Remembering longtime LES activist Nancy Rose Sparrow Bartow

Top photo by Sara Bennett 

Text courtesy of Julie Carson and friends 

Nancy Rose Sparrow Bartow, a weaver, dancer, devoted civil rights and community activist, and longtime local resident, passed away at home on Sept. 15. She was 93.

Born in Detroit in 1933, Nancy was the youngest of three born to Scottish and English immigrant parents. She often spoke of her appreciation for her mother's craft and skills, developed out of necessity, as well as her father's habit of inviting strangers in for dinner. 

From this foundation came Nancy's practice of radical love and acceptance, which fueled her activism and the energy she brought to friendship and community involvement. 

In Detroit, Nancy learned to dance and fell in love with art and music, befriending many in the arts, like painter and drag performer LeRoy Foster. 

After graduating from Wayne State University with a degree in movement therapy, Nancy moved to New York City and made the Lower East Side her home for over 70 years. There, she met and married her first husband, Len Chandler, a folk singer and political activist. 

Together they tore it up in the 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene with friends, famous and not, in music, the arts, and the civil rights movement. Among the luminaries: Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and James Baldwin. 

They attended the Newport Folk Festivals and the 1963 March on Washington, where Len performed; they sailed on Pete Seeger's inaugural month-long voyage aboard the sloop Clearwater in 1969 along the Hudson River to champion environmental awareness, with Pete, Len, and others performing concerts along the way. 

After Nancy saw the 2024 film "A Complete Unknown" about Bob Dylan and the early days of folk music in NYC, she remarked it was like watching a home movie of her own life with her just off camera. 

Nancy loved to dance, and did so all her life. She danced with Martha Graham, and kept a picture of herself from The Boston Globe dancing in Graham’s groundbreaking tube of stretch jersey.

A masterful artist at the loom, Nancy studied weaving and design at NYU. She worked designing and producing textiles commercially, and wove for her own pleasure on her enormous home looms.

She was also an accomplished leather artisan, working alongside her longtime friend, Barbara Shaum, in Barbara's East Village leather sandal shop. 

She brought her leatherwork to her civil rights activism. She worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi during and after the 1964 Freedom Summer, when hundreds of volunteers came to register Black voters. 

In 1965, she founded multiple leather co-ops under SNCC's offshoot, the Poor People's Corporation (PPC), so former sharecroppers and domestic workers could earn a living on their own terms. She designed bags, sourced the materials and equipment, taught the co-op members to sew, and arranged distribution and sales channels like Liberty House, first as a catalog and later stores in New York.

A joyous couple

In 1985, Nancy married her great love, Jim Bartow, a jazz guitarist, composer, and revered teacher at Harlem School of the Arts. They were a joyous couple, with legions of friends. 

After he died in 2015, their affection lived on through their cheerful answering machine duet, "You've reached Nancy... and Jim!"

Nancy and Jim loved to dance together, and would push the furniture in their apartment aside to properly dance on any random Tuesday. Whenever music played, they took the floor unabashedly. 

More recently, she danced with the Movement Choir, a liturgical dance group at Trinity Episcopal Church, and volunteered with the Dance for Parkinson's Disease group. 

A life of always showing up 

Nancy was a dedicated volunteer throughout her life. She served on community boards, worked for causes that mattered to her, leafleted for political candidates and causes, read to the blind, and showed up for friends in need. 

A piece of art hanging on her wall reads, "We Are Each Other's Business." Nancy lived that in the best way. She didn’t just care; she showed up, she helped, and she made a difference. 

Her commitment to community organizing and social change never wavered as she aged. In 1992, she helped launch the Coalition for a District Alternative (CoDA), a progressive organization that recruited and backed grassroots candidates for local office on the Lower East Side and East Village. She served for many years on Community Board 3, the board of the Gouverneur Gardens housing coop where she lived, and the community advisory board of Gouverneur Hospital. 

Her activism continued into her 90s. Her ICE whistle hung by her front door, and she wore it around her neck whenever she left the apartment. 

This past March, the New York City Council presented her with an award recognizing her life of service "which is truly the lifeblood of the community and the city." She was honored as an "outstanding citizen, one who is worthy of the esteem of both our community and the great City of New York." 

Nancy is survived by her nieces, nephews, grandnieces and grandnephews by the dozen, friends, and neighbors. 

Nancy was a beloved and inspirational friend to all, entreating us to "every day: move your body, have joy, and have love." 

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There's a celebration of life for Nancy Rose Sparrow Bartow this Saturday, Nov. 14, from to 3-to-5 p.m. in the Community Room, 605 Water St. (basement of Building 4, Gouverneur Gardens). All are welcome.

RIP Richard Lloyd

Image via 

Richard Lloyd, the influential guitarist and co-founder of Television, one of the defining bands of New York's early punk scene, died yesterday at his home in Chattanooga, Tenn. He was 75. 

Lloyd had been diagnosed with bile duct cancer earlier this year. According to a family statement shared with Rolling Stone, his wife, Sheila, and their dog, Willie Mays, were by his side. 

Born Richard John Alt in Pittsburgh in 1951, Lloyd moved to New York with his mother shortly afterward and grew up in Greenwich Village. He took up guitar at an early age, attended concerts at the Fillmore East as a teenager and studied at Stuyvesant High School before dropping out. 

After brief stays in Boston and Los Angeles, Lloyd returned to New York and became involved in the emerging downtown music scene. Through Terry Ork, he connected with Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell and Billy Ficca, who had been playing together as the Neon Boys. 

With Lloyd joining on guitar, the group became Television. The band became a fixture at CBGB on the Bowery, alongside Patti Smith, the Ramones and other artists who helped shape New York's punk scene. (Hell departed in 1975 and was replaced by Fred Smith, formerly of Blondie.) 

Television signed with Elektra Records in 1976 and released its debut album, Marquee Moon, in February 1977. Although it wasn't a major commercial success in the United States, the album became a landmark of the era, particularly for the intricate interplay between Lloyd's and Verlaine's guitars. The band found greater commercial success in the United Kingdom. 

After Television's initial breakup in 1978, Lloyd pursued a solo career, beginning with Alchemy, and continued recording and performing for decades. 

In later years, he moved to a farm in Chattanooga, where he converted a barn into a recording studio.

Lloyd's death follows that of his longtime Television bandmate Tom Verlaine, who died in January 2023 at age 73.

Remembering Rose Friedman, East Village resident and NPR editor

Rose Friedman, an East Village resident since 2014, died of cancer on Sept. 17. She was 38. 

Friedman, an accomplished labor historian and arts and culture editor for NPR, fought for and won a major increase in paid parental leave for her co-workers in the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. 

Rose worked on dozens of stories with an abiding interest in food, books and workers' struggles. She also covered the Harvey Weinstein trial in Lower Manhattan for the network. 

Rose is survived by her partner, Andrew, and her children, Pepi and Lotte. 

She was a partisan of the neighborhood's eclectic food and drink culture and was often found out along Avenue C, especially at ABC Beer Co., where an informal gathering will celebrate her life on Sunday (Oct. 25) at 2 p.m. 

In lieu of flowers, the family suggests tipping your bartenders double. 

ABC Beer Co. is at 96 Avenue C between Sixth Street and Seventh Street.

A celebration of life for Pamela Pier, longtime owner of Dinosaur Hill

Friends and neighbors will gather Saturday afternoon (Oct. 17) to celebrate the life of Pamela S. Pier, the longtime owner of Dinosaur Hill, the East Village toy store that was a fixture on Ninth Street for nearly four decades. 

Pier died earlier this year at age 82. 

She opened Dinosaur Hill in 1983 at 306 E. Ninth St. just east of Second Avenue, filling the shop with wooden toys, puppets, games, books, puzzles and other decidedly non-electronic diversions. 

After 37 years in business, Pier retired and closed Dinosaur Hill in late 2020. As we reported at the time, the shop had become a destination for generations of neighborhood families. 

The celebration will take place Saturday from 2-4 p.m. at Green Oasis & Gilbert's Sculpture Garden, 370 E. Eighth St. between Avenues C and D. 

The gathering is open to friends, neighbors and others who knew Pier and Dinosaur Hill. RSVPs are requested here.

Remembering John Penley, photographer and activist of the East Village

Image via spagnuolo.nyc

John Penley, the photographer and longtime activist whose presence was a fixture at East Village and Lower East Side protests for decades, died on Sept. 15. He was 74. 

Friends said Penley had been in declining health after being diagnosed with an abdominal tumor and suffering a stroke. He died in Lake Havasu, Ariz., where he had been living in recent years. 

Penley was a familiar figure in the neighborhood's squatter and housing-rights movements and at protests in and around Tompkins Square Park. 

He was both participant and documentarian — carrying a camera while taking part in many of the causes he photographed.

A former Navy servicemember, Penley began photographing demonstrations and political actions as a way of documenting the movements he was involved with, eventually working as a photojournalist. 

His images appeared in The New York Times, Daily News, New York Post, Newsday, High Times, The Guardian, East Village Eye and other publications. 

His photographs captured a period of enormous change in the East Village and Lower East Side, particularly the battles over housing, squatting and gentrification during the 1980s and 1990s. His work also documented AIDS and gay-rights activism and protests involving police brutality, the death penalty and racial discrimination. 

In later years, he photographed Occupy Wall Street and demonstrations supporting Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks. 

Penley's archive — papers, photographs and negatives dating from roughly 1980 to 2013 — is housed at NYU's Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. Penley began donating the collection in 2009, with additional material arriving in 2013. 

His activism occasionally landed him on the other side of the camera — and in court. In 1982, he was arrested and sentenced for trespassing at the Savannah River nuclear power plant in South Carolina during an anti-nuclear protest. 

Five years later, he was arrested at a rally he organized to register homeless New Yorkers to vote; his archive includes documents from his subsequent lawsuit against the NYPD and then-Mayor Ed Koch. 

By the 2000s, Penley remained an unmistakable neighborhood presence, protesting development and displacement and inserting himself into local battles large and small. (EVG covered many of the events that he organized. Find a sampling here ... here ... and here ... among many others.)

He was known as much for his blunt opinions and colorful personality as for his activism.

His interests and activism extended far beyond the neighborhood. Friends remembered his involvement in struggles from Akwesasne to Oaxaca. 

In his later years out West, he advocated for low-income residents affected by development in Las Vegas, including around the construction of the Sphere. 

But much of what Penley saw through his camera remains here. Thousands of his images preserve an East Village and Lower East Side of protests, squats, artists, activists and street life — and the neighborhood fights in which he was rarely just an observer.

Photo by Paul DeRienzo via Facebook

Celebrating Chet Mazur at Otto’s Shrunken Head

Photos and reporting by Stacie Joy 

Friends, family and fellow musicians gathered at Otto's Shrunken Head on 14th Street on Friday evening for a celebration of the life of Chet Mazur, a longtime presence in the downtown music and arts scene. 

Mazur died last month after being struck by a U.S. Postal Service truck near his Hell's Kitchen home. He was 66. Just hours earlier, he had performed at Otto's with his band the Rasslers.

In the back room, a slideshow played as family members and friends shared stories about Mazur. Photos and handwritten remembrances lined the hallway, and bands performed later in the evening, including Alice Donut, a group often associated with Mazur.

The mood mixed sadness with plenty of laughter as attendees recalled their favorite Chet stories. 

Outside, several people remarked how much he would have enjoyed the gathering — that it was his kind of party.

One attendee said she was glad some time had passed since the initial shock of his death, allowing everyone to celebrate his life properly — "all the good and wild parts."

Thursday's parting shots

Tributes to the great Tim Curry seen at Superiority Burger on Avenue A. (The reverse celebrates Dolly Parton.)... and last night above the Bowery Mural Wall at Houston (via @thequeerreview) ...

Tuesday's parting shot

A tribute to Dolly Parton this evening at the corner of Tompkins Square Park on 10th Street and Avenue A. 

The country music legend, songwriter, actor and philanthropist died today at age 80.

Remembering Chet Mazur

Chet Mazur on the cover of the Alice Donut record Mule from 1990 

Chet Mazur, a longtime presence in the local music scene, died this past weekend after being struck by a U.S. Postal Service truck in Hell's Kitchen. He was 66. 

According to published reports, Mazur was struck early Saturday morning near his home on West 55th Street and Ninth Avenue, where he had lived in recent years. The driver allegedly left the scene and was later arrested. 

Just hours earlier, Mazur had performed at Otto's Shrunken Head on 14th Street between Avenue A and Avenue B with his band the Rasslers. 

Mazur had been part of the downtown music and arts scene for decades. 

His death has prompted an outpouring of remembrances from friends and fellow musicians. 

"He was everywhere and knew everything and everybody," longtime friend and Alice Donut member Michael Jung told The City Reporter. "Everybody knows Chet, and everybody loves Chet." (Read more here: Stunned Friends Remember an East Village 'Torchbearer for Sleaze Rock.') 

And a few tributes from social media...

 

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RIP Carlos 'Chino' Garcia, co-founder of CHARAS and longtime Lower East Side activist

Photo from 2021 by Stacie Joy 

Carlos "Chino" Garcia, a pioneering Lower East Side community organizer whose decades of activism helped shape the neighborhood through housing advocacy, community gardens, environmental initiatives and the arts, died last week.

Garcia, who had been in declining health in recent years, was among the co-founders of CHARAS, the influential cultural and community organization that transformed the former P.S. 64 on Ninth Street between Avenue B and Avenue C into the El Bohio Community Center. (CHARAS came from the initials of its co-founders — Chino Garcia, Humberto Crespo, Angelo Gonzáles, Roy Battiste, Moses Figueroa and Sal Becker.)

From the city-owned building, CHARAS became a hub for neighborhood life, hosting community meetings, children's programs, art exhibitions, concerts, theater, job training and political organizing in the late 1970s before the group was evicted in 2001 after the Giuliani administration sold the property.

In subsequent years, Garcia and other activists continued to fight for the space, which a developer unsuccessfully tried to convert into dorms and other uses before finally selling the property in early January 2024. 

Born in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, Garcia moved to New York as a child in 1951 and eventually settled on the Lower East Side in 1958. 

In a 2015 oral history with Village Preservation, Garcia reflected on how his activism grew out of his youth. 

"We became leaders because we said, 'We're getting screwed by the society, not just a couple of thugs,'" he said, describing how he and others came to see housing, education and jobs as part of the same struggle. 

Beyond CHARAS, Garcia played a key role in tenant organizing, sweat-equity housing rehabilitation, the creation of community gardens — including La Plaza Cultural — and efforts to preserve neighborhood institutions.

Despite losing El Bohio, Garcia remained committed to community work. 

"We're still around. We're still doing projects," he said.

 We'll update this post with memorial service information when it becomes available.

Tributes to Garcia on social media include...

 

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Volunteers honor founders of Backpacks for the Street on the Lower East Side

Photos and reporting by Stacie Joy

Volunteers with Backpacks for the Street gathered on the Lower East Side on Sunday to honor the nonprofit's two founders, Jayson Conner and Jeffrey Newman, who died within days of each other earlier this summer, according to The New York Times. 

Conner, 48, died June 28 of a heart attack at the couple's Manhattan home. Newman, 58, died on July 2. A cause of death was not revealed. 

The couple launched Backpacks for the Street in 2018, filling backpacks with essentials such as socks, toiletries, notebooks and wet wipes for New Yorkers experiencing homelessness. 

What began with a handful of backpacks grew into an operation with nearly 40 volunteers that has distributed more than 180,000 backpacks across Manhattan. 

Each week, volunteers assembled more than 100 backpacks before distribution ... in which Conner and Newman emphasized treating every person with dignity and compassion. 

"It was fascinating to see how well they managed to communicate with people on the streets," volunteer Kristina Kashtanova told the Times. "They taught me how to be a better human and how to talk to people who were so different from me."

Volunteers are discussing how to continue the program, though no decisions have been made.

An L7 moment at Irving Plaza

From the last time we saw a longtime favorite, L7 — October 2022 at the Irving Plaza, 15th Street and Irving Place. 

Adding to the chorus of tributes to Jennifer Finch (upper right), the band's bassist, singer and songwriter, who died yesterday from an aggressive form of brain cancer. She was 59.

Remembering Steve Almaas

Photo via Instagram

Steve Almaas, a longtime East Village resident, musician and songwriter whose career stretched from the pioneering Minneapolis punk scene to New York's alt-country movement, died June 5 at his home in Beacon, N.Y., from complications related to cancer. He was 69. 

As reported by the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Almaas was a founding member of the influential Minneapolis band the Suicide Commandos, whose late-1970s work helped inspire a generation of Twin Cities musicians, including members of Hüsker Dü, the Replacements and Soul Asylum. 

After relocating to New York in 1979, Almaas became a fixture on the downtown music scene. He played in several bands, including Beat Rodeo, the group for which he became best known. The band is widely regarded as an early pioneer of the Americana and alt-country sound that would later gain broader popularity. Beat Rodeo released two albums on I.R.S. Records in the 1980s, with the group's debut produced by Mitch Easter, who also worked on R.E.M.'s earliest recordings. 

Almaas also recorded several solo records and was a frequent collaborator with other musicians. Friends quoted by the Star Tribune remembered Almaas as a connector who brought musicians together. 

In addition to music, Almaas worked as a teacher, librarian and community advocate. In recent years, he lived in the Hudson Valley, where he worked at the Woodstock Public Library. 

He is survived by his partner, Brandy Burre; two sisters, Janet Almaas Pickford and Judy Almaas; his daughter, Solveig; son-in-law TJ; and grandchildren Sully and Loa. 

We knew Steve from our many evenings at Sophie's in the days leading up to the launch of EVG. He lived on the same block of Fifth Street and was one of the bar's memorable cast of characters. 

We would occasionally run into him in recent years. Unaware of his health challenges, we didn't realize what he had been facing when we crossed paths this spring.

When asked how he was doing, he paused for a moment and said, "Just trying to enjoy all the positive things in life."

He smiled, as upbeat as ever, said goodbye and continued down the block.

 

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A celebration of life for Albert Fabozzi in Tompkins Square Park

Photos by Stacie Joy 

Friends, neighbors and community members gathered around the Tompkins Square Park holiday tree this morning to share memories, stories and music honoring a longtime community leader and the founder of the Park's annual holiday tree-lighting tradition.

Albert Fabozzi recently passed away at age 85 after a short illness. 

He started the Tompkins holiday tree lighting in 1992, following the death of his longtime partner, Glenn Barnett, from an AIDS-related illness. 

What began as a memorial to Barnett and others lost in the AIDS crisis became a lasting neighborhood tradition. 

Speakers included Tom Birchard (below) of Veselka and Sam Shipman, Barnett's nephew. Chris Tanner also performed as Mama Cass Elliot, singing "Make Your Own Kind of Music," one of Fabozzi's favorite songs.

After the remarks and music, attendees laid flowers at the base of the tree in remembrance of Fabozzi and Barnett.