Out and About in the East Village

In this ongoing feature, East Village-based photographer James Maher provides us with a quick snapshot of someone who lives and/or works in the East Village.



By James Maher

Name: Roberta Bayley (and Stella)
Occupation: Photographer
Location: St. Mark's Place and 2nd Avenue
Date: Tuesday, May 23 at 3:15 p.m.

I was born in Pasadena, Calif. I went from California to London, where I lived for three or four years, and then I came to New York in 1974. I came here because I had a one-way ticket from London to New York. I didn’t know anybody here, but I had to get out of England fast — nothing illegal, romantic. New York was where the ticket was. My friend ... said, ‘I have a one-way ticket to New York,’ and I said, ‘I’ll take it.’

I had a list of names in New York that people had given me in London. Everybody I met was really great. Some people let me stay with them, and then I found an old friend in Brooklyn from San Francisco, and I just stayed. I came to the neighborhood right off the bat, to East 12th Street.

The people I met when I came here were involved in the rock 'n' roll scene, so I got to know people like the New York Dolls and Richard Hell and the Voidoids. In the midst of all that, I was working at CBGBs — I would take the money at the door. I also had a very strong interest in photography, but I hadn’t been doing it, so I bought a camera, and then I started taking pictures of the bands. And that’s what I’m still doing.

I loved the Ramones, the Heartbreakers, the Voidoids. I liked some bands that never made it. The Miamis were one of my favorites. They were the first band I saw in New York. And a band called the Marbles — they were kinda cute but they didn’t make it.

The other lucky thing, besides working at CBGBs with all these new bands that didn’t have record labels or anything and needed pictures, was that I also went to work for a magazine called Punk, which sort of became the engine of the scene. That allowed me to not only photograph the bands, but also to photograph them in really weird situations. We used to do these things called fumettis, which is like a comic in photos, with little word balloons, but you take the pictures — it’s like a little movie.

It was great because to shoot photography that way, I’d always say this looks terrible, and they’d say, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll color the background in later,’ because that’s what it was. You could draw stuff in, so it made things pretty easy and fun. We had a lot of fun. We got to do wacky things like Mutant Monster Beach Party — we had a big shootout at Coney Island, and so some people were the surfers and some people were the bikers. Lester Bangs was a biker, Debbie [Harry] was a surfer, and they had a big battle on Coney Island. We all went out there and really acted it.

Debbie probably was my favorite person to photograph because she was so easy to photograph, and she was always such a nice person. We got to put people like Debbie Harry and Joey Ramone in situations they would have never really been in in real life, but those are some of my best-selling pictures — Joey with the surfboard is my top number one.

I like where I am. You can still eat for very cheap, and there are a lot of little quirky stores with interesting people running them. It’s a quirky neighborhood. It just has more grit to it, but St. Mark's has gotten pretty weird with all the empty storefronts. It’s like this weird ghost town. It has to be the greedy landlords are just asking for too much. The only thing that seems to make money on St. Mark's is cheap food, $1 pizza and Mamoun's.

I mean the place on the corner, they were going to serve vegan ice cream – you can’t make the rent with that. The Gap was there and they couldn’t pay the rent. It was funny when the Gap came in — it was all undercover. These big things were blocking it, and then one day they just came down and the Gap just kind of appeared intact. Now it would probably fit in a little better.

The big fire [on Second Avenue] was traumatizing ... the idea that your apartment would catch fire and you would lose everything. That was a really fast fire – I was across the street in a café when it happened.

One thing I really don’t like are the travelers, when they come. My last dog was killed by one of those travelers’ dogs. When they start showing up, it just gives me the creeps. I feel bad for them, but it’s sort of by choice.

I’ve been in the same place since 1975. My rent was $125 a month, so I wasn’t going anywhere. The neighborhood was cheap – that was the main thing back then. It was just very relaxed. Everybody talks about the city being so dangerous and horrible — I never really experienced that. I mean, I got mugged, but I didn’t think that was because of the city being bankrupt. I didn’t walk around feeling scared. I just thought it was great. That’s why I stayed — I connected with a scene that was happening here, which I hadn’t really been part of, just slightly in London and slightly in San Francisco. Here, though, it just felt like something new was happening, and it was exciting. Everybody was broke and everybody was trying to make it. It’s a fun time in your 20s. Wouldn’t go through it again, but I enjoyed it.

James Maher is a fine art and studio photographer based in the East Village. Find his website here.

Out and About in the East Village

In this ongoing feature, East Village-based photographer James Maher provides us with a quick snapshot of someone who lives and/or works in the East Village.



By James Maher

Name: Jerry Shea
Occupation: Photographer and Art Director
Location: 10th Street between 1st And A
Date: Tuesday, May 23 at 2:30 p.m.

My first visit to the neighborhood was in the late 1950s. I was living upstate, where I was raised, and it was my habit as a kid just to roam the streets of New York. I would come down here on the Third Avenue El, which was a real treat. That was a lucky day when I discovered the El.

And as soon as I was old enough, I got down here and settled in. I lived on 10th Street between Second Avenue and Third for a long time. The East Village and the West Village back then were the favorite places of mine. I liked being here because it was more relaxed. It wasn’t pretentious, and I loved the mix of people.

It drew me, and I kept coming back. And of course there were clubs that were fun. Then I had a girlfriend who lived here, and together we really explored the neighborhood, all parts about it, and we read about the history of it. When you read the history of a neighborhood, it gets you closer to the neighborhood — you care for it more. And especially the history here — it’s extraordinary.

Then in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was really kind of grim here. You could easily walk across the East Village and pick up a couple hundred vials that were used for crack ... but when it changed, that was the period of time where I was working and I was in Midtown and uptown, and it was only later that I came back down here. I’m retired, but I’m a photographer and art director. I was the art director for Sears, Roebuck & Company, and my photography today is street photography. And I got involved in the community. I was involved with the 9th Precinct Community Council for a lot of years, which meant a lot to me.

Veselka is definitely a favorite, favorite place. I’m there for breakfast and lunch just about every day. I just had lunch from there, and I shared notes with Tom, the owner. I was at Veselka before he was, back in the late 1950s.

I love the skyscrapers of New York, but I love the sky more, and being down here there is more sky. I love downtown. I love the Villages. What makes this place special was the mix of people. It was artists, writers, immigrants. It was so beautiful to walk on a warm Sunday morning across the East Village, and you would pick up three or four different strands of music coming from the buildings. I remember one of the mornings, I counted four or five, but you would certainly pick up Latin music, and there was a building over here I deliberately walked passed because there was always jazz on. It was really sweet.

James Maher is a fine art and studio photographer based in the East Village. Find his website here.

Out and About in the East Village

In this ongoing feature, East Village-based photographer James Maher provides us with a quick snapshot of someone who lives and/or works in the East Village.



By James Maher

Name: Gustavo Roldan
Occupation: Designer
Date: 4 pm on Wednesday, May 10
Location: Avenue A and 3rd Street

I’m from Venezuela. I came here around 40 years ago – just vacation, and then I liked it and I stayed. I came to this neighborhood immediately. People who I knew were around here, and I thought it was pretty edgy. I liked it.

Maybe because I’m into fashion, but that’s what I liked about the neighborhood. It was so avant-garde. There was a lot of creativity around. That drove me to this neighborhood. A lot of artists, parties, excitement. All kind of things were around here. It was amazing. There were people filming all the time, in the 1980s. People were so cool – I mean they are still. I loved 7A. The Pyramid was cool and Save the Robots.

I was on the Hells Angels block. The block was safe, but the 4th of July parties were very annoying. It was packed with bikers. There were fireworks and people getting drunk and very loud, blasting music. The neighborhood was crazy, it was tough but I never had any problems.

I’m a designer. I make hats. That’s what I do now, but back then I used to do jewelry. I just bumped into it. It was great. I did mass production — I did shows and trade shows. That’s how I made a living. I worked with all different types of people.

James Maher is a fine art and studio photographer based in the East Village. Find his website here.

Out and About in the East Village

In this ongoing feature, East Village-based photographer James Maher provides us with a quick snapshot of someone who lives and/or works in the East Village.



By James Maher

Name: This longtime resident wanted to share his story but asked to remain anonymous
Occupation: Retired
Location: St. Mark's Place between First Avenue and Avenue A
Date: Monday, May 1 at 3:45 p.m.

I’m from Europe. I immigrated here from Greece when I was 5. I came to the Lower East Side, about less than a mile from here. There were a lot of Greek immigrants at that time. It was OK – a lot of people in the neighborhood knew each other, and there was a big Greek community up until about the 1970s. A lot of the old timers started dying and moving out and Chinatown started expanding. There are only a handful of families left now. I’ve lived on the Lower East Side my whole life.

My father had a merchandize business on the Lower East Side, selling housewares, glasswares, cookware. A friend of mine knew the super of a building. He controlled who was going in and out, so I spoke to him and he said, ‘I can keep an apartment aside for you.’ They were much more available then.I started out at $225 a month – it was more than amazing.

I moved in around 1979. I was just glad for a place to stay that I could afford. I lucked out and soon after I moved in, the super friend of mine, I told him, ‘I think I’m thinking of moving out,’ and he said, ‘You know what? Don’t you dare move out. The rents are going to be much higher and you’re going to regret it.’ So I figured, let me listen to the voice of experience, because somehow he had an inkling of what was to happen, and it turned out exactly right. I’m glad I listened to him. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be around here.

When I was in my 20s, and my father’s business was still open, friends from the neighborhood used to go to a place called Adam and Eve. It was on Waverly Place, right near NYU — a big hangout place for students and people in that age group. We used to go there and just drink pitchers of beer and get smashed there, but the difference was that we weren’t out to cause any trouble or be annoying or anything. We used to just sort of hang around with each other. We didn’t get involved with anybody else there.

After I closed my father’s business, I went to work in Century 21 in Brooklyn, and later in the wholesale jewelry business in Chinatown. I stayed there quite some time, 18 years, and then around 2001, the business started going down so I got laid off and I went to work in Midtown in the big jewelry district on 47th Street. I went to work for another wholesale place but much bigger, much busier. The boss and the manager realized right away that I had more experience than most of the people working in there. He grabbed me right away. It’s hard to find somebody to do that kind of work. They had a big mail-order all over the country. Crazy boss, very strict, very paranoid and stuff but I learned how to deal with it.

There were a whole bunch of drug dealers right on that corner where the bar Good Night Sonny is. It used to be a cleaners and they used to congregate and sell that stuff on the corner. They put the guy right out of business because his customers were too afraid to drop stuff off and pick stuff up. I would avoid that side of the street – it was horrible. When Giuliani became mayor, he started cleaning up a lot of the street traffic – one of the few good things that he did. That improved the situation a lot. Didn’t solve it because they just packed up and moved to another neighborhood.

The neighborhood was like the Haight-Ashbury of the 1960s in a way. The East Village became like that and is still like that to an extent. Everything goes, total freedom, and a mixture of people. A lot of freedom just in the sense that you could be whatever you wanted and nobody would look down on you.

A lot of the old-timers have died or moved out or whatever and the yuppies started moving in. You can’t blame them for doing it, but since they’re willing to pay more ... the landlords just took advantage of it and started charging higher rents.

I would prefer it if the rents weren’t up so high but there’s nothing I can do about that. It’s unfair — it’s pushing out the working-class people and the poor people, and the students come in and they’re not thinking of long term. They just stay a year or two until they finish school. Landlords love that because then you can increase the rent by law, so the rents just keep on going up. It’s going to reach another housing bubble I think. I see a lot more signs around, apartments for rent, than I saw the year before.

The high rents have also been pushing out small business. It’s been very hard for any little business to survive. Along this block there’s a high turnover, especially further down. Some of the stores don’t even last a year, and then they’ve got to get out. That’s a horrible situation, because it can’t be that they’re all doing something wrong. It’s just that they can’t make enough. Nobody wants to work for the landlord.

James Maher is a fine art and studio photographer based in the East Village. Find his website here.

Out and About in the East Village, 2017 recap

Taking a week off from Out and About in the East Village (aka OAAITEV) to revisit our interviewees to date from 2017. Thank you to East Village-based photographer James Maher and everyone who has taken part in this series. OAAITEV will return soon.

Jan. 11 — Ali Sahin

Jan. 18 — Eric Rignall

Feb. 1 — Lola Sáenz

Feb. 8 — Lola Sáenz, Part 2

Feb. 15 — Delphine Blue

Feb. 22 — Delphine Blue, Part 2

March 1 — Mark Seamon

March 8 — Merle Ratner

March 22 — Jennifer Brodsky

April 5 — Terry and Harmony

April 12 — Elizabeth Atnafu

April 19 — James, the Leather Man

Out and About in the East Village

In this ongoing feature, East Village-based photographer James Maher provides us with a quick snapshot of someone who lives and/or works in the East Village.



By James Maher

Name: James
Occupation: Leather Man
Location: First Avenue at Second Street
Date: April 5 at 5:15 pm

I’m from the the Bronx, New York, and I currently reside in the Bronx, New York.

Before I got into this, I was working in Macy’s department store. I just wanted to try something different. I’ve always been a crafty type of guy, making stuff, tinkering, and I just applied that aspiration to leather. I tried buying some leather and making stuff out of it, and this is what it evolved into.

I make belts and other things out of leather. I’ve been doing this for 30 years, since 1986, and I’ve been in this present location for six years.

Previously I was in what was then called Midtown, 30th Street and Sixth Avenue. I’d always wanted to come to the Village because the Village has always been representative of art and culture and things like that, and one day or one week at the other location there was a severe snowstorm, and I couldn’t go there, so I tried it over here and it was very good to me. And I’ve been here ever since. You’ve got the train station here, and it’s more of a neighborhood — so yeah, it’s pretty good here.

It’s more of a local neighborhood. The other area was like that when I first started working there, but then it gradually evolved into a commercial area where people didn’t really appreciate the arts anymore. They wanted stuff with labels on it, stuff off the racks — cookie-cutter stuff.

It’s great meeting fascinating people in this neighborhood. The other neighborhood, I wouldn’t meet anybody like you. I’m in a long line, or long link of art people. People come by and use my work as the foundation – they add stuff to it and take it to another level. Some people come by and they put a label on it. Some people come by and add other dimensions to it. This is a solid foundation – it’s genuine leather. That’s why they appreciate it.

James Maher is a fine art and studio photographer based in the East Village. Find his website here.

Out and About in the East Village

In this ongoing feature, East Village-based photographer James Maher provides us with a quick snapshot of someone who lives and/or works in the East Village.



By James Maher

Name: Elizabeth Atnafu
Occupation: Artist
Location: 2nd Street and 1st Avenue
Date: April 5 at 4:45 pm.

I’m from Ethiopia originally. I moved to Washington when I was 14. I finished high school and university and then moved to New York. I met very good people — musicians, photographers and other beautiful human beings, many older than me. They were like an extension of my college teachers in a way. They gave me more ideas.

I’ve been in this neighborhood for 21 years. I’ve always been interested in this neighborhood even though I have lived in different neighborhoods. I used to live in Chelsea, Tribeca and Soho, but this neighborhood brings a lot of interesting people from all over the world.

What interests is there are a lot of older creative people who couldn’t afford the city and moved here. There is all types of diversity. Another is the gardens and the people who work together on them. A favorite thing is there’s no judgment — wherever you sleep, on the floor or not. It has the originality of a long time ago. It has that touch.

Now it’s changed. People came from everywhere, and they look at you like you do not belong. They are afraid. It is OK, that is part of life too. When you approach people with a sense of humor, that breaks the line. The neighborhood is a human being too. You push it. There is anger too — there is disappointment here. We are mixed.

This neighborhood is trying to give the creativity. Most of the tourists who come here, they see all kinds of crazy outfits and crazy people — things that are different from what they’re used to. That by itself is an art gallery — a street art gallery.

I’m an artist. I’m a storyteller. I am inspired by people. I used to have a studio at 285 E. Third St., but now the rent is so high that it’s gone. I use to volunteer the studio by inviting kids there. As for me now, I’m a nomad artist. I travel to different places and paint and live and come back to New York. Not that I have money – it’s based on invitations in exchange for work.

I like to collect a lot of things. I have 52 things collected from the streets to make the art out of it. I went to a cigar store and there were a lot of empty boxes for sale. They told me, ‘We are trying to send city kids to a camp,’ so I said, ‘OK I’ll buy 50.’ And then when I got home, I didn't know what to do with them. Finally, I started breaking them and painting them, and collecting anything I find interesting in the street, and I put them together.

So I invited different people — whether it was the Chinese deliveryman, the intellectuals, the kids. I said, pick the piece you like and write about it, but I tell everybody to speak their own language. If you are Spanish, write in Spanish; if you are Chinese, write in Chinese. And they don’t understand, but that means we are becoming together. You’ll see that book in the future. The book is called "East Village Universe."

James Maher is a fine art and studio photographer based in the East Village. Find his website here.

Out and About in the East Village

In this ongoing feature, East Village-based photographer James Maher provides us with a quick snapshot of someone who lives and/or works in the East Village.



By James Maher

Name: Terry and Harmony
Occupation: Artist
Location: Second Street and First Avenue
Date: Thursday, March 30 at 3:30

I’m from Philadelphia. I came here in 1980. I had just finished graduate school in fine arts in Oklahoma, and after that I was very ready to experience the city. I’ve lived in my apartment for 32 years.

I was looking for a place for myself – when I moved in my rent was $276. My block was pretty much just all empty, burned-out buildings and junkies. It was very quiet. I had friends who refused to visit me and this and that, but I don’t think I ever felt really in danger. The junkies had their business, and I had mine, and they left me alone.

When I first moved in there, the super was this old Irish woman – she was really a remnant of the old Irish immigration that came through here, and then I had a Puerto Rican super. He was found tied up and murdered in his apartment one day.

There were a lot of fires on my block that were either set or just convenient. Operation Pressure Point took place for months — there were cops on every corner and they were just mass arresting everybody. They knew who you were, if you lived in the neighborhood, and they kept an eye. They were just arresting people – like the plumber came and he had to show his ID, so that pretty much emptied out a lot of the junkies.

I’m a fine artist, a painter. I’m working in oil pastels - small because I work in my apartment and so the size limitations are there. I had a few shows in places like Gargogyle Mechanique and Gallery Amazonica ... but I never really got into the whole art scene, which flourished in the 1980s.

At one point there were quite a few galleries around here. I remember going to openings and seeing people like Keith Haring. There were performances and this and that almost every night. It was a lot of fun. There were after-hour clubs in abandoned buildings. There were art centers. There were all kinds of places that no longer exist.

I think the last remnants of the neighborhood that really have that community feel are the community gardens. There is now much more of a young, drunken, kind of boozy brunch crowd. There’s only about three or four of us who have lived in my building for more than 30 years. Now the turnover is so fast with a lot of college kids and young working kids. Unfortunately, our new landlady is not giving out new leases, so it’s a little concerning because we pay our rent.

James Maher is a fine art and studio photographer based in the East Village. Find his website here.

Out and About in the East Village

In this ongoing feature, East Village-based photographer James Maher provides us with a quick snapshot of someone who lives and/or works in the East Village.



By James Maher

Name: Jennifer Brodsky
Occupation: Founder, perNYC
Location: 13th Street and Avenue B
Date: 8 pm on Monday, March 20

I moved to the neighborhood a few years ago. I lived on the Upper East Side for a bit. I lived by Union Square and in Bushwick too. I feel like what differentiates those neighborhoods to me are the stoops. By Union Square, there are no stoops. On the Upper East Side, there are stoops, but they don’t have the same feel. No one sits out there. It’s a lot of glitz and glamour. No one has the time of day for anyone.

In Bushwick, there weren’t really stoops, but you had these front porches. The area that I lived in had families who would barbecue and have a bunch of lawn chairs just sitting out there for them. Here you have the best kind of stoops. People are outside not just with family, but also alone, with friends and with strangers. It's where some of my favorite encounters happen. Like outside Raul's Candy Store, while he and his friends play dominos in the summer. We catch up and talk about how everyone is doing.

I love the architecture here. My building was built in 1910. I recently went to the map shop on Fourth Street [between 2nd Avenue and the Bowery]. I asked the lady if she had a map with what my block looked like. She pulled out one from 1876 and it was still divvied out the same way that it is now. With my apartment building, there is a tenement house in the front, but then you go through and there is a courtyard and a back building.

Other neighborhoods have square buildings. Here you have triangles, hexagons and circles. I keep an open mind, because you never know what you can find. For instance, what lies beneath the many layers of paint on my door — for now, I've found it’s a free upper-body workout to pull open that door.

Recently, on St. Patrick’s Day, I headed over to Casey Rubber Stamps, which is a great East Village staple. It’s a really small store full of rubber stamps. There’s something so fun about them. I remember when I babysat for a kid when I was younger — this little boy went crazy happy with his new stamp collection that he stamped all over the walls. So when I walked into the store, I had this flashback of that scene of stamps all over the wall.

I founded, host and produce a podcast called perNYC. Each podcast episode explores a unique NYC creation, such as a NYC event, music, production, business, store, restaurant, photography, videography, movement, merchandise, fitness, art, establishment, and more, as per the creator.

You get to hear first-hand all the details around each creation. You could think that it takes a certain type of personality, a certain type of person, or certain traits to be a creator, especially in New York, where there is so much going on and someone is trying to pound you down, while someone else is trying to keep you up. But everyone is so different.

James Maher is a fine art and studio photographer based in the East Village. Find his website here.

Out and About in the East Village

In this ongoing feature, East Village-based photographer James Maher provides us with a quick snapshot of someone who lives and/or works in the East Village.



By James Maher

Name: Merle Ratner
Occupation: Labor Rights Organizer at the International Commission for Labor Rights
Location: Avenue A Between 3rd Street and 4th Street
Date: Thursday, March 2 at 3 p.m.

I’m from the Bronx. I lived here in the early 1980s ... I moved back here about 30-something years ago because I wanted to live in a multiracial, working-class neighborhood.

It was not gentrified like it is now. There were a lot more working-class and poor people, and not as many restaurants. There were also not so many vacant stores. Every store was filled — there were more mom-and-pop places. I liked Bernstein’s on Essex. It was a kosher deli with Chinese waiters. They had the best pastrami. It was an interesting place.

Then and now it has been a politically active area – anti-gentrification struggles later, always anti-war struggles, anti-racism struggles, and LGBT struggles. It’s a traditionally immigrant area, from here down to the whole Lower East Side. It’s where my grandparents came when they came from Odessa in the early part of the 20th Century.

It’s a very diverse community culturally and politically – it’s very progressive. I went to the rally against Trump here in Tompkins Square Park, and every time there’s a demonstration in Washington or New York there’s a huge contingent from this area that go. So I like to be among working-class people, although that’s changing a little bit. But the projects are here. They’re not going anywhere. We’re going to fight to keep them here. It’s a neighborhood where I feel comfortable.

There’s also a long tradition with the labor movement. A lot of labor activists have been active here and still stay here, and Trump is trying to kill the labor movement. That’s a particular struggle, for unions and labor rights. I think that if we don’t organize as workers and fight, not only for labor union rights but for a different society, an alternative to capitalism, we’re all going to go down.

I work for the International Commission for Labor Rights, but I’m also on the board at the Laundry Workers Center, which organizes low-wage immigrant laundry and food service workers, and has a big struggle with B&H Photo Video, which is trying to move a lot of the jobs of the Union-organized shop to New Jersey. So that’s an important struggle.

My family has a history — my grandmother, when she came from Odessa, was the first woman business agent at the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, and my mother was a member of Local 1707 Day Care Workers. I have a picture in my house of my grandmother, it must have been in the 1920s, with a long skirt with a bustle, the very traditional thing that women wore, holding a picket sign with her friend that said, ‘Don’t be a scab.’

James Maher is a fine art and studio photographer based in the East Village. Find his website here.

Out and About in the East Village

In this ongoing feature, East Village-based photographer James Maher provides us with a quick snapshot of someone who lives and/or works in the East Village.



By James Maher

Name: Mark Seamon
Occupation: Owner, Love Shine, Artist
Location: 6th Street between Avenue A and B
Date: Monday, Feb 27, at 1 p.m.

Seamon recently announced that after 20 years, Love Shine, which sells handmade bags, accessories and gifts, is closing up shop at the end of March, and moving the business online.

I grew up in Long Island, about 20 minutes outside Manhattan. My mom lived there and my dad lived in the city, so I was sort of back and forth. I moved to the neighborhood in 1980 at 19 years old. My first entry into the East Village was a friend of our family who was living on St. Mark's Place. When I was still in high school, I was coming in to visit her a lot. That got me intrigued by the East Village. It was right in the heart of St. Mark’s during the prime music time. It was so cool – I thought it was the coolest place in the world.

I stayed with her for 6 months, and then I found the apartment with my sister on Sixth Street between 1st and A. I was in college, and it’s still the apartment that I’m living in now. It was really dicey. This side of Avenue A was pretty bombed out looking.

When I got out of school, I was doing my art, and the plan was in order to keep doing my art, I needed to get a job, so I started cooking. I was a chef for a long time. I went to cooking school, and after I got out I opened up a restaurants on 14th Street with two friends from school called Babette’s. That lasted about a year. It was a really fun place — I don’t regret it, but it didn’t work out.

Then I got into catering, and I worked for "Saturday Night Live" for a long time doing catering for them. While I was doing that, I got a job at a place called Florent, which was in the Meatpacking District, and I worked there from 1986 to 1992. The Meatpacking was still the Meatpacking, but the restaurant itself was actually one of the places that began the change, because it was a super-trendy place — it was a real destination spot.

From there, I worked in a couple other restaurants, and then I started getting involved with this business [Love Shine]. I got involved in a relationship with a guy who was a costume designer, and I was doing my painting, and so we did some traveling around Mexico. We actually spend two months living there, and while we were there we started making things together. He was sewing up bags and I was painting on them. Then we started giving them to friends and that started to turn into a little bit of a business. We were just working out of his apartment. Then a friend of ours had a booth at a trade now and we started selling them through there.

Fast forward seven years later, we had a little business selling to other stores and working out of his apartment, but then he passed away. At that point, I had this business going on but I had no place to work, so I was trying to figure out my next step - if I wanted to keep it going or not. I went to a party right down the block and I met this woman who was a real-estate agent in the neighborhood. She said, ‘I’ve got this really great spot, totally cheap and you can move right in.’

It was the space next door. It used to be Shaquille’s Reggae Record Lounge, but it was actually a drug front store. It was completely a front. It had a couple records in there. I knew the space just from living around here but had never went in. There were bullet holes, and then there were also these little cubbyhole spots where they would hide the drugs in the walls. But it was perfect. That was how the shop was born.

I figured I’d put all my bags in here, and my friends in Mexico were exporting stuff here, and I thought I’d decorate the store with all their things as well. That was 1997. I had that space for 10 years. The landlords changed over a couple times and my rent almost tripled in the time that I was there, so it was no longer that cheap. Then this space opened. It was occupied by a friend of mine who is a painter.

I do think that it was the people that lived here that made the neighborhood special. It was the diversity of the neighborhood - the Latinos mixing with the gays with the musicians with the Ukranians. It was just a big melting pot. There was a lot of art coming out of here and a lot of galleries back there for awhile. there was a lot of music. There was a big burgeoning gay and lesbian scene that was going on. There was a lot of creative energy and people trying new things. People homesteading apartments and buildings. There was kind of a sense of discovery and excitement. I think that shaped the community.

You could just be like, ‘Oh that’s a nice space,’ hang up a sign, and open up a shop, and your overheard was low enough that you could kind of make it work. We would do lots of events and have these parties and fashion shows on the street. There was an energy in this neighborhood that people responded to.

Over time, people just kind of lost interest in it. There wasn’t as much of the communal feeling. It was like the whole demographic shifted in a very weird way. I actually thought it was going to turn into better business. For some reason, I feel like we became less relatable. I think that maybe this place confused people. They weren’t quite sure what we were doing here. People used to work night jobs ... but then they were around during the day and walking the streets. Now no one’s around. It’s a ghost town during the day.

Our future is that we plan on moving our workshop into a studio, which is in my friend’s apartment right now. We’re going to work on expanding our online business. We’d like to continue to do stuff in the community if we can, maybe some markets or pop-ups. We want to stay here, you know, and we might reopen at another point if we can ever find a space that we could afford, but for right now we are just going to focus on the online. That seems to be the only part of the business that’s growing for us. The rest has been going down.

You can find Love Shine via their website as well as Facebook and Etsy.

James Maher is a fine art and studio photographer based in the East Village. Find his website here.

Out and About in the East Village

In this ongoing feature, East Village-based photographer James Maher provides us with a quick snapshot of someone who lives and/or works in the East Village.



By James Maher

Name: Delphine Blue
Occupation: Radio Host, DJ, Pilates Instructor
Location: St. Marks Place between 1st and 2nd
Date: Thursday, Feb. 2 at 1:45 pm

Read part 1 of the interview with Delphine, a Queens native, here

When the Ritz was opening where Webster Hall is, they had an ad in the SoHo Weekly News, and it said that they were starting a dance company and they were choreographing rock music. I thought that’s the company I need to be in, so I went to the audition. The dance company thing lasted for 3 seconds but Jerry Brandt who owned the Ritz, was there. I said to Jerry, ‘I’m a DJ,’ and he said to me, ‘I’ll give you any job you want here but you can’t be the DJ.’ He said I could be the waitress.

I had never been a waitress, so opening night I tried to carry 12 Heinekens on a tray, which is impossible but I didn’t know that because I wasn’t a waitress. The place was packed because it was opening night. I dropped all the beers and I just put the tray down and started dancing. He said to me, ‘Ok, you can answer the phone in the office.’ So I did that and then I started putting together the VIP list, which was totally fun. But all the time I wanted to be the DJ. So after a few months they gave me Monday Nights. I worked there for five years and I eventually started working in all the other clubs from 1979 to 1983 or 1984. Danceteria, it was so fun.

I always loved the Cure from the get-go. They were my favorite band, and they’re still my favorite band. I also loved the B-52s, Gang of Four, The Police, The Knack, The Records, The Pretenders, Elvis Costello and Marianne Faithfull. One of my favorite nights ... was when Tina Turner played. This was probably the most exciting night. She played and after the show I was in the VIP room and David Bowie was there. I said to my friend, ‘I wish I could kiss him,’ and he heard me and spun around and kissed me on the lips. I think I fainted. That’s my big Bowie story.

Meanwhile, I also wanted to be on the radio, so I went to WNEW, which was the cool station and I just stood outside the door. Vin Scelsa came out and I said, ‘I really want to be on the radio. I really want to be a DJ,’ and he hit on me. I was so crestfallen, because I was so sincere and earnest.

Meanwhile. I got hired to work at WLIR, which was a modern rock station. Then in like 1985-86, everybody started listening to these stupid big hair bands like Poison. Everyone started going in that metal direction and I just couldn’t get with it. So I got fired from WLIR and I started my own show on WBAI. I forged a place for myself and developed a reputation based on playing music that you didn’t hear on the radio.

In 2000, I started working at WFUV, then I got hired at Sirius, and then at the same time East Village Radio started. East Village Radio just blew up, and it was so fun being in that DJ booth in that window. I loved that station, but then they crashed and burned and WBAI became a frightening caricature of itself and started to fail, so I left there.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this I got hired to be on Jack.fm, which was the most despised FM radio station, but it didn’t matter because it was the No. 1 market in New York. I was on afternoon drive so I had gone to the mountaintop. That’s it — I did it. I got to speak 30 seconds twice and hour in a three-hour shift, and I made more money than I had ever made in my life. We’re talking basically three minutes in three hours. It was ridiculous. I would say nothing, nothing. Then they changed the format one day without telling me and I lost my job.

I got scared and lost sleep, and then I decided to become a Pilates teacher. I got certified, which was really hard to learn something totally new. I still do radio and DJing too so I’m happier now. A little while later one of the guys who had been on EVR, my friend Steve Dima, called me and he and a couple people were starting a radio station at the South Street Seaport called Little Water Radio. So now I’m an owner-operator. Four of us started the station and we’re having a blast.

James Maher is a fine art and studio photographer based in the East Village. Find his website here.

Out and About in the East Village

In this ongoing feature, East Village-based photographer James Maher provides us with a quick snapshot of someone who lives and/or works in the East Village.



By James Maher

Name: Delphine Blue
Occupation: Radio Host, DJ, Pilates Instructor
Location: St. Mark's Place between 1st Avenue and 2nd Avenue
Date: Thursday, Feb. 2 at 1:45 pm

I’m from Queens — Fresh Meadows. My dad had a store on Avenue C and 5th Street in the 1960s called Sol’s Hardware. I would go there sometimes when I was very young. I remember we walked out of the store one day and there was a guy wearing a fez and I was like, ‘Dad, what’s that,’ and he was like, ‘That’s a beatnik.’

He had that store for awhile but that was when the Lower East Side was dangerous. People were getting shot and killed and my mom told him, ‘You have to sell that store or I’m going to be a widow.’ Around that time there were some homeless guys who were going into various hardware stores on the Lower East Side and buying wood alcohol. It was cheaper than going to a liquor store and some of them died. They were alcoholics and drinking this stuff and dying in the street.

So the FBI started to investigate it and they asked one of the homeless people where they bought it and they pointed to my father’s store. At the time my grandfather was minding the store and they arrested him on the spot and charged him with murder and he was on the 6 o'clock news. He wasn’t charged with murder ultimately, but they kept this investigation on for years and years. When I was a little kid they used to come to my house, handcuff my father, and take him away to question him.

They left my father’s business unattended on the Lower East Side when they arrested my grandfather and we had the lawsuit against the city that they kept pushing back to try to get us to drop it, and we didn’t. And then we finally won and we had a huge award — and then the city reduced it to like $900.

I started coming to the East Village around the late 1970s. My best friend and I moved into a studio apartment at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. It was tiny and it was totally fine — we were as happy as could be. We started going to all the clubs then, down to the Mudd Club, Club 57, Max’s Kansas City to see Blondie and CBGBs to see Patti Smith.

The club scene was so creative and a melding of all these different things and all these different kinds of music. It was everything together. It seemed like everybody was doing something related to the arts or fashion or being in a band. You could get by and you could live. You could live creatively and everybody you knew was doing that.

The best thing about the East Village then was that there were gazillions of shops down here. There were loads of vintage stores where you could get great clothes. Many of the shops didn’t open till 5 or 6 in the afternoon and stayed open till midnight. Nighttime was when all the cool shops would open, so you would go hang out in the shops and record stores and then go to a club. I would describe it like a festival. That’s what it felt like. Didn’t get going till noon. The streets were deserted till noon. You could eat any kind of food, really good food for really cheap and buy anything you wanted anytime of the day or night, and be surrounded by creative people.

I was aspiring to be a ballet dancer. That was my dream. I went to ballet classes every day. Then a little bit of rock n’ roll life collided with that. They didn’t mix very well and rock n’ roll won. And you kind of have to be touched by the gods to be a ballet dancer, and I wasn’t going to get where I wanted to go, but I could have still had a dance career.

I started DJing at the Sheraton Hotel on 53rd Street and 7th Avenue. They had a dinner club and they only hired girls. We were supposed to be playing disco music and they were teaching me how to mix. It’s not that I had a prejudice toward the music, I liked it, I liked to go out dancing, but I tried to play some rock songs and I got fired.

Next week Delphine talks about her DJ career that took her from WLIR to WBAI to Little Water Radio.

James Maher is a fine art and studio photographer based in the East Village. Find his website here.

Out and About in the East Village (part 2)

In this ongoing feature, East Village-based photographer James Maher provides us with a quick snapshot of someone who lives and/or works in the East Village.



By James Maher

Name: Lola Sáenz
Occupation: Artist, Poet
Location: 12th Street
Date: Saturday, Jan. 28 at noon

Read Part 1 with Lola from last week here.

I’ve been exhibiting with a group named Artistas de Loisaida since the late 1990s. It’s still alive and kicking and it’s run by Carolyn Ratcliffe, who is the art director. Mostly I exhibit at Theatre for the New City, and I also donated some paintings to the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art on Wooster Street – the first LGBTQ art museum in the world.

I always dreamt about getting into a gallery or working with an art dealer but that whole thing is so hard to get into – it’s insane. I think it’s all who you know. I have files of turndown letters. I haven’t been able to get into a gallery because nobody’s responding, so I said screw it — I can be my own agent. It’s such a game.

I created a painting called Crossing Borders inspired by the women crossing the border. I’m Mexican and most of my relatives are in Mexico, and I said that belongs in my hometown, so I aimed for the El Paso Museum of Art. When I used to run cross-country in high school, as we were running the levy, I would see the Coyotes carrying the ladies on their shoulders walking through the Rio Grande. This piece was inspired by that — running for a better life. When I would go to visit my family, my mother and I would go to the Museum. I would drop off the portfolio to the art director, and I would take her to see all the artwork. They turned me down for like 15 years.

Then my mama Gloria passed away, and I decide to submit one more time in her honor. I said, ‘I want to donate this to my hometown.’ I shipped it, they got it, and they had almost a 3-month wait. It had to be approved by the committee, the Culture Department of El Paso, the mayor, the cockroaches, and maybe a couple of mice. So finally they wrote to me and said they loved it — yes. When I went to the museum with my family for the show, I felt as if my mother's spirit was there holding my hand. It was beautiful. It was my mami who said, ‘Never give up on your dreams.’

I was really taken by 9/11. I created a canvas called 9/11 Broken Heart. I would take it to Union Square and I was walking around and Martha Cooper discovered the painting — she’s a well-known photographer who specializes in graffiti artists. She suggested collecting some of the 9/11 artwork and turning it into a show, and I said sure. She introduced me to Marci Reaven, who worked for City Lore, and she called me and told me that I was invited to have my painting as part of an exhibit called Missing at the New-York Historical Society Museum.

A couple years passed and then I created a black-and-white painting of bodies called Ground Zero. I became very acquainted with the curator for the 9/11 Memorial Museum because I wanted to give them this one. She turned me down — saying they haven’t quit finished building the museum. A year later she said no still. So when they finished the museum, I sent her an email and said, ‘Look, this is it, again, in case you forgot what it looked like.’ And she said, ‘Wow are those bodies?’ I said, ‘Yeah, those are dead bodies.’ I said, ‘Can you just let me bring it and you and your people can just see it face to face?’ So she said ok.

Jan Ramirez is the curator of the 9/11 Memorial Museum, and she had turned me down a few times in the past few years. But they finally said YES and they acquired Ground Zero and Fallen Leaves. It pays to believe in your dream and be persistent.

My mom raised 5 kids. My parents got divorced when I was 13, so I think a lot of the early work had a lot of trying to get over a lot of stuff — but it’s also part of life. The documentary end of it happens when I get inspired by an event like the East Village gas explosion or by Sandy.

During Sandy, I was in the dark here just with a flashlight, working. I did one piece titled Uptown, because I took the bus uptown and everybody was partying and having brunch and eating and shopping, and everything looked so beautiful and colorful. I was shocked that half of these people had no idea that downtown was in the dark and that it was really bad. Downtown was dark and it was watery. It was just the total opposite of uptown, so that’s where that inspiration came from.

The gentrification that’s happening breaks my heart. I do miss a lot of the places that used to be here. I miss Something Sweet the most — that little bakery on 11th Street and First Avenue, and the owner and her family were wonderful people. And another place comes in, and 18 months later and they’re not there anymore. It’s been a lot of there and not there. On 9th Street between First and Second, there’s a building that went up that looks like it should be on Fifth Avenue, my god. It’s pretty wild. It’s hard to believe. I would have never imagined in 1993 that we’d be experiencing all these dramatic changes.

But I love the East Village no matter what. It still has its grub. It still has its little dark side. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. To me, it’s very bohemian no matter what. Even with all my neighbors who are probably NYU students because they party a lot. Ever since I’ve been here people have been partying. Now I’ve heard the building is about 80 percent NYU students, but the noise doesn’t bother me.

I feel very lucky and very blessed. I’d like to end up in a few other museums and then maybe find a place to have a solo show, because I’m ready. Those are my next goals.

James Maher is a fine art and studio photographer based in the East Village. Find his website here.

Out and About in the East Village

In this ongoing feature, East Village-based photographer James Maher provides us with a quick snapshot of someone who lives and/or works in the East Village.



By James Maher

Name: Lola Sáenz
Occupation: Artist, Poet
Location: 12th Street
Date: Saturday, Jan. 28 at noon

I was born in El Paso, Texas. I always wanted to be an artist. When I left high school, I couldn’t afford to go to art school, so I moved to LA and lived there for about 10 years. I started to do artwork the last few years living there. Then I met this girl who was from here in the gay pride parade and she said, ‘You gotta come to New York because it’s the place.’ I said, ‘Yeah, well, I’ve always dreamt about it.’

I moved to New York in 1990. The first year here I lived on King Street. I was personal training. I had already met a woman in LA who lived in New York City. Her name was Linda Stein, who was a big real-estate broker to celebrities and manager of the Ramones. Linda was the first person who gave me work. I became her personal trainer, for 15 years. She also said that if I needed to move, I could always stay upstairs for free in her apartment where her daughter used to have bunk beds, and I could use their bathroom and kitchen.

So I did, and I moved uptown to Central Park West. It was a tiny little room on the top of the building — a gorgeous view. All I could fit there was a futon and an art table, and it had one window. I would share the bathroom down the hallway with the guys, the doormen. In that building, I met Bill and Judith Moyers and got to train them. Linda introduced me to a lot of clients to train, including the owner of Hess Oil.

Not having a kitchen or a bathroom was tough. So after a year I found this small apartment in the East Village in 1993. I’ve been here ever since. I eventually stopped training Linda to focus on the art, and a few years or so later she was murdered by her yoga teacher. I was shocked and devastated. Most of the magazine and newspaper articles were writing about the story, making it sound like it was Linda's fault. It was impossible that anyone would deserve to be murdered for saying the word fuck or blowing smoke.

I wrote to The New York Times, New York Magazine, etc. in her defense, but no one took my story except Lincoln Anderson from The Villager. And of course I was right. After all the investigation, it was found that the yoga teacher had been stealing from Linda. She remains in prison.

There was a shop called Peter Leggieri's Sculpture Supply Store below my apartment where the record store is now. It became my living room. That’s where I learned how to carve. He would sell stones from all over the world. He would give me a few stones and chisels. It was a great outlet in the East Village because all the artists would stop by and say hello. It was bit rough. There were a lot of drugs on the block. I remember a detective friend would go up on the roof through the back of Peter’s place to spy.

It got rough right in my next-door apartment, which was a lady-of-the-night hangout for all the junkies. It was a little weird. I kept thinking where else can I go, so I stuck it out. I didn’t really care what people did with their lives. People would be getting high on the staircase, and I didn’t want any confrontation with any of them. It was like that for the whole first year.

Then Giuliani came to power, and before you know it the marshals came and broke the door, pulled everyone out, and arrested a bunch of people. The undercover cops started arresting a lot of people. The year after that was cool because I didn’t have to bump into anybody living next door to me. I didn’t care about the outside world — it was just what was next door to me.

I’m a self-taught artist. Since I was a kid, all I wanted to be was an artist. I started to watch and study Picasso and Frida Kahlo and Matisse and Diego. I would go to museums and be inspired by the work. I guess you’re born with it or something. The first few paintings that I did in LA, I felt like I had been guided by the hand of God or something. It was me, but it was like somebody else was there.

I decided to create one painting a year. My artwork has four or five layers of paint, and I don’t like transparency — and the paint supplies are very expensive. I do a lot of city-related paintings and a lot of self-portraits. I add a little poetry to an artwork sometimes. I’ll work on a painting like a maniac. Every painting has its own story. I could work on it for a month straight every day and every night with a couple days off a week. If I’m really in it, I will work it until I feel exhausted or I get stuck.

In Part 2 next week, Sáenz talks about the influence of 9/11 on her work and thoughts on the neighborhood today. "I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else."

James Maher is a fine art and studio photographer based in the East Village. Find his website here.

Out and About in the East Village

In this ongoing feature, East Village-based photographer James Maher provides us with a quick snapshot of someone who lives and/or works in the East Village.



By James Maher

Name: Eric Rignall
Occupation: Owner, Inkstop Tattoo
Location: Avenue A, Between 12th and 13th
Time: Friday, Jan 13 at 5 p.m.

Originally I was born in Egypt to an American dad, and we traveled a lot. I lived in Nicaragua, Guatemala, Colombia, Dominican Republic, New York and Philadelphia. I moved to New York in 1989 and I’ve been here since then. I started out in Staten Island — cheap rent there, and then I moved to Queens. I’ve been there for 25 years now.

I went to the Philadelphia College of Art for four years. When I moved to New York, I hoped to find something in that field but I ended up in screen printing, working in a factory, and then I opened up my own screen-printing business for a few years, but I got tired of it and wanted to do an apprenticeship to learn how to tattoo.

So I started doing that and I did it under the radar before it was legal. I had my screen printing studio on Sixth Avenue and 28th Street and was tattooing out of there for about a year. I was actually sitting in at City Hall in the hearings to see if they were going to make tattooing legal or not so I could be one of the first ones to jump on it and find a spot.

I opened up officially in this spot in February 1997. It was a little difficult at first because no one wanted to rent out to a tattoo shop. They figured that it was going to just be bikers, parties, and all sorts of craziness, but luckily I had someone who had a shop in Jersey to vouch for me and back it up.

The landlord asked for a big deposit to make sure, but once I got the spot it worked out very well. A lot of people thought I wouldn’t succeed here because they said there was a curse on this place. It was a funeral home and a driving school, but the funeral home got shut down by the marshals for smuggling drugs in the coffins. They figured there was a cloud over this place, but luckily I’m not superstitious.

The neighborhood was very different. The rents were very low obviously. I used to park my car across the street where that apartment building is — there was a little gravel lot there that charged 100 bucks a month for parking. The neighborhood was just starting to become better. At the time, Avenue B was still a little rougher and Avenue C you wouldn’t even go to. There were still a lot of bars, including my favorite across the street, Z Bar. There was a good underground music scene going on, more than there is now. Avenue A was definitely a little bit more raw, more gritty.

I got to know all the local people around here. Everyone knew everyone. Everyone was always outside — whole families out there. For example, the ladies with their chairs out of the sidewalk feeding their pigeons, and the guy selling the Piragua — the flavored ice. They were always outside and a lot of people were selling odd stuff. It was [accepted]. There was no problem.

I had a lot of local people coming in for years. Initially, it was just people in the neighborhood and then a few years went by and we got a much wider range of people from all walks of life coming through. I’ve had people around for 20 years, but as you tattoo someone for 20 years they run out of room, but we’re doing generations now. I’ve got someone on Monday who’s bringing in his son. I’ve been here long enough that I’m tattooing their kids. I had some friends who came in years ago when I first opened, their daughter was in a stroller, and now I’ve done three tattoos on her already — makes me old.

When we’re busy maybe each person will do three or four people a day. Generally speaking, three hours is a good appointment. Anytime longer than that and people start to get a little squirmy, but we break it down into sessions for larger work. They’ll come back in a couple weeks once its healed and do another round.

I like to do the real detailed larger pieces. I like to put everything into each piece. There was one that was a Mayan temple back piece. It had the same amount of steps as Tikal. I did the drawing from the photograph and did it exactly like the actual ruin, so I was cursing myself out for trying to be so accurate when I was drawing and tattooing it. My God, these are a lot of steps.

James Maher is a fine art and studio photographer based in the East Village. Find his website here.

Out and About in the East Village

In this ongoing feature, East Village-based photographer James Maher provides us with a quick snapshot of someone who lives and/or works in the East Village.



By James Maher

Name: Ali Sahin
Occupation: Owner, C&B Café
Location: 7th Street between Avenue A and Avenue B
Date: Thursday, Jan at 4 pm

I’m from Turkey. I came here about 9 or 10 years ago. I visited here once before when I was a kid, and I guess it was time. New York is a charm. I’ve been in restaurants in New York for eight years now, cooking mostly, but I’ve done almost anything. I went to culinary school back in the day and worked for some fine dining restaurants in New York City, and then I wanted to open up something simpler and more approachable than fine dining.

Fine dining was a great experience. You learn a lot, but you can’t eat in a fine dining restaurant everyday — one financially and two it wouldn’t be that healthy. It’s a weird thing when you work in these fancy restaurants that you can’t afford to eat in. It was a good learning experience. It was like a school but they pay you, although kitchen work is pretty hard. The fine-dining world takes itself the most serious, which is great in one way, and it’s not that great in another, because at the end of the day it’s just food.

I was working in the West Village and there was this great little café owned by a French couple, 11th Street Café. I would always go and have a sandwich and coffee and they had a great staff and delicious food, fresh. So I thought, “Maybe I can do something like this, but a little different.” There it was very simple — we are very simple too but we make our own breads and sausages and stuff, so I took that and I said, “You know what, we’ll make everything in the house,” which is not an easy concept. We couldn’t do everything in house in the beginning because it takes a lot of labor and we didn’t have that much money, but as we started generating more money then I managed to hire other people, and now we make everything in house except cheese and butter — two years in.

I actually wanted to open in Brooklyn, where I lived at the time, but it didn’t work out — the hype and expense in Brooklyn was really high. I couldn’t find a place and I couldn’t agree with the landlords. I honestly never looked into the city because I thought I couldn’t afford it. I just randomly ran into an ad for a space below Houston, which was affordable, and so I started to look into lower Manhattan, and then the next ad was for this space, and it worked out. It happened in like 15 days after three years of trying to find a space.

The type of food is kind of hard to explain. We serve breakfast and lunch only — we serve breakfast all day and lunch starts after 11. Everything is made here and made to order. It’s a small café but it works like a high-end restaurant. We start cooking everything once you order. The idea is more approachable, more affordable, good food, which I think is still missing in New York City, and in America unfortunately. Food in New York at least is suffering a lot right now. A lot of places are closing down and big names are going out of business.

I never did a coffee shop concept, restaurants yes, but I was mostly behind the scenes. The first day we were open, I think it was a blizzard day, and I didn’t have milk or cream and people kept asking. Of course they asked for milk. One of the neighbors here, Daniel, who’s a longtime East Village person and used to be a theatre director, a very kind and artsy gentleman, brought us the milk and cream from his house. That was pretty great and he still comes in. And last year there was a blizzard and they shut down the subways, and I walked all the way from Bed Stuy. It was a two-hour walk. I didn’t know, but a bunch of people walked in that day. It was a great business day. Now I’ve moved back, a little too close. I live about 50 steps away — I never leave work.

I lived in this neighborhood when I first moved to New York, on Avenue C between 7th and 8th for the first two years, then I moved to Brooklyn and I worked in the West Village and Upper East Side. The East Village is special. The people here… especially after I started the business, now I talk to everybody who comes in and lives in the neighborhood. They’ve been really kind and generous. It’s amazing. I’ve talked to other people who run businesses in the neighborhood and we all feel the same way. I don’t think it could work anywhere else, honestly.

I feel like we’ve managed to build a place where it’s not just a hyped-out restaurant. It’s more like an in the neighborhood-forever type place. We can name about 70 percent of the people who walk into this place and have a small talk or conversations about their life – and then they know when they need to move faster too. We gotta work.

James Maher is a fine art and studio photographer based in the East Village. Find his website here.

Out and About in the East Village 2016 in review

That's a wrap on Out and About in the East Village (OAAITEV, per the T-shirts) this year.

As always, many thanks to East Village-based photographer James Maher for his continued contributions. (The feature dates to Aug. 1, 2012.) And also thank you to Stacie Joy for filling in several times this year when James was traveling.

Meanwhile, we're looking forward to featuring more people who live and/or work in the neighborhood next year. For now, here's a look back at this year's profiles...

Jan. 13 — Spike Polite (part 1)

Jan. 21 — Spike Polite (part 2)

Jan. 27 — Leslie McEachern

Feb. 3 — Niall Grant

Feb. 10 — Kevin Cloutier

Feb. 17 — Rafael Hines (part 1)

Feb. 24 — Rafael Hines (part 2)

March 2 — Annie Ju and Melissa Scott

March 9 — Parker Dulany

March 16 — Shari Albert

March 23 — Brother Rasheim

March 30 — Jon R. Jewett

April 6 — 2016 recap to date

April 20 — Alan Good (part 1)

April 27 — Alan Good (part 2)

May 4 — Maria and Brisco

May 11 — John Ellert and Sam

June 1 — Ceasar Noel Soto

June 8 — Joe (part 1)

June 15 — Joe (part 2)

June 22 — Colette Pwakah (part 1)

June 29 — Colette Pwakah (part 2)

July 6 — London

July 13 — Roosmarijn van Kessel

July 20 — Anna Pastoressa

July 27 — Creaux

Aug. 10 — 4-year recap

Aug. 17 — John Von Hartz

Aug. 24 — Craig

Aug. 31 — Hal Hirshorn

Sept. 14 — Amy Sheridan

Sept. 28 — Boris Ryback

Oct. 5 — Jamey Poole and Rusty James

Oct. 19 — Michelle Candela

Oct. 26 — Grant Stitt

Nov. 2 — Candice Brewer

Nov. 16 — Eric Paulin (part 1)

Nov. 23 — Eric Paulin (part 2)

Nov. 30 — Henry Hills

Dec. 14 — Cara Bloch, Carmen Ruiz-Davila and Luella

Out and About in the East Village

In this ongoing feature, East Village-based photographer James Maher provides us with a quick snapshot of someone who lives and/or works in the East Village.



By James Maher

Name: Cara Bloch (left), Carmen Ruiz-Davila and Luella
Occupation: Owners, Love Gang
Location: East Ninth Street between 1st Avenue and Avenue A
Time: Thursday, Dec. 8 at noon

Carmen: I was born in Barcelona. I was an artist, a sculptor, and 11 years ago I came to New York. I moved to the East Village in 2011 and now I live in Greenpoint. I used to live in the Bronx in the 1980s. In an article [about the store] The Village Voice wrote, ‘Carmen from the Bronx.’ I was like alright, I guess that gives me street cred. Don’t tell them that I went to school in Ohio.

When I opened up the store, I had this crazy idea that I was going to make sculptures, have a store, and have a child, and that didn’t work out. I opened up a store here in 2012, and it was called Deverado, a designer vintage clothing store. It was open for about 3-and-a-half years, and then I had a baby and took a year off. Then I proposed to Cara to have a store here that was a little bit of vintage but more independent designers. She was like, "Yeah, cool. Let’s do it." And we came up with Love Gang. That was in 2015.

Cara: I’m from Miami. I got into art school at the International Center for Photography (ICP). Since I was a child, I was always a music nerd, and after ICP one of my first assistant jobs was with a music video director, Matt Mahurin, and that just escalated everything into rock photography. At the time, going to art school was very competitive, and I’m sitting there like Mrs. Friendly. I needed to make friends outside of ICP, and I became very good friends with a girl named Abby who sang in bands, and we would just go and hang out in Three of Cups, downstairs. I was a big 1980s cheesy rock fan. I love Slayer and Anthrax. I loved all that stuff.

As these bands I photographed were getting bigger, they would start opening for bands like Circle Jerks and Iggy Pop, so they would give me photo passes. One of my first rock jobs was with Punk Planet, and that propelled me to begin a body of rock work, and then I started to drop my book off at various magazines. I was just getting rejected all over the place.

I did my second documentary, photographing rock fans at concerts in front of cars. Then I started to do sports fans, and I submitted that to American Photography — that was my first 2004 American Photography award. I showed this body of work along with my music work, and I got a message that I was going to Boston. My first job was Bright Eyes, and I was like “Oh my god.” I was on a plane for the next 10 years. I did portraiture and live photography. My boss always said to me, once you get in one magazine it’s a snowball effect. Then Spin contacted me; then record labels contacted me. I couldn’t believe it was happening. I was 24 or 25, and I wanted to take every job and go everywhere and do everything. I also started to work non-profit for Rock the Vote, and that was a great experience.

Then at 30 years old I got sick. I was sick for five years with something called vestibular migraines. There were a lot of misdiagnoses. Doctors would tell me I was depressed. I said, "How can I be depressed? This is my dream come true." I had this ignorant idea that you’d go to the doctor and you’d be fine. And it just took one doctor, who took a blood test. I was severely deficient in vitamin D. It sounds like a very glamorous job, but when you fly to LA, it’s a red-nighter, you’re exhausted, you’re put in a van pumping yourself with Coca-Cola, and then you’re dealing with an entitled celebrity who doesn’t want you around, and you have to be on. Then you have to turn your deadlines in. I think it just had a big effect, and I was no angel either. I think it just took its toll on my immune system. When you get sick, life changes.

At that time, I met Carmen. I thought, "This girl’s so cool." She was so stylish and friendly, and she collected vintage. I always had a passion for that but nowhere near her knowledge.

Carmen: I’m a vintage nerd. I like the history of it. I like the concept of it.

Cara: I was fascinated. I didn’t know the history and I didn’t know the designers, and she invited me to her house. I said, “I’m going to be friends with this girl.” Sometimes I would work in her designer vintage store. And at the time, I started to work again, but with the iPod coming out, with the music industry, everything changed. I wasn’t making the same money anymore. I also thought it would be really nice to not travel and stay in one place.

Carmen: We had to come up with a concept that we were both amenable to. I had some ideas. I wanted the store to be more about the East Village, whereas the other store was a destination. It was high-end vintage and it was very niche. I sold to a lot of designers and stylists. This store was about creating a fun environment with a lower price point We have pop-ups with local designers as well. We’re the first store that some designers show in.

Cara: We love the history. We have reoccurring customers and it’s great. They hang out and have cocktails and they come to our pop-ups. That’s lovely. What I loved about Carmen’s concept was that it was all about emerging and independent designers — things that are special and unique, that you can’t find – the anti-Zara. We also came out with our own line. Carmen designed a whole beautiful clothing line. To open this store, to come out with our own line, and now she’s working on these amazing candles… She’s turning into a chemist.

Luella is like our therapy dog. We’re all working late and hard and long hours, and she’s great to have around. She’s a good salesperson.



Carmen: On Dec. 16 we’re doing a silent auction for Planned Parenthood [details here], and they’re going to come and speak. We have about 40 donations — almost everyone from the neighborhood and some artists. We just want to raise as much money as we can, and 100 percent of the profits go toward the New York chapter. I was never an activist. I went to my first protest not that long ago, so I think one good thing about all this happening is that it’s really turning non-protestors into protestors and activists.

James Maher is a fine art and studio photographer based in the East Village. Find his website here.