Police car jumps curb at Avenue D and Fifth Street; nine people hospitalized

From a summation of various reports from late yesterday afternoon: A police car, responding to a call, was speeding on Avenue D when it made a left turn onto Fifth Street, toward Avenue C, when it collided with a white Cadillac. (The accounts vary on which vehicle struck first.) Witnesses say the officer turned on his siren and, seconds later, lost control, jumped the curb and hit a crowd of people on the sidewalk. The Times reports today that nine people were hospitalized, including an infant, and are in stable condition.




Three TV news outlets were on the scene: NY1, WPIX and Telemundo 47.



Bob Arihood was there shortly after the accident occurred, and has many dramatic photos.

Update on the Lower Eastside Girls Club: Groundbreaking set for the fall

I've noticed some work being done on the grounds where the Lower Eastside Girls Club will build their new home on Avenue D between Eighth Street and Seventh Street.



I asked Lyn Pentecost, executive director of the Lower Eastside Girls Club, for an update. Here's her response, via e-mail:

"We have been conducting the city-mandated archeological site survey. So far all the archeologists (a woman crew) have found is late 1800's broken bottles and assorted pieces of pottery. Nothing of note, really — but we will create some kind of display of the 'finds' in the new building."



"As for the trees — the city required they be cut down also, but we have marked and will save the more mature maples. We have located a woman 'miller' who will mill them into boards on-site. The boards will be stored in a nearby basement and return to live again as our café tables."



"Right now we are thinking of a formal October 'groundbreaking' — work will probably have begun, but the fall is a better time to have a ground-breaking party!"

The new Lower Eastside Girls Club: "We are really, truly, after all this time...breaking ground this year"

Wanted to share a comment to my post from yesterday on the Lower Eastside Girls Club opening its new HQ on Avenue D. It's from GoGirl at the Girls Club. It reads, in part:

We are really, truly, after all this time...breaking ground this year!!!! Just a few comments- that old Villager stuff is ...old. We are no longer an EDC project and no longer affiliated with FEVA. The building is being built through HPD and will only be Girls Club (30,000 sq.ft) and the housing- which is a 50/50 project- 50% market, 50% affordable! And as for that guy appearing to pee against the wall- unfortunate graphic I agree- but what he is really doing is buying an affordable tamale with rice and beans at our cafe take-out window!!!! So bike on over in early 2011. And feel free to drop by our 1st Street center and see the floor plans anytime.

The Lower Eastside Girls Club's "urban paradise" closer to reality -- groundbreaking set for this year

It has been a long time coming... This vacant lot on Avenue D between Seventh Street and Eighth Street...



...will some day be home to a new 12-story Lower Eastside Girls Club.... The Capital Campaign has been ongoing...



(Before going any further, the people depicted in these renderings really seem out of place... and not at all reflective of the diversity in the neighborhood...and what are those two in the bottom photo on the left doing? The guy on the right looks as if he's peeing against the wall.)

Anyway!

Now, according to an article yesterday at Inhabitat:

Though New York City’s real estate climate is anything but sunny, this year, the Lower East Side Girls Club (in partnership with the Dermot Company, a high-profile local developer) will break ground on a new 30,000–square foot, mixed-use arts and community center on the corner of 7th Street and Avenue D. It will be the first and only Girls Club facility in NYC (when boys and girls clubs nationwide joined in 1986, the Boys Club of New York, operating on the LES, opted out of the merger, leaving the neighborhood’s girls to develop their own organization).

And!

In addition to an expanded version of their Sweet Things Bake Shop, the LESGC’s signature social enterprise, the four-story center will contain open-air space for a farmers’ market, a fair trade bookstore and gift shop, a library for after-school tutoring and book club meetings, a full dome planetarium, a commercial kitchen and culinary training center, a leadership training site for career counseling, an amphitheater, and — if you can believe it—much, much more. The true heart of the project, though, is a science, health, and environmental center that will be available to all community youth.

According to a 2005 article in The Villager:

In 2002, the Economic Development Corporation gave the Girls Club control of six city-owned lots on Avenue D between 7th and 8th Sts. for the site of a new facility...

The Girls Club is not the only beneficiary of the project. About 13,000 square feet of space on the lot will be used for not-for-profit tenants, and 15,000 square feet of studio space will be leased to the Federation of East Village Artists, according to a mayoral press release. Rooftop antennas on the building will provide free high-speed Internet access to residents of two neighboring public housing developments.

As it has been reported, the top eight floors of the building will house 72 apartments.




Note: Just around the corner on East Seventh Street is the $10 million penthouse in the Flowerbox.

Two storefronts on Avenue D

While we're on the topic of Avenue D.

"Ode Fro Avenue D"

I've quoted Dave Crish, an editor at Not for Tourists, hereabouts in the past...Here's a piece he did for NFT from Jan. 20, 2007, titled, "Ode Fro Avenue D."

Began perambulation 'pon th'eponymous rue of yours true, D, fro corner at Second Ave, Biblioteca Fish. North to pole at pipestack, left at 12th to Tompkins Square. Vista clear, slightly bloodshot like 'em passing. Marinated of cheaply attained dose of cognac passant boutiques novel as Bertolt's idiom, Village East. O'er C to entrepot spirito plein of tattered clients at two o'clock. Mezzagiorno. Fro acquiring new slick to park loo and amidst chat of weathered Russians, two, coking, model damsel whispered past shadows dressed in denim torn, purple locks. Trans whiff to make mist of eerie mer, here -- terre trod of fading 'hemia beaux, though, not bent as once it were, however -- cracked as ever in relation the lamin' isle's elsewhere. Demarcated smoked Avenue D. Alphabet City's Z, la.

For those who need some spiritual intervention while preparing your taxes this year

On Avenue D.

Goldfish in the Flowerbox

The Times has a Home & Garden feature on a young family's home in the Flowerbox building on East Seventh Street between Avenue C and Avenue D.

The feature is titled "A modernist temple."

The photo below includes the caption: "The couple were drawn to the condo's indoor-outdoor feel. A wall of ivy was planted along the interior balcony that overlooks the living area. Directly below the garden is a shallow, 12-foot-long reflecting pool, where goldfish dart just below the surface."



Speaking of this building...in 2007, the triplex penthouse apartment here at 259 E. Seventh St. sold for about $10 million — a neighborhood record.

As the New York Sun reported at the time:

The luxury building, around the corner from Avenue D, is attracting big dollars to a street that most New Yorkers a decade ago would not have considered even for a stroll.

"This is Perry Street, this is 77th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus," the lead broker for Flowerbox, Larry Carty of Warburg Marketing, said. Eight loft units in his building, which started at $1.495 million, sold out in three months. The gigantic Lillian Wald and Jacob Riis housing projects down the block are hardly a liability, according to the broker. "So what? You pay 800 bucks a night at the Maritime Hotel, and you're looking out your window at projects," he said.

"Buyers weren't worried about Avenue D," Mr. Carty said. "If anything, they were saying, ‘Where exactly is that?'"

[Photo: Elizabeth Felicella for The New York Times]

Stopped by Houston and Avenue D to pay my final respects

Meanwhile, on Avenue D between Third Street and Fourth Street: