Friday, May 24, 2024

A curbside structure demolition party at Lucky on Avenue B

Photos by Stacie Joy 

On Wednesday evening, Abby Ehmann invited patrons of her bar Lucky on Avenue B to help dismantle the no longer-compliant curbside gazebo between 10th Street and 11th Street. 

Ehmann, who paid for the demoliton and its removal herself, also let people take home pieces and parts of the formerly adorable gazebo from the pandemic era. (Update: In the comments, Abby noted that Billy took the remains of the infrastructure home for use in his garden in New Jersey.)

Arming bar patrons with crowbars and sawzalls... what could go wrong? 

Actually, nothing (and there were a few actual carpenter types on hand)...
and later...
Ehmann was also celebrating a birthday on this demolition day...

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Love the spirit!

Scuba Diva said...

Thank you for demolishing this; better late than never, as they say!

noble neolani said...

I wish someone had thought of asking one of the many community gardens if they could use this nice structure. It would have been a more green use of these materials.

Abby said...

For those wishing we had donated the wood, the only parts we actually demolished were the pieces that had mostly rotted. Billy drove off with the (still surprisingly robust) infrastructure for use in his garden in NJ. We were proud to be the first to REALLY demolish ours and look forward to seeing ALL of them come down! We will not be replacing ours with one of the compliant, temporary structures. We are ceding the streetspace back to the city — and its citizens. Thank you all for loving it (or hating it) while it was up. We thought it was THE cutest one!

Perfume junkie said...

I wish more restaurants are doing away with sheds/sidewalk cafes. I don't know why the city thought sidewalk cafes would be ok. The ones on my street are literally blocking entire sidewalks while adding more and more tables. Will there be a max. limit of tables/chairs allowed? How are they going to regulate? Are speakers still allowed? I'm so over restaurants making all this money on our public spaces. The other day, my local mailman had to go into the street to get around a "sidewalk" cafe. How have we allowed this to get so out of control???

Jess said...

It's unreal that the city still has allowed these to be up and the businesses that built extensions attached to buildings that take over half the sidewalk like pizza and bagel on st marks and third.