Fisher women on the East River... she and her husband were the nicest people... He Irish-American, She originally from uptown... they loved fishing and telling fising tales... she pulled little sea bass one after another and gently threw them back...
“When the Solas crowd outside congregates, the bouncer comes out and tells them to move along. They'll then form small groups on the stoops of the neighboring buildings and businesses.
Now they have descended upon the sidewalk shed next door where they continue to scream, fight with each other, block the traffic by getting in and out of taxis, and generally live up to every negative stereotype of the drunken 20-somethings who take over the East Village on the weekends. The group of about 50 people [pictured above] didn't leave the area until 5AM.”
Few specifics are available about the building’s history, but it was built in 1895 as the first home of the Roman Catholic St. Elizabeth of Hungary parish. When that parish moved uptown to Yorkville, the building became the Russian — Greek Orthodox Chapel of the Holy Trinity serving the Russian and Greek embassies. Later, it became the Russian Orthodox Church of St. Nicholas, which eventually moved to East 97th Sreet.
Today, the building is part of the Western Orthodox Benedictine Friars of the Hispanic Mozarabic Rite, though it still bears the royal seal of the Russian Czars on its façade.
"I’ve lived in the neighborhood for 30 years. I was a doorman on the Upper East Side. The difference between the Upper East Side and here was like night and day. I worked for gazillionaires. What they paid for shoes and clothes, I could pay my rent for 3 months.
It was a different neighborhood 30 years ago. It was dangerous but I never felt really threatened. You just had to know your way about, where you were going, and what you were doing. Half this neighborhood was burnt out; every block had burnt out buildings. It was really empty. If you weren’t from around here people knew it because it was so depopulated.
I moved down here by accident. I was in love with this girl and we were in the throws of breaking up. I grew up in Queens. I had no intentions of moving down here, especially back then when this neighborhood was the way it was. But she moved here and I followed her. I thought maybe we’d get back together but it never happened and I ended up staying.
It was quite an accident and it changed my life. I met some wonderful people: artists, writers, and creative people. It’s always been a young neighborhood, but it wasn’t college students, it was young people on the fringe. It was quite some fun. You had the Robots; you had EPCs; you had the Limbo Lounge; Pizza a Go-Go; the Pyramid Club was in full swing. I got exposed to a lot of things I wouldn’t have been exposed to in Queens. There were some heartbreaking things too; I lost a lot of people to drugs and to the AIDS crisis.
They filmed 'The Godfather Part 2' on this block. All these buildings here still had the old fashioned storefronts. They were sealed up, but they all had the old-fashioned storefronts, so they fixed them up and created a barbershop and a candy store and put canopies on them. It’s the scene where that guy in the white suit [Don Fanucci] is going down the street, where he gets blown away by Robert DeNiro in the hallway. That’s where a lot of these trees came from, because the block association said, 'if you’re going to disrupt our lives we want some compensation', so they agreed to give them money for these trees."
64 Second Avenue represents an excellent opportunity to purchase a unique mixed-use asset on the Avenue in an up and coming East Village neighborhood. This building has significant potential as a cash flow investment, Live plus income opportunity, or a retail user opportunity. The 5 story property contains one ground floor retail unit along with 3 apartments above, including an Owner’s Duplex with a rooftop garden.
[A] longtime friend and neighbor of Brigham’s, who did not want to be named, did not believe she was drunk and said she only spent the night away from her sublet because she forgot her keys at the Virginia wedding. “She wasn’t a drinker,” said the friend. “She was building a career after a bad marriage. ... She was happy.”
As he drove into the city from La Guardia Airport they talked by phone, first at 9:25 and then at 9:30, he said. Shortly afterward, her body was found by a 19-year-old neighbor, at the foot of the stairway. She was dressed entirely in white, with the contents of a large, clothing-stuffed weekend bag around her, according to interviews he gave NBC News and other outlets. Her father arrived just after the ambulance left the building.
“It’s just devastating, it’s so unspeakably difficult,” he said. “I’ve received 100 e-mails, and almost to a person everyone says I don’t know what to say. And I don’t either, in a way. It’s just devastating to lose such a beautiful creature.”
She's spent most of her summer in Tompkins Square Park chasing pigeons, avoiding aggressive terrier mix types (she's learned the hard way) and generally becoming part of the local cafe society. The photos here are of her favorite local haunts. (She'd rather not say precisely which establishments she frequents as she doesn't want the health department cracking down on her favorite places simply for having the temerity to serve a dog.)
She can report that she's not terribly fond of Mexican food (too spicy!) and loves, loves, loves, sautéed mushrooms. She's also exploring a run for a Community Board seat but isn't really prepared to talk about that just yet.
