for events: 14 weddings were held at the Creative Little Garden last year, and a “Saturday Night Live” skit was filmed there. But earlier this summer, Mr. Rose decided he would no longer be involved with the garden, citing personal reasons he did not want to discuss on the record.

Most East Village gardens are run in a communal fashion, meaning the loss of one member wouldn’t bring on a closing scare. But Mr. Rose runs the garden if not with an iron fist, then with a very green thumb. “The good thing about our garden is that it’s run by one guy,” he said. “That’s why it looks the way it does. It’s not a whole bunch of people complaining and compromising — which is most gardens, where it gets political. I sort of became the dictator and did everything when no one else did and it just worked out easily that way.”

Mr. Rose did get assistance from Ron Curtis, a friend who built the garden’s 66 birdhouses and has been involved with it since it opened in 1978. But Mr. Curtis wasn’t an ideal replacement, since he travels constantly. (This summer, he’s in Nova Scotia.) Read more…

Sarah Darville Sue Palchak-Essenpriess in her apartment.

Sue Palchak-Essenpriess caught a break in Housing Court last week.

The resident of 50 East Third Street, who along with her husband organized fellow tenants against the landlord who refused to renew their leases, defiantly stayed two months past the expiration date of her lease. That caused her landlord, Abart Holdings, to file suit for $2,400 on top of the rent she had paid for the two extra months, as well as for legal fees. On Friday, those demands were dropped, Ms. Palchak-Essenpriess said, and the parties settled for the amount of their security deposit and a month’s rent.

Now Ms. Palchak-Essenpriess is packing up and preparing to move to a new apartment in Washington Heights. “If you were to think of the stress arc, I guess this is the peak of it. The uncertainty is over, but now the devastation of the change is settling in,” she said.

Actually, there’s still one bit of uncertainty: Who owns 50-58 East Third Street? Read more…

Stephen Rex Brown The unmarked police car and the van in the background.

Stephen Rex Brown Deputy Inspector John Cappelmann speaks with the driver, who eventually decided against going to the hospital.

We already knew traffic on the Bowery was a nightmare, but a van driver found out the hard way this afternoon, after rear-ending an unmarked police car at East Fourth Street. Awkward!

The commanding officer of the Ninth, Deputy Inspector John Cappelmann, made a star appearance at the scene of the fender-bender at around 4:30 p.m. He said the officer driving the car, who works at the Police Academy, considered going to the hospital, but then decided against it.

The passengers in the van were fine, and no damage was evident to either vehicle.

Stephen Robinson The victim, on a stretcher, being treated by medics.

A would-be robber cracked a female employee at Snack Dragon in the head with a tip jar he tried to snatch at around 2 a.m.

Stephen Robinson Bloody gauze at the scene.

“Somebody walked in there and tried to take the tip jar,” said Deputy Inspector John Cappelmann, who confirmed the incident on East Third Street near Avenue B. “The female tried to stop the perp, and he wound up using it as a weapon.”

The victim required stitches in her head. Bloody gauze was left at the scene, where several stunned witnesses lingered until around 3 a.m.

One of the bystanders, who did not give his name, said he tried to pursue the suspect who fled the scene, but lost him on Avenue C.

Inspector Cappelmann added that investigators from the Ninth Precinct were on the verge of arresting a suspect.

Stephen Robinson The scene at East Third Street and Avenue B.

DNAInfo reports that the Bowery Poetry Club will close for around one month starting in mid-July to make way for full food service. “There will be a better mix of food and art,” club owner Bob Holman tells the site, without going into further detail about how the well known performance space will change. The news comes after much concern over the poetry club’s fate. Last month EV Grieve noted its nearly empty events calendar for August. And a Kickstarter for a restaurant in the club was quickly abandoned in May.

Speaking of rock and roll legends at local hangouts, City Room happened to strike up a conversation with Alice Cooper at the Broadway location of The Bean this morning. Later on Mr. Cooper made a stop at Trash and Vaudeville. Tonight the man behind “School’s Out” plays the Prudential Center in Newark.

Melvin Felix

As Spanish soccer fans celebrated their Euro 2012 victory by thrashing in the Washington Square Park fountain yesterday afternoon, members of the East Village Book Club sat in a grassy corner of the park and pondered the birth of Frankenstein’s monster.

The book club had decided to take its monthly discussion, which usually occurs at Bar on A, outdoors for the first time since its inaugural meeting in Tompkins Square Park last November.

Melvin Felix The East Village Book Club

Sitting in a circle around cookies and chicken fajitas, the group of eight agreed that there was more to Mary Shelley’s classic novel than a mad scientist screaming, “It’s alive!”

“The movies massacred what the book was all about,” said Ranita Saha, a long-time member who commutes from the Bronx.

Jae Disbrow, the East Village resident who created the club, picked this month’s book for its philosophical and existential themes. “It gets a really bad rap,” she said. “I had to convince some of our members that it’s not like the book ‘Dracula.’ It has a lot of subtext and a lot of good things about it.” Read more…

Stephen Rex Brown Chico at work today.

The original Kiss mural at Avenue A and East First Street has been wiped out, and Antonio “Chico” Garcia is busy creating a temporary replacement that depicts the band comin’ home to New York City.

The new design is on a woodshed outside of the former Nice Guy Eddie’s, which is getting a gut renovation by the new owner, Darin Rubell, who also owns Ella and Gallery Bar. When finished in the next day or two, the mural will show the band arriving on a train to the city. Read more…

Stephen Rex Brown Workers on East Seventh Street today.

East Seventh Street just can’t catch a break. Last week it was sinkholes, and now the block between First and Second Avenues has been closed to traffic due to repairs of a collapsed sewer in the area. A worker on the scene earlier this afternoon confirmed that some electricity on the block was being disconnected so that the repairs could be made.

Courtesy DMT Lt. Dick Craig (Joshua Schwartz) and
Janet Lawton (Lindsey Carter) in “Bride of
the Monster”

This weekend, you’ll want to jump on your last chance to catch Frank Cwiklik’s madcap stage adaptations of the works of Ed Wood, widely hailed as the worst director of all-time.

Using minimal sets in the Red Room theater, Mr. Cwiklik ingeniously deploys music, dance, projections, video screens and many entrances and exits to elaborately block his very skillful actors through Wood’s unintentionally bad dialogue. They seamlessly carry the plots and garner many laughs along the way.

“Downtown Theater is all about motion in small spaces, with limitations and low budgets just like Ed Wood did,” said Mr. Cwiklik, a prolific writer, director, and producer who is drawn to Wood’s works along with those of Shakespeare. “They tackle every genre,” he said of the two auteurs. “They come from the heart and are concerned with entertaining their audiences first.“

Mr. Cwiklik previously wrote and directed a popular S&M version of “Macbeth” called “Bitch Macbeth.” Since 1999, his company, DMTheatrics, has staged more productions than most put out in decades. Which, of course, brings Wood to mind. Read more…

Melissa Cronin

On Wednesday, the last day of school, dozens of students hung up their Gone Fishin’ signs – literally. Along the East River esplanade, kids of various ages tried out their angling skills at a fishing clinic hosted by the Lower East Side Ecology Center.

“Our goal with fishing clinics is to get people down here to learn about the river,” said Daniel Tainow, the center’s educational director. “We want to teach people that there are things they can do to help protect the quality of the river.”

While kids threw back anything they hooked, a little further up the river, near the Williamsburg Bridge, it was a different story.

“I eat whatever I catch,” said Wilfredo Castro, one of several East Village residents who lounged by their fishing poles. He fishes on the river almost every day. “The ecosystem is healthy. That’s why the fish like it,” he said. Read more…

Suzanne Rozdeba A new awning over the Fat Sal’s space.

Benny’s Burritos is expanding into its onetime takeout space. Al Landess, a manager at the Mexicali spot on Avenue A said the restaurant let go of the next-door nook several years ago for rent-related reasons, and it became Fat Sal’s Pizza. “When the pizza place left,” he said, “we decided to jump on it again.” Mr. Landess said he hoped to expand into the space and add more tables within a month.

You may have also noticed on Community Board 3’s July agenda that Croxley’s Ales plans to inform the SLA & DCA Licensing committee of an alteration at its July 16 meeting. The agenda notes an “expanding space,” but a manager at the restaurant knew nothing of plans to expand. We’ll let you know if we hear more.

The Villager scored a tour of the five-story mansion that accommodates one lucky family at 47 East Third Street, and boy does it sound like a palace. Where once were 15 rent-regulated apartments, now sits a two-story “airy living room,” a wrestling room, a room for a live-in nanny, a room for the building’s security system, and “an upside-down river” of re-purposed wooden beams that serves as a ceiling sculpture. Even Mosaic Man plans to do one of his signature designs on the exterior of the building. The Economakis family waged a controversial battle to oust tenants in the building beginning in 2003. Eventually, nine holdout tenants took buyouts that averaged $70,000, according to the paper.

Sarah Darville

Sarah Darville

Iconic Hand Rolls isn’t the only takeout joint that’s new to the neighborhood: an empanadas spot will host its grand opening tonight, days after quietly soft-opening on East Ninth Street.

Empanadas Bar makes a bold claim on its menu, as you can see below: “We only use organic or local farmer market products.”

“The idea was that New York doesn’t have good empanadas,” said owner Juan Tourn. “Here, everything’s fresh.”

He and another cook, Efrain Sosa, left Novecento, an Argentinian restaurant in SoHo, after Mr. Tourn spent a year dreaming of opening his own small place. Deciding what to serve at Empanada Bar was easy, he said, since he’d been making empanadas for decades, first in Argentina (where he got his dough recipe) and then in Spain.

Will this newcomer fill the void that Ruben’s Empanadas left when it closed on First Avenue? Find out for yourself: tonight’s grand opening starts at 6 p.m. Read more…

Cyn Darling Scenes like this at Sutra Lounge may soon be a thing of the past.

Community Board 3’s agenda for July just landed in The Local’s inbox, and the most striking item is a possible new operator in Sutra Lounge.

Reached by telephone, club owner and Community Board 3 member Ariel Palitz said that negotiations are ongoing with the company that may take over, Golden C Hospitality Inc, and that she’d added her business to the agenda so as not to miss a deadline for this month’s meeting.

“If they don’t accept the offer it’s probably going to be withdrawn,” said Ms. Palitz, who expected that negotiations with the company would be concluded by early next week. For now, she would not go into further details.

A few other highlights include an appearance by the new operators in the Lakeside Lounge space, as well as a request for approval of a full liquor license at the new location of Nevada Smiths. (The soccer bar has appeared on the agenda for several months, only to be withdrawn.)

Stephen Rex Brown Blueprints for the CBGB in Times Square.

Some punk rock purists might roll their eyes at Tuesday’s announcement that the CBGB Festival will hold a “multi-stage” concert in hyper-commercialized Times Square. But before you go cracking a Disney-meets-Dead-Boys joke, consider this: a few years before the legendary club on the Bowery closed, founder Hilly Kristal was on the verge of reopening it in Times Square.

The new location wouldn’t have been a mere recreation of the club that fostered the likes of The Talking Heads, Television, Blondie and many others, either. Mr. Kristal planned to drastically expand it. Blueprints drawn up of 1540 Broadway, which are pictured above, hint at the scale of his ambition.

He aimed to demolish a four-screen movie theater next-door to the now-closed Virgin Megastore and make it a club. Given that the theaters could seat 1,626 people total, it is clear that Mr. Kristal was fine with CBGB — which by then had developed into the merchandising bonanza it is today — moving on from the dirty bathrooms, dingy bar and sorry speakers of the original location. Read more…

Sarah Darville Sue Palchak-Essenpreis

When Council Member Rosie Mendez joined the residents of three buildings on Third Street last month to protest the non-renewal of their leases, Sue Palchak-Essenpreis vowed to stay put past the end of her lease on May 14. And she did just that: her one-bedroom apartment is still jam-packed with bookshelves, and plants are perched on almost every windowsill. But last night, she signed a new lease for an apartment in Washington Heights. On July 4, she’ll move out of her third-floor apartment at 50 East Third Street. But first, she has an appointment downtown.

On Friday, she and her husband Greg Essenpreis will appear in Housing Court in hopes that a judge will keep them from having to pay the legal fees of their landlord, Abe Haruvi. That would mark the end of the high-profile protest against the owner of 50, 54, and 58 East Third Street, who did not renew the leases of some 17 tenants whose contracts with his company, Abart Holdings, were running out this summer. After a few months of outcry, most of the buildings’ residents are now moving on.

Since Ms. Palchak-Essenpreis began organizing tenants, she said, there has been more fleeing than fighting. “There has been a different moving truck in front of the building almost every day for the last two weeks,” she admitted. “After I sent off the e-mail – ‘We’re going to court!’ – it was like a cartoon: everyone ran off.” Read more…