And now for something new and different on St. Mark's

Alternate headline: You've got to be fucking kidding me.
At the site of the old CBGB shop. (Surprised someone isn't calling this yogurt place Punk Berry.) I even made a joke on March 29 that this location would become a yogurt shop. So I guess this is my fault.

Previously on EV Grieve:
Tourists will have to go online to buy their CBGB T-shirts

Important decisions of our time

What's new on Avenue C?

Bao 111 at 111 Avenue C closed up shop at the end of February because of escalating rents...(Get this: the owner planned to move to the west side because it was less expensive.)

Anyway, the new owners are renovating the space, with hopes of opening by the end of the summer. They were very cordial, and told me it will be a restaurant featuring French-Carribbean fare.

Meanwhile, as the sign reads, Barnyard is open (last Tuesday was its first day, in fact), a high-end cheese and meat shop at 149 Avenue C just north of Ninth Street.

Free punk show in Tompkins Square Park Sunday

More fun to come next Saturday and Sunday.

Suzannah B. Troy has much more on the show. Bob Arihood has many excellent photos here.

EV Grieve FYI

From the Times:

THE Manhattan co-op market has just set a sales record, according to brokers briefed on the sale.
Jonathan Tisch, the chairman and chief executive of Loews Hotels, closed this month on the purchase of a sprawling 14-room co-op facing Central Park, for $48 million, the brokers said. The apartment is on the 11th floor at 2 East 67th Street, one of the monuments to luxury living designed by Rosario Candela in the 1920s.

Wow. Just $8 million more than what the Yankees gave Carl Pavano.

The rich want Bloomberg for a third term

According to today's Post:

Big Apple business honchos want four more years of Mayor Bloomberg -- and are preparing to do whatever it takes to help him stay in City Hall for a third term.

Sources close to the mayor say his deep-pocketed pals are "aggressively pushing" him to run again - his term ends in December 2009 - and are strategizing on how to change term-limits law to make it happen.

"We believe it's very feasible," said one source. "If he decides to run again, there are people who want him, and those people are planning to do everything they can. It is a very, very strong movement."

[Image via New York Post]

Keeping the spirit alive

Yesterday afternoon on Fifth Street near Avenue A. Two signs leftover from the "let them eat cake" protest from July 11.

A message for the kids

On the door at St. Brigid's school.

Is it July 27 yet?

Oh, good. That means it's time for the start of the second season of Mad Men, the AMC show about advertising in 1960s Manhattan...that is seemingly advertising everywhere around the city. Gawker had a post July 14 on the Mad Men subway-ad campaign.



(Coincidentally, at the time I saw the post, Mad Men was up on the site's ad rotation.)


Meanwhile, if you like the show, Gridskipper posted a handy-dandy guide to Mad Men locales in the city last year. (And can a Mad Men tour for tourists be too far behind...?)

[Images on Gawker -- Flickr via Thighs Wide Shut]

That sound you hear is EV Grieve scrapping the bottom of the barrel to find mid-1980s footage of Times Square

It's Huey Lewis! And the News! Howard Johnson's in all it's neon glory at the 38-second point.

Too many people got Carrie-d (groan, sorry) away on the stoop

According to this week's issue of The Villager (via Jeremiah):

Call it “Stoop and the Groupies.”

With the May film release of “Sex and the City,” flocks of female fans of the show once again are pouring into narrow Perry St. in Greenwich Village. But as waves of women visit the front steps of the imaginary home of Carrie Bradshaw, tempers in the community have begun to flare.

Visitors are lured to the area by the fictional lives of the characters created for the popular TV series. They sit for photos on “Carrie’s stoop” and shop in local boutiques. They wait on line for cupcakes at nearby Magnolia Bakery, then sit outdoors eating them on a nearby bench — just like Carrie and Miranda did.

For the show’s fans, at least, it seems a picture-perfect ritual. Yet, in the sweltering heat of summer, some neighbors are resenting all the ruckus and seeking an end to “Sex and the City” tours on their streets.

Last week, residents won a reprieve, when, on July 15, the largest of the tour operators, On Location Tours, announced it would take Perry St. off its route.

On this solemn occasion, I'd like to look back at this post from June 2:
These are a few of the photos you'll find when you search for "Carrie Bradshaw" on Flickr

A reminder of artists who lived and worked in the LES

[Tom Warren, P.P.O.W. Gallery “Portrait/Self-Portrait of David Wojnarowicz,” at P.P.O.W.]

The Times had a review yesterday of two exhibits that I want to see.

HISTORY KEEPS ME AWAKE AT NIGHT
A Genealogy of Wojnarowicz
P.P.O.W.
555 W. 25th St., Chelsea
Through Aug. 22

SIDE X SIDE
La MaMa La Galleria
6 E. First St., East Village
Through Aug. 3

An excerpt of the review by Holland Cotter:

With the Lower East Side fast losing connections to its history as an alternative neighborhood for art and politics, two summer group shows remind us of artists who lived and worked there, and have, through example, passed its spirit on.

“History Keeps Me Awake at Night: A Genealogy of Wojnarowicz” at P.P.O.W. — a gallery that opened on East 10th Street in 1983 — focuses on David Wojnarowicz, the radical-minded artist, writer and East Village denizen who died of AIDS in 1992. Although the show has five pieces by him, its purpose is to map his continuing presence, and the work of younger artists assembled by the curators Photi Giovanis and Jamie Sterns, conveys varying degrees of influence and homage.

Possibly the most striking difference between Wojnarowicz’s Lower East Side and our own was the inescapable presence of AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s. “Side x Side” at La MaMa La Galleria includes work by three Wojnarowicz contemporaries who died of the disease — Scott Burton (1939-1989), Nicolas Moufarrege (1947-1985) and Martin Wong (1946-1999) — and by two other artists, Kate Huh and Carrie Yamaoka, whose work registered its impact.

Newsflash: New York is expensive (aka, we're No. 1!)

According to Forbes:

New York City's got fashionable Fifth Avenue, trendy Tribeca and an oasis in Central Park. To enjoy those perks, residents pay up.
The Big Apple topped a new list of America's most expensive cities, with a measured cost of living surpassing that of Houston, Boston and Washington, D.C. The culprit? High rent: $4,500 a month on average for a two-bedroom, unfurnished luxury apartment.
Los Angeles comes in second place. Its residents can partly blame a long, expensive commute. The average driver there spends 72 hours a year stuck in traffic delays, and, as of July 21, the cost of a gallon of regular gas was $4.46.

To determine the U.S. cities where the cost of living is highest, the London office of Mercer, an American human resources consulting company, measured the prices of the same basket of goods in 253 of the world's cities. The basket is composed of over 200 products, representative of executive spending patterns and including everything from rent for a luxury apartment to the cost of a fast-food hamburger.
Location has a lot to do with why New York and Los Angeles top the list.
In New York, the need for more homes has been increasing since the mid-1970s, says Edward Glaeser, an economist at Harvard University.
"Before 1970," he says, "workers in some sense were paid a premium to live in New York." This, says Glaeser, was due to its reputation for crime and dirtiness. "Now, people pay a premium to live there."
The change happened when the city began to experience robust economic growth that's still occurring, despite some hiccups along the way. Even though business is increasingly global, New York is a center for industries that produce ideas, like finance and publishing, notes Glaeser.
"You don't see anyone relocating to South Dakota," he says. "The idea now is that you become smart by hanging around other smart people, which New York has in abundance. That's why it's been able to thrive."

Related:

Actually, New York is cheap (Curbed)

[Image via New York]