Let's go right to the article!:
In recent weeks, major nightclub operators associated with the Meatpacking District, SoHo and West Chelsea have been sniffing around the E. Houston corridor from the Bowery to Avenue A, where the weathered and fully licensed lower First Ave. properties Sutra Lounge and Lucky Cheng’s are prized commodities.
According to our sources, those interested in either these spaces (or a handful of unlisted ones in the area) include operators from Pink Elephant, Greenhouse, Hudson Terrace, Acme, 1Oak and Electric Room.
And here's a quote from a member of the Community Board 3's State Liquor Authority & Department of Consumer Affairs Licensing committee:
“The East Village is ripe for the picking right now,” says Ariel Palitz, who’s closing Sutra Lounge after nine years. “There’s an opportunity to change the culture and the makeup of the neighborhood from the underground nightlife experience to a high-end clientele.”
Yes! Especially if you're trying to sell a lounge space near East Houston!
And from Alex Picken, described as a "nightlife real estate specialist" ...
“It’s a good location for nightlife, because the residents for the most part are a younger age group,” he says. Picken also notes that a neighborhood used to loud bars won’t be impacted by a switch to lounges and clubs.
Yes, because a switch to lounges and clubs will have zero fucking impact on the neighborhood! And we're all 22! And want clubs and lounges everywhere! WOO!
The piece also mentions the coming changes to the former Nice Guy Eddie's space and Club Element on East Houston...
Good thing the MTA put in those bus bulbs to handle the overflow of limos and stretch Hummers on First Avenue...
37 comments:
"ripe for the picking" is such a rapacious sentiment.
@ Jeremiah
Yes. And from a member of the Community Board, no less.
CB3 is a joke. Much like this article.
Who planted this article?
WOO fucking WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I have been warning people for years that once the economy gets better, downtown will be screwed. Get ready people, they are coming for the EVillage, SoHo, Bowery, LES and more. Not only clubs & etc, but your rent stabilized apts are going. They are coming for you so you better get working and stop worrying about some protest this weekend.
The End Is Near, brought to you by your local Community Board.
god. where is everyone going to go in this now tourist fed city.
when i was younger my mother had several pages for me in her telephone book (yes, we we had personal phone books where we wrote down telephonenumbers) because i moved so often.
with no rent control and rent stabilization being phased out there is no place that middle income folks (are there any left?) can afford to move to.
and forget opportunities for low income folks.
we're all screwed and will have to watch as the wooooooooooooooos take over and drive us into mental hospitals.
well, at least that's affordable housing if you have insurance.
What is the difference between a bar and lounges and clubs? The furniture?
“What is the difference between a bar and lounges and clubs? The furniture?”
It’s the customer A-hole percent factor.
Bar—A-hole %-5%
Lounge—A-hole %-35%
Club—A-hole %-90%
WTF are they talking about? New downtown nitelife? I resent this and makes me want to take a baseball bat to the face of these twits. I used to go to Den of Theives, you know, on Houston, Save the Robots, Volt and others. This is BS.
"“There’s an opportunity to change the culture and the makeup of the neighborhood from the underground nightlife experience to a high-end clientele.”
We're being eradicated. High-end clientele. F**k seriously? This is contempt. I'm pissed, man..
That article read like an article in The Onion! Ha ha!
Oh Grieve keep this hilarious commentary coming!
Well, I WAS going to suggest a way in which we could simply ELIMINATE about 40,000 of these fuckers all at once......but that would be useless 'cuz there's ANOTHER 40grand waitin' over on the Mainland just droolin' to participate in uber-hipness happiness.
Hard to fight'em when they don't even know WHAT they don't know.
But juuuust out of interest, IS there a thing like mass justifiable homicide?
Just wonderin'.
Oh....oh.....right, I think the Bushies caled it "war", or somethin'.
Why is Mark Birnbaum wearing pantyhose around his neck?
i doubt there's much we can do except make the neighborhood openly hostile to them. and i'm not talking about snarky signs taped to lamp posts.
be hostile to these people. do not passively accept this cr@p. challenge it and them and make them feel uncomfortable. that's what kept them at bay for so many years
So let's suggest some tactics, then. I wasn't here (in this neighborhood) in the 1980s; how do you kept the NIMBYs at bay?
I just want to know who is going to clean up all the vomit? The plan is to change the night life from something that serves the locals to something that serves tourists looking for a place to trash.
bring it on baby. I could use the equity in my coop. No reason west lower chelsea should be more expensive than EV.
What a bunch of old foggies cry babies and whiners. If you live in the NYC, you have to deal with nitelife and yes god forbid people not as cool as you.
Get over yourself!!
This just underlines what I see at all the CB meetings I've attended. Living on the Bowery, I split CB2 & CB3. CB2 seems to support the needs of the Community who lives there; and CB3 seems to care more about the 24/7 businesses & screw whoever lives there.
And someone threw up in my mailbox last week. Right in the slot. yuck! Even someone of "a young age group" would hate that.
Soon enough, NO ONE will want to pay market rate to live anywhere near Houston St. CB3 is making their future ugly and their reputation ruined.
I feel bad for Ms. Stetzer and the SLA committee members - they will not be highly regarded by those being forced out nor by the new folk$ coming in. And the tourists/visitors don't care enough to be grateful. Sad really.
Houston Street is already a traffic nightmare on weekends- both for pedestrians, cars, and bikes- they used to put most of the clubs on the far west side where the streets were wider, and in non-residential areas so people could be loud, cabs could line up etc. Now there is no place like that but Houston is saturated plus that construction fuck-up- that is making things even worse
Is it possible to impeach a community board member? I'm being serious.
this coming from a 25 y/o who's from the city lived in the EV for 5 years who a lot of you would probably call yuppie, depending on your meds or grieve level that day...
you guys are just the aging hipsters of a generation past.. yeah some of you guys have some cool stories about the 70s or 80s like that guy who stabbed people at webster hall.. even then this has almost no relevance 20 years after the fact.. you cant keep just telling these stories to people 30 years later and expect people who aren't unemployed to pay attention in great detail...
but most of you people reading this came along much later were just freelancers, waiters, or parents' money or something.. and after you all got priced out and think that the 90s will just last forever. of course most other neighborhoods have changed like this but the original residents of other neighborhoods in the city dont grieve like this...
what you call the east village was a very short period of time.
you guys are just 50 y/o, melancholic hipsters which explains why you're so obsessed on projecting about how the hipsters of today are so shitty... yeah no ones good enough for you guys.. yuppies, hipsters, even crusty punks
@we$tville ea$t: Genius! It's amazing how you've got it all figured out! (And so concise: everything explained in just a few grammar-free paragraphs.)
With so much hyper-awareness of the world, perhaps you could start your own blog. Call it "What I know about how awesome the EV has become in the last five years and the 50 y/o melancholic hipsters that are trying to ruin my good time." In any case, thanks for the lesson!
There’s an opportunity to change the culture and the makeup of the neighborhood from the underground nightlife experience to a high-end clientele.”
Ariel Palitz should be caned for even thinking this. You're a very sad and ungrateful person Ariel. We'll remeber this quote.
we$tville ea$t: "What you call the east village was a very short period of time."
The beatniks came here in the 1950s, then the descendent hippies (60s); punks ('70s-era), anarchists, squat punks (80s-era), and crusties (90s-era); and during all these decades were musicians, artists, poets of all kinds, roughly until about 2005, when the fully unrelated woo/Santacon/frat/Westville/A Building crowd showed up.
us = 50 years
you = less than 10
Most of us have jobs, too, by the way.
PS. Fuck off.
Until the people who live in the EV become members of these CB3 committees, expect the businesses to continue to make the rules and change the neighborhood in their favor. That's what the bar folks did - they've been members of the SLA committee for a few years now, and the results are evident.
Either participate in the community, volunteer, get on the CB, or you've no right to complain about what your neighborhood turns into. Well, you can continue to complain, but no one has to listen.
Once again: Love ya, pinhead. And nice time capsule, LvV,
Grieve, can you please just get on the board already? Save us all.
Trends are trends..bridge and tunnel crowds will tire easily of this..upscalers won't come really. Who is kiddin who?? Really!!! You are all dreaming. What's hot today..cools tomorrow. Seen it..try as ye may..the underground is cool..the rest..the same ole same ole.
Don't feed the troll$!
"What is the difference between a bar and lounges and clubs? The furniture?"
Yes, furniture, as well as price "exclusivity" (that is, velvet rope and contemptuous thugs at the door), and attitude.
- East Villager
I used to work at Sutra Lounge, while the pay was low the tips were good and she gave a lot of favors, and we would all take turns with this. After a while though you get disgusted and have to move on.
I know that many of my adversaries will find this impossible to believe but I was grossly misquoted and misinterpreted in the Daily News piece. Anyone who knows me and my mission knows that for over 15 years I have been devoted to New York preservation and have fought to keep the integrity of the Nightlife scene. I would NEVER say that East Village is ripe for the picking for an elite meat packing scene, even though that scenario it is plausible that it will happen, it is not my mission. What I DID say was that because of the wide spread closing of venues in the East Village that it was time for a Renaissance, an end of an era for many venues that have been open for many years and that it would inevitably change the existing culture here. I don't know how or why my words were twisted, and I do know that anything I say will always be used against me due to my pro nightlife stance. I usually don't defend myself against such things but this is way out of bounds from my beliefs and from what I said and I felt clarification was in order. Believe it or not.
Sure Ariel and Bill Clinton never had sex with "that woman".
we$tville ea$t
It’s okay for people to want to protect their homes, businesses, schools, and neighborhood. It isn’t because we have nowhere else to go or no money- though that is probably true for some of us. This has to do with home. We have seen our elders evicted from their nursing homes in their most vulnerable years, our small shops and unique neighborhood businesses priced out of their storefronts and good neighbors of many years losing their homes. Families displaced. Our neighborhood was diverse and interesting and we think that is worth preserving.
Fighting to keep your neighborhood and your neighbors intact isn’t “just” telling stories about the past. It’s what you do when something matters to you – it’s what you do when you grow up.
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