Who is taking responsibility?
The happy family just last week!
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-EtMzWq4E_d7VsG6dxsOqB905D9CnMTQevVHw4T3iyeUsdPO7_62fOJPRvXWQha4YMy15vdiKDuMooqca2KG-s35Ogmb5hQ3FBPrffoKAcTDEK0J3bNVaXaUw0pP4kXEQI2I3_rXksww/s400/king.bmp)
[Bottom photo via Chet Chat with Chet]
* OK, that last part isn't true.
Three good Samaritans chased down a cowardly thug after he beat and tried to mug a woman in front of a trendy Manhattan bar, cops said yesterday.
Kester Robinson, 23, was allegedly trying to steal the 33-year-old victim's iPhone and purse at around 8:15 p.m. Tuesday near Mama's Bar on Avenue B in the East Village, sources said.
"I opened the door and he just took off and I ran after him," said Robert Hart, the bartender and part owner.
Customers Brian Bielemeier and Jude Campbell joined the chase, tailing Robinson for several blocks until the suspect ran out of steam.
"As soon as I grabbed him, he started crying and said, 'Don't call police,' and 'Let go, I have asthma,' " Bielemeier told The Post.
Robinson, who lives in The Bronx, was charged with attempted robbery and faces up to seven years if convicted.
December 20, 2007 -- It may be the final nail in the shared coffin of East Village dive bars. Two longstanding holes-in-the-wall, Sophie's on East Fifth Street and its sister spot, Mona's on Avenue B, are up for sale. "The neighborhood has changed so much," co-owner Bob Corton told Page Six. "I love both bars, but they're dinosaurs now." Corton plans to sell the low-lit saloons after the holidays. He has run Sophie's, which adopted its name from its original owner, the late Sophie Polny, since 1986. He opened Mona's in '89. Corton assured us he'll stay in the neighborhood but couldn't predict the future of his beloved drink tanks: "Once the places are sold, what happens to them is really out of my hands."
Jeremiah Moss said...
hey grieve, whether or not sophie's goes, i hope you'll continue to blog about stuff in our neighborhood. there's plenty of bloggable material to go around!
Street gangs, brothels, flophouses, Joey Ramone - at one time or another, the Bowery has played host to them all. Of the many Manhattan areas to have transformed over the last decade, the Bowery has to rank among the unlikeliest.
Transform it has, though. Homeless shelters like the century-plus-old Bowery Mission still dot the street, and lighting and restaurant supply stores still dominate the retail scene, but gentrification is most definitely on the march.
Yes, the Bowery is booming. Prudential Douglas Elliman broker Rob Gross has worked in the area for more than 20 years. He remembers selling real estate on the Bowery in the early '90s, returning on some occasions from showing apartments to find his car broken into.
"It was definitely off the grid a bit back then," he says.
Today, Gross is handling the new Bowery and Bleecker development - a three-unit building of floor-through condo lofts that includes an 1,862-square-foot penthouse with a private roof deck that's listed for $3.1 million. With Poliform kitchens, 50-inch plasma-screen TVs and prices starting at about $1,500 a square foot, the building is a world away from the formerly dodgy Bowery.
"The Bowery is one of the last areas in New York to experience a kind of seismic shift," says self-storage magnate and neighborhood developer Adam Gordon. "It's an interesting bridge neighborhood. It's at the crux of NoHo, SoHo, the East and the West Village. There are few places that have the access that this neighborhood does."
Gordon owns a plot of land just off the Bowery at 41 Bond St., which he plans to develop as an eight-unit luxury condo building once the financing environment improves. He also owns the Bouwerie Lane Theatre building at the corner of Bond and Bowery, part of which he's recently turned into three condos. One apartment is reserved for Gordon himself, and he plans to put the other units - a 5,200-square-foot triplex penthouse and a 2,500-square-foot full-floor apartment - on the market in March.
Also coming to the once-seedy street: a new five-unit residential building at 263 Bowery from developer Shaky Cohen, a 152-unit luxury rental building at 2 Cooper Square, a Lord Norman Foster-designed gallery building at 257 Bowery and restaurants from Keith McNally and Daniel Boulud.
It's the Cooper Square Hotel, however, that provides perhaps the best metaphor for today's Bowery. Because two residents of the apartment building next door at 27 Bowery refused to give up their units, the hotel was forced to build around them and incorporate their building into its design. And so at the northern end of the street, there sits an old brick tenement building that from the sidewalk looks as if it were being swallowed up by a sleek, glassy high-rise hotel.
It's old versus new - and these days new would seem to have the upper hand.
Or, as Gordon says when asked if he fears the loss of old, edgy Bowery he once knew, "I don't think it's fear. It's an inevitability."
Gordon adds: "I don't pine for the Bowery of 50 years ago. It was a hole."
Use you're head and keep your ass alive. b.c. youre the only one who's gonna do it...so you be careful the next time you go dancing with Mr. Brownstone.