The Department of Health is really cracking down

The vernal igloo of Tompkins Square Park

According to this YouTube description: "vernal igloo! living on the streets of nyc for a month, i sometimes slept outside. a perfect spot in tompkins (no 5/0), completely undisturbed & obscured by green, i slept here on & off for about a week. big enough for 1, 4ft x 3ft x 7ft, enough room to sit up even!"




4ft x 3ft x 7ft apartments nearby are going for what now these days, $1,750? (And is that Emile Hirsch in the video?)

Claim: Bruce Willis doesn't own any part of the Bowery Wine Co.

According to the Observer, in a piece posted last night:

“Basically, he’s not really a partner,” confessed Bowery Wine Company co-owner Chris Sileo, one of two people whose names actually appear on the controversial wine bar’s liquor license (Mr. Willis not included).
“We’re old friends,” Mr. Sileo said of the famous action-film hero. “He lets me attach his name to the place to do me a favor because he knew it would help me. We just say he’s involved in the project.”
Given all the fuss stirred up by Mr. Willis’ supposed involvement in the place, however, Mr. Sileo might want to rethink his celebrity endorsement deal.
“I could do without it,” he said of all the recent hubbub. “I think most of it was because Bruce’s name was attached, and they saw an opportunity to get in the paper.
“I have no problem with activists,” he added. “But it is totally misdirected.”
Echoing the sentiments of fellow Bowery retailer John Varvatos—whose splashy opening of a trendy clothing store on the site of the hallowed CBGB rock club sparked similar demonstrations this past spring—Mr. Sileo said his small business is not responsible for the overall upscaling of the neighborhood.
Blame the landlords, he said; not the tenants: “If you want to direct it at Avalon, fine. But don’t direct it at some New York guy who happens to open a place in the Avalon. We could’ve easily opened down the block; we just opened there because it was a decent location and we got a decent rent.”

Bonus: Bruce Willis from his wine cooler days!

Raising the bar

So the Times debuted its Social Q's column in the Sunday Styles section this past, er, Sunday. Written by Philip Galanes, the column aims to "help with an awkward social situation."

I'm looking forward to seeing the following question, "I moved to the East Village a few months ago. There are so many bars! It's sure not like it was in [HOME STATE]. How should I behave when I'm in a bar? Is tipping customary?"

Anyway, in recent months, I've noticed that this new crop of young professionals -- 21 to 25 years of age, give or take a year on the legal side -- aren't very savvy at the ways of a bar. (I'm not a bartender -- just someone who sits in too many of them for too long.) Generally speaking, they're a self-centered bunch who embarrass themselves without even realizing it. Plus, is it really so difficult to know what you want to drink? One young woman came into one of my favorite neighborhood spots and asked what kind of red wine they had. The bartender said they only had a Merlot. "I'll have a piña colada then." How do you go from red wine to that? Or the young group of women at the same bar who asked the bartender for a recommendation on what to drink. Or the woman who asked to see the drink menu at the Grassroots.

So, generally speaking, what's wrong with some of today's neighborhood-bar-going young generation? (Clarification: I'm talking about regular-bar bars -- props to Brooks of Sheffield for that phrase -- not some bottle-service club.)

For starters:

They act as if they've never been in a bar.
They want to pay using a credit card because...
They rarely have cash on hand.
They leave things behind. ("Did you find a black leather bag with a Lumix digital camera inside...?" Heard a variation of that one too many times.)
They always want the jukebox turned up, which is annoying because...
They always play the most obvious songs on the jukebox.
They will rarely buy rounds for each other. Instead of one person coming to the bar and asking for four drinks, each person comes up and orders individually. (And then pay with a credit card...)
They rarely read a book, newspaper or magazine while waiting for a friend. Instead, they send text messages or play with their iPod.
They aren't aware of their surroundings. (It's just fine for the two of you to take up five seats at a crowded bar.)
They carry too many shopping bags.
They are careless with their possessions. (Hey, it's cool to leave your open purse on the bar, I'll watch it for you!)
They need to be stimulated -- forget conversation, give them Big Buck Hunter.
They wonder why they're aren't more TVs.
They always ask what the happy hour special is. And then still try to bargain.
They like to think they are special because they are in your bar.
They think snapping their fingers or clapping their hands will make the bartender respond much quicker.

I'm sure I've left out many annoying habits of the bar-going Yunnie. And you can likely do better. Feel free to add more in the comments. Oh, and if you're a youthful bargoer, please feel free to defend yourself.

The Lower East Side/East Village: The neighborhood continues to go (AGAIN AND AGAIN AND...)

I recently posted the May 28, 1984, New York magazine cover story titled "The Lower East Side: There Goes the Neighborhood." WELL! Turns out New York wasn't the only media outlet in town to notice something going on in the East Village/Lower East Side.

On Sept. 2, 1984, the Times took a similar look at the neighborhood in a piece cleverly titled "The gentrification of the East Village."

To some excerpts!

WHEN Susan Kelley looks out her window she sees a beginning. ''There are so many young professionals sitting on the stoops, ties undone, just talking,'' said the 24-year-old Wall Street real-estate broker as she surveyed East 13th Street, where she has lived for two years. ''There's a feeling of togetherness, of movement. A feeling that things are different every day.''

When Barbara Shaum looks out her window she sees an end. ''I see them walking down the street in identical blue suits with their briefcases and I think, 'There goes the neighborhood,' '' said the leathercrafts maker who has lived in a loft behind her studio on East Seventh Street for 21 years. ''Why are all these people coming here, where they're so riotously out of place? I don't want my neighborhood to change.''

In the meantime, residents of the East Village live in a mixture of past and present, hope and anxiety.

The neighborhood is now home to people like Miss Kelley, who graduated from the State University of New York at Binghamton two years ago with a degree in art history and works for a Wall Street real estate broker. She moved to her renovated two-bedroom apartment on 13th Street because the rent was low - $900 a month, which she splits with a friend - and ''because it was an adventure - I liked the idea of being part of the change.''

It is also home to people like Mrs. Shaum, who watched her neighbors come and go in waves for more than two decades - first immigrants, then flower children, then drug dealers and now young artists and professionals. The rent on her store and adjoining loft was $200 until last year, when her landlord tried to evict her and renovate the building. After a court fight he agreed to give her a three-year lease at $450 a month for the first two years, $500 a month for the last year. ''But when that is up,'' she said ''he's going to try to make me leave again.''

Their neighbors are people like Sally Randall, a fashion editor whose tastes run toward magenta eye glitter and who moved to the area as a student nine years ago and stayed because ''I liked the atmosphere.'' Or Carolyn Dwyer, a clothes designer who opened her boutique, Carioca, on East Ninth Street eight years ago ''because I didn't want to live someplace slick like SoHo.'' Or Mark Clifford, a business writer who has lived near Tompkins Square for three years and felt the need to defend the red Lacoste shirt he was wore to brunch one Saturday morning. ''I'm not one of the preppies everyone's railing against,'' he said. ''This shirt happens to be older than me.''

They recognize the changes they and their peers have brought to the neighborhood.

''When I took these spaces over, nobody wanted them,'' Miss Dwyer said. ''It was a mess outside. People threw garbage in my doorway. I cleaned up, I did my time. To be threatened after you helped to make it a nice place is an insult.''

If you're thinking of living in: The East Village

A few excerpts from a Times article from Oct. 6, 1985, titled "If you're thinking of living in: The East Village:"

PROSPECTIVE buyers of city-owned properties are swarming over the East Village, looking for bargains in hundreds of dilapidated buildings and vacant lots.

Among them are developers and people who cannot afford or will not pay the high rents and condominium prices prevalent elsewhere in Manhattan and hope that the East Village will give them every New Yorker's dream - maximum space for minimal outlay.
Indeed, its proximity to midtown Manhattan and Wall Street is catching the eyes of an increasing number of New Yorkers who view it as the next likely alternative to chic Washington Square, the trendy Upper West Side or the East Side.

A walk through the East Village is all that is needed to see its obvious problems:
* Condominium prices and rents for rehabilitated apartments, while lower than in established Manhattan neighborhoods, are rising fast and are likely to keep rising for the next few years.
* Crime, particularly crime related to drug abuse, is prevalent. Drug deals are made openly in Tompkins Square, the neighborhood's only park, and burglaries have risen markedly, according to officials of the Ninth Police Precinct, which serves the area.
* Quality-of-life problems abound. Residents complain that garbage remains uncollected for weeks, graffiti are endemic and the Fire Department says the East Village is among the most arson-prone areas in the city.

Despite its problems, the East Village has in recent years emerged as perhaps the most artistically avant-garde neighborhood in the city. Its boutiques are stocked with kamikaze clothing and its galleries with doomsday art, adding yet another layer of diversity to its traditional ethnic heterogeneity.

The cultural mix has been further enlivened by an influx of an increasing number of students from New York University, Cooper Union and other colleges, as well as young professionals.

'There are bohemians who live here who are only pretending to be bohemians,'' said Alfred Marston, chairman of Community Board 3 at 137 Second Avenue. ''Actually, many of them are the most straight-laced of people who work days in the financial district and want to shed that prim, professional image at night and on weekends.''

UNLIKE other areas of the city, said Mr. Marston, a financial consultant with a doctorate in economics, ''a lot of people who feel they have missed the boat in their private lives head for the East Village looking for a renewed lease on their youth and, obviously, some of them find it because more well educated, professional people keep coming.''

Mark Rudolph, a free-lance video producer, is such a person. Six months ago, he saw an ad in FYI, the Time Inc. house organ, and eventually moved into a two-bedroom apartment in a newly rehabilitated building at 652 East Sixth Street, near Avenue C. His rent is $900 a month.

In the blocks adjoining his building are dozens of lots, some occupied by squatters living in tents and shacks. ''But you've got to live somewhere,'' said Mr. Rudolph, expressing the feeling of thousands who will not live anywhere but Manhattan.

Rehabilitation of scores of buildings is under way and to hear local developers tell it, the sale of condominiums is brisk. The developers of 65-69 Cooper Square, a new building with 37 studios and one-bedroom condominiums, said more than two-thirds had been sold since it opened several months ago. The apartments range in price from $175,000 to $208,000, with typical maintenance of $329 a month.

But prices are not rising uniformly: The owners of a 20-unit apartment house at 82 East Third Street recently lowered their asking price from $575,000 to $515,000.

Rents for apartments, when available, can be high. Studio apartments on East Ninth Street between First and Second Avenues are being advertised at $725 a month, and two-bedroom apartments at St. Mark's Place and First Avenue have been advertised for $1,500 a month.
Condominium and co-op prices vary widely. Sponsors of a new co-op in a building being rehabilitated at 613 East Sixth Street are asking $165,000 for a two-bedroom, two-bath apartment, with maintenance of about $500 a month.

Things that I do not want to know about

Outside Monique Skin Care on 9th Street near 1st Avenue

Previously on EV Grieve:

Signs of the times

My shopping list today includes rum, vodka, Grand Theft Auto IV, underwear...and I'll start watching Gossip Girl

I'm really tired of suggestive advertising

Dumpster of the Day

St. Mark's Place, between 1st Avenue and Avenue A.

On it!

Well, at least when we get this darn truck working again...

OTBs will stay open

Good news, as the Times reports:

Confusion and discord gave way to handshakes on Sunday as Gov. David A. Paterson and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg agreed on a deal authorizing the state to take over the city’s Off-Track Betting Corporation while still granting the city a share of gambling revenues.
The agreement allows the city’s 68 OTB parlors to open on Monday, averting a shutdown the mayor had threatened for Sunday that would have put hundreds of people out of work.

More Yunnies out to destroy the past

Catching up on some reading...saw this discouraging item in Scoopy's Notebook in The Villager this week:

Sign of the times: A decades-old mural of the neighborhood in the Brevoort East’s lobby at 20 E. Ninth St. will be removed if the building’s co-op board has its way. Word is that the building’s board is made up of “a group of young people who are focused on modernizing the lobby.” Yet, we hear there’s “considerable opposition among shareholders,” a core of whom would like to keep the artwork. The mural was created in the early 1960s and is a depiction of Village life at the turn of the century, featuring the Washington Square Arch and lower Fifth Ave. “Since this mural is clearly visible from the street, I believe that its removal should be of interest to the general Village community,” one co-op owner e-mailed us. “I have lived in the Village my entire life and know that residents of this community oppose unnecessary changes that diminish the historic nature of this unique community.”

[FYI -- The artwork above is not the mural in question...just the flier for the musical from 1924]

New to the Yunnies?

Post scribe thinks turmoil in Africa is so trendy in the news right now!

Page Six Magazine, which is FREE every Sunday in the New York Post -- you just have to pay $1 for the paper! -- has several doozies today. First, there's a "trends" piece titled "The Sex Effect." You see, there's a recent release called Sex and the City that seems to be very popular. More than that, "anything Carrie Bradshaw touches turns to gold." Indeed! For instance, the $885 Hangisi shoe that Big used to propose to Carrie has sold out from New York stores! (Sixty pairs were sold the day the film opened on May 30; there is now a 400-name waiting list for them!) Also, the New York Public Library, where Carrie planned her dream wedding, is apparently the new Perry Street townhouse. According to the article, "throngs of tourists have made a pilgramage to the steps where Carrie was" [EV Grieve edited out the last word so not to ruin the movie for anyone who may actually want to see it, but you really shouldn't].

Then there's the column called "The Socializer" by "woman-about-town" Kelly Killoren Bensimon. She wants to be a real-life Angelina Jolie (or something) and see Africa. You just have to read her column for yourself. (Click on the image for a better view.) Content from the magazine is not online.

At the Bowery Wine Co. protest Friday night -- in pictures

Here are a few photos from last night's protest that started in front of the Bowery Wine Co. I was only able to stay for the first leg of the protest, which, as Jeremiah reports, continued on to CBGB/Varvatos, the Bowery Hotel, 47 E. 3rd St., then down to Avenue A, through Tompkins Square Park, and finished at the Christodora House. His Flickr pool is here. Bob Arihood was also with the group the entire time. He took many compelling photos, as usual. (Check out my videos from the Bowery Wine Co. here.)

A little back story here.

At the Bowery Wine Co. protest Friday night

Here are a few videos from the Bowery Wine Company protest tonight. (Apologies if they look as shaky and grainy as Cloverfield. Still learning the ways of the camera.) Not sure how much narrative you need, though I'll likely add some later...The fellow in the first and third video was the lone dissenter. He kept yelling "pussies go home." He also repeated, "We're republicans, and we're here to stay!" No word yet whether he was an official representative of the New York Young Republican Club.













As I note in the post above this, I was only able to stay for the first leg of the protest, which, as Jeremiah reports, continued on to CBGB/Varvatos, the Bowery Hotel, 47 E. 3rd St., then down to Avenue A, through Tompkins Square Park, and finished at the Christodora House. His Flickr pool is here. Bob Arihood was also with the group the entire time. He took many compelling photos, as usual.

For the weekend: Seven songs

Alex at Flaming Pablum passed along this music meme to, uh, me. Here's the deal:

"List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're not any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they're listening to."

My list seemed fitting to include here. For starters, I just entertained my 21-year-old nephew for a few days here. He's really into Britpop now, and wanted to know more about great New York bands. Of course, I quickly got out the album that started it all here: Vampire Weekend!

[Ducking beer bottles being thrown my way...]

For real though, I went about trying to give him a variety of New York bands. Yes, some are obvious. But it's a good place to start with a 21-year-old whose mother's favorite band is the Monkees.

In any event, since we played these songs the other day, I've continued to listen to them -- making these my favorite songs right now. (Ask me tomorrow, and...)

Lou Reed, Coney Island Baby


New York Dolls, Trash


James Chance and the Contortions, I Can't Stand Myself


Sonic Youth, Teenage Riot


Unsane, Body Bomb


Pussy Galore, Dick Johnson


Sugar Hill Gang, Apache


[Cheating] Bonus, for the summer season:
The Ramones, Surfin' Bird


Now for my seven tags...I don't have that many friends...this may take some effort!

Believe Me

Hmm...

Fire trucks on St. Mark's Place

Someone said something about a gas leak. Didn't seem too serious.

Appreciating the classics

Friday The 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan is, of course, the most realistic film ever made about New York City. As the review on AllMovie.com notes, "Screenwriter Paul Schrader and director Martin Scorsese place this isolated, potentially volatile man in New York City, depicted as a grimly stylized hell on Earth, where noise, filth, directionless rage, and dirty sex (both morally and literally) surround him at all turns. When Jason attempts to transform himself into an avenging angel who will "wash some of the real scum off the street," his murder spree follows a terrible and inevitable logic: he is a bomb built to explode, like the proverbial machete which, when produced in the first act, must go off in the third."

[Hey...wait a minute here! C'mon, it has been a long week...In all seriousness, there are some unintentionally hilarious moments in Part 8...You get the idea just be watching the opening...]

"The neighborhood was desolate, so underpopulated that landlords would give you a month's free rent just for signing a lease"

[Photo of 216 E. 7th St. in 1979 by Marlis Momber]

My obsession with the East Village in the 1970s and early 1980s continues.

In November 2003, new editions of the bible, Luc Sante's "Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), included an afterword, which was also published in The New York Review of Books on Nov. 6, 2003. (I have an old copy of the book, and was unaware of the essay. By the way, the essay also appears in the booklet that accompanies the Stranger Than Paradise Criterion Collection.)

Here are a few of the many compelling passages from My Lost City:

I drifted down from the Upper West Side to the Lower East Side in 1978. Most of my friends made the transition around the same time. You could have an apartment all to yourself for less than $150 a month. In addition, the place was happening. It was happening, that is, in two or at most three dingy bars that doubled as clubs, a bookstore or record store or two, and a bunch of individual apartments and individual imaginations. All of us were in that stage of youth when your star may not yet have risen, but your moment is the only one on the clock. We had the temerity to laugh at the hippies, shamefully backdated by half a decade. In our arrogance we were barely conscious of the much deeper past that lay all around. We didn't ask ourselves why the name carved above the door of the public library on Second Avenue was in German, or why busts of nineteenth-century composers could be seen on a second-story lintel on Fourth Street. Our neighborhood was so chockablock with ruins we didn't question the existence of vast bulks of shuttered theaters, or wonder when they had been new. Our apartments were furnished exclusively through scavenging, but we didn't find it notable that nearly all our living rooms featured sewing-machine tables with cast-iron bases.

The neighborhood was desolate, so underpopulated that landlords would give you a month's free rent just for signing a lease, many buildings being less than half-full, but it was far from tranquil. We might feel smug about being robbed on the street, since none of us had any money, and we looked it, and junkies—as distinct from the crackheads of a decade later—would generally not stab you for chump change. Nevertheless, if you did not have the wherewithal to install gates on your windows you would be burglarized repeatedly, and where would you be without your stereo? In the blocks east of Avenue A the situation was dramatically worse. In 1978 I got used to seeing large fires in that direction every night, usually set by arsonists hired by landlords of empty buildings who found it an easy choice to make, between paying property taxes and collecting insurance. By 1980 Avenue C was a lunar landscape of vacant blocks and hollow tenement shells. Over there, commerce—in food or clothing, say—was often conducted out of car trunks, but the most thriving industry was junk, and it alone made use of marginally viable specimens of the building stock. The charred stairwells, the gaping floorboards, the lack of lighting, the entryways consisting of holes torn in ground-floor walls—all served the psychological imperatives of the heroin trade. . . .

Now, more than a decade after I finally finished my book Low Life, the city has changed in ways I could not have pictured. The tenements are mostly still standing, but I could not afford to live in any of my former apartments, including the ones I found desperately shabby when I was much more inured to shabbiness.

[For more amazing photos by Marlis Momber like the one above, please visit her Web site.]

Things are getting really tough at the Fed

Outside the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on Liberty Street, 11:20 a.m., June 12.

Bonus (Or, perhaps, Punishment):

Jeremy Irons rips off the Federal Reserve in Die Hard: With a Vengeance

(Because we're such big Bruce Willis fans!)

Old sign of the day

I came across this Cloder sign on Ann Street, which runs parallel to Fulton near the Financial District. I did a little digging and couldn't find out what Cloder was. Based on the condition of the storefront, it doesn't appear anything has been in this space for a few years.



Also, it's a one-sided sign, apparently to attract the one-way traffic moving east on the street.

This former business is directly across the way from the closed-off back entrance of the Blarney Stone, where their neon goodness brightly shines. Must enter through the front door on Fulton.