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Second Avenue near East Seventh Street… with their temporary signs in the front window…
Glenn Spiegel, a lawyer for 'Stomp''s producers, said the show has been a 'cash cow' milked for years by Orpheum’s owners who have refused to maintain the historic theater for years.
"'Stomp' did not want to move,” but 'it smells like sewage' in the lobby, the carpets are in a state of disrepair and there are signs in the rest rooms asking people to dispose of soiled toilet paper in the waste basket, not the toilets, Spiegel said.
The lawyer also said patrons have complained about rats, which have been seen in larger numbers in the neighborhood since a gas explosion two doors down on Second Ave. leveled three buildings and killed two people on March 26.
"The show decided we can’t function like this any more," he said.
We call on New Yorkers from across the five boroughs, #BlackLivesMatter activists and organizations as well as all organizations that stand for social, economic, and racial justice to rally at Union Square this Wednesday at 6pm.
People of Baltimore have taken to the streets day after day for justice for Freddie Gray and for Black lives across the country but now that the National Guard has been called in and a curfew set, we must stand in solidarity with the people of Baltimore. The media will continue to paint the people of Baltimore as rioters and looters but people forget that the City and Police of Baltimore loot and destroy Black and Brown communities of Baltimore every day of the year.
Rally at Union Square at 6pm on the North Side of the Square (on 17th street) to show the people of Baltimore that we stand in solidarity with them and with their resistance because their resistance is for justice and their justice is our justice.
Owners of The Orpheum Theater, where STOMP has played for 21 years, say the producers of the show are violating a licensing agreement requiring them to give the landlord more notice and valid reasons if they want to relocate.
STOMP’s producers notified Orpheum “out of the blue” last week that they plan to move out as of June 15, according to court papers.
They have arranged to go to a rival off-Broadway theater, New World Stages, a multi-theater complex on West 50th St.
The producers said they are leaving because the air conditioning system at the historic Orpheum Theater has been inoperable for 72 straight hours — triggering their opt-out clause.
Diakun "says in his Manhattan Supreme Court suit that Con Ed advised him to hire a plumber to restore gas service four days after the March 26 building explosion.
Diakun says there was no siphoning, claiming the plumber he hired discovered a gas leak in the basement of 128 Second Ave. and then removed extraneous pipes to fix the problem.
Since the explosion, 128 Second Ave. has accrued 87 violations with the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, along with two additional violations and a stop-work order from the Department of Buildings, according to city records. The building has been without heat, hot water, or cooking gas for three weeks.
Name: Mark Mace
Occupation: Retired, Chef, former Director of Operations for Natural Gourmet Institute
Location: East 3rd Street between 1st Avenue and 2nd Avenue
Time: 4 pm on Friday, April 24
I’m originally from Flatbush, Brooklyn. All my family are Brooklynites. My parents moved out to Long Island during the early 1960s when everybody moved out to the suburbs. I lived by the water.
So by the time I was 18, I was a real beach kid. The people I hung out with were all artists and musicians. We were all sort of an artsy crowd as teenagers, but I got bored with that, so we started hanging out here in the 1970s, around 1974. It was dangerous; it was wild. The city was a shithole, plain and simple — an absolute shithole. It was everything that you wanted as a teenager. There was graffiti everywhere; there was filth everywhere. The buildings were dirty; the air was dirty.
There were a lot of things happening in the city. For young people, it was interesting and exciting. There was a lot of good music, a lot of good blues, a lot of good rock, and lot of good performance art. There was a lot of interesting graffiti. The city was a big crucible of art — in all forms.
I had friends who were artists here. They went to Cooper Union. We used to have scotch parties and clam bakes in the school. I remember going to loft parties on the Bowery, and we sat on the ledge of the window and smoked joints and just watched the city. There was almost nobody on the streets. Where the Bowery Hotel is, I remember that was a gas station and there were two junkyard dogs that used to sleep on the pavement ... you could walk right by them and they wouldn’t bother you.
I remember on Second Avenue seeing the junkies hanging out by Gem Spa and we used to call them weebles because they would be standing there with the phone in their hand at the public telephone and they would be leaning over so far that it would be impossible for any human to do that without falling over. That’s why we called them weebles because they would never fall over. Second Avenue was bad and then it pushed back to First and then to Alphabet City.
I’ve had so many careers. I started out in music, as a soundman for a 10-piece bar band with horns and everything. They broke up and then I went to cooking school in Philadelphia. I moved there in 1985 and Philly food-wise was the place to be for some strange reason. I don’t know why and I just happened to be there. I had a great time there and the people were great, but I was a New Yorker. I came back in 1988 and I moved into my apartment on 6th Street.
New York in the 1980s was a great place to be a cook. Food started taking off like crazy. If you were a good cook, and I was a good cook, you could get a job anywhere. I spent 12 years cooking and I moved up the ranks. I must have worked at maybe 15 restaurants, anything from neighborhood places to two- and three-star places.
I then took a job and opened a restaurant in Warsaw, Poland, for a couple in LA, in 1995. My friend called me from LA and said, ‘Hey I got some friends who want to open a restaurant in Poland, do you want to do it?’ My interview was at the Delta Air Lines lounge at JFK and then like six months later I was in Poland opening a California-style cuisine restaurant. It was tough because they didn’t have a restaurant industry.
Then I came back to New York. I worked in a couple of restaurants and then I got a job at a cooking school on 21st Street as the steward. I worked my way into director of operations and I just retired from it. After 25 years of cooking, I hate cooking now. I’ll make a big batch of something and I’ll put it in the freezer.
I appreciate the fact that the city has come up in that it’s renovated and clean, safe and the subways are efficient. You can ride the subways at 3 in the morning and be relatively safe. Now it’s very expensive. A drink will cost you $20. That was a joke when Studio 54 opened up in the heyday of the disco days. Now that’s the normal price. And everything’s a little too precious. I appreciate artisan this and artisan that but it’s gotten to the point where everything is so precious.