FYI — Christmas is coming

Spotted on Second Avenue between East 14th and East 15th streets this morning by William Klayer.

No word if this was related to a Happy Hour.

Your chance to brainstorm ideas to renovate the Tompkins Square Park Playground

Just a heads up for your calendars or Post-it notes… Councilmember Rosie Mendez is hosting a meeting this coming Tuesday evening to discuss ideas for improving the Tompkins Square Park Playground near East Seventh Street and Avenue B … as the above-flyer says, Mendez has allotted some $900,000 to renovate this space… this is the first step in the improvement process…

The meeting is Tuesday night at St. Brigid's on Avenue B (enter the community center space on the East Eighth Street side) from 6:30-8 p.m.

253 E. 7th St. is now a pile of bricks

[Image from 2014 via Massey Knakal]

Over between Avenue C and Avenue D, the former four-story residence at 253 E. Seventh St. is no more...





An LLC with a Grand Street address bought the building in August 2014 for $4.3 million. The new owners have plans (waiting for final city approval) to put up a 6-story building with six residences on this now-empty lot.

Thanks to EVG reader Daniel Root for the demolition photos.

Previously on EV Grieve:
Options for this lovely East 7th Street townhouse include demolition

New building in the works for 253 E. 7th St.

The disappearing 253 E. 7th St.

Chopping soon signage up at the Death Star

Exactly one month ago today we heard about the three new retail clients coming to 51 Astor Place/the IBM Watson Building/Death Star — Bluestone Lane Coffee, Chop’t Creative Salad Company and Flywheel Sports.

The first of the incoming trio's signage has arrived on the Fourth Avenue/Astor Place side at Ninth Street this week… Chop't! Per the window dressing, the quick-serve salad place will be "Chopping this Winter." (Wonder if they do firewood too?)



These new tenants will join what's looking like the World's Largest CVS here in MiSo.

Previously on EV Grieve:
3 retail spaces available at 51 Astor Place (22 comments)

You can finally shop at 51 Astor Place!

3 new retail tenants for 51 Astor Place: Bluestone Lane Coffee, Chop’t and Flywheel Sports

Sidewalk bridge comes down as condo conversion continues at former East 6th Street synagogue

Workers have removed the sidewalk bridge from outside the former Congregation Mezritch Synagogue at 415 E. Sixth St., EVG reader Michael Hirsch reports.

The under-renovation space, which includes an additional level, will house three condos... with pricing starting at $2.95 million…



The slogan for the residences here between Avenue A and First Avenue: "History reimagined … For modern living."

To date, the teaser website just has contact info about the condos. No sign of interior renderings or other details just yet.

Previously on EV Grieve:
Plan to add condos to historic East Sixth Street synagogue back on

Play spot the potential penthouse atop the East Village synagogue

A final look inside the Anshei Meseritz synagogue on East Sixth Street

Stained-glass windows removed ahead of condo conversion at Congregation Mezritch Synagogue

Condos at former East 6th Street synagogue will start at just under $3 million

Former Organic Avenue space for rent on 3rd Avenue

The for rent sign is up now at the former Organic Avenue space on Third Avenue at East Ninth Street.

According to the listing (PDF!) at Walker Malloy, the asking monthly rent is $17,500 for the 1,020-square-foot space (no basement).

And what was Organic Avenue paying? A past-due notice on the door in late October showed the monthly rent to be $13,583.33.

As for OA, the entire juice-bar chain abruptly shut down on Oct. 15.

So the fact that this space is on the market shoots down any theories of the rumored-to-be-expanding Duane Reade on the East 10th Street corner taking over the entire west side of Third Avenue along here. Three storefronts remain empty next to that Duane Reade.

How you can score free pizza AND rodent repellent tomorrow at the 1st Avenue L stop

Via the EVG inbox®…

WHAT: New Yorker's are used to seeing rodents in the subway but commuters may see a few that are too big to ignore on their commute to work tomorrow morning.

WHO: The event is being sponsored by earthkind®, a North Dakota-based pest prevention company and the makers of the award-winning Stay Away® Rodent repellent that’s proven to keep rodents out of indoor areas, safely and naturally.

WHERE: Giant mice will be greeting commuters at the E. 86th Street and W. 72nd Street subway stations before heading down to Pizza Rat’s home base at the First Avenue L station for an authentic NYC lunch of, you guessed it, pizza! Free samples of Stay Away Rodent® will be given to the first 5000 riders who greet the mice and give them a warm, NYC welcome!

WHEN: Thursday, November 12th from 7:30 am to 1:30 pm

WHY: The earthkind® mice are on a mission to teach New Yorkers how to keep “pizza rat” and other uninvited guests [ED NOTE: Family members?] out of NYC hi-rises, brownstones and homes without using poisons.

The mystery of the missing section of Tompkins Square Park fencing... SOLVED (probably)

[Photo Monday by Bobby Williams]

In an important post from Monday, we noted that someone removed part of the fence along East Seventh Street near Avenue A at Tompkins Square Park. Given that there wasn't anyone around to ask what was going on, we could only assume that the Samuel S. Cox statue was being moved to the top of 100 Avenue A as a way to compete with Red Square.

Well, as a reader noted in the comments, the fence removal was more likely done to aid the removal of the tree stump near the statue...



... and this morning, workers removed said stump.


[Photo by Derek Berg]

Case closed! (Though can anyone confirm if the Cox statue is actually still there?)

The Marshal seizes the former Red & Gold Boil on St. Mark's Place

Back in early October, the rather unfortunately named Red & Gold Boil (sounds like a topic for a WebMD search) closed after 13 months in business at 30 St. Mark's Place between Second Avenue and Third Avenue.

The sign on the door from management made it seem as if the place may reopen with a new concept. (We look forward to serving you again, etc...)

The notice of eviction that recently arrived has now been joined by a note from the Marshal, announcing that the landlord has legal possession of the space...



The restaurant opened in August 2014 as the Red & Gold Crab Shack... somewhere along the line the boil replace the crab shack.

Previously on EV Grieve:
Breaking: Japadog is closing for good after tonight on St. Mark's Place

Reader report: Crab Shack in the works for former Japadog space on St. Mark's Place

Here is your Red & Gold Crab Shack! signage on St. Mark's Place

Out and About in the East Village

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



By James Maher

Name: Willie Correa
Occupation: Artist, Sound Engineer
Location: East 3rd Street between 1st Avenue and Avenue A
Time: 2:45 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 9

I basically had a long history here, but I’ll just give you a quick rundown. I got to the Lower East Side very young — in 1954. I was 2 years old. I grew up and I’ve seen the neighborhood transition. Imagine Avenue C back in the late 1950s. It was still a lot of Jewish stores and stuff like that.

There was a mixture always of different ethnicities. There were the Ukrainians, the Jews, the Italians. My older brother lived kind of through a "West Side Story" thing. He got stabbed. He was going out with an Italian girl. Just like the movie; just like the play. I’ve seen all that. It still has that mixture, but the gentrification has taken it to an extreme.

I was one of the founding directors of the Nuyorican Poets Café, but I’m no longer on the board or stuff like that. I got involved because I’m an artist. [The different arts] at the time all kind of ping ponged off each other. They vibrated off each other and went in their own directions, but it was a mix. I was a sound engineer. That’s why Miguel got me into the café because we needed to hear the poets. Back then in 1974 the audio systems were very poor until I started for them. We started doing broadcasts on WBAI live.

I found the building on East Third Street for them. The structure actually belonged to La MaMa, and [founder Ellen Stewart] basically turned it over to us because we didn’t have enough room at the time.

The neighborhood was going down the tubes. It was a small little bar and we needed the to accommodate all of the interests. So we went back into the neighborhood, took the building, but it took us a long time to come back to the level where we were on Sixth Street, because the neighborhood was diving. It was drug infested. We got a little grant to renovate the building through the city. It was terrible. They messed up the building.

Now I’m working with Taller Boricua in the Barrio, but I still live in the neighborhood. I do their content management. They’ve been around for 40 years and I actually connected with them through the Nuyorican. It’s in the Julia De Burgos Cultural Center on 106th Street. I’m also shooting their work now. They’ve got 40 years of original prints, which nobody can afford, so we’re doing a whole series to make affordable versions.

I’ll tell you one thing — you know the new building that they’re putting up on Avenue A? The Wall Street kids need a place to live and stuff like that, which is cool, but I go by yesterday and you see the sign they’ve got now? It’s this female and she looks like a beached whale. Give me a break. How low can you go? I’m not a woman but it’s low, man.

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

Report: 311 calls about homeless people are on the rise in the East Village/Lower East Side

Catching up to this story from DNAinfo on Monday… in which reporter Lisha Arino went through public records to find that 311 calls "about the presence of homeless people, homeless encampments and panhandling have spiked in the past year."

Per the article:

More than 300 complaints relating to homeless people were recorded this year through October in the 10009 and 10002 zip codes — which covers the bulk of the East Village and Lower East Side — a jump from the 171 calls recorded last year overall…

The increase in calls continues its upwards trend. Records show that there were only 83 calls logged in 2010.

However, as DNAinfo points out, the "numbers don’t necessarily mean the neighborhoods’ street homeless population has increased." The mayor's office says that "the number of complaints was proportional to the increase of citizens using the 311 app."

In addition, Manhattan Outreach Consortium director Cesar Vanegas said that he has not seen a significant increase in street homelessness recently.

Read the full article here.

What it will cost to live above the ruins of La Vie in the Bowery District

At the end of October, the teaser site went up for the condos a-rising on 64 E. First St. between First Avenue and Second Avenue. (An area which the developers have dubbed — hey ho! — "The Bowery District.")



Yesterday, pricing and model-home pics (H/T Curbed!) arrived for the residences that sit on the former neighborhood scourge La Vie. And you will be paying a pretty premium to live on the former hookah hotspot. Prices for the two homes now available hover just below and above the $3.3 million mark.

And some blurbage:

An exclusive boutique collection of six full-floor residences with private outdoor terraces in the Bowery District. The Bowery epitomizes both the colorful history and perpetually changing landscape that is New York. 64 East reflects the heritage of this iconic thoroughfare in a forward-thinking, modern design.

And some photos…





And the terrance penthouse…



And, as you may recall, the final product…


[Official for real rendering]

Previously on EV Grieve:
La Vie has closed; neighbors rejoice

Former La Vie space on East First Street will be demolished

Getting rid of the rats at the former LaVie ahead of a new 6-floor residential building

Here lies the remains of La Vie

Here's a look at the new condos coming to East 1st Street

This is what the new condo building at 64 E. 1st St. will really look like

The 'stunning boutique collection' of new residences on East 1st Street in 'The Bowery District'