I felt it was worth mentioning that the vacant Chase branch on Avenue A and 2nd Street is now home to a half of a roll, a half of a bagel and a dead pigeon. It's anybody's guess whether the three are related but I suspect fowl play. (It's probably inappropriate to pun in the face of death but that one kind of fell into my lap).
THE Lower East Side has become a destination for those from other boroughs, other towns and other nations who seek a few hours of Manhattan life. On a recent Saturday night, on Rivington Street between Essex and Ludlow, it was easy to find people from Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, England and Germany. It was harder to find a local resident.
Nearby, a stretch limousine idled, its passenger area illuminated by a black light and filled with champagne glasses. Inside, Luis Salcedo, the driver, waited for his evening’s charges — eight people from Queens. Mr. Salcedo said he was often called to drive to the area. “They always sing songs on the way,” he added.
“The greasy dude factor is low here,” said Sam Sellers, one of the resident D.J.’s. “You can play reggae and the guys aren’t grinding up all over the girls. It’s parties of friends, not one or two or three people looking for a night, so the energy is amazing.”
The bars most of us frequent don't have a theme aside from "cold beer here" and don't attempt fashion statement other than perhaps a "wipe boots before entering" sign. They're just bars. Places to hang out, grab a beer and shoot the bull. And if they've got dead animals hanging on the wall you can be sure we can appreciate or — at the very least — correctly identify what they are.
Not so in New York. For the hipsters who inhabit our cultural capital, dead animals on the bar wall are merely ironic statements of urban cool, and if no one actually knows what those animals are, just call it a moose. Everyone else does.
How an animal so obviously not a moose can be misidentified by pretty much the entire world is a good example of how quickly stupidity can go viral.
First it's misidentified by the bar owner who put it up, then by the patron upon whose head it landed, then by said patron's lawyer, then by the (not one but two!) NY Post reporters who wrote the story, then by the wire services and blogs who picked up the story. So now, a few days after the story was first published, Google "stuffed moose attack" and you will discover tha New York City's killer moose has gone worldwide....
PETA sent a letter to Dawn Sweeney, president and CEO of the National Restaurant Association, urging her to encourage members who still have animal heads mounted on the walls of their establishments to take them down and send them to PETA. PETA plans to offer fun, puffy faux animal heads in return. The letter comes on the heels of reports that a 150-pound moose head at the White Slab Palace restaurant on Manhattan's Lower East Side came crashing down onto a diner, leaving her with a concussion. The woman is suing the restaurant for damages.
"Perhaps it was bad karma--the departed moose's way of taking revenge on restaurant owners who are disrespectful enough to display their remains," writes PETA cofounder and President Ingrid E. Newkirk. "For the new year, we want to help restaurants ditch dead decor and go friendly faux."
In the letter, PETA points out that a growing number of Americans oppose the cruel blood sport of hunting and are repulsed by the idea of using a dead animal's head as decor. PETA has offered to provide a free faux head for every real head that the association sends to the group. Options range from a teeth-baring T-rex to an inflatable, easy-to-clean moose head to an attractive handcrafted faux deer head.
It smells like something at 201 E. 19th St., and it sure isn't Christmas.
The Missionary Sisters of Sacred Heart are suing two tenants in the Gramercy building who they say are creating an ungodly stench that's making their neighbors sick.
Gloria and Michael Lim have "caused noxious, foul and harmful odors to emanate from the [apartment] into the common areas of the subject building as well into other apartments," the nuns' suit says.
"The smells emanating from the subject premises are so horrible and potentially dangerous to the life, health and safety of the tenants" that "on one occasion the Fire Department . . . had to be called."
The odor on that occasion from the apartment was so awful that building workers had become "seriously concerned that the smell was the result of someone having died in their apartment and began ringing certain tenants who live alone to check in on them," the filing says.
When all those people were determined to be still kicking, the concerned firefighters zeroed in on the Lims' apartment, convinced the dead-person smell was coming from there.
They pounded on the door and when they got no answer, they started to break it down, the suit says. Gloria Lim eventually came to the door and asked what the "commotion" was, the suit says.
The firefighters entered the apartment, and Lim told them she was "smoking and drying fish."
When asked by The Post what caused the odors -- which court papers likened to "vomit or rotting meat" -- she only said: "I cook dried fish."
