NYE's parting shot

Photo by Derek Berg 

A balloon moment on Seventh Street... see you next year!

NYE 2024

Photo by Stacie Joy 

By now, most everyone is likely already in place on Times Square, waiting for midnight and chit-chatting about the less-bulky diapers you discovered. 

But! If you're in the area and need NYE paraphernalia, there's a street vendor selling merch on Avenue D between Fourth Street and Fifth Street.

The 10 most-viewed EVG posts from 2024

From January, an early morning view on 14th Street 

In this season of the listicle, we present the 10 most-viewed EVG posts from 2024. As always, crime stories and closures attract the most clicks. 

Thank you for reading this past year. A happy and healthy 2025 to you and yours!

• NYPD releases images of suspect in Astor Place slashing (June 8) 

• The Avenue A 7-Eleven is now closed. The reason why may not surprise you. (Nov. 12) 

• When a Dodge Charger drove down the sidewalk on 2nd Street during a high-speed chase (May 4)

• Kushner unloads more East Village apartment buildings (Oct. 10) 

• Lower East Side indie mainstay Rockwood Music Hall abruptly closes, musicians say (Nov. 11)

• Observations on the growing humanitarian crisis with asylum seekers in the East Village (Jan. 16)

• Trump sculpture draws attention on 2nd Street (and elsewhere) (Nov. 1) 

• The Tompkins Square Halloween Dog Parade will go on — or will it? Why no one seems to know. (Oct. 15) 

• [Updating] 2 people shot in Tompkins Square Park (March 16) 

• Baseball bats, fisticuffs and broken windows: A bonkers fight escalates as man drives car onto the sidewalk on 3rd Avenue (Oct. 10)

A look at the work-in-progress Night Club 101 at the former home of the Pyramid on Avenue A

Photos and reporting by Stacie Joy 

Renovations continue at 101 Avenue A, where the owners of Williamsburg's Baby's All Right are teaming up with the Knitting Factory for a new venue called Night Club 101 between Sixth Street and Seventh Street. 

Club staff invited EVG inside the former Pyramid Club and Baker Falls for a work-in-progress sneak preview of the space, set to debut tonight with a friends and family NYE party featuring headliners (and EVG fave) Water From Your Eyes. 

The original bar remains, though it has been shortened to fit the space and create a bigger entryway...

There are new doors between the bar and the club with pyramid cutouts to pay homage to the original club (top photo and below...)

The main room for live music and DJ sets, with an Olympic-ring color palette, is much brighter. It also has a new stage with additional soundproofing, new lights, speakers, and a sound system.

There's also a small VIP nook on the main floor...

Downstairs, patrons will find another bar, with a lounge and DJ booth for afterparties.

The space will host live music, DJs, themed dance nights, art shows, and "community-building events." Shows are expected to start in the New Year. (Daryl Johns will play a night here on Jan. 9. His show at Baby's All Right on Jan. 10 is sold out.) 

Keep an eye on Night Club 101's Instagram account for show updates. 

As we first reported in October, Baker Falls moved on from here after a year in the space. East Village resident Nick Bodor has set up shop at 192 Allen St. between Houston and Stanton — the former Rockwood Music Hall Stage 2 — where he's creating his "decrepit-manor in the woods fever-dream alt-rock concept." 

Baker Falls, which featured a bar, cafe, and live performances, anchored the Knitting Factory's latest iteration at the longtime former home of the Pyramid Club. The venue closed in late July for extra soundproofing. 

The Pyramid closed in October 2022 after 40-plus years in business between Sixth Street and Seventh Street. The club ushered in an era of socially conscious drag performances featuring Lady Bunny, Lypsinka, and RuPaul, among many other trailblazers. As a music venue, the Pyramid hosted Nirvana's first NYC show in 1989. 

Previously on EV Grieve: 

• About Night Club 101, taking over the former Baker Falls and Pyramid space on Avenue A

Monday's parting shot

Photo by Derek Berg 

A moment outside 62 E. Seventh St. today...

6 posts from December

A mini month in review (with a photo from 1st Avenue the other evening) ... 

• Why this new condominium remains tenant-free in the East Village (Dec. 19) 

• Housing lottery is underway for 21 apartments in the East Village (Dec. 17) 

• Scrooged: 14th Street Trader Joe's employees say their hours are being cut this holiday season (Dec. 12) 

• Strand employees reach a tentative agreement, return to work pending ratification vote (Dec. 11)

• At the 33rd annual Tompkins Square Park Holiday tree lighting (Dec. 9) 

• St. Marks Veterinary Hospital is closing this month (Dec. 11)

Offside Tavern has closed on Avenue A

Photos by Stacie Joy 

The Offside Tavern, located at 94-96 Avenue A, has closed. Its last night was Dec. 22. 

Ownership thanked patrons in an Instagram post... leaving the door for a potential return elsewhere...

 

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Offside NYC (@offsidenyc)

The Marshal took legal possession of the storefront at Sixth Street in a legal notice dated Dec. 26 (Merry Christmas!).

On Dec. 17, we noted that the retail space — 6,500 square feet over two levels — was for lease. Offside Tavern had occupied the corner spot since spring 2023. 

This was a new iteration of Offside, which operated at 137 W. 14th St. for three years until the pandemic-related PAUSE of March 2020. During the NHL season, OT was a hockey bar specifically for fans of the New York Islanders. 

August Laura had a brief run at the address, opening in October 2019 ... then a haphazard schedule during the pandemic before finally shutting down in December 2021. 

They took over the space from what some people considered an East Village institution — Sidewalk, the restaurant, bar and live music venue (home of the Antifolk Festival) that closed in February 2019 after 34 years.

B Cup Café debuts today in new Avenue B home

Photos by Stacie Joy

Starting today, B Cup Café is soft-opening in its new location at 204 Avenue B, between 12th Street and 13th Street. 

B Cup is the first tenant in the renovated retail space, which was rebuilt after a June 2023 fire at B-Side, the former bar on the ground floor.

The new B Cup includes an expanded menu and later hours with the addition of a beer-wine license. (There are four wines offered by the bottle or glass as well as five beer choices.) 

The café spent 18 years on the SW corner of 13th Street and Avenue B, recently closing in this spot after the landlord did not offer the business a new lease.

If you're on Instagram, you can follow the B Cup account for updates. 

Previously on EV Grieve: 

• B Cup Café is on the move on Avenue B

With a new 10-year lease, Nowon temporarily closes for a kitchen upgrade

Nowon, located at 507 E. Sixth St. between Avenue A and Avenue B, will be closed for renovations through the New Year. 

Here's the announcement on Instagram: 

After an incredible 5 years in the East Village, we're investing in the next 10 with a full kitchen upgrade, HVAC fixes, and soundproofing! Because of this, Nowon East Village will be closed Dec. 23-Jan. 9 for renovations. 

The restaurant, which serves nontraditional Korean fare (specialties include the double cheeseburger with kimchi mayo and dill pickles), will reopen on Jan. 10.

On Nov. 30, Chef Jae Lee announced that he had signed a 10-year lease for the space. Nowon opened in November 2019 and had four months to make an impact before the pandemic PAUSE of March 2020. (During the hiatus, they teamed up with Frontline Foods to provide meals for health-care workers.)

There's also now an outpost in Bushwick with a Boston location opening early next year. 

Nowon, named after the residential district of Seoul, where Lee is from, pays tribute to the culture of Korea and his family.

Three Kings Tattoo has left 10th Street

Photos by Stacie Joy

Three Kings Tattoo no longer has a presence in the East Village. 

The shop had been at 343 E. 10th St., just west of Avenue B, since the summer of 2019, when it moved to this high-profile space from a storefront on Avenue B between 11th Street and 12th Street. 

Remnants of the space were spotted on the curb yesterday... (h/t cs on b).

Three Kings, established in 2008, continues operating outposts in Williamsburg, Long Island and London. 

Before Three Kings arrived, No. 343 had been vacant for years. This space was part of the former Life Cafe, which closed in September 2011.

Lidl watch for 2025

Here's a build-out people will likely be watching in the New Year. 

As reported in late August, Lidl, the German supermarket chain with 12,000 stores worldwide, is opening a branch on Grand and Clinton on the Lower East Side next summer. 

The coming soon sign is up, as the top photo shows. (Thanks to Roger Bultot for the first two photos in this post.) 

Lidl US signed the lease for the 23,000-square-foot space at 408 Grand St. (previously a Rite Aid) on property owned by the affordable housing nonprofit Grand Street Guild.

Here's a look inside the gutted storefront going back to October (pic by Stacie Joy)...

There are several Lidl outposts around NYC, including Queens and Staten Island. When the Grand Street grocery opens, it will be the third in Manhattan. There's one in Harlem now, with a location slated for Chelsea. 

This article tells you what you can expect from a Lidl.

When former President Jimmy Carter helped rebuild an East Village tenement building

Photo via Habitat for Humanity 

Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, died this afternoon at the age of 100. 

His post-presidency work included lending his building skills to Habitat for Humanity. 

Carter and his wife Rosalynn were among the volunteers who helped rebuild the six-story residential building at 742 E. Sixth St., between Avenue C and Avenue D. In the early 1980s, the property, called Mascot Flats, was a burned-out shell missing a roof. 

Per Village Preservation: 

In 1983, Bruce Schoonmaker, a minister running the Graffiti Ministry Center on East 7th Street, helped convince Habitat for Humanity to start a project at this building; for the previous six years, the organization had focused on smaller home-building efforts in several states and a few foreign countries. That July 1983, they purchased the building from the City as its first large inner-city renovation, with apartments that would be sold at a very low price to the community's poorer residents who also committed 1,000 work-hours to the rebuilding efforts. 

In April 1984, Robert DeRocker, then Habitat for Humanity's New York executive director, persuaded the former president who was in town for a speech to tour the site. Carter had already worked with the nonprofit to build a house in Americus, Georgia, a few miles from his home in Plains. What the ex-president found was a building in total disrepair, with no roof or permanent staircase, and interiors fire-blackened and knee-deep in garbage. 

"There was this old lady — she was 65, maybe 70," Carter told the Times. "She was living in the next building and there was no water, no heat, no electricity. And she was cooking her meal on a trash fire that she built between two bricks. I realized then how much Habitat could mean to a neighborhood like this." 

Three years after renovations began, in November 1986, 19 families moved into the rehabilitated building. 

President Carter revisited Mascot Flats in 2013.

For more on this project, check out "The Rebuilding of Mascot Flats," a 60-minute film documenting the efforts of homesteaders to transform the building.

   

In a statement following Carter's passing, Habitat NYC and Westchester is inviting the public to visit Mascot Flats to share messages and items of tribute for Jimmy and Rosalynn. ("We ask the public to be mindful that this is a residential building and to conduct your visit with consideration and respect.")

Week in Grieview

Posts from this holiday-shortened week include (with a photo yesterday from Tompkins Square Park by Derek Berg) ...

• A fundraiser for ABC No Rio's late director, Steven Englander (Monday) 

• Rai Rai Ken, a longtime East Village ramen shop, has closed (Friday) 

• Ferns announces February closing date (Monday) 

• Coming attractions: Buddies Coffee on 3rd Street (Monday)

• Ops watch at 176 2nd Ave. (Monday) 

• A visit to Cafewal (Thursday) 

• Getting chippy: Merry Christmas, now let's mulch your tree (Tuesday)

• Fluffy Fluffy bringing the souffle pancakes to 1st Avenue (Tuesday)

• Openings: Tipsy Shanghai on 2nd Avenue (Tuesday) 

• Taverna East Village remains closed while waiting for a Con Ed inspection (Monday) 

• No Joe for now at Joe's Wine Co. (Monday) 

• A warmup (with lines) for Danny & Coop’s Cheesesteaks on Avenue A (Monday) 

• Merry Clintmas! (Tuesday) 

If you want to start getting into the Valentine's spirit, you'll be in luck at the Target on 14th Street and Avenue A (thanks to Edmund John Dunn for the photo).

Last week for the East Village-wide exhibit 'Energies' at the Swiss Institute

You have until next Sunday to see the ambitious, East Village-wide "Energies" exhibit at the Swiss Institute. 

Here's more about the show, which opened in September: 

"Energies" is "an international group exhibition that unfolds throughout the entire building at 38 St. Marks Place and expands into numerous partner locations in the surrounding East Village community. The exhibition includes influential historic artworks alongside contemporary positions and new commissions that address ecological affordances and effects, social formations, and political arrangements attached to energy past and present." 

One of the pieces includes Gordon Matta-Clark's "Rosebush," which has been restored at its home since 1972 outside the St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery on 10th Street and Second Avenue. 

 The Art Newspaper recently published a piece on "Rosebush:" 

In a brief yet prolific career that ended with his death at age 35 in 1978, Gordon Matta-Clark responded to the neglect of New York City's urban environment with radical interventions, most famously colossal cuts in abandoned buildings. Much of his work was meant to be ephemeral, and little of it survives, especially in the places it was created. An exception is a small, rusted steel cage outside St Mark's Church in-the-Bowery. For years, it has stood unmarked and empty of the flowers it was intended to hold. 

"It is, we believe, the only existent work in an outdoor public space of Gordon's," says Jessamyn Fiore, co-director of the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark. 

The reactivation event this past fall was a collaboration between the Swiss Institute, the Poetry Project, Danspace Project and St. Mark's Church. Read more here. 

The Swiss Institute, on the SE corner of Second Avenue and St. Mark's Place, is open Wednesday through Friday from 2 to 8 p.m., Saturday from noon to 8 p.m., and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. 

There is no admission fee.

A night like this

 

The Cure's A Song From the Lost World" (the band's first album since 2008) made plenty of year-end top-10 lists. (It would make the EVG top 10 as well.)

On Dec. 18, the band released a live version of the single "A Fragile Thing," recorded at the Troxy London show last month.

Noted

Thanks to Plannedalism for this shot today from Second Avenue and 10th Street...

Rai Rai Ken, longtime East Village ramen shop, has closed

Photos by Steven 

After some 24 years in service, Rai Rai Ken has closed on 10th Street between First Avenue and Second Avenue. Sunday was the last day in service for the Tokyo-style ramen shop.

The shop, part of Bon Yagi's T.I.C. Restaurant Group, first opened in 2000, relocating a few storefronts away in 2012. 

Here's part of the signage for patrons on the door... 

We were incredibly lucky to have served you for over 2.5 decades. Back in 2000, before ramen was a household word, we opened a hole-in-the-wall counter shop reminiscent of downtown, old-school Tokyo. 20 years later, during the pandemic, we linked up with takoyaki pioneer Otafuku and with soul-food powerhouse Curry-ya in our current home in order to survive. 

Our staff over the years has pivoted a lot. However, due to an unfortunate series of events, we have decided to close. We appreciate all the support and wonderful memories over the 24 beautiful years.

This also likely means the end of Curry-Ya, which shared the address. Ban Rai sake bar is listed as temporarily closed.

A visit to Cafewal

Photos and reporting by Stacie Joy 

Leading up to the holidays, I visited the new Cafewal (Fulani for cafeteria) located in ELIM House of Worship, 602 E. 12th St. at Avenue B. EVLovesNYC rents space and a kitchen there to provide daily hot meals, showers, assistance, and information, as well as a community for asylum seekers, with a focus on offering free services for immigrants from West Africa.

Cafewal serves a daily weekday lunch at 12:30 p.m. to anyone who shows up (and all are welcome). I am greeted by Executive Director Tyler Hefferon, who shows me around the space and explains its origins.

"The new kitchen is an expansion of our restaurant training program that began last spring as an effort to provide asylum seekers with certified letters stating that they were volunteering with our organization, an important piece of paper that contributed to a barbaric point system engineered by New York City of qualifying extenuating circumstances and aided in the prevention of single adults being kicked out of the NYC shelter system every 30 days and left with no place to sleep," he said.

We discuss how the program works and its training component to assist the newest New Yorkers with job skills. 

"The meals are prepared to meet EVLovesNYC's standards — nutrient-dense, culturally sensitive, and absolutely delicious. The kitchen provides much-needed hot meals to our neighbors and assists our chefs by providing their first NYC kitchen experience to add to their resumes, plus the technical and organizational skills required by the fast-paced NYC hospitality industry," Hefferon said. "We are thrilled that many program participants have progressed through the asylum process to the point of receiving their federal work authorization and are searching for their first jobs in the United States, with some individuals apartment hunting and exiting the shelter system."

To date, since the spring of 2020, EVLovesNYC has provided over 585,000 hot meals and 8.4 million pounds of groceries to food-insecure New Yorkers, Hefferon says, and the costs have been difficult to keep up with, as the 3,600 hot meals per week cost between $3 and $4 each. The organization is funded solely by small-dollar donations and corporate sponsors.

If you’d like to donate — you can do so here.

Thursday's opening shot

Photo by Steven 

We're now on the clock for MulchFest, which culminates with Chipping Weekend on Jan. 11-12 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. in parks designated parks around the city... including Tompkins Square Park, where you can drop off your tree over the next few weeks.