In the 1950s, she married the poet LeRoi Jones, who later changed his name to become the Black power nationalist Amiri Baraka. Hettie Jones spoke and wrote about the bigotry and antisemitism she faced at that time, both as a Jewish woman and a white woman married to a Black man.In 1957, the couple founded a literary magazine, Yugen, and the Totem Press, which published works by legendary Beat writers, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Williams S. Burroughs.Later divorced, they had two daughters: Kellie Jones, a professor of art, archaeology and African American studies at Columbia University, and Lisa Jones Brown, a writer on staff at The Village Voice for 15 years.The family had lived at 27 Cooper Square since the early 1960s and the heyday of the Beats.
Village Preservation has more about her fight to save her longtime home between Fifth Street and Sixth Street, where she lived for nearly six decades:
In 2007, when a hotel developer announced plans to build the 22-story Cooper Square Hotel, it looked like the 1844 Greek Revival house at 27 Cooper Square would be demolished. The four-story building that currently stands on this lot is of unknown origins. However, clues from a tax assessment records and historic maps indicate it might have been constructed between 1843 and 1845, as two narrow houses with ground-floor shops.Given Hettie's petite size, it would be easy to call her successful effort to save the structure a David-and-Goliath triumph, but that would diminish her accomplishment. Remarkably, her gentle but persuasive stress on the building's age and artistic heritage convinced the hotel's owners. They opted to spare the building and simply utilize the structure's lower two floors for corporate headquarters. Hettie also convinced the hotel to reinstall the vintage stained glass window above the entrance door, which had been removed long before.
Van Dalen was born in Amstelveen, Holland, in 1938 to a conservative Calvinist family during World War II. He began rearing pigeons at 12, seeking solace in the companionship of a community outside the instability around him.Enraptured by the magic of their flight, van Dalen saw his own migration journey, from Holland to Canada and ultimately to the United States, reflected in the migratory nature of the birds.After arriving in New York's Lower East Side in 1966, before ultimately settling in the East Village, van Dalen served as witness, storyteller, and documentarian of the dramatic cultural shifts in the neighborhood.While active in the alternative art scene in the East Village during the 1980s, van Dalen began his career as a graphic designer. Working as a studio assistant to Saul Steinberg for over 30 years, van Dalen learned the stylization and design aesthetics that would ultimately ground the visual language he used to discuss the culture around him.Van Dalen became known for his Night Street Drawings (1975–77), a monochrome series of graphite drawings documenting the surrounding Lower East Side with tenderness and empathy, including vignettes of car wrecks, sex workers, crumbling buildings, and more.As poet and critic John Yau wrote, all of van Dalen's work arose "out of a meticulous draftsmanship in service of an idiosyncratic imagination merged with civic-mindedness."
I consider myself a documentarian of the East Village, yet I am a participant and spectator to its evolution. Began documenting my street surroundings in 1975, urged on by wanting to note and remember these lives. Came to realize I had to embrace wholeheartedly, with pencil in hand, my streets with its raw emotions.
Debby Lee founded Cafeteria Culture as a concerned parent of public school students. After her younger daughter announced that she didn't want to eat school food anymore because styrofoam trays were "killing the polar bears," Debby Lee started working to eliminate styrofoam from New York City Public School cafeterias.Always a uniter but never afraid to push boundaries, Debby Lee advocated with constant pressure on decision-makers to eliminate foam trays in school cafeterias and didn't stop until her mission was accomplished. This grassroots victory eliminated over half a billion plastic foam trays per year from student meals, landfills, and incinerators in New York City and now 18 other cities across the U.S.Debby Lee's public school work to drive change forward has a tremendous and lasting impact on our world far beyond the city. Her dream to achieve equitable zero waste has fueled the continued work of Cafeteria Culture and paved the way for New York City's 2019 and New York State's 2022 foam bans. We owe much to Debby Lee's sheer determination to tackle this problem that at the outset, most people thought was impossible to accomplish.Debby Lee centered our students throughout these victories. Whether she was teaching them to build giant foam monster puppets or to create their own stop-motion animation projects, she shared her creative gifts to support students in telling their own stories. These principles continue to guide our teaching today to support Cafeteria Culture students as they continue to advocate for environmental justice and possibility.
Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl who escaped from New York City's Central Park Zoo and became one of the city's most beloved celebrities as he flew around Manhattan, has died, zoo officials announced Friday.A little over one year after he was freed from his cage at the zoo in a criminal act that has yet to be solved, Flaco appears to have collided with an Upper West Side building, the zoo said in a statement.
As you may have already seen, Flaco the Eurasian eagle-owl has passed away. I am sad beyond words. Flaco defied the odds and made quite a life for himself in the city over the past year. Along the way he came to mean so much to so many, including me. ❤️🦉 pic.twitter.com/gJnby3TtvB
— David Lei (@davidlei) February 24, 2024
Thank you for visiting us and for connecting us to something bigger. Rest easy, Flaco 💔 #flaco #birdcpp @BirdCentralPark @davidlei pic.twitter.com/vxgeasUvtP
— RHP (@RobinHerbstPapa) February 24, 2024
I am heartbroken tonight as I know so many of you are. I took this video of Flaco one week ago today, which was the last time I saw him. Hearing him hoot brings me comfort, and I hope it brings you some comfort too.💕🦉
— JacquelineUWS (@jacquelineUWS) February 24, 2024
We will never forget you, Flaco. pic.twitter.com/VvAOyYaupf
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.'"
Burrows began her Broadway career in the 1950s, starring alongside Ossie Davis in "The Wisteria Trees." She continued to perform on Broadway for several years, appearing in such shows as "The Green Pastures," "The Skin of Our Teeth," and "The Blacks." But Burrows became frustrated with the narrow range of roles available to Black women, and she left Broadway to pursue a solo career in one-woman shows.Burrows' one-woman Off-Broadway show, "Walk Together Children," was critically acclaimed and continued as an international tour after its initial run. She went on to perform other one-woman shows, including "Sister! Sister!" "Dark Fire" and “The Great White Way: The Story of Rose McClendon."
In 2020, she was honored with an Obie Award for Lifetime Achievement. Burrows was also an activist who represented the Women's International Democratic Federation at the United Nations.
... including this piece in The New Yorker titled The Many Lives of Vinie Burrows.Vinie Burrows, an actress who made her mark on Broadway in the 1950s but who grew frustrated by how few choice roles were available for Black women and turned her focus to one-woman shows exploring the legacies of racism and sexism, has died at 99. https://t.co/qakbhiKE74
— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 5, 2024
Of course, he missed going into the store, said his wife and partner of 42 years Randy Klein. "He would go in every day with gusto. Never angry or with frustration."Phil and Randy Klein are a New York story if ever there was one. Having met 43 years ago at a bus stop in front of the New York Public Library, they were both going to the same stop at 34th Street to Penn Station — one to Flushing and the other to Long Island. That became a ride of love, and they married a year later in 1982.You could say that fateful meeting started them off on the same road into a shared future that led to Whiskers Holistic Pet Care. Born from their commitment to trying to save their own dog from cancer and the frustration and anger with traditional recommendations and medicine.
Bob Contant, co-founder and co-owner of St. Mark's Bookshop, died at his Manhattan home on Nov. 6. Per published reports, he died of cardiac arrest. He was 80.Bob Contant, a founder of the countercultural St. Mark’s Bookshop in the East Village, who prided himself on stocking titles that were not “too popular” and stayed in business for four decades, died on Nov. 6 at his home in Manhattan. He was 80. https://t.co/uFpbf6K1GR
— NYT Metro (@NYTMetro) November 22, 2023
He came to New York in 1972 and was manager of the old 8th Street Bookshop in Greenwich Village. In 1977, Contant, along with others working at East Side Books — Terry McCoy, Peter Dargis, and Tom Evans — decided to open their own store at 13 St. Mark's Place. St. Mark's Bookshop moved to a larger location, at 12 St. Mark's Place, in 1987 and then in 1993 to a new development by Cooper Union at 31 Third Avenue.The store built on its strength in poetry, critical studies, small press literature, and art. But after many years, with a change of board, the school shifted its approach to the bookstore and offered no help when, in the wake of the financial crisis, St. Mark's had trouble paying its $20,000-a-month rent.
