City installs pre-tagged Big Belly on 7th Street and Avenue A

This afternoon, Derek Berg noted that a worker delivered a Big Belly to the northeast corner of Avenue A and Seventh Street ... one that, ingeniously or not, had already been tagged... (save someone the trouble of doing it later) ...



Back in June, workers placed these solar-powered trash cans in and around Tompkins Square Park as part of the city's $32-million plan to combat vermin in rat-popular neighborhoods, like here. (As I recall, the northeast corner of 7th and A didn't have its own Big Belly.)

As previously noted, the rat-proof trash cans — which cost $7,000 each, per the Daily News — might work when they are not full or have trash stacked next to them...


[Sept. 2]


[Sept. 9]

ICYMI — Mayor forms Office of Nightlife

Nightlife is part of the soul of our city. The Office of Nightlife will make sure it stays that way for generations of New Yorkers to come. pic.twitter.com/hUNIZOVBJv

— Bill de Blasio (@NYCMayor) September 20, 2017

In case you didn't see this news from Tuesday night... when Mayor de Blasio arrived at House of Yes in Bushwick to announce the formation of the city's Office of Nightlife, where a soon-to-be-appointed Night Mayor will reign.

Per DNAnfo:

The new appointee will field complaints and mediate disputes between nightlife establishments and city and state agencies, as well as residents with complaints and concerns.

"[Nightlife] is part of the magic of New York City," said Mayor Bill de Blasio, flanked by former Ramones drummer Marky Ramone and jazz double-bassist Ron Carter, at the Wyckoff Avenue venue. "Where the culture happens is essential. Without the venues, the culture simply can't exist."

The administration is in the process of interviewing candidates for the job, which is expected to be filled by the end of the year.

The Office of Nightlife will have an estimated annual budget of $407,000, including $37,000 for office space, supplies and computers, as well as $370,000 to pay the Night Mayor and an assistant director of the office, according to a financial impact statement.

"The office will be led by who someone who will undoubtedly be more popular than me and will wield tremendous power," de Blasio said.

As those de Blasio fans at the Post noted:

Despite the presence of community boards and the city’s own Department of Small Business Services, the mayor believes another layer of government is needed to deal with quality-of-life issues and to help keep struggling clubs from going under.

Gothamist has more on the creation of this Office here.

East Village resident sues State Liquor Authority over bottomless brunches

East Village resident Robert Halpern, a lawyer who has lived here for more than 30 years, is in the news after he sued the State Liquor Authority over a loophole in the 1999 law that allows bottomless brunches (drunk brunch, drunch, etc).

The Real Deal first had the story yesterday:

These weekend specials, where you pay a set price for unlimited alcohol during brunch hours, are prohibited by law, according to Halpern’s complaint, and they’re contributing to the “deterioration of the neighborhood.”

According to Halpern’s calculations, there are 679 active liquor licenses in the East Village alone, and the Liquor Authority keeps approving more. There were 305 new liquor licenses approved in the area in 2016, and 243 in 2017.

“There are too may people running around drinking all the time,” Halpern told The Real Deal. “It’s become more and more of a drinking culture here.”

From the Post:

“Anybody who has lived in this neighborhood for a while knows that it’s gotten out of w​h​ack. There’s no balance anymore in terms of people living here and people just deciding to have fun here,” he said.

The SLA has claimed that bottomless brunches — where customers pay a set amount for endless mimosas and Bloody Marys — are exempt from a rule prohibiting unlimited drinks because the “service of alcohol is incidental to the event.”

Halpern insists that’s nonsense.

“Alcoholic beverages are not ‘incidental’ to the bottomless brunches, they are intrinsic to them,” he said.

And the Daily News:

A Liquor Authority spokesman said that state law prohibited over-serving — even during bottomless brunch.

"Serving unlimited drinks is prohibited under the Alcoholic Beverage Control law, and instances of over serving by our licensees are aggressively investigated and prosecuted," SLA spokesman Bill Crowley said, adding that the law does provide for certain "special circumstances."

His complaint reportedly enumerates 17 bottomless brunches available in the East Village, including the Cloister Cafe on Ninth Street, Jeepney on First Avenue and Pardon My French on Avenue B.

A celebration of tenant groups this weekend

On Saturday, the Middle Collegiate Church is hosting a Tenant Empowerment Conference.

Here are the details via the EVG inbox...

The goal of the conference is to celebrate all of the great work that's been done by tenant groups in New York City over the past few years.

We will also discuss the most effective means for tenants to assert their rights in the face of misbehaving landlords, rapacious developers and greedy banks.

In attendance will be tenants who have confronted predatory equity-practicing landlords (ie., Steve Croman, ICON Realty, Renaissance Properties, Jared Kushner, Samy Mahfar, Raphael Toledano, Madison Realty Capital etc.), as well as affordable housing advocates, local small business owners who are being threatened, local press, elected representatives and other interested parties from all over the city.

The conference will last from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. There will be a welcome address and a keynote speaker. There will be three panel discussions, run sequentially.

Tenant power packs, continental breakfast and lunchtime sandwiches will be provided to attendees.

The TTC (The Tenants Coalition, formerly the Toledano Tenants Coalition) and Cooper Square Committee are the co-hosts. The Middle Collegiate Church entrance is at 50 E. Seventh St. between First Avenue and Second Avenue.

Here's a slide show that that the groups put together ... showing some of what tenant organizations in the city have done in the past two years:

Time for the 6th annual LUNGS Harvest Arts Festival this weekend

More than 100 events are scheduled this weekend in the neighborhood's community gardens as part of the LUNGS Harvest Arts Festival.

You can head to the LUNGS website here for a rundown of the various performances, concerts, screenings and other related events.

Wednesday's parting shot

Sunset pic by Bobby Williams ...

Updated

Here's the sunset view from Fourth Street by Maya Falmagne ...

'Also Starring Harry Dean Stanton' starting Friday at the Quad Cinema

RIP Harry Dean Stanton (1926 - 2017)

A post shared by Quad Cinema (@quadcinema) on Sep 15, 2017 at 3:40pm PDT

As you may have heard, Harry Dean Stanton died on Friday at age 91.

Back on Aug. 16, the Quad Cinema, nearby on 13th Street between Fifth Avenue and Sixth Avenue, had announced a retrospect of the actor's work scheduled for Sept 22 to Oct. 3.

Per the Quad:

Few actors are as recognizable in American movies as Harry Dean Stanton. The singularly mild-mannered face of the New Hollywood, his repertoire expands to dozens of appearances in beloved studio, cult, and independent movies, with only a handful of lead roles to his name.

In a career spanning more than 60 years, Stanton’s inimitable hangdog persona revealed a distinctive capacity for harebrained agitation and laconic, low-key melancholy that prove equally disarming. Stanton has worked with many cinema greats, from Carpenter to Wenders to Lynch. On the occasion of his starring role in Lucky (opening September 29) ... the Quad is proud to present a wide-ranging selection of his most memorable roles.

Screenings start on Friday, and include "Paris, Texas," "Repo Man," "Alien," "Escape From New York," "The Straight Story" and "Pretty in Pink," among many others.

The final print edition of The Village Voice is out today

The last print edition of The Village Voice — a 176-page commemorative issue — is out today with Bob Dylan on the cover.

Facing declining ad revenues, among other factors, owner Peter Barbey (since 2015) announced the end of the print era last month.

Here's part of editor Stephen Mooallem's farewell letter in this issue:

When I talk with people about the Voice, they often refer to it as an “institution.” But I think of it more as having a constitution. By that, I don’t mean a document containing a statement of essential principles by which the Voice is governed — I mean a constitution in the way that a person has a physical constitution. If you treat it well, then it can flourish; if you don’t, then it withers. Its existence is not inevitable. It needs to be fought for. When I look at what this paper has been for the past (almost) 62 years, I see the names of many people who have done just that for the Voice, and we’ve decided to dedicate this final print issue to them. The Voice may be bigger than print and ink or any owner, editor, medium, or era, but this paper belonged to New York, and the people who have worked for it have served both the Voice and the city in exemplary fashion.

The Village Voice was founded in 1955 by Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher and Norman Mailer. It will continue on as an online publication.

[Updated] The State of New York seizes Brick Lane Curry House on 2nd Avenue

EVG contributor Derek Berg shares these photos this morning ... showing that State has seized the restaurant here at 99 Second Ave. between Fifth Street and Sixth Street for nonpayment of taxes ...



In March 2016, the State seized the other two Brick Curry locations in the city, in Midtown and the Upper East Side.

According to Eater, Brick Lane owner Sati Sharma owed nearly $350,000 in unpaid taxes "when combing all four of his NYC restaurants, including the locations of Brick Lane Curry House and an Italian restaurant in Midtown called Radicchio Pasta and Risotto, which has been closed since at least January [2016]."

The "vast majority" of owed cash at that time was from unpaid sales tax, per a spokesperson for the Department of Tax and Finance.

The Second Avenue location is the last of the Brick Lane empire in the city.

Brick Lane moved to Second Avenue from Sixth Street in 2014.

Updated 9/21

The tax issues have apparently been taken care of... Brick Lane is back open today...


[Photo by Steven]

Out and About in the East Village

In this ongoing feature, East Village-based photographer James Maher provides us with a quick snapshot of someone who lives and/or works in the East Village or Lower East Side.



By James Maher

Name: Pepe Flores (who was a little camera shy)
Occupation: Retired, Daycare Teacher
Location: Avenue C and 4th Street
Time: 3:30 pm on Friday, Sept 15

I was born in Puerto Rico in 1951 in public housing near the docks in Old San Juan, but then we moved to the countryside when I was 4 years old. I was raised on the sugar cane plantation.

I went to college at the University of Puerto Rico. I got involved in the left [political movement], and I had to leave because my life was in danger. There is political persecution in Puerto Rico — it’s been going on since 1898, the minute that we were invaded. Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States, so anybody who looks for the independence for Puerto Rico, in a pacific way or in a violent way, is a threat. So I moved to this neighborhood 45 years ago when I was 20 years old.

There was a two-bedroom apartment for $90 on 3rd Street between C and D. In those days, New York was affordable, you know what I mean? There was a big Puerto Rican population when I got here. There was a barrio uptown, one in the Bronx, then one in the Lower East Side. There was a big community, working class. We don’t consider ourselves immigrants because we are American citizens. I have an American passport.

I didn’t plan to live here — it was just that I was working in a bilingual program on 4th Street and all of a sudden I found myself in this community. I met somebody who was part of the adopt-a-building program, to adopt buildings that landlords had abandoned. So I got involved with the organization and I got an apartment in there. From there I moved to 11th Street. That’s where I got involved with the homesteading, with the renovation on the building. And now I’ve been in the same apartment on Avenue C for 35 years.

This is the first place where I saw performance art, the mix between dance, music, video, and all kinds of styles of creativity. One of the famous places for that was out on the corner on 2nd Street and Avenue B where the gas station used to be. The Gas Station was the abandoned gas station. These people took over and that’s where they had their performances.

And then you had the Nuyorican Poets Café that started on 6th Street between A and B and then they moved to 3rd Street. There was another place also that I collaborated with, it was called the Nuyorican Village. It was where the Jazz Boat used to be. The Jazz Boat was a jazz club on Avenue A between 6th and 7th Street, and when it was abandoned this guy Eddie Figueroa took it over. His approach was that, because the term Nuyorican can be a little bit of a put down, he believed that it was the “New Rican,” it was a new kind of Puerto Rican — we were vegetarian, macrobiotic. It was a very vibrant cultural community here.

People tend to treat this area as a drug haven, but it wasn’t like that. There was a working-class community. The people portrayed us as living on welfare, but you know what? In my building, out of 16 units, 14 people were working people, and I don’t know anybody who used to live on welfare. We were all working-class people, and most of the people in this neighborhood, or a lot of people that I know, they used to work in the Garment District, because the Garment District had steady jobs. It was close to the people, and it had pretty good paying jobs – enough to pay rent and live a decent life.

I would associate the decay to the disappearance of the Garment Center as a place for jobs. All these people lost their jobs. All these people that come from Puerto Rico, most of the people were people who came from the countryside. Once we lost jobs, then drugs came in, heavy drugs, heroin, cocaine. Those are hard, and it turned around the neighborhood. And then AIDS — I buried so many people here who died of AIDS, young people, adolescents, children, and they didn’t care.

They knew what was going on over here. They knew. I mean, if you see at 6 in the morning on 5th Street, 80 people lining up, you’re a cop, you say coño. They’re not going to church. They were there to score, at 6 in the morning. [The city] knew the whole thing about the drug trade that was going on here. They didn’t do nothing because that was a way to gentrify the neighborhood. That was a way to get people out of here. It’s a way that the system, the powers that be use to oppressed people. When you’re doing drugs, you don’t care about housing, education. You just care about your habit and that’s it.

And then with the economic depression that turned out, the landlords, they couldn’t collect the rents, and the easy way was to burn the buildings. They would pay somebody to go and burn a building with people in it. The building that I lived in, and all the buildings, we had to have volunteers to be security at night, especially at night because that’s when people came to burn out the buildings. They wanted to get the insurance money.

Besides that, I was a daycare teacher for 30 years of my life. It used to be on First Avenue and 9th Street, where P.S. 122 is. I took care of the children of Philip Glass, Ornette Coleman. After 30 years I left, but I’m still involved in the community. The things that you have to provide for the community are housing, education and health services. I consider myself a community activist. I’ve been involved with the gardens. There is a center on 9th Street between C and D called Loisaida Center, and I’m volunteering with them. My motto is, I’m not a volunteer, I donate my time. That’s another way to look at it.

I’m still here, I have two children even though they’re grown ups now, They’re doing great. I love this neighborhood. I want to give you an example – I used to walk out of the door and before you got to the corner you say, ‘hello’ to 5 or 10 people. It’s the community, the sense of community, the sense of caring about each other. You care about the old, the young, the adolescents. There are parks, youth centers. This is my neighborhood; this is my barrio. I think that concept comes from agrarian societies – that concept of barrio, of community. For some reason, the people who moved here had that spirit of community. The gardens are an example of that. People get together — the old, the young — and plant. There are more gardens between Houston and 14th, from A to D, than in any other neighborhood in New York City – and great, incredible gardens. I don’t play favorites – I love all of them.

James Maher is a fine art and studio photographer based in the East Village. Find his website here.