Joe Puglisi Drom, 85 Avenue A.

Drom, the world music venue on Avenue A, is undergoing rebirth after several months closure.

The club exists down some stairs set back in a building between Fifth and Sixth Streets, so it’s easy to miss. The entryway, usually crowded with bar-hoppers, is gated during the day, with only a sign to indicate its location. Some may have assumed it had closed for good.

Drom was founded three years ago by Serdan Ilhan, a seasoned music producer from Istanbul. According to Mr. Ilhan, Drom started as a stage for “world music, especially gypsy music.” Gypsy style, originating with the Romani people of Eastern Europe but now a global phenomenon, is essentially a blend of European and Indian folk styles.

Mr. Ilhan has been involved in the music business since 1994, working with world music events at Lincoln Center and Summerstage. He has also toured with several acts. But operating a venue is his main passion. Drom is the third in a series of attempts to curate a stage in the East Village. “I’ve been in the business a long time,” Mr. Ilhan said. “And venue and the music are together for me.”
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Maya Millett Lorcan Otway guides a tour of prohibition enthusiasts towards the gangster museum, located on the upper level of Theater 80.

Long before the Beat poets, the Warhol kids, free-spirited artists and musicians came to define the East Village’s bohemian scene, a different kind of character dominated the streets: the neighborhood bootlegger.

During the height of the 1920s Prohibition era, New York City served as the American gangster’s playground. Behind ordinary storefronts and in dingy back alleyways, men and women thirsty for forbidden libations and the prospect of a good time crept up to nondescript doors and slipped into another world. At the height of the Jazz Age, America was ready to dabble in debauchery even in the East Village, where European immigrant families crowded into tenement buildings.

Unlike the glamorous settings depicted on the new HBO series “Boardwalk Empire” the face of the speakeasy owner here was often not a wily gangster, but a German shopkeeper or a Jewish teacher. For these East Villagers, starting a speakeasy was as easy as opening their homes for an afternoon to sell alcohol. The illegal booze was snagged through a number of enterprising means — whether through dealings with a local bootlegger or grabbing what they could from a stalled truck transporting the stuff. “It was just kind of a buyer’s market — bootleggers were slipping menus underneath doors like Chinese food menus.”
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Meredith Hoffman Jon Taylor, director of the World Class Learning Academy, said the school has postponed its opening to next fall to finish renovations to its home in the old La Salle Academy building on Second Street.

World Class Learning Academy, a private primary school, will hold its first open houses this Saturday and Sunday to recruit students for next fall.

Located in the La Salle Academy’s old Second Street building between First and Second Avenues, the new school pushed back its initial 2010 start date to September 2011 to finish renovating and to enroll more children.

“There’s a certain transparency about for-profit schools and parents are aware of that,” said Jon Taylor, the school’s director. “It’s about reinvestment and getting value for your money.”

He admitted this year is a “loss-making” year, but the school’s investor Sovereign Capital trusts its success based on the track record of other schools in the World Class Learning Group. The schools focus on global education, and holistic and personalized learning.
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Rachel Wise

Good morning, East Village.

Our community is filled with writers whose bylines are recognized well beyond the boundaries of our neighborhood. Today, we’re proud to note that James Traub, a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine who is equally adept at writing about foreign policy or regional governors in Afghanistan or baseball royalty in the Bronx, is bringing his talents to The Local.

Mr. Traub, who has an office on Second Avenue, sought us out for the opportunity to explore the neighborhood he loves in print. He will be writing about the East Village’s extraordinarily diverse food culture in a series of idiosyncratic reported posts that we’ll be featuring over the coming weeks and months. We hope that he will be the first of many of our neighborhood’s authors who choose to share their voices with The Local’s readers.

In other neighborhood news, we wanted to let you know that there is a town hall meeting Saturday afternoon to discuss the new rules on community gardens. The NYC Community Garden Coalition is hosting the meeting at the New School in Wollman Hall, 66 West 12th Street, fifth floor from noon to 4.

NYU Journalism’s Stephanie Butnick will attend the meeting and offer her report Monday. In the meantime, you can read more about the recently enacted rules here.

EVGrieve has a nice interview with sketch artist Terry Galmitz, whose new show “My East Village” opens this weekend. And if you think bedbugs are a big deal here in the East Village take a look at what they have to deal with up the road a piece.

Hannah Rubenstein Boshir Khan, of Panna II, and Thahmina Ahmed, of Milon, are continuing a restaurant rivalry that has lasted more than 20 years.

Boshir Khan leans over the plastic tablecloth at Panna II, glancing around the crowded restaurant to ensure that no one is listening. His voice is conspiratorial, nearly inaudible beneath the blaring Bollywood trills and ululations that emanate from speakers overhead. “I am launching a new website,” he says confidingly. When asked for more details, Mr. Khan will only smile mysteriously. “It will be completely new,” he replies. “Go and see.”

He will say no more for fear that his latest business innovation will be usurped by the enemy, Milon, a rival restaurant which shares the same building at First Avenue and Sixth Street. A silent, dazzling and well-chronicled war has raged between these two Indian eateries in the East Village for more than two decades.

Now, a new generation of owners is preparing to take this battle for the hearts and stomachs of diners to a new level online. Any day now, Mr. Khan will launch a revamped website and he promises that its features will assure Panna II of its culinary supremacy once and for all.

For now, though, Mr. Khan offers few details and each evening as the sun sets, the battle begins anew, bathing the sidewalk in a neon blaze.

Milon and Panna II are mirror images of one another. They share many similarities: menus, BYOB policy, prices, décor—and a home. Flanking opposite sides of an iron staircase, each restaurant consists of one corridor-like dining room where tables and chairs form a labyrinthine obstacle course for waiters. Bollywood music is pumped through the restaurants at a deafening volume. A disco ball hangs from the ceiling.
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Sarah Tung

We wanted to bring your attention to four features here on the site that we think can help you learn more about what’s happening in our community.

To find the first, just look up. There, on the blue bar at the top of the page, is a new heading “News River.” It opens directly onto an aggregator of links from the East Village blogosphere that was developed by Dave Winer, a visiting scholar at NYU Journalism.

We briefly mentioned a second addition earlier this week: a series of links that provide comprehensive real estate data about the East Village. You can find them if you scroll down the column along the right side of this page or by following these links.

• Market Snapshot Data
• Building Permits Data
• Sales Activity Data
• Building Directory Index

And directly below the real estate links in the right column is a special pull-down menu that provides test score information about public elementary and high schools that serve the East Village.

Below the schools data is the final feature that we’d like to bring to your attention: our pull-down menu of East Village restaurants drawn from data at The Times.

These are just a few more of the collaborative ways that we’re bringing value to the blogosphere through the talents of Mr. Winer and our colleagues at The Times.

NY Craft Beer Week, promotes brews with quirky names — Ommegang, Pretty Things, and Dog Fish Head — that have been designated “craft, ” meaning made by traditional methods and lacking “adjuncts” like rice or corn that are often used in mass production beers.

The East Village can claim bragging rights for having more bars participating than any other neighborhood in the city, according to Josh Schaffner, director of NY Craft Beer Week. Each bar features a specific brewery and offers money-saving promotions with the purchase of a passport.

Below is a map of all participating bars, their locations, and featured breweries. Craft Beer Week ends Sunday.

View NY Craft Beer Week – East Village in a larger map

Liquor licensing is the hot topic in the East Village, with some residents railing against the noise and violence that they say booze brings.

But cafe owners looking to put alcohol on their menus to make money said that applying for a license is a head-spinning process that often ends with them being painted as villains.

Take the Case of Table 12, the 24-hour diner on Avenue A and East 12th Street. On Sept. 20, the liquor authority committee for CB3, which represents the East Village, refused to recommend Table 12’s application to the State Liquor Authority to sell beer and wine. On Sept. 28, the full board upheld the committee’s decisions on a number of East Village liquor license applicants, including the denial of Table 12.

A brother of Table 12’s owner, who identified himself only as Tarik, said that the diner’s license application was submitted to help give patrons a “better dining experience” and also for the profit potential.

“It’s why the place is open for business,” he said. “A cafe is not open for non-profit.”
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Rachel Wise

Good morning, East Village.

There’s a piece in Capital today about Alicia Hurley, the NYU vice president charged with explaining the intricacies of the university’s hotly debated expansion plan to members of the community.

Seeing this piece prompts us to remind you all about our intention to cover news coming out of the university as fairly and as comprehensively as we can.

To that end, Kim Davis, our community editor whose work you might have already read on the site, will take a lead role in shaping our coverage of the university.

None of us is naïve about the nature of the debate about the university’s role in the community. This is an issue about which we at The Local have given a great deal of thought and planning and we certainly invite your comments and questions about how we intend to manage our relationship with the university.

It should also be noted that when The Local was being developed, one of the first steps that we took was contacting the university administration to inform them that we planned to vigorously exercise our independence as journalists. The university expressed no objection and has made no effort to influence the blog’s editorial content.

This blog is not the voice of the university – it is, as we’ve said from the outset, an experiment in journalistic collaboration, born of the efforts of faculty and students of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute who then reached out to The New York Times as a media partner.

We’ll talk more about this in the days and weeks to come but, again, we’d like to hear from you about this.

Daniel Snyder Steve Dalachinsky helped organize Tuesday night’s tribute to Tuli Kupferberg.

The Living Theater on Clinton Street was the scene of an 87th birthday party Tuesday night. Unfortunately, the guest of honor, poet and pacifist Tuli Kupferberg, was not in physical attendance, having died last summer. His friends had a wonderful time on his behalf.

Tuli Kupferberg, born on the Lower East Side in 1923, and in his last years a resident of SoHo, will be forever associated in many minds with the East Village arts underground of the 1960s.

He was a member of the quintessential East Village radical band The Fugs, performing alongside poet and novelist Ed Sanders, then owner of Peace Eye Books on Avenue A.

The Fugs, along with David Peel and the Lower East Side, and The Holy Modal Rounders, formed an underground music scene which mixed raw folk-rock with anarcho-pacifist politics, an approach now widely regarded as a prototype for the punk rock of the 1970s. Fugs songs like “Kill for Peace,” “C.I.A. Man” and the nihilist classic “Nothing” (“Monday nothing, Tuesday nothing…”) occupy an eccentric niche in music history.
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Kim Davis.

What legitimate expectations does the community have of bar and club-owners when it comes to noise? And just which community are we talking about? I wanted to remove my editorial hat for a moment and join this conversation from a personal perspective.

Of course we can have legitimate expectations when it comes to how the nightlife industry conducts itself. The owners should be held responsible for behavior inside bars and clubs, for the level of noise emanating from the premises, and for what happens right on their doorstep. In particular, they should be held accountable if they serve liquor to guests who are already intoxicated: illegal, of course, but a law hardly ever enforced.

They cannot, however, be held responsible for policing the streets of the East Village. It was the city, remember, who decided that smokers should congregate outside licensed premises, with the result that late-night conversations once held behind closed doors are now held on the sidewalk.

Beyond posting friendly reminders to keep the noise down, what can bar and club owners do? They have no authority to impose silence on the streets; they can’t control the behavior of customers who have left their premises; and they certainly can’t stop cabs sounding their horns.

But just who is being disturbed by late-night street life? I’ve lived between Avenues C and D for ten years, and my neighbors aren’t complaining about noise from clubs. They can’t hear it over the music they’re blasting themselves. What’s more, long-term residents of the blocks east of Avenue A are for the most part happy to see bright lights and nightlife replace the dark storefronts of the past. As the urbanist Jane Jacobs taught, empty, silent streets are hospitable to criminality.

Is it noise that’s really what bothers some segments of the community? Or is it change? Is it the sense that the people making the noise (visitors to the neighborhood, students) don’t really belong? Is this supposed issue really a peg on which to hang prejudices and a sort of inverted snobbery: keep out of my East Village – you’re not welcome?

Kim Davis is the community editor of The Local East Village.

Samantha Ku A selection of flavored seltzers at Northern Spy Food Co., 511 E. 12th St.

Instead of biting into a crisp apple to celebrate (finally) the start of fall, how about going upscale with a glass of homemade Fuji apple lemon seltzer? Or you could try Concord grape or quince, all flavors concocted for microbrewed seltzer.

Northern Spy Food Co. at 511 East 12th Street between Avenues A and B has been serving the sparkling spritzers since opening November. The flavors, made from locally sourced, organic ingredients, change with the seasons from strawberry-rhubarb in spring, to cucumber-mint for early summer, and watermelon-basil for the early days of autumn.

The restaurant, named after a local variety of apple, even mounted an old-fashioned seltzer arm, hearkening back to the soda fountain heyday of the ‘20s and ‘30s.

Samantha Ku Preparing a seltzer with carbonated water and syrup.

Traditional soda fountain culture has its roots in the natural mineral baths of 18th-century Europe, according to Anne Cooper Funderburg, who wrote “Sundae Best: A History of Soda Fountains.” Scientists believed that duplicating the effervescence of the spa waters would also produce healing effects in the body, a far cry from soft drinks of today. Now, restaurateurs are taking fountain drinks back to their roots with fresh ingredients and simple flavors.

Samantha Ku Northern Spy Food Co. owner Chris Ronis enjoys his creation, the coffee seltzer.

Dan Nguyen

Good morning, East Village.

On Tuesday night, Community Board 3 voted overwhelmingly to pass a measure that would restrict the number of concerts using amplified sound at Tompkins Square to one day per weekend.

Although the proposal passed without debate, Susan Stetzer, the district manager of Community Board 3, told NYU Journalism’s Timothy J. Stenovec that she was surprised by the level of vitriol about the measure in the blogosphere.

Ms. Stetzer took particular exception to the characterization by one commenter on EVGrieve who described her as “a self-appointed sound-nazi.”

“You don’t call people Nazis,” Ms. Stetzer told Mr. Stenovec after the meeting.

Ms. Stetzer also denied that there was any political motivation behind the measure.

“No one’s against concerts, no one’s against any type of concerts, no one’s against political activity,” Ms. Stetzer told Mr. Stenovec. “All that’s asked is that certain concerts that are very loud, and we’re not saying which ones, just take it down a notch.”

In other neighborhood news, there are a lot of reads about the 67-year-old East Village man who was injured when an air conditioner fell from the sixth floor of a walk-up on Second Avenue. Check out The Post’s account here, EVGrieve’s here and the Daily News here.

There’s another fine read about an effort to feed the homeless in The Times. We’ll have a story later today by NYU Journalism’s Meredith Hoffman about another plan to help the homeless.

And here’s an interesting link from Guestofguest about one bar’s unusual attempt to connect with its neighbors.

Jenn Pelly Notices about the death of Ms. Wasserman, also known as Annie, were posted this weekend along East Fourth Street.

Annie is gone.

Gloria Wasserman, who sold newspapers at the Fulton Fish Market for decades and became a fixture in the East Village known and beloved as “Annie,” died last Wednesday morning at her daughter’s home in Los Angeles, friends and neighbors said. She was 85.

Notices about Ms. Wasserman’s death were posted on East Fourth Street over the weekend by the Cooper Square Mutual Housing Association. It was on East Fourth Street, especially outside the Eastville Comedy Club, near Second Avenue, where Ms. Wasserman could usually be found holding court in recent years, uttering what became known as her catchphrase — “Leave ‘em laughing.”

Ms. Wasserman was best known for her work at the Fulton Fish Market where she spent 35 years selling newspapers and cigarettes and earning the nickname “South Street Annie.”
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Sophie Hoeller

The battle over gentrification in the East Village can become heated at the flick of an offhand comment about an apartment rental. But today came a bit of news that is all but certain to fuel the debate even further: the East Village made the top 25 of the annual Forbes list of America’s richest ZIP codes.

The ZIP code 10003 – an oddly shaped sliver of the Village that is roughly bordered by First Avenue to the east, East Houston Street to the south, 20^th Street to the north and Washington Square Park to the west – was designated No. 22 on the list based on the average home price here of more than $2.8 million.

The area’s inclusion in the upper stratosphere of the Forbes list was reported today by The Daily News.

No. 9 on the Forbes list was SoHo (10012).

What does this say about the East Village today – and what might it portend for the future? Feel free to put your thoughts here.

Meanwhile, if you want to explore more, and help us figure out the housing trends in the neighborhood, The New York Times offers these pages devoted to real estate in the East Village:

• Market Snapshot Data
• Building Permits Data
• Sales Activity Data
• Building Directory Index

Kim Davis Sidewalk Café, 94 Avenue A.

Sidewalk Café, nestled on the northeast corner of Avenue A and Sixth Street, looks like an unassuming bar with the usual dingy decor, cheap happy hour, and constant huddle of smokers at the door. But the backroom boasts a different sort of history, one filled with battered guitars, risky performances, and a tidal wave of eccentric entertainers looking to pick up a fan or two.

This East Village staple, around since the late 1980s, has long been home to an almost overwhelming roster of young musicians. The Café boasts free live music every night of the week, as well as some comedy shows, but the cost is hidden in the two drink minimum (not a problem for most attendees).
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Rachel Wise

Good morning, East Village.

The State Liquor Authority Committee and Department of Consumer Affairs Licensing Committee for Community Board 3 met for three hours Monday night and the discussion centered on two of the neighborhood’s hot-button issues: the granting of liquor licenses and noise complaints.

NYU Journalism’s Molly O’Toole reports that many of the roughly 30 people who attended the meeting asked committee members about whether more restrictions should be placed on provisions for transferring liquor licenses from one business to another.

Currently, the holders of liquor licenses may sell them like any other asset. And Ms. O’Toole reports that Susan Stetzer, the district manager of Community Board 3, said that landlords — and previous owners — are using the lure of those licenses to demand high selling prices and higher rent for incoming tenants who want to open businesses that sell alcohol. Under the current rules, new tenants in that situation can immediately acquire a temporary license and begin operating.

“Transfers is the single issue that has this committee and our community in its vice grips,” one resident said, noting the public opposition last week to the granting of a license to Table 12, a diner on Avenue A.

Ms. O’Toole also reports that some residents believe that the high volume of noise complaints in the neighborhood — 2,324 complaints have been called in to the 311 hotline for city services as of June, the most from any community board district in the city – may be partly attributed to the city’s smoking ban in restaurants. Smokers, who go outside to light up, are sometimes the source of noise complaints.

“The community is paying for what Bloomberg should have thought out,” said David Mulkins, a frequent critic of licensing rules who lives on East Fifth Street near Second Avenue. Mr. Mulkins directed his ire at Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who recently proposed broadening the smoking ban.

Peter Bradley, another resident of East Fifth, expressed frustration that not enough was being done to address the concerns of community members.

“We’re like a dog with no teeth,” said Mr. Bradley. “We bark a lot, but not much seems to change.”

We’d also like to remind you that residents will have another chance to be heard when Community Board 3 holds a full board meeting tonight at 6:30 at P.S. 20, 166 Essex Street (between East Houston and Stanton Streets). Besides issues related to alcohol, EV Grieve notes that the board may also consider a measure to limit the number of concerts in Tompkins Square Park.

Timothy J. Stenovec Harry Greenberg retires today after 22 years as the supervisor of Tompkins Square Park.

Harry Greenberg remembers the moment Tompkins Square Park changed.
 It was the winter of 1992, and the Friends of Tompkins Square, a now defunct civic organization, planted a pine tree on the eastern side of the park’s central lawn. In the first of what has become an annual caroling celebration, community members adorned the tree with lights and decorations. If recent history were any indication, that tree and its ornaments should have been stripped down and hocked by the park’s homeless, the fate countless park plants had already suffered.
 But miraculously, the tree—and the decorations—remained, day after day.

“Nobody ripped the lights down, and that’s when you knew people enjoyed it,” Mr. Greenberg said.

Indeed, Tompkins Square Park today is a far cry from the park that Mr. Greenberg found when he arrived here as a fresh-faced parks supervisor in 1988. “I’d have to crawl over people that were sleeping out here with their dogs,” Mr. Greenberg said, describing what it was like to come into his office at five o’clock each morning.
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C.C. Glenn A bowl of Peter’s Pot soup at Quintessence, 263 East 10th St.

Some people eat to live, and then others eat to achieve an altered state of spirituality. Devotees of a raw vegan diet claim that all those veggies and nuts can help you become spiritually “lighter.” Can bliss be found in a bowl of soup?

My quest took me to Quintessence, a cozy raw vegan restaurant on 10th Street where I slurped a bowl of Peter’s Pot soup, an orange-colored concoction blended from cucumbers, peppers and tomatoes. For those unfamiliar with the concept, a raw vegan diet involves foods (such as a blended vegetable soup) that are uncooked and never heated above 118 degrees.

Mid-soup, I tried to imagine myself slowly moving towards the so-called spiritual “light” that other customers claimed they had found. The chilled vegetable melange was tasty, but I didn’t exactly transcend gravity.
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