More King of the Hill promo sightings; residents wonder how a show that was never, ever funny remained on the air for so many years

Picking up from BoweryBoogie and Curbed last week.

Had a sighting at Sixth Street and Avenue A:



And Houston and Avenue B:





Full disclosure: Mrs. Grieve and I are the "residents" the headline refers to. Feel free to defend the show in the comments.

Welcome to the house of Swayzzzze

The Swayzzzze! On the south side of Houston between Norfolk and Suffolk. Two things. No, wait. Make that three!

1) If I'm not mistaken, though I probably am, this address always seems to house some sort of big ad like this. Why?

2) How would you feel living here...and having to go through the door that is actually The Swayzzzze's gun barrel (so to speak) every day?

3) Road House is a fine motion picture. (How Driving Miss Daisy beat this out for Best Picture in 1989 I have no idea. And Daniel Day-Lewis for My Left Foot? The Swayzzzze was robbed.)

Haven't we suffered enough?

From this week's Page Six Magazine.

Tree Lighting in Tompkins Square Park

There were Christmas carols and music and hot cider and community spirit this afternoon at the annual Tree Lighting ceremony at Tompkins Square Park.







And, uh, a live snippet of "Silent Night"....



Unfortunately, at this point, the NYPD swept in and arrested everyone involved. Apparently the Christmas carols exceeding the 20 decibels at 5 feet rule as mandated by the sound permit required by the city. The tree was chopped down as evidence. I asked a police officer what was happening as he packed his gun especially made for dispensing tear gas. Rather humorlessly he said, "These motherfuckers will pay for being too loud."

Sorry. This isn't true. Or funny. But such a scenario crossed my mind.

Toots

All this talk today in the next few posts about fancy cocktails and secret "underbelly" bars makes me...

Well, it makes me want to watch Toots, the documentary on Toots Shoor, the legendary Manhattan saloonkeeper. The film, directed by his granddaughter, will have a limited theatrical run before being released on DVD Jan. 13.

Here's a look:

Noted

The Times features spiffy Crown Heights hotspot Franklin Park today. As the Times reports:

“I came because of the Skee-Ball,” said Ashley Bonnell, 28, on a recent Saturday night, as she sipped a gin gimlet alongside the white subway-style tiles of the smaller bar. “My friends have been calling me to join them in the East Village, but I told them I’m hanging out in my hood.”

From the next stool, her friend Joachim Boyle, 28, who was also drinking a gimlet, concurred. “You don’t know how excited I am to be out of the Village and live here.”

Mr. Boyle pondered whether old-timers would dismiss them as invading hipsters.

“I’m not a hipster,” Ms. Bonnell, a physical therapist, insisted.

“Yes, you are,” Mr. Boyle said, waving toward her long cardigan, red scarf and chunky boots. He tugged on his subtly sheened blue button-down. “So am I.”

Also, the Times offers a handy guide at the end that includes the address and this...:

DRESS CODE Facial hair, cabby hats, zippered sweaters and jeans for men. Oversize cardigans, leggings or skinny jeans, long scarves and flat boots for women.

A taste of Milk & Honey and other "underbelly bars"

In the Times of London today, writer Stephen Bleach takes a tour of the "underbelly bars of New York." La Esquina. Angel's Share. PDT. The Box. Milk & Honey. Village Pourhouse. (Heh. OK, just seeing if you're still paying attention...)

Anyway! Here's his impression of Milk & Honey at 134 Eldridge St. Once he finally gets in and what not.

The address was a sleazily ungentrified street of bins and boarded-up tailors’ shops on the Lower East Side. If La Esquina looked like the place where people get shot on NYPD Blue, this was where they’d dump the body. By the cracked plastic bell push was a dirty sign: “Alterations”. Not promising — but a buzz, a word on the intercom, and we were in.

It took a while for our eyes to adjust to the light. About 10 minutes, in fact. You can tell how cool a place is by the degree of gloom, and if Milk & Honey were any cooler, you’d have to order your drinks in Braille.

In fact, there’s no list. You tell the waitress what mood you’re in and the barman rustles up what he deems appropriate. He sent me a cherry daiquiri. I hate cherries. As Dexter Gordon sax tunes floated lazily in the darkness, we peered at the people around us. From what we could see, they were all very beautiful, which was nice, and appeared to know it, which wasn’t.

“So, here we are,” I said to Jaqui. “This is the coolest place in New York. What do you think?”

She sipped her eggy concoction thoughtfully. “It’s a good bar, and I like the fact we got in,” she said. “But can we go and be tourists now?”

She had a point. Digging into Gotham’s hidden underbelly was fun, but there’s a limit to how cool you really need to be.

“Up the Empire State tomorrow, then a carriage through Central Park?”

“I’ll drink to that,” Jaqui said.

More trendspotting! Fancy cocktail bars for serious drinkers

The Chicago Sun-Times today has an article titled "Pouring on the charm: New York's latest trend takes the old private club and mixes in a new twist." It's written by a New York-based freelancer and examines "haunts for serious drinkers" such as PDT, Death & Co., Tailor, Pegu Club and Doc Holliday's (OK! Again, just checking if you're still with me...)

Hmm...So, who's pushing this serious cocktails trend? In the previous post, the writer discloses that he was a guest of NYC and Company.

Did the police check with the Stone Temple Pilots tour manager?

From the Post today:



I don't know. He could pass for Scott Weiland. A little?

Dharma Punx on the Bowery

The Times features the Dharma Punx movement today:

Punk is not dead, though these days on the Bowery it’s a whole lot quieter. Silent, even.

Every week, dozens of people, usually young and artfully scruffy, climb three creaky flights of stairs off this formerly gritty stretch of downtown Manhattan, a block from where CBGB, the hallowed hall of punk, once stood. Often shrouded in hoodies, inked with tattoos and studded with piercings, they look primed for a serious rock show, and perhaps a few related vices. But in a softly lighted loft, in earshot of the traffic’s roar, they instead find a spot on the floor, close their eyes and take long, deep breaths.

Called Dharma Punx, the gathering is part of a nationwide Buddhism-based meditation network that is part Sid Vicious and part Dalai Lama.

In case you haven't read about this in recent years (the NYC sessions have been going for nearly three years), there's no new-agey mumbo-jumbo. The group here is lead by 48-year-old Josh Korda.

Mr. Korda freely uses four-letter words and makes frequent references to his favorite bands, like the Suicidal Tendencies or the Cro-Mags, a seminal hard-core group. Dharma Punx regulars like the fusion of grit and Zen, and they appreciate that there is no preaching, no proselytizing, no chanting and no mention of dogma.

Spirit of the holidays

Walking with the Grieve family Christmas tree last night. Just turned off Avenue A. Car with Jersey plates cruises by, the driver looking for a parking spot. In a few hours, the mooks inside will be peeing/barfing in the streets before heading home. Driver's side window comes down. Bring it on. "Nice tree dickhead."

Breaking: Model booty at the Cooper Square Hotel

Curbed has the first peeping-tom photo from a scantily clad photo shoot at the just-open Cooper Square Hotel. I'd post the photo here, except that this is a decent family-owned and operated site that wouldn't stoop to gratuitous butt shots to drive up our page views.

Given all this talk about Richard Hell the last two days...

At CBGB...which would have turned 35 this month.

A Leshko's quickie

[Updated: Sorry, I missed doing this earlier. Bob Arihood's words and photos are always compelling at Neither More Nor Less. Check out some of his shots that include Leshko's.]

There's a photo of the late lamented Leshko's (not that one above us) on the corner of Avenue A and Seventh Street in my post on the film What About Me from earlier today. Anywho, I was trying to remember when the original Leshko's closed. (1999.) So I did a little research. Just wanted a share a few passages from articles I found on the place. And I am not being fucking nostalgic, OK! I swear! I love the Yuck Cafe that's there now! Uh, Yeti Cafe, sorry! Er, Yuca.

As Slavs of New York wrote in October 2005:

As more and more Slavs move out of the East Village, their presence is being felt less and less. Two major landmarks recently disappeared: Leshko's and Kiev.

Of course, both are still standing. It's just that both have been renovated, reimagined and reopened, losing much (if not all) of their Ukrainian flavor along the way.

First to go was Leshko's (111 Avenue A at 7th Street), which opened in 1957. New owners closed down the old-school favorite in 1999 and turned it into something that ended up in an issue of Wallpaper* not long after. The menu lost almost all of its Slavic dishes, with the exception of pierogies. But they were reworked almost beyond recognition - mushroom and leek pierogies?

And from the Times of New York in 2000:

For decades, Leshko's has held down a corner near Tompkins Square Park in what was once called the Pirogi Belt, in deference to the neighborhood's Slavic population. Aside from providing early-morning and late-night sustenance to the local clubbing crowd, Leshko's served Ukrainian staples like cabbage soup, boiled beef and the occasional special of jellied pigs' feet.

The Leshko family sold the restaurant in the 1970's, though, and it began to decline, becoming grungier and less and less inviting. Its site, at Avenue A and Seventh Street, is heavily trafficked, and one can easily imagine the new owners selling out to, say, the Gap or Starbucks, one further step in homogenizing the East Village. The owners did, in fact, want to sell the restaurant, but the Leshko family still owned the building, and any new tenant required its approval. The family preferred to maintain the site as a restaurant.

Meanwhile, two business partners who wanted to open a restaurant, Robert Pontarelli and Stephen Heighton, finding that Leshko's was for sale, decided to pursue it. They met with Jerry Leshko, a son of the original owners, who is an art history professor at Smith College, and hit it off. Leshko's was theirs.

First came a thorough renovation. The crumbling coffee shop interior was replaced by handsome hearthstone columns, a dark oak floor, Danish modern lamps and beige-and-white Saarinen chairs offset by burgundy banquettes and a black Lucite bar. The winning look is part Frank Lloyd Wright and part Dick Van Dyke Show.

From here the corner became the Yuca Cafe. Saw Sam Shepard eating there once.

Updated: Sorry, I missed doing this earlier. Bob Arihood's words and photos are always compelling at Neither More Nor Less. Check out some of his shots that include Leshko's.