The first floors of the all-new 79 Avenue D are now visible above the plywood here between Sixth Street and Seventh Street.
[No. 79 construction pic by George Cohen]
As previously reported, L+M Development Partners are putting up a 12-story retail-residential building that will include 110 apartment units, 22 of which will be permanently affordable. Amenities will include a fitness center, landscaped roof deck and an outdoor terrace.
Gone are the one-level storefronts including Rite Aid, which relocated one block north to the ground floor of the Arabella 101 building. Rite Aid signed a lease to return to the retail space at No. 79.
The project is expected to be completed in 2018. It will look something like the rendering on the plywood...
With the '60s countercultural revolution beginning to take shape, Peel moved to San Francisco, where he dove into the new hippie scene. When Peel came back to New York, he picked up a guitar and started writing songs and leading singalongs in Washington Square Park.
Peel took the name because he was prone to smoking banana peels. "It looked like grass," he told High Times in 1977. "We kept it in vials and called it banana grass."
One day in 1968, Elektra Records A&R rep Danny Fields heard Peel and his gang of protestors singing in the park. In the 2015 documentary, "Danny Says," Peel recalled:
"I met Danny Fields in 1968, He brought me to Max's Kansas City and bought me a steak dinner. How could I say no to a steak dinner when I was used to eating pizza all my life on the street?"
Fields signed David Peel & the Lower East Side to a two-record contract.
An April 2012 feature in The New York Times noted how a new generation had discovered Peel.
He was a regular last fall at the Occupy Wall Street movement’s Zuccotti Park encampment, and now shows up in Union Square to jam with the Occupy protesters there.
Peel was also a regular during the summer concerts in Tompkins Square Park. He lived on Avenue B. He was unmarried and didn't have any known family members.
His friend Steve Bloom wrote for Celebstoner:
Wherever Peel was, with his loud voice and boisterous personality, you couldn't miss him ... Peel, who answered the phone, "Yo, yo, yo" and had a characteristic stutter, will be missed.
The Times article from 2012 noted that "he planned to continue to sing on the streets and in the parks downtown 'until the day I drop dead and go to rock ’n’ roll heaven.'"
Spotted on Second Street at Second Avenue... Corporate Death Star by @crispstreetart ... there's a painted version outside Julie's Vintage on Second Street at First Street...
Owner Leslie McEachern said that "making the numbers work week in and week out is just not viable for us anymore."
Since the announcement broke on March 24, the restaurant at 300 E. 12th St. near Second Avenue has been full of well-wishers turning out for a last of Angelica's vegetarian cuisine.
In addition to real estate woes — and the refusal to take any kind of plastic as payment — Angelica Kitchen’s problem may have been the food. It tended to be heavy and gluey and bland, true to the cuisine it came from. Yet that sort of vegetarian cooking can still excite reverence and nostalgia. I, for one, will be sad to see this vestige of the old East Village vanish.
And at The New Yorker, Jay Sacher, a former Angelica's employee, pens an essay under the headline "The East Village Loses Another Place for the Young, Hungry, and Weird." He writes about delivering food to Joey Ramone and recalls other celebrity encounters at the restaurant.
But, really, it’s the non-famous folks I remember most: Spencer, always walking into work with a purple plastic Kim’s Video bag in one hand, stuffed full of records—a man of obscure and eclectic musical tastes who was prone to saying things like, “The only good Beatles song is ‘Norwegian Wood.’"
And...
The East Village has been a walking graveyard for years now, sputtering along as a cover-band version of itself. For me, the loss of Angelica marks its true and complete ending. I know, of course, that such things are relative, and other New Yorks will exist for other younger waves of the young, hungry, and weird, but it does nothing to soften my lament for the passing of this one.
This weekend, the restaurant is hosting a memorabilia sale... selling off "chopsticks to food processors to sculpture."
The sale is 2-8 p.m. on Saturday... and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday...
Meanwhile, a group calling themselves Friends of Angelica Kitchen have launched a crowdfunding campaign to help pay off remaining expenses.
The restaurant started out on St. Mark's Place in 1976. It moved to 12th Street in 1987.
Coming soon signage has arrived over at 74 E. Seventh St. between First Avenue and Second Avenue...
As we understand it, the storefront will be a shop run by the owners of Tea-Whisk, whose aim "is to introduce the beauty of Japanese Tea Ceremony in NY."
The owners have hosted tea ceremonies at events around the city. This is their first shop. You can find the Tea-Whisk website here. Tea ceremonies date back 400 years in Japan. This article in the Voice looks at the art of tea ceremonies, and features the owner of Tea-Whisk, Souheki Mori, who runs the business with her husband.
A reader noted that a davey drill and other equipment recently arrived at 253 E. Seventh St. between Avenue C and Avenue D... where a 6-story residential building featuring six residences (each condo roughly 1,500 square feet) will rise.
This replaces a four-story residence that stood here until late 2015.
And on the other side of Seventh Street... we haven't heard much about No. 264 (the one on the left), the circa-1843 townhouse awaiting possible demolition... there's a "no trespassing" sign on the door...
Barbara Sloan, the operations manager at Manhattan Renovations, a general contractor representing GlobalServ, said the owner was planning an information session for neighbors “to discuss details surrounding potential asbestos abatement and demolition.”
As far as we know, such a meeting hasn't taken place to date.
Zoltar had been partially covered with a trash bag outside Gem Spa the past few days. The front pane of glass in his house of birch-veneer fortune telling fell back and knocked his head wrap off to the side.
