OK, I think we get it...

Avenue A near 12th Street.

Hanging out on St. Mark's Place

Another view of the coming recession

Last Tuesday, Jeremiah had a post with a photo of "the recession" graffiti at the "coming soon" Capital One branch on 8th Street and University. Meanwhile, I just saw the front page of last Friday's Washington Square News:



I really like this shot by WSN photog Ben Norman. Perhaps this will be one of the iconic images of this time in NYC...

Happy 100th birthday John's of 12th Street

Just got a press release announcing that East Village mainstay John's of 12th Street "is celebrating their 100th year anniversary on Thursday, Oct. 23 by rolling back the prices on their menu to approximations of those available in 1908."

The release included a few historical tidbits. Like!

During prohibition Momma John kept a "hootch" still in the backyard behind the kitchen and made wine in the basement. John opened a speakeasy upstairs and patrons would enter through the restaurant, where he served Momma John's brews in espresso cups in case of a raid. To celebrate the end of prohibition, John put candles on each of the tables in the restaurant and started the wax candelabra which is still in use and being added to nightly in the back room.

And celebrities!

Patrons though the years include an eclectic range of bold face names including Jackie Kennedy (who brought her young family in for spaghetti dinners), Ben Stiller (who dines with his parents), Pete Townsend (lore has it he sketched the idea for Tommy on a napkin), Christian Slater (who had his 9th birthday party in the restaurant's back room), Tom Cruise (who initially went unrecognized and waited patiently for a table for an hour), and Kelly Ripa (her first date with now husband Mark Conseulo was at John's).

Noted

NYU was recently ranked 15th by Global Language Monitor as one of the most mentioned universities in print and electronic media, beating out the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern University and Georgetown University, among others. The study measures university appearance through every accessible database, including print, electronic media and the blogosphere.
Columbia University, however, snagged the number two spot in the study.

(Washington Square News)

NYC on the record(s)

Yesterday, I had a post on revisiting the "Physical Graffiti" cover art 33 years later.

Somehow I've managed to missed the ongoing NYC album art posts at Gothamist. Here, Gothamist proves a little background on how NYC played a prominent role on an album cover...They've covered everyone from Dylan...the New York Dolls...to the Strokes and the Beastie Boys. Good stuff.

[Updated: Alex has video from an MSNBC report on "the death of album cover art.]

Noise, then darkness

Stevengyang posted this video on YouTube titled "235 East 13th Street." Here's the description:

This is a video of the construction that has gone on around us over the past year. The construction has turned our bedroom window into a concrete wall. The wall is so close we can touch it. At then end you see how dark the room is even at 3 pm during the day. At least its not as loud anymore.

Ugh. What a nightmare. Mrs. Grieve and I moved out of an apartment on the LES around the time when rumors were circulating that the empty lot next door was becoming a six-story building with retail on the ground level. Sure enough, there's now a spiffy new apartment building on that space. We had five windows in that apartment, including three that faced the lot. The apartment was dingy as it was -- can't imagine what it would be like now.

Perhaps developers should be sentenced to live in apartments next to their construction zones to experience all this firsthand.

Previously on EV Grieve:
The dog days of summer

A New View of the Lower East Side (I'll say!)

Meanwhile, the above post made me curious about the 19-story Ludlow Hotel rising on, uh, Ludlow, right behind The Ludlow. (Clever, these names!) What do you do if you forked over money for a space in The Ludlow with nice southern exposures...which will soon be exposed to a 170-room hotel? (And what about The Ludlow's slogan: "A New View of the Lower East Side...")



Curbed had this shot last month:



Haven't seen mention of the new hotel at The Ludlow site.

They should really update their Web site, too. None of the images reflect the new construction going on next door. Seems a little misleading to me...

Nancy Spungen 30 years later

New York magazine has this feature this week:

The Day Punk Died
Thirty years ago this month, the death of Nancy (of Sid &) effectively ended New York’s early punk scene. It’s been easy to hate her since — maybe too easy

In the article, Karen Schoemer speaks with Legs McNeil, among others. She interviews him at the Yaffa Cafe. I love how the article ends:

Legs McNeil doesn’t live in New York City anymore. He bought a house in rural Pennsylvania and doesn’t relish his return visits. He’s now a recovered alcoholic wearing a black Hawaiian shirt decorated with pictures of exotic cocktails and pegged black jeans 30 years out of fashion. He wants his old New York. He glances at a girl in slutty Sex and the City clothes that aren’t slutty anymore, talking on her cell phone while her dining companion gazes patiently into space. The sight brings out a little of his old fire. “I don’t know who the fuck they’re talking to,” he sneers. “Are they talking to other people in restaurants eating breakfast?” Where’s Nancy when you need her? She would have hated it here. She wouldn’t have lasted a minute.

Here's the Sid and Nancy heroin interview from the punk documentary D.O.A.

Noted (ZOMG edition)

Yes, yes...several people have told me that Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are living in the East Village while she is appearing on Broadway...at the American Felt Building on 13th Street near Fourth Avenue. (Or maybe not!) No shortage of photos of Tom and daughter Suri on the street...here they are on Fourth Avenue via the Vulture.


[Photo by Flynet Pictures]

14 year old against Bloomy's third term (no matter where she may actually go to school)

LimeWire has the following post on Rachel Trachtenburg:

At 14 years old, the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players drummer (and daughter of its singer/guitar player Jason and costumer/slideshow operator Tina) is already playing a more active role in local politics than most of us ever will.

New Yorkers are, by now, familiar with the proposal to extend term limits and allow our mayor, Michael Bloomberg, to run for the city's highest office a third time. As part of the process, the city council is now holding public hearings, allowing citizens to argue for or against the plan. On Thursday, Rachel spoke to the council, making the case against allowing Bloomberg to seek a third term.

In her testimony, Rachel told the council that, because Bloomberg raised taxes to give money to the Yankees and move the fountain in Washington Square Park slightly (and continuously sided with landlords on rent stabilization and affordable housing issues, I might add), her family was priced out of their East Village home. Now, they live in Bushwick, where their friends are often mugged at gunpoint. "Any monkey can raise taxes," says Rachel. "No offense to monkeys."

Meanwhile, BushwickBK.com has an important addition to the story:

A minute of research shows that Rachel is enrolled in school in SEATTLE — which means her family’s apartment in New York is at best a business necessity and at worst a luxury or status item, even if it is now in Bushwick. Boo. Hoo.

Physical Graffiti 33 years later

From the WOW Report (via BoingBoing):

Artist Lou Cannizzaro went back to 96 St Marks Place in Manhattan 33 years after that location starred on the cover of Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti album. Robert Plant should have aged so well.

Wikipedia has this about the cover art:

The album's sleeve design features a photograph of a New York City tenement block, with interchanging window illustrations. The album designer, Peter Corriston, was looking for a building that was symmetrical with interesting details, that was not obstructed by other objects and would fit the square album cover. He said:

We walked around the city for a few weeks looking for the right building. I had come up a concept for the band based on the tenement, people living there and moving in and out. The original album featured the building with the windows cut out on the cover and various sleeves that could be placed under the cover, filling the windows with the album title, track information or liner notes.

The two buildings photographed for the album cover are located at 96 and 98 St. Mark's Place in New York City. But to enable it to fit, the building (which is actually a five-story building) had to be cropped out. So for the album cover it became a four-story building instead. The buildings used on the cover were the same that Keith Richards and Mick Jagger were filmed in front of in the Rolling Stones music video "Waiting on a Friend."