Delancey Street has claimed another victim, resulting in further outcry regarding one of the city’s deadliest thoroughfares.

Police said that Dashane Santana, a 12-year-old resident of the Jacob Riis Houses, was crossing Delancey Street at Clinton Street at around 2:36 p.m. when a minivan traveling towards the Williamsburg Bridge struck and killed her. The 58-year-old driver stayed at the scene and has not yet been charged with a crime, the police said.

Both Borough President Scott Stringer and State Senator Daniel Squadron once again urged the city to make Delancey Street safer for drivers and pedestrians alike.
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Bowery Boogie spotted the renderings of a new hotel planned for Orchard Street between Rivington and Stanton Streets — and the blog’s reaction isn’t too favorable. They call the design, which towers over neighboring buildings, “gut-wrenching, vomit-inducing.” Boogie also notes that the long-stalled property is already up for sale for $26 million and is being marketed as having a hotel that will be “delivered complete” in 2013.

As Mars Bar disappears, an artist who lived across the street from the dive and was regularly featured on its walls is honoring its memory by selling t-shirts. Last year, Sergey Aniskov marked Christmas at Mars Bar by painting a mural of a booze-swilling anarchist Santa Claus (see it below). This year, he has printed the image on limited-edition t-shirts that are going for $22.99 on eBay and will also be sold, said the artist, at Reason Clothing at 436 East Ninth Street.

“I was a regular at Mars Bar for ten years,” said Mr. Aniskov, 41, who came to New York from Moscow in the 1990s and now works at Animation Collective. “It was the place where you went when you were really having problems. You knew you’d find good company and get good feedback from the real people and the real East Village. I felt like I had to do this as a memory.” Read more…

If you’re feeling welcoming — and aren’t camera-shy — Bowery Boogie has information regarding a photography student who is hoping to photograph local residents inside their homes. The student at the International Center for Photography was charged with documenting the neighborhood in a unique way, and decided that portraits would be a welcome departure from familiar shots of the Bowery or Tompkins Square Park. “I was hoping to get a range of people to capture the diversity of the LES,” he wrote.

Stephen Rex Brown Only on St. Marks Place.

Good morning, East Village.

The Lower East Side’s most deadly street tragically reaffirmed its reputation yesterday, as a cyclist was killed at Delancey and Chrystie Streets. The Lo-Down reports that the rider was turning at around 6 p.m. when he lost control of his bike and fell under a cement truck. Earlier this month, we noted that the Lower East Side has the most dangerous intersections for cyclists of any neighborhood in Manhattan, with most of them on Delancey Street.

The Observer discovers that model and MTV personality Alexa Chung has purchased a one-bedroom apartment on East Third Street.

According to The Villager, two brothers have made a documentary about the neighborhood hip-hop scene during the seventies and eighties. “No Place Like Home: The History of Hip Hop in the Lower East Side” will screen at Clayton Patterson’s gallery next Sunday. A coloring book of Lower East Side personalities is also in the works.

Meghan Keneally The new restaurant will be at 78-84 Rivington Street, located on the corner of Rivington and Allen Streets.

The owner of Frank, Supper, and Lil’ Frankies, along with a business partner, are opening a new Italian restaurant called Sauce on the corner of Allen and Rivington Streets in early October. In addition to a dining room, the space will feature a grocery section as well as a demonstration kitchen that will host cooking lessons.

Last year, Frank Prisinzano, who runs three restaurants in the East Village, and Rob DeFlorio applied to open a fourth restaurant on Second Street and Avenue A. Citing the high number of restaurants in the area and the noise levels, the community board resolved not to support their application for a liquor license.

“They were right,” Mr. DeFlorio said about the decision. “We got excited because the place was two doors down [from Supper] and it was available. We jumped the gun.”

Upon going back to the drawing board and finding the space on Rivington, they were approved for a beer and wine license from the board immediately. The new restaurant, set to open on October 4, will be the first of Mr. Prisinzano’s ventures to cross below Houston Street. Read more…

We’ve now received more information about the disturbance that occurred at the 7th Precinct’s National Night Out yesterday. According to a police spokesman, a man fleeing the scene of a gang assault made an unlucky wrong turn and ran right into police listening to the precinct’s commanding officer as she addressed a crowd of local residents and elected officials.

The suspect was part of a group of seven who allegedly assaulted a 24-year-old man at Ridge and Stanton Streets at around 5:45 p.m. The suspect fled the scene, according to the police, but ran right into the gathering of around 70 people at Attorney and Stanton Streets.

As shown in the Local East Village’s video from the scene, the incident interrupted Deputy Inspector Nancy Barry’s welcoming speech mid-sentence as officers swarmed the suspect.

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Rachel Citron The 7th Precinct has been targeting bar owners for serving drinks to minors.

The police crackdown on bars in the Lower East Side resulted in a dramatic increase in charges of underage drinking against business owners, data provided by the State Liquor Authority shows.

During a three-month stretch of intense enforcement early this year, the S.L.A., which acts on recommendations from the police, handed down 39 charges of underage drinking in the neighborhood, compared to 31 charges issued during all of 2009 and 2010.

Lauren Carol Smith View full graphic

Bar owners in the three zip codes that, taken together, include the East Village and Lower East Side faced 230 charges of serving minors from 2007 to 2011, resulting in $1,034,800 in fines. The data shows that large numbers of charges come during intense periods of enforcement, and bars in the Lower East Side in particular have faced an unprecedented and disproportionate amount of scrutiny this year.

Each offense results in fines of up to $10,000, and repeat offenders risk being shut down permanently. Some of the more high-profile watering holes caught in the dragnet include Mason Dixon (which eventually closed altogether) and Welcome to the Johnson’s.

The increase in enforcement came as the 7th Precinct resurrected its cabaret unit, which focuses on the Lower East Side’s booming nightlife scene, as well as the arrival of Capt. David Miller at the precinct last year. An officer with Community Affairs in the 7th Precinct would not comment on enforcement of sale of alcohol to minors.

In 2009, the East Village’s 9th Precinct disbanded its own cabaret unit, though at a recent community meeting Deputy Inspector Kenneth Lehr said underage drinking remained a priority.

Many bar owners say that they are being unfairly punished for an issue beyond their control.

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Mark Riffee There are 23 galleries on Orchard Street between Canal and Houston Streets and 71 total in the Lower East Side.

In the more than three years since to The Times declared, ‘Here comes art,” with the opening of the New Museum space on the Bowery in 2007, the galleries indeed have come to the Lower East Side.

They occupy ground-level storefronts of skinny buildings with wrought-iron fire escapes zigzagging up their front facades on the seven tree-speckled blocks of Orchard Street between Canal and Houston and in the New Museum’s vicinity, too. They teeter on the edge of Houston. When Miguel Abreu opened his eponymous gallery at 36 Orchard Street in 2006, he can remember no more than four or five reputable galleries in the area. By the time the New Museum opened the next year, the Times counted two dozen. Now there are 75.

And the movement is inching northward.

So, East Villagers, is this a cultural revival on the scale of the 1980’s, which spawned the likes of Jean Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Jenny Holzer? It’s hard to ignore the similarities. Like the East Village was, the Lower East Side has become a hotbed of intimate spaces at the bottom of tenement-style buildings run on low budgets by young gallerists eager to be the first to show New York’s freshest talent. The new scene is home to “very idealistic people who believe in the art. And that’s incredibly admirable,” says Pepe Karmel, 55, a professor of art history at NYU and a former art critic for The Times. “There’s really a place for that in the art world.”

Like their predecessors, the participants of this new scene put authenticity above all else. Mr. Abreu, 48, chose his Orchard Street location because adding to the Chelsea “super-market,” land of the “homogenous white cube,” wouldn’t allow any potential for distinction. In the Lower East Side, collectors and gallery-goers can expect to “discover something” and engage in “some kind of conversation with the work,” says Mr. Abreu Read more…

Suzanne Rozdeba Preservationists have rallied around the Essex Street Market, which may be forced to move because of the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area development project.

While a battle between preservationists and the developer of 35 Cooper Square is still brewing, residents on the Lower East Side are raising their voices about the possible uprooting of another historic location, the 70-year-old Essex Street Market.

“If that market had disappeared, and I had just sat back in my apartment, I don’t think I could live with myself,” said Cynthia Lamb, a Lower East Side resident who is circulating a petition to keep the market, home to more than 20 businesses, from being relocated as part of the contentious Seward Park Urban Renewal Area project. The site is home to five parcels of land that have sat empty as a development debate has steeped for over 40 years. John Shapiro, the city’s planning consultant, has suggested a “superior location” elsewhere on the Seward Park site for the market.
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