Noted

"Famed for its concentration of heavily subsidized 20-something residents — also nicknamed trust-funders or trustafarians — Williamsburg is showing signs of trouble. Parents whose money helped fuel one of the city’s most radical gentrifications in recent years have stopped buying their children new luxury condos, subsidizing rents and providing cash to spend at Bedford Avenue’s boutiques and coffee houses." (The New York Times)

The motorcycle diaries

There was a rather mysterious beeping noise on Fifth Street near Avenue A. Neighbors first started hearing it Thursday night. The source was traced to a covered motorcycle parked by the Con Ed Avenue A substation. As of yesterday, the motorcycle's alarm continued to make the beeps at intervals of 10 seconds or so.

Fewer noise complaints to 311 -- except for that increase in complaints about loud music and parties

As the Post notes today: "Noise complaints phoned into the city's 311 hot line between January and March plummeted 16.5 percent compared to the first quarter last year -- from 9,292 to 7,755 -- and city officials cited fewer construction projects and slowing commerce for the newfound tranquility."

However!

"Economic misery might be prompting New Yorkers to seek company at raucous parties. Complaints of loud music and parties surged 18 percent in the first three months of this year."

Noted

Page 1 of the Post today...



And Friday...

The Times on why NYC corporate law firms are becoming an endangered species

"As the apocalypse on Wall Street ripples out into the larger economy, a thick red tide is lapping at the once-impregnable foundations of New York’s corporate law firms, threatening to turn the industry — and with it, some iconic city characters — into an endangered species." (The New York Times)

Street fair!

Second Avenue at 14th Street...





And I forgot that Stella's corners the market on some of the food options...

Meeting for a plan to preserve the Bowery

Click on the image below to read the Bowery Alliance of Neighbor's plan to preserve the east side of the Bowery from Ninth Street to Canal. There's a meeting to discuss the plan on June 16.

Remembering the "Mayor of the LES"

Great story today in The Wall Street Journal about Rudy Mancuso. On Oct. 3, 1951, at the Polo Grounds, Mancuso -- who had one exposure left on his camera -- took what is arguably the most famous photograph in the history of baseball: Giant Bobby Thomson taking an 0-1 fastball from Dodger Ralph Branca over the leftfield wall in the bottom of the ninth. And the Giants win the pennant!



Sadly, though, Mancuso never received credit for the photo. He even lost the negative. As Joshua Prager notes in the Journal, "And so, tragically, the man who shot 'The Shot Heard 'Round the World' was entirely forgotten."

Many years passed. Mancuso's pencil moustache turned from black to white as newswires and then vendors and then Web sites hocked an inexhaustible supply of his photo. He made no money from his shot and held no proof that it was he, an embosser and die cutter living in a Lower East Side walk-up, who'd most famously preserved baseball's greatest moment.

Anyway, you can read the story for yourself to see what became of the negative and to find out what he did at the Hotel Rivington. Mancuso died on May 10 at age 89.

The Times did a piece on photo in September 2006.

Last year at this time on EV Grieve: The Lower East Side — There goes the neighborhood

That's the headline for the May 28, 1984, New York magazine cover story that I recently came across. The piece begins in the early 1980s with the rotting hulk of the Christodora and the young man eager to own it, Harry Skydell.

You can read the article here.

Not That Way Anymore

Stiv Bators died June 4, 1990. (Via Ohio Sounds via Punk Turns 30)

EV Grieve Etc: Mourning Edition

The freakologist of Times Square (Jeremiah's Vanishing NY)

Smith's cleans up when we weren't looking (Lost City)

The East Village circa 1934 (Hunter-Gatherer)

"Sorcerer's Apprentice" fun on 17th Street (BoweryBoogie)

Crap! We missed National FroYo Day! (Eater)

Depeche Mode lead singer sells WV townhouse, buys Battery Park penthouse (The Observer)

Depeche Mode? Musical interlude!



A family of four's 700-square-foot EV apartment (Dwell)

Lux Living has a stalker (Lux Living)

Looking at Music: Side 2 at MoMa (Stupefaction)

Dave's new shirt; Biker Bill's new hat (Slum Goddess)

"Diary of a Times Square Thief" is one of 120 films to play at the Brooklyn International Film Festival...which starts today.

The Scavengers

Last Saturday, a group of post-collegiate types took part in a scavenger hunt throughout the neighborhood. Sometime after 7, the group reportedly convened in front of Sophie's. There, the group members assembled many of the things they apparently had on their list to find. They all took pictures of each other with their junk. They were rather harmless in the grand scheme of annoying post-collegiate types who go on scavenger hunts and/or pub crawls in the neighborhood. Still, as several people confirmed, they were characterized as rambunctious and oblivious to their surroundings. They were, we understand, shooed away from the front of Sophie's by management. They were giving the impression that the ruckus on Fifth Street was caused by bar patrons. This was not the case. The group moved west toward Avenue A with their scavenger-hunt possessions in tow for more pictures. Then, the group parted ways, leaving behind everything that they had collected for someone else to clean up.