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Spotted on 11th Street near Avenue C this morning.

Print still isn't dead

An EVG reader notes that someone keeps taking the Sunday Times from outside a building on East Eighth Street.

So now the super is tracking the situation via the building's surveillance system... from yesterday...



Previously on EV Grieve:
To the person stealing this newspaper

Still living the dream on the Lower East Side

The Times checks in with a piece for the paper's real estate section titled The Lower East Side, Where Gritty Meets Trendy.

Aside from details on the schools and the commute, the Times provides some average pricing for rentals and condos.

Despite the higher prices for everything, people still come here to live the dream. (Oh, that's what dreams are made of.)

“This used to be a place for a new beginning, people living the dream in a tenement apartment,” said Ariel Tirosh, an associate broker with Douglas Elliman who is the sales agent for several luxury condos, including 100 Norfolk and 179 Ludlow. “Now they live the dream in a new condo.”

Living in… the East Village

[Random EVG photo from the archives]

The Times checks in with a "Living in" piece about the neighborhood ("The East Village Clings to a Colorful Past") … your basic primer with some history and what not.

Passing along a few real-estate fact and figures from the piece:

Though home prices are no longer cheap, the East Village still offers a slim advantage in terms of value over other Manhattan neighborhoods… The average price per square foot of a condo in Manhattan this year through Nov. 30 is $1,643; in the East Village, it is $1,562, which is about 16.5 percent higher than 2013. There are only about 33 condos on the market…

And!

[Bond New York broker] Wagner said he does not notice much difference between average condo prices in the East Village and those in Chelsea or the West Village. Studios typically run around $485,000; one-bedrooms about $900,000; and two-bedrooms about $1.5 million, with outliers in both directions. Co-ops typically cost about 20 percent less than condos, he said.

The New York Times profiles Ben Shaoul

On the topic of Ben Shaoul, currently developing the former Cabrini Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation on Avenue B and East Fifth Street ... as you may have seen, he was the subject of a lengthy feature in The New York Times on Sunday.

Writer Rebeccca Flint Marx chronicled how the president of Magnum Real Estate got his start ... amassing an estimated 40 buildings in the East Village alone. ... she also documented some of criticism that he has garnered from tenants along the way ...

However, as the article noted, Shaoul defends his record and wonders why he doesn't get a "pat on the back" about renovations/improvements from residents ... he also said that he doesn't understand why people hate him. "I'm a regular guy, I have feelings."

There's too much in the article, which also quotes EV Grieve, to summarize here. You can read the whole article here.

52 years ago today: First mention of the 'East Village' in The New York Times

Some time ago, our old friend Pinhead sent along a clip from The New York Times ... As far as his research could tell, the first time that The New York Times mentioned the East Village in print was on Feb. 7, 1960 — 52 years ago today.

The article was titled "'Village' Spills Across 3D Ave." And it appeared on Page 1. As the article notes, the destruction of the Third Avenue El in 1956 "helped stir up a minor social and realty revolution on the Lower East Side."

And, here we go...

Uh-oh...

And here come the rental agents... in the eighth paragraph of the article, "East Village" makes its appearance...

The article makes a lot of interesting observations... such as the growth of "high-rent apartment houses" that popped up along Fourth Avenue, replacing some second-hand book shops in the process.

You can access (buy) the article at the Times here.

Future trivia: Feb. 5, 2012, was the first day that the Times mentioned "NoEVil."

Going for a ride with Fran Lebowitz

Over at the Times this evening, there's an interview with Fran Lebowitz, who owns (and drives!) a 1979 Checker Marathon, "which she keeps in an expensive garage in the East Village." Reporter Michael M. Grynbaum tagged along for a ride. An excerpt from the Q-and-A:

What about those pedestrian plazas that the mayor installed in Times Square?

Closing down the streets the way he did — you know, the lawn chairs in Times Square and that kind of stuff? It’s grotesquely suburban. O.K.? It makes New York seem like a failed Rust Belt city, where they are trying to, you know, bring people downtown to a mall where no one shops because the factory closed. It is the opposite of an urban environment.

Thanks to EV Grieve reader Mykola (Mick) Dementiuk for the link ...

Dear Bill Keller:

Spotted the other day on Avenue B and Eighth Street.

NYU has annoyed neighbors for a long time, apparently

Well, this is almost too good to be true...It's from a New York Times article from January 1914, back when NYU was (mostly) in the Bronx. You can read a PDF of the article here.

Members "sing and tango." Heh. Nellie Vought, early NIMBY?

Death becomes him

Hey now. Just catching up with the Times of New York from the other day... The newspaper reviews Shepard Fairey's Deitch Projects show. And what does the reviewer think?

"On the walls of an art gallery, his efforts look like death warmed over."

Instructive if you have problems unifying your 1,800 square foot, four bedroom home

There's a Home & Garden piece in the Times titled "An East Village Apartment, Sleek and Childproof."

The piece begins...

AFTER hiring and firing two architects in three years, David and Blanche Uyttendaele had a home with a split personality.

The back of their 1,800-square foot co-op in the East Village was traditional — like a prewar apartment on the Upper West Side — with a long, narrow hallway that led to the three bedrooms and master bathroom. The front felt more like a loft, with one open living and dining space.

They needed to unify the space somehow, but that wasn’t their only challenge.

The Uyttendaeles (pronounced YOU-ten-dales), both 40, have two rambunctious boys ... who treat the apartment like a playground, racing around barefoot after school and leapfrogging from the coffee table to the sofa like small superheroes. So the space needed to be childproof as well.

Actually, I stopped reading at this point. Let me know how it ends.

[Photo: Elizabeth Felicella for The New York Times]

Ray's in the Times

At the Times, Jim Dwyer checks in on the situation at Ray's. He talked with Bob Arihood... He also spoke with Arianna Gil, who helped organize the Saturday night delivery service. (Speaking of which, it's Saturday. If you need something delivered... 718-473-9636)

The headline: Not Your Banks’ Bailouts: Stores Too Loved to Fail

Anyway, here's a passage:

One recent blustery night, Maria Musial stood behind the counter at Ray’s, where she has worked since arriving from Elk, Poland, in the early 1980s.

“When I came, he was nearly the only store on the block,” Ms. Musial said. “The squat people was here. Now it’s young customers, new people.”

A friend, Bozenna, chimed in.

“They don’t like egg creams,” Bozenna said.

Read the whole article here.

[Photo by Michael Sean Edwards.]

After helping ruin the East Village, NYU turns its attention to covering it

With the help of The New York Times, the East Village is officially now a hyperlocal journalism experiment at NYU. Not content to just gobble up real estate all over the neighborhood, decapitate churches and fill the streets with obnoxious students, NYU has now teamed up with The New York Times to gentrify the EV blogosphere. Here's the official release:

NYTimes.com announced today a collaboration with New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute to create a new Local community news and information Web site covering the East Village in New York City.

The Local East Village site will be developed by N.Y.U.'s journalism faculty and students and is scheduled to launch later this fall. Richard G. Jones, an award-winning veteran journalist and former New York Times reporter, will serve as the editor of the site. Mr. Jones will work with students, faculty and the East Village community to cover the news of everyday life in the neighborhood.

Together with N.Y.U. professors Yvonne Latty and Darragh Worland, Mr. Jones will also manage "The Hyperlocal Newsroom," a course that will allow students to engage in a variety of ways, including reporting and writing for the site. Summer courses will also be available for students of other journalism institutions.

Awesome that the Times thinks enough of the East Village to assign the beat to some NYU grad students who have lived here for a short time. (The Times has two other Local community news sites: one for Maplewood, Millwood and South Orange, N.J., the other in Ft. Greene and Clinton Hill.)

Per Choire Sicha at the Awl: "[M]y third and minor objection is that most of the reporters are going to be young people who actually don't know anything about the history of the area they're reporting on. But that's fine, if they are smart or have time to learn things or have a good editor."

Jay Rosen, who directs NYU's Studio 20 program, has a lengthy explanation of the project here. An excerpt:

Permit to say what I find so fascinating about this project. Man, it has everything in it — everything I’ve been studying since I gave my first talk to newspaper editors in Des Moines, Iowa in 1989. It’s neighborhood journalism; it’s cosmopolitan too. It’s about innovation; it’s about the classic virtues, like shoe leather reporting. It combines the discipline of pro journalism with the participatory spirit of citizen journalism. It’s an ideal way to study the craft, which is to say it’s an entirely practical project. It’s what J-school should be doing: collaborating with the industry on the best ways forward. It’s news, it’s commentary, it’s reviewing, it’s opinion, it’s the forum function, community connection, data provision, blogging — all at once. LEV I said is a start-up, but it’s starting with the strongest news franchise there is: the New York Times.

And!

[T]he thing I really love about it… NYU is a citizen of the East Village, a powerful institution (and huge land owner) within the frame. Our students are part of the community; they live there, or at least a lot of them do. Because we’re located there; we can’t really separate ourselves from our subject. Look, not everyone is going to be thrilled that NYU is doing this with the New York Times. We’ll have to take those problems on, not as classroom abstractions but civil transactions with the people who live and work here. You know what? It’s going to be messy and hard, which is to say real. But what better what is there to learn what journalists are yet good for in 2010?

I have a lot of mixed feelings about all this... too much to try to process at the moment... I wasn't thrilled with the earlier incarnation of this project. (And I'd still like to know what happened to the comments on this article. And how the reporter first heard about the incident.)

In any event, the editor at the NYU site who sent me the news release about the local East Village site? She lives in Brooklyn.

For further reading:
The 'Times' Comes for the East Village with Another Non-Paying Student Paper (The Awl)

Ray's makes the Times

From a feature today titled "Fixture of Avenue A Faces the Threat of a Padlock."

A few excerpts:

Opposite Tompkins Square Park, the usual sort of post-midnight gathering was taking place on a recent evening inside a cramped storefront with tile floors and a worn blue counter.

Kevin Mag Fhloinn was there, talking about a probability system he invented, which makes a spin of the roulette wheel so inviting it barely feels like a bet. Mitch Green told how he once tried to interest Rocky Graziano in buying a neon sign. And there was a smiling man who introduced himself as Thrilly-D; he plunked a large order of Belgian fries onto the counter, and, with beery breath, invited his new comrades to dig in.

And!

It was just past two in the morning and steel gates rattled on Avenue A as neighboring stores locked up for the night. Mr. Alvarez peered through a window as a police car sped past. And Mr. Green reminisced about the neighborhood in the mid-1970s, when the streets were so desolate that you couldn't find a cab.

"When there was nothing else around," he said, "Ray was around."

[Photo: Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times]

Got Milk?: NetFlix habits of 10009

There's an interactive feature at the Times that examines NetFlix rental patterns, neighborhood by neighborhood, in a dozen cities.

What did the NetFlix queue look like for 10009?



The popularity of "Milk" here may be one reason the Blockbuster on Broadway and 10th Street has so many copies for sale...

Anyway, this list above is for 2009... And Netflix has a feature that allows you to search for favorites by zip code. I just did this for 10009. Here's what I found:



It's also worth checking out the comments section for this feature too...Says one: "It'd be interesting to see the correlation between areas where Mall Cop coincides with Palin supporters."

Previously on EV Grieve:
What movies people in the 10009 zip code are watching

Field of nightmares

The lead today from an article in the Times titled Commercial Real Estate Slumps in New York:

There are 920 football fields of available office space in Manhattan. More than 180 major buildings totaling $12.5 billion in value — from Columbus Tower at 1775 Broadway to the office tower 400 Madison Avenue — are in trouble, meaning in many cases they face foreclosure or bankruptcy, or have had problems making mortgage payments. Rents for commercial office space fell faster over the past two years than in any such period in the last half century.

All the Indian food that's fit to eat?: The Times Restaurant and Bar

I've never noticed this restaurant along Eighth Avenue near 40th Street... just across the way from The New York Times Building...




Was this restaurant always here? Did they change their name -- or font -- when the Times arrived across the street in 2007? A Sulzberger family side project?



(Times building photo via)

Moving away because of those sausage-party dinners at Schiller’s

Well, you may have already seen this breakup letter in the Times this past weekend... John Vorwald, a former editor at The New York Observer, who lived at the corner of Ludlow and Rivington Streets for six years, decided enough was enough with the yunnies and he's moving on...

You gussied yourself up with shiny new hardware: Thor, Fat Baby, Spitzer’s. Hordes of banker boys in J. Press checked shirt/chino uniforms and manicured necklines swarmed to you faster than to the promise of a government bailout. They enjoyed sausage-party dinners at Schiller’s (“It’s like Pastis, but edgy!”), used winter as a verb and eyed sun-speckled Germans and Australians “on holiday.”

Toothsome Upper East Side girl packs (never fewer than four) tarted up in too-new Lilly Pulitzer dresses and slurped down sugar-free Red Bull and Grey Gooses at the Stanton Social. Hipster millennials, rocking extra-skinny jeans, oversize Elton John glasses and cocked-back fedoras, turned Pianos and Welcome to the Johnsons into their own private Thompson Twins video. Hold me now. Hold my heart.

Lessons in frugality from the Times: And just never you mind about the women in bikinis sipping Veuve Clicquot in South Beach

Nice piece in the Times titled "A Lesson in Frugality, From the Tenements." And it starts at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.

Writer Damon Darlin asks, "Can middle-class American consumers save like immigrants of more than a century ago? Can they change their mind-sets and lifestyles in order to accumulate capital and work down debt?"

Excellent discussion point, though I got sidetracked with the promo ad next to the article for a South Beach feature in the Times.

"Where 30 Is Ancient, Youthful at 80" (the East Village in this case)

The Times has a feature today on a Halloween costume party at the Educational Alliance’s Sirovich Senior Center on 12th Street.

The article, titled Where 30 Is Ancient, Youthful at 80, starts like this:

Anyone hazarding a guess about the demographics of Manhattan might name the East Village the youth capital of the island. It's a place where anyone over 30 starts to notice that her standard fashion go-to's are suddenly has-beens and that everyone else in the environs has preternaturally dewy skin. One friend decamped from the neighborhood when she turned 32 and decided that that was too young to be the oldest person in her building...

Influx of youngsters aside, the piece also notes that in the Community District 3 (EV, LES and Chinatown), "31 percent of people who are 65 or older are living at or below poverty level, the second-highest rate for the elderly in New York City."