Good news: The Blarney Stone has reopened

Yesterday, in fact, after being closed for nearly three weeks...



...with a few modifications...



On Fulton Street in the Financial District.

Previously.

Very bad things: Blarney Stone still closed on Fulton Street

No sign of any activity. If my math is correct, they've been closed now for 18 days.

Previously.

A model condo: An angel will try to earn her wings while living at the District

So, per usual, I was reading talkingmakeup.com, you know, the daily makeup and beauty blog, and I came across this item of interest.

For the first time ever, Victoria’s Secret has opened its legendary runway to the public by holding open casting events in New York City, Miami, Los Angeles and Chicago where the country’s most beautiful women competed for a chance to be the next Victoria’s Secret’s Runway Angel.

A Victoria’s Secret panel of experts have narrowed down the field to 10 finalists, who were flown to New York City to take part in “Angel Boot Camp,” a series of challenges where the contestants will show their photogenic qualities, prove their abilities as a spokesmodel, show off their red carpet star quality and radiate charisma while walking a runway in lingerie.

Yeah, yeah, blah, blah...(Oh, wait: radiate charisma?)

While in New York, the finalists will stay at The District, a luxury condo building in the heart of Manhattan’s financial district boasting spectacular views of downtown Manhattan. Throughout their stay, the aspiring models will also enjoy such amenities as a roof deck with four pools, a lounge/library with fireplace, a billiards room, screening room and such elegant furniture by RentQuest.

That's one way to lure some horndogs to live in the District at 111 Fulton St., where some units are available.

Oh, and the weekly webisodes from Angel Boot Camp started airing last night, pervs. And I can't wait for the webisode where the models have to radiate charisma while walking past the MTA's Fulton Street pit and working a shift in the Nassau Bar...

The Blarney Stone is closed (again)

Uh-oh. Thanks to a tipster who points out that FiDi fave the Blarney Stone on Fulton Street has been closed now for five days. As you may recall, the bar was mysteriously closed for seven days or so this past February.

Previously on EV Grieve:
The Blarney Stone is back in business

Things that you can do with your real estate promissory note

And why the random quotation marks? On Fulton Street in the Financial District.

NYU de-dorms 200 Water St.; preps the 12th Street residence hall

As we noted yesterday, NYU plans on expanding into parts of New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania and Ohio. Well, there are plans for developing up to 6 million square feet of additional space by 2031 in the area around Washington Square Park.

Meanwhile, what else is happening in the NYU dorm world? First, 200 Water St. in the the Financial District is getting de-dormed. Since 1998, NYU has housed some 1,200 students in these 32 floors. As the Times reported on April 3, 1998, the building went up in 1971 as an office tower for the securities and insurance industry. It was converted from office space to residential space for NYU by the Rockrose Development Corporation.

The decision to lease the Water Street building comes as part of the university's drive to provide housing for a student body that includes fewer New York residents than ever before.

"Ten years ago, half of a typical freshman class was from New York," said John Beckman, a spokesman for NYU. "Now that is about 20 percent."

According to the Water Street home page, "Our theme for the 2008 – 2009 year is "Leave your Watermark" inspired by Water Street’s last year as an NYU residence hall." What's going in this space? Not sure! (According to a commenter here, Rockrose is converting the units to rentals.) But at least they have that new Duane Reade anchoring Fulton and Water. So the students will be moved to other dorms closer to campus.




In recent weeks, all the old dorm mattresses -- hope the students didn't leave their watermarks here! -- were stacked up in the lobby at 200 Water St. and carted off to...




... I don't know, perhaps the new eyesore called the 12th Street dorm that sort of, but not really incorporated the façade of St. Ann's into the residence hall's entrance. This 26-floor dorm between Third Avenue and Fourth Avenue will house 700 freshman starting this August.



Here are a few of the articles The Villager has done on the 12th Street dorm in recent years.

See you at the Village Pourhouse in August kids!

All the Fulton Street Duane Reade news that's fit to post

The Big new Duane Reade opens at the former Staples site on Water Street and Fulton on Saturday...



...which means the old Duane Reade a few hundred feet away on Fulton is closing...



Meanwhile, someone artfully arranged these bricks on Water Street outside the new Duane Reade.

Remembering Richard Leck: "He liked the anything-goes quality, the creativity and the street life"

Karen Lillis first met the writer and poet Richard Leck nearly five years ago. And in a rather short amount of time, he made a profound impact on her life.

"Richard was a really positive, steady presence in my life... Among other things — like good life advice from someone who had survived 75 years — he embodied and remembered a New York I was really interested in, a bohemian place people came together to make," Lillis told me in an e-mail. Lillis has since published Leck's work on her Words Like Kudzu Press in Pittsburgh.

Leck, a longtime East Village resident, passed away of heart disease on Dec. 19.

First, some background on Leck's life from his obituary in The Village Voice:

He was drafted to go to the Korean War in 1951, but deferred his service to attend New York University’s Journalism School. During this time, he also reported for the New Jersey Observer. He served in the Army in peacetime from 1956 to 1958, training at Fort Dix and working in Westchester.

In the 1960s, Leck was a habitué of the Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene, frequenting Cafe Figaro, The Limelight and The Commons, but especially Cafe Feenjon. He mingled inside and outside of the coffeehouses with such figures as Yoko Ono; Shel Silverstein; Peter, Paul, and Mary; Feenjon owner Manny Dworman; poet Taylor Mead; offbeat radio show host Long John Nebel; actor Darren McGavin; and painter Yukiko Katsura, among others.

He said of that time, “I didn’t write in those days — I just listened. I just took it all in.”

Leck worked a variety of odd jobs, often retaining a bohemian’s preference for the low-key lifestyle to a regular day job. He did the books for a retailer, he managed an antique store, he sold goods on the street, and he worked with Jewish children.

In recent years, he was a regular customer at Neptune Diner on First Ave., at St. Mark’s Bookshop and at Junior’s on the Fulton Mall, in Brooklyn.

Without any living relatives, Leck was to be buried in Potter's Field. However, Lillis and other friends reached out to Graham Rayman at The Village Voice, who then helped cut through the bureaucracy. Leck was buried in a modest military service at Calverton National Cemetery in Long Island on Jan. 23.

Lillis will host a memorial reading for Leck at the Bowery Poetry Club on Saturday, May 9 from 2 p.m.-3:30 p.m. It will be called "Praise Day Reading for Richard Leck." Free admission. Several writers will read from Leck's poems and excerpts from his memoir, "Jumped, Fell, or Was Pushed."

Here, Lillis talked to me about first meeting Leck and his feelings about life and the East Village.

You met Richard while you were working in the St. Mark's Bookshop. What do you remember about that? What were your first impressions?

Lillis: I was working the register, and Richard came up and opened that book, "The Little Black and White Book of Film Noir." He started reading some of the one-liners to me in an exaggerated accent and telling me about the movies they came from. I came right back with some quotes because I'm a film noir buff myself — it really surprised him that someone half his age knew these movies. So, he just kept talking to me.

I immediate felt familiar with him — he was both a familiar Village type — open to meeting people, very idiosyncratic, ready to give you a piece of his mind. And also a familiar Irish-American type, very entertaining and psychologically smart, very funny with a Vaudeville sensibility. He reminded me a lot of my paternal grandfather.

After that, Richard would come back to the store to talk to me, or we'd go for coffee. It wasn't long before I started compulsively taking notes whenever he talked.

What do you think inspired him about living in the East Village?

Lillis: He liked the anything-goes quality, the creativity and the street life. He liked being able to meet sympatico people, artistic types. He liked not feeling restricted the way he did as a schoolboy.


In his obit for the Voice, Graham Rayman described Richard as "one of that disappearing class of people who make the neighborhood more colorful and more interesting than the yuppie scum who invade this sacred ground and drive up the rents." Did Richard share with you his feelings on the present-day East Village?

Lillis: [Laughs] Yes, Richard shared his feelings on the topic — early and often. He recalled the East Village from when it was "The East Side," and his acquaintances drifted over there to do drugs in the "shooting galleries." This was in the 60s. He said it wasn't the "East Village" until the realtors wanted to sell it, and I think he felt it just kept going in the wrong direction from there. I mean, it was still the Village and unlike anything else, but now he saw the young women who spent hundreds of dollars on their purse dogs' wardrobes, he saw cybercafes where no one talked to each other, he saw bohemian style replaced by adults in sweatpants, he saw people so busy they sped by him at a Manhattan pace, he saw landlords renovating buildings for the worse — over and over — only to jack up prices. He saw young people so worried about money and rent that they couldn't enjoy art or life just for the pleasure of it.

He talked a lot about the glass and steel skyscrapers going up all over the Village. He hated the glass and steel buildings! He liked to talk about the huge windows — "That's not a window, darling, that's a wall!" He said the people living in them must feel like they owned everything they could see. He preferred wood and brick; to him the glass and steel represented the opposite of a home, they just represented coldness and greed, and an imperial mindset.



At the time of his death, he was working on an autobiographical novel. Will any of this be released?

Lillis: Yes, one section of it already has been published in the zine, Go Metric (Issue 22), and more will be, with luck. Several excerpts will be read at the memorial reading. The book wasn't actually a novel but a memoir, working title, "Jumped, Fell, or Was Pushed" — from an adage they used to teach him in his NYU journalism program in the 1950s. Richard liked to refer to the book as comedy-sociology. The book is his life stories from the 1930s through at least the 1980s. It starts out in Jersey City and moves into the New York phase. The Depression, World War II, Mayor Hague, the Army, the Village coffeehouses of the 60s. We were working on the book together — he was telling me the stories and I was writing them down and helping shape them — I wanted to capture his voice and his cadence, and his humor. I have two years worth of material from talking to him once a week, so I believe I have enough to finish it. I may ask his closest friend, Frances, to help me fill in some gaps — she'd been close with him since the late 80s. And I'm trying to get more excerpts of the book published along the way.

Can you talk a little bit about the efforts to make sure that he received a proper burial?

Lillis: Navigating the different city agencies and the misinformation involved was disheartening and very stressful — but some individuals worked very hard to make a proper burial happen, and that was pretty amazing to see. It took a village to bury a Villager! There were many points when we thought the whole thing would go bust and Richard was going to end up in Potter's Field — we couldn't find a next of kin, we didn't have money, we were running out of time, we didn't have help from the VA — they were very rude and dismissive. I felt very overwhelmed working on this from Pittsburgh where I relocated, and Frances was going to different agencies on foot but getting doors slammed in her face. I was just determined that a U.S. veteran should not be ignored in this way, so I kept going up the food chain for leverage — writing to city politicians, then congressmen; organizing email campaigns and getting bloggers involved. Finally I started writing to newspapers, and Graham Rayman at the Village Voice was the only one who responded in due time. First he made some key phone calls to stall the march to Potter's Field. Then he blogged the story, and a few HOURS after he posted it, the Mayor's Office called Frances to say they were taking care of a military burial. The power of journalism — and public shaming — cannot be underestimated!

I learned three things I would pass on: 1.) Everyone should write a will right now, and artists should write down who they want to do what with their art/manuscripts/publishing rights, etc. Get it notarized. 2.) You're allowed to bury your friend if there's no next of kin or a will, you just can't cremate him or her. 3.) An articulate e-mail is now officially more powerful than phone or face time, unless you're someone important.

What do you think inspired him about living in the East Village?

Lillis: I think he also liked the way he could be Manhattan anonymous sometimes, or have people to talk to when he wanted to find them — at the bookstore, the diner.


The view from the kitchen/sitting area at the Sirovich SRO on East 12th Street where Leck lived since 1993.

As Graham Rayman noted: In his poem, "Residents," Leck seemed to be referring to folks like himself when he wrote:

Let dandelions be. They break up
the monotony of the grass.

"Variety" -- an NYC time capsule

The 1984 drama "Variety" plays tomorrow night at 5 during the Tribeca Film Festival. According to the Program Notes: "In Bette Gordon's pioneering indie film about voyeurism from a female perspective, a young woman (played by Sandy McLeod) works as a ticket taker in a porn theater, and her curiosity leads her to shadow a male patron."

"'Variety' features an unparalleled collaborative team of downtown artists and performers, including composer John Lurie, cinematographer Tom DiCillo, writer Kathy Acker, photographer Nan Goldin, and actors Spalding Gray and Luis Guzmán. In retrospect, 'Variety' also represents a time capsule of New York City, filmed at bygone landmarks like the Variety Theatre, Fulton Fish Market, and Yankee Stadium, as well as an edgier incarnation of Times Square."

No advance tickets are left for the screening at the SVA Theater on West 23rd Street. But you can go for the rush tickets an hour in advance of the screening ...

The Villager has a feature on the film in this week's issue.

One of those days

On Fulton Street near Water Street.

What else do you think would take over a large retail space downtown?

As we mentioned last year, the big Staples store that anchored the corner of Water Street and Fulton Street at the gateway to the South Street Seaport closed up in November.

Meanwhile, there has been plenty of activity at the site....Prepping it for — c'mon, you can guess correctly!






...a big Duane Reade, this according to a construction worker ...
Huge need for this! There isn't a Duane Reade within 100 feet of this location!



OK, OK....the other Duane Reade there on Fulton is simply moving...

Previously on EV Grieve:
That joke isn't funny anymore: Duane Reade opens at location of former OTB parlor on John Street

EV Grieve Etc: Mourning Edition

The Circus has left town: A dive bar death (NY Barfly)

Hello again!: Esquared is back (Esquared)

TV the size of Rhode Island discarded on East Ninth Street (plus, demonic squirrels in TSP!) (Slum Goddess)

Jill visits Forest Hills while Jeremiah walks Myrtle Avenue.

Looking back at The Minetta Tavern (Greenwich Village Daily Photo)

At the Fulton Fish Market in 2002 (Scouting NY)

Graffiti truck art (City Rag)

Sales at the Ludlow Residence (BoweryBoogie)

Ex-Gawker editor Choire Sicha to write a nonfiction book on some 20-somethings trying to live and work in NYC. "If you’re fascinated by something you can get close to it — that’s always been true about New York," he told the Observer. "But I also feel like the $1.99 breakfast sort of went away, and the room for rent in the East Village went away too. The cost of entry became prohibitive with the last little boomlet we had, in a kind of extreme way." He went on: "I had a million jobs when I moved here and what I see happening among my younger friends, and among people I’m interviewing who are kind enough to give me their time, is there’s nowhere to go."

EV Grieve Etc.: Mourning Edition

Highlights from elsewhere in the NYC blogosphere (Patell and Waterman's History of New York)

The REAL reason Valerie Solanas wanted to waste Warhol (Page Six)

Graffiti artists vs. the cops who used the hunt them (The New York Times)

John Penley is going somewhere -- Erie, Pa.? Newark, N.J.? (Scoopy's Notebook, last item)

Faded signs on the LES (Ephemeral New York)

Thought this was a bear market? Twelve years of beekeeping on NYC rooftops (Lancaster Farming, and no snickering)

Annoyed Parisians can blame NYC for L’Experimental Cocktail Club (The New York Times)

Meanwhile, George Clooney in talks to play Bukowski (Jeremiah's Vanishing NY)

Got limos? (BoweryBoogie)

Finding the beauty at the South Street Seaport (Greenwich Village Daily Photo)

Action at the long-delayed Fulton transit hub (A Fine Blog)

More signs of the recession: At the Blarney Stone

On Fulton Street in the Financial District.

Revisiting Fulton Street...and say hello to Fultonhaus!

Fulton Street, down in the Financial District, is as dreary as ever. The street is still torn up. And there's that large, unnecessary money pit in the Earth on Fulton and Broadway where the Fulton Street Transit Center will open in 4783. (At the east end of the street at Water and the South Street Seaport, the storefront that housed the Staples remains vacant.) Still, though, despite all this...the street is functional enough for the working folks in the neighborhood. You have your Radio Shack, your Subway, Dunkin' Donuts, Starbucks, CVS, etc. Your basic chain hell with a few mom-and-pop shops in the mix. (With some affordable work space on the upper levels.)



Despite the economy, more change is inevitable along this corridor. For instance, on the north side of the street, between Nassau and Williams Street, there are four properties for rent. (Here's info on 119 Fulton St.)






As humdrum as the street level looks, big things have happened up above...check out the upper left-hand side of this photo...



That's the 14-story loft residence (a SHVO exclusive!) known as Fultonhaus at 199 Fulton St., just a few doors east of the Crisis Intervention Program at the Coalition for the Homeless. Dunno what the occupancy rate is at Fultonhaus. For what it's worth, there is some furniture out on a few of the terraces, though not too many brave souls are taking advantage of the Fultonhaus rooftop right now. [Update: Thanks to the commenter for setting me straight: The roof deck is part of District next door to Fultonhaus.]



Oh, one thing worth mentioning on the Fultonhaus site...the "nightlife" section...not exactly an area renowned for it. Anyway, the wonderfully seedy Pussycat Lounge gets namechecked!


No love, though, for the Blarney Stone? Which is right next to the Fultonhaus. And they're having a nice sandwich/side order combo deal. Just don't ask for separate containers, OK?

Why getting around the Financial District is so fun!

Need to get somewhere in a jiffy? You'll be better off, oh, crawling.

Pearl Street!



Liberty Street!



Maiden Lane!



Wall Street!



Fulton Street! (Still!)



Fulton Street is really ugly



Broad Street!



And last summer, Beekman was torn up...back to normal now...

EV Grieve Etc: Mourning Edition

Looking back at the murder of Lee Morgan, gunned down at Slug's on Third Street and Avenue C (This Ain't the Summer of Love)

About the old Fulton Ferry Hotel (Patell and Waterman's History of New York)

Matt Harvey interviews Poster Boy (New York Press)

Another NYC institution to fall? (Eater)

WTF FYI: More men getting BoTox...because of the recession (Daily Intel)

Getting glazed over in the West Village (Jeremiah's Vanishing NY)

$20 million for this EV pad (The Observer)

The photography of Paul McDonough (Stupefaction)

Alex has a good anecdote on (new blogger) Glen E. Friedman (Flaming Pablum)

Esquared retires (Esquared)

Neck Face offers an opinion on Michael Phelps (BoweryBoogie)

The haunted house of Second Avenue (Blah Blog Blah)

First look at the condos where the Cedar Tavern once served (Curbed)

Most winners of The New Yorker's caption contest are from California (Blog About Town)

A milestone in the housing market? (A Fine Blog)

The Blarney Stone is back in business

A lovely sight. No word yet on why they were closed on Fulton Street for seven-plus days...

(Jumping ahead to) Day 7: The Blarney Stone is still closed

The fellows at the shoe repair shop next door are equally mystified as to why the Blarney Stone isn't open...and they said it closed last Friday, not Monday as I previously thought. Commenter Stewie at Eater mentioned yesterday that several businesses along this stretch of Fulton Street have had problems with water pipes of late. True...a very likely cause for a closing. However, looking in the BS's back entrance on Ann Street, nothing looks out of place. No signs of construction...or work of any kind. One minor thing: The five pieces of tape on the front gate -- from which a sign had been telling us what was what? -- are now gone...

Update on the Blarney Stone: Still closed

Following up on my earlier post on the Blarney Stone on Fulton Street. Uh-oh — it's still closed as of around noon today. Not a good sign. This is a good lunch space...and a better drinking spot. OK, and a good lunch spot to drink in. Anyway, it's one of the few bars remaining in the Financial District worth frequenting...



Looks as if a sign was taped up on the gate....But five measly pieces of tape in this wind? The sign is likely in Brooklyn Heights by now. I walked around to the back entrance on Ann Street and looked inside. Nothing amiss. Everything seems to be where it usually is. The phone just rings...no outgoing message.



So I'm sure this is just a temporary thing...Right?

Still, given the changes sweeping down Fulton Street, nothing would surprise me...