Duane Reade wants to make you feel like dancing

Just give me my Beano Food Enzyme Dietary Supplement Tablets and let me get out of here.

Admiring the trash at 2 Gold Street

In the morning...


...and late afternoon.

Impressive! (Looks more impressive in person, of course!) With so much trash, this must be 24k living!

If you're thinking of living in: The East Village/Lower East Side...in 1963,1985,1992, 2000 and 2008

As you may have heard, it's expensive to live here in New York City. Rents just keep going up! For a little perspective, I looked at five articles from The New York Times on living in the Lower East Side/East Village. (Three of the articles came with the headline, "If You're Thinking of Living in: The East Village.")

Renovations on Lower East Side Creating New Living Quarters
May 5, 1963 (and written by Bernard Weinraub! Only thought he did movies...) Article only available for a fee (charged by the Times, not me).

Apartments to be found in the vicinity are primarily renovated lofts and tenement flats. Rentals in the renovated houses vary. According to Harry J. Shapolsky and Harry Gruber, builders and owners of more than 25 buildings on the East Side, south of 14th Street, the monthy rental for a one-and-a-half-room air-conditioned apartment in a building with an elevator ranges from $85 to $100. The monthly rental for a three-room apartment in the same building ranges from $110 to $145.

In a renovated building with neither air-conditioning nor elevator, according to Mr. Shapolsky, the monthly rental for a one-and-a-half-room apartment varies from $65 to $85. A three-room apartment in the same building ranges from $75 to $95 a month.

The emergence of renovated apartments has occurred mainly in the area called the East Village – north of Houston Street, south of 14th Street and east of University Place.

Real-estate manager Richard] Paley places the most favored area on the Lower East Side around Tompkins Square Park…

"This is the last frontier in Manhattan for reasonable rents," he said. "You can live here for 'Bronx' or 'Brooklyn' prices."

If You're Thinking of Living in: The East Village
October 6, 1985
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.

In general, the trend of real-estate prices seems steadily upward, and that portends what many in the neighborhood fear, gentrification. It already has happened to many of the theaters, nightclubs and music clubs that used to abound in the area only a few years ago. Most are gone now, the victims of rising rents.

If You're Thinking of Living in: The East Village
June 14, 1992
Yet the allure of bohemian decadence keeps housing prices up. The building stock includes "more five-story walk-ups than anything else," said Gary Brenner of City Estate Agency. Rents in these and in brownstones and renovated spaces, he said, are $600 to $1,000 a month for studios, $750 to $1,400 for one-bedrooms and $1,200 to $1,800 for two-bedrooms.

Luxury buildings went up during the 1980's. But more than half the owners in the Christodora House, an 85-unit condominium on Avenue B overlooking the park, have rented their spaces, waiting out the recession before selling, according to James Roman, sales manager for the Halstead Property Company, a brokerage, and Red Square, a high-rise rental at 250 East Houston built in the late 80's, "still has empty apartments and a steady turnover."

St. Mark's Real Estate, which handles rent-stabilized apartments, said studios fetch $600 to $700 and two-bedrooms, $1,000 to $1,100.

If You're Thinking of Living In: The East Village; From Mean Streets to Cutting-Edge
December 17, 2000

Prices for co-ops and condominiums have quadrupled since 1996, said Jordan Gitterman, an owner of Magnum Realty, which specializes in East Village properties. Though most buildings in the neighborhood remain rental, condominiums are going on the market with prices ranging from $250,000 for one bedroom to $450,000 for three bedrooms.

''Before this big swing in the 90's, this was a pretty rough area,'' Mr. Gitterman said. ''There are still some rough blocks, but it has changed from a low-income area to a trendy, hip area for young people.''

One recent condo conversion is a 20-unit building on East Fourth Street, between Avenues B and C. The building's history encapsulates much of the neighborhood's last hundred years. Built as a church rectory in the early 20th century, the building was later sold and used as a yeshiva for Eastern European boys. It was vacated sometime in the late 60's, reopened as an arena for amateur boxing matches 10 years later and then was boarded up until it was sold to Urbatech Designers and Builders in 1989, said one of the company's owners, Yoram Finkelstein.

Urbatech renovated the building and put the apartments on the market in the early 1990's, but found no buyers. ''We had an ad in the paper in the early 90's, and people would call and hear it was on Avenue C and they would just hang up,'' Mr. Finkelstein said.

After renting the apartments for a decade, the company put the apartments on the market again in September and sold more than half in two months. Prices run from $340,000 for two bedrooms, to $380,000 for a one-bedroom unit with a roof terrace to $425,000 for a three-bedroom unit, he said.

Even more surprising to many longtime residents is the steep rise in rents in the last five years. Apartments that rented 10 years ago for $500 or $600 now go for two or three times that. Studio apartments rent for $1,300 to $1,400, one-bedrooms go for $1,700 to $1,800 and two- and three-bedroom apartments run as high as $3,000, said Jack Bick, owner of Charaton Realty.

''If you want to live in the East Village, you better be prepared to pay a lot of money,'' he said. ''The only way to get anything for under $1,000 is to share a bedroom.''

He and other area brokers attribute the rapid rise in rents to New York University students who began flowing into the neighborhood in the mid-90's. Most of the neighborhood's apartments fall under the city's rent regulation laws, which generally permit landlords to raise rent by 20 percent for new tenants, and the rapid turnover in student tenants has propelled rents upward. Since students tend to stay in apartments for just a couple of years, landlords can raise the rent when the students graduate and move on.

''By their third and fourth year in college, all the students want to live in the East village,'' Mr. Bick said. ''And Mommy and Daddy say, 'O.K., we'll foot the bill.' ''

Finally, while not specifically discussing the East Village, this article from Sunday sums up the NYC rental market:

Luring Affluent Renters in Manhattan
June 29, 2008

For Mackenzie Rosenthal, who will be a senior at New York University next year and who will be moving into a one-bedroom at 20 Exchange Place this summer, “the perks were just kind of too good to pass up.” She said she and her father had “pored over the lease, saying: ‘Where’s the catch?’ but as far as we can tell, there doesn’t seem to be one.”

When she and a roommate moved into her current two-bedroom walk-up in the East Village, they had to come up with $12,000 to cover the broker’s fee, security deposit and first and last month’s rent. “That was just ludicrous,” she said. “But when I move into my new apartment, all I need is the first month’s rent.”

Ms. Rosenthal said that after factoring in the free month’s rent, her $3,000 apartment will cost her $2,750 a month. She worries that she will not be able to afford to stay in the apartment when her one-year lease is up, but her broker, Jeffrey Carlson of Platinum Properties, said that as an original tenant, she might be able to negotiate the same rate at renewal time.

Employment opportunity of the day

At John and Pearl Streets.

10 Big Shows Daily! (in air conditioning)

So there has been plenty of faux porn in Times Square of late, from Malcolm McLaren's stag mash-ups to a 1970s Times Square massage harem created for a Ryan Gosling-Kirsten Dunst movie.

Boring!

Here's a look back at some real Times Square XXX signage from the 1970s:



[Via raulriveranyc on YouTube]

Previously on EV Grieve:
Here's to a "relaxing" weekend in the city!

"Changing for the bettor"

As you may know, the OTB outlets will stay open now that the city and state hashed out an agreement deal two weeks back.

Now that all this drama is settled, I hope we can see some OTB commercials, like this one from 1986:



Bonus!

An ad from 1986 for Belmont Park:



[YouTube videos via MyCommercials]

But of course (And a look back at 110 Third Ave.)

So what's new at 110 Third Ave.? (Or, shall I say One Ten Third Ave.?)


And this branch won't haven't any of that panhandling (they spell it pan handling, meaning someone who handles pans? Or something to hold hot pots with?) or nonbanking business!



Meanwhile, a moment of silence for the old 110 Third Ave. (Sigh.)


RIP, June 2005.

[Photo courtesy of Patrick Crowley]

And, of course, 110 Third Ave.'s place in cinematic history:

"The old Hollywood sense of lawless New York is rearing its ugly head"

Julia Vitullo-Martin, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, wrote an op-ed in today's New York Post titled "Revenge of the Bad Old Days."

She begins:

Does it feel some days as if New York-- wealthy, successful, seemingly at the top of the world -- is slipping back into the bad old days of crime, noise, dirt, rudeness? Like pentimento rising from an old canvas, the traces of New York's previous misery are appearing on the streets and in the subways -- graffiti, aggressive panhandling, open drug dealing, filthy public areas, ear--splitting noise, screeching sirens, a sense of disorder we thought was gone. It's not "Soylent Green" again, but the old Hollywood sense of lawless New York is rearing its ugly head.



And fast-forwarding past a lot of analysis and stats and what not:

Are we heading backwards? No, but we need to remember our own heritage.

New Yorkers haven't always understood that some ominous trend was beginning. For example, 1958 was the start of what the late Erik Monkkonen, a historian at UCLA, called New York's "rogue tidal wave of violence." Almost no one noticed at the time. It lasted until 1992, when the Dinkins administration, under Commissioner Ray Kelly, began its Safe Streets program. And while Monkkonen was optimistic about New York's future, he warned of the relentless cycle by which, once some "lower level of violence had been achieved, the mechanisms for control and the value of peace get forgotten, and a slow rebirth of violence begins." We can fool ourselves into thinking that the New York of the last few years is the New York that will always be. But our city is and always has been a tumultuous place, in which the miseries of the past don't seem so far away. We need to be vigilant, as we have been since 1992, against the small, unpleasant, menacing intrusions on New York's quality of life.

We know that New York's economic engine, the financial industry, is under immense strain, that the mayor's budget faces severe deficits, and that some businesses are starting layoffs.

Bloomberg has been the right mayor for good times. Now the truly difficult part starts: keeping New York great in hard times.

[Image of the East Village in the 1970s from Litter Bugged via Filthy Mess]

An EV Grieve FYI (AKA, Sunday filler)

At 14 Street and Second Avenue. Back open July 3!



I've long been a fan of the random use of quotation marks on signs and in print...(which is why I'm a big fan of The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks.)



Meanwhile! And how can anyone hate the Colonel? Here's why:

I'm sure there was a perfectly good reason why this man was carrying a chainsaw through Tompkins Square Park this morning

Looking back: Red Square and gentrification

[Photo by Stephen L Harlow, via his Flickr page.]

In the last few weeks, I've posted several archival articles that discussed the gentrification of the East Village/Lower East Side, including one from the May 28, 1984, New York magazine ("The Lower East Side: There Goes the Neighborhood") and one from the Sept. 2, 1984, New York Times ("The gentrification of the East Village").

The New York piece focused on the Christodora House, which some viewed as a symbol of gentrification in the neighborhood, and later a focal point of the "yuppie scum" protests during the 1988 Tompkins Square Park riots. I recently came across an additional good read that examines another symbol for change in the East Village/Lower East Side: Red Square, the luxury apartment building (featuring a statue of Lenin on the roof) that opened in June 1989 at 250 E. Houston St. between Avenues A and B.

Frederique Krupa, a Paris-based designer and writer who teaches at the Parsons School of Design, wrote a fascinating article on Red Square that was published March 10, 1992. The article is online here at translucency.com.

In the article, she interviews two key people involved in Red Square's creation, Michael Rosen, a former NYU professor of radical sociology who now lives in the penthouse of the Christodora, and Tibor Kalman, the renowned graphic designer who passed away in 1999. (In a review of the 1998 book "Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist," The New Yorker wrote, "A witty, eclectic tome of images and writings . . . spanning the career of the graphic designer . . . the man behind Benetton's Colors magazine; a Communist-theme apartment building called Red Square that hastened gentrification on the Lower East Side while seeming to subvert it...")

Krupa's article on the revitalization of the East Village, and the role of Red Square in this, is far too complex to summarize in a blog posting.

However, one passage is particularly interesting: The Red Square marketing campaign. She notes, "[I]nstead of doing a slick brochure like so many buildings now have, they are marketing the coarseness of the area as the primary selling point.

"The Disneyfication of the area and its population, written like a movie script, is obnoxious."

She then quotes part of the Red Square brochure copy:

"A seamstress and a presser, shy as villagers falling in love over the accompaniment of whirring sewing machines and sweet tea...[fade to...] The lint of sweat shops swept out by raucous Spanish accents...[fade to...] Long haired poets silk-screening posters for the revolution...Today it's an after hours club. Or is the apartment where the incredible Dutch model with one name lives with Mr. Wallstreet?"

Krupa continues with a description of the brochure, which I'd love to see for myself:

"Considering that Mr. Wallstreet is most likely one of the prospective tenants of Red Square, the last quote reads like bad subliminal seduction. Never mind that the account executives may well be forcing out the pressers, seamstresses and long-haired poets. The sepia-toned cover features a kissing, tangoing white couple swinging a piece of cloth in a standard tenement apartment, with its open shelves and small windows. He wears a large, stylish suit; she wears a plain, loose dress. He has short brown hair in a standard businessman haircut; she has long, peroxide-blond hair. The standard clock is on midnight. Wires dangle down from strangely placed sockets. The picture appears ordinary, yet it is incredibly strange that it would be chosen for the cover. These people are probably celebrating the fact that they will be able to trade in the five story climb for an elevator and crumbling walls for new construction. In other words, they are trading reminiscence for amenities."

Perhaps this trying-to-be-provocative approach served as the template for the free-for-all that is now the Lower East Side with the multiple hotels and high-rise condos like The Ludlow, which according to its site, "connects the buzz of the neighborhood with the tranquility of home."

By the way, the community work of Michael Rosen since Red Square should be noted. Krupa writes that he "is now focusing solely [on] subsidized housing for the poor . . . as well as construction of half-way houses and shelters for battered women. His early ventures are then seen as an anomaly to his social convictions." As a Nov. 23, 2006, article in the Times on Rosen notes, "He dresses shabby chic and rides his bicycle to community meetings to fight what he sees as insensitive development." As this article in the Aug. 4-10, 2004, issue of The Villager reports, Rosen has held various fund-raisers to protect the special character of the East Village. He and his family have been part of helping save St. Brigid's, creating the Kids' Art Bike Ride for the Lower East Side, among many other admirable endeavors.

[For more of Stephen L Harlow's amazing photos like the one above, please visit his Flickr page.]

Fulton Street construction at a glance

Sure, I don't know much in the way of construction equipment, but this thing looks like a prop from, say, There Will Be Blood.

At the Waterfalls: This was bound to happen

As everyone knows, Olafur Eliasson's waterfall under the Brooklyn Bridge is ON as of yesterday.

Didn't take long for it to create problems, as this EV Grieve EXCLUSIVE video shows:



And now that I'm being stupid, might as well air the EXCLUSIVE Cloverfield 2 footage that was uncovered recently on YouTube (via Goldenfiddle)...

Conspiracies: Where are all the fliers?

Last night, I saw several fliers around the neighborhood for the July 11 protest at 47 E. 3rd St. When I went by where the fliers had been (dramatic pause), they were gone! It's possible, of course, that the fliers were removed by local shopkeepers or people interested in going or neatniks. Or! Someone is purposefully taking them down so that no one knows about the protest...

Which you can read more about in Patrick Hedlund's Mixed Use column in this week's The Villager.

Dark star

Houston and the Bowery.

Come on in, the shopping's great!

As Urbanite reported (via Jeremiah) on Monday, the Strand Annex on Fulton Street will close after the summer. Why?

The Annex, purveyor of discounted books both new and used, has been at its current location for 12 years. But store owner Fred Bass says that recent construction in the area has decreased customer traffic and lowered profits.
“We were doing very well with that store, and then they started the construction, which really hurt our sales,” Bass said. “The lease was up, and of course the landlord wanted the normal increase. But we figured the construction will last at least another year, and we just felt that it wasn’t viable to do that.”

Another year? Good luck. I made a joke in April about 2078. That seems realistic. I see this mess on Fulton Street every weekday. It's only getting worse. This is an area you want to avoid. And I know people who do, unfortunately. If something like the Strand is giving up, what about some of the other smaller shops?  They need the business.

Previously on EV Grieve:

Been on Fulton Street lately? What a treat! 

All Fulton Street-related posts are here.

Dorms, dorms -- everywhere

Michael Stoler provides a New York dorm update in today's Sun, the alarmingly titled "From Condominiums, Dormitories May Rise."

As he writes:

Fordham University is aiming to increase the population at its Lincoln Center campus by 2,500 students, to 10,500; New York University's long-term plan calls for 1,000 new students locally, and the City University of New York has reported record high enrollments for the past eight years, and now claims 230,000 students citywide.

The New York State Education Department reports that more than 475,000 full- and part-time students receiving school credits were enrolled at colleges and universities in the five boroughs last fall, up from 417,000 in 2000.

With the sales of residential condominiums sluggish of late, industry leaders say some will be redeveloped to serve as residential dormitory halls. In March, NYU purchased Gramercy Green, a newly completed 21-story, 300-unit building at 316 Third Ave. at 23rd Street. Originally planned as a residential condominium, the building is slated to open in the fall, providing housing for 900 undergraduate students as well as faculty.

He reports that renovations are under way at the former residential tower, the Booth House, at 318 E. 15th St., between Second and First Avenues. In February, Arun Bhatia Development Corp. paid $56 million to New York Downtown Hospital for the 129,000-square-foot property.

The New York Sun has learned that the developer plans to convert the property into dormitory space to house students and faculty of the New School, a university comprising eight schools with a total of 9,400 undergraduate and graduate students.

Meanwhile, a little closer to home:

On the Lower East Side . . . construction is nearly complete on a new dormitory for the School of Visual Arts. The 20-story, 80,000-square-foot building is situated at Delancey and Ludlow streets on the former site of a Duane Reade. The new dormitory will house 350 students in a building that will be leased to the school for 40 years with an option to purchase at the end of the lease.

I don't have a problem with students...But. I have a problem with how the student population changes the types of businesses a neighborhood attracts. This means more things that cater to the taste of students. Yogurt shops, for instance. Chains like Whole Foods or Trader Joe's. Things that will drive up rents. And force out the (remaining) mom-and-pop stores.

Dumpster of the Day

Ninth Street between Second and Third Avenues. Very tidy!

EV Grieve: South Florida edition (continued, unfortunately)

Last item on the trip, promise.

So! If you do happen to find yourself in the Sunny Isles Beach, Fla., area . . . and don't feel like working on your skin cancer, I recommend spending time at the Pelican on the Pier, an old-school, open-air bar that I wish were closer to home.

Here's what the Miami New Times had to say about the place. That's a pretty accurate account.

Cheap beer, fresh fish, good views. And some interesting characters.

Meanwhile, let's see if anyone is paying attention...Man, Caruso is annoying.

Piece of cake: July 11, 8 p.m.

[I've been away, so in case this has already been covered...]