Here's an earlier version of the flier and social from several weeks ago. (Please note that the time and location have changed.) This hung on the Ninth Street side of the Christodora for two whole days. (Surprised that it wasn't removed sooner than that....)
For Jared Hoffman, the club’s owner, the move signifies a rebirth for the Knitting Factory legacy. For Leonard Street residents, the club’s departure means the end of years of complaining about noise, garbage and loitering outside the club.
“It’s not fun to be somewhere where you’re seen as the bad guy,” Hoffman said during a recent interview in a converted Brooklyn apartment that’s the club’s new office. “There’s just no way, in that environment, not to annoy some people. It’s an un-winnable situation.”
“People are expecting Tribeca to be as quiet as a suburban street in Greenwich, Connecticut,” he added.
Ahn-Tuyet Pollock, who has lived next door to the Knitting Factory for eight years, said she and many of her neighbors have been waiting for the day that the club would close and the sidewalk be free of its patrons.
“It’s been a struggle for us ever since we moved in,” Pollock said. “[Club-goers] line up in front of the building, they smoke, they make all kinds of noise, they want to come into our building to use our bathroom...it’s a nuisance.”
While the departure of the Knitting Factory is welcome news to many Leonard Street residents, their respite from club-going throngs could be short-lived.
Joe Rosales, a broker for Lee Odell Real Estate, closed on a $12 million sale of the six-story building at 74 Leonard Street to the Laboz Family Trust in July, and the space, he said, has already drawn interest from developers looking to install another nightclub.
“The way that space is laid out, it has to stay commercial,” Rosales said.
What struck me more than anything...Stocks Skid, Dow Down 12!
Saving the iconic neighborhood from what one performer describes as “yuppie scum,” the HOWL! Festival’s organizers vow to temporarily return the East Village to its humble beginnings: Before streets became “crowded with people drinking,” as [artist Riki] Colon says, and before the upper middle class invested in housing while anxiously awaiting graffiti-free streets. HOWL! seeks to revive the beat poetry shouted from street corners and the days when artists were viewed as visionaries. This year’s festival has an additional endeavor: to make HOWL! relevant to a new generation, thereby passing along the East Village’s explosive, controversial and irreplaceable legacy.
2 by 4 used to be the gay cruising spot The Bar, but the large metal mud-flap girls on the wall sum up the sexual reorientation. Straight college dudes now come here looking for sauce and sass that follows a tried-and-true Coyote Ugly formula of cheap booze and choreographed bar-top theatrics. A center rail splits the action: At the billiards table, young Ronnie Wood look-alikes get hustled by neighborhood bike messengers; at the bar, scantly-clad barmaids navigate spins on the in-house stripper pole.
Take the case of American Apparel . . . It has opened two stores in New York City in 2008 and plans to open four more before year end, according to Adrian Kowalewski, the company’s director of corporate finance and development.
“We haven’t seen anything but an increase in our business, despite the slowdown in the overall economy,” Mr. Kowalewski said. “Many of our customers are young, urban dwellers, and so are not as exposed directly to increases in fuel prices or the meltdown in the housing market."
“I’ll tell you why I need to live in Manhattan,” he trilled while thrusting his martini shaker into the air. “An Englishman must live on an island!”
“I’ll tell you why I need to live in a penthouse,” she replied with her
signature deadpan. “I’m only happy when I’m on top.”
“And the reason you live with me?” he asked while refilling her
glass. “You own the penthouse.”
"Hi-my-name-is-Garth-and-I'm-from-Children-International-and-we're-trying-to-help-children-in-poverty. Children-in-abject-poverty. There-are-kids-dying-every-day- because-they-don't-have-something-as-silly-as-food-and-water. I-mean-even-a-bum-in-New-York-can-have-two-meals-a-day!"
Despite the fact that his breathless spiel is all monologue, Garth's job title is "dialoguer." It's a term coined by an Austrian company known as the Dialogue Group, which helped to develop this brand of street confrontation and brought it to U.S. cities a few years ago with a subsidiary called Dialogue Direct.
Garth pauses to catch his breath and then whips out a laminated picture of his own sponsored child, an innocent-looking boy sitting in a hut thatched with palm fronds. The location, he says, is the Dominican Republic. He checks to see whether he still has the attention of the woman in front of him. He does, but then realizes he's talking to a reporter.
"Children are dying and you're wasting my time!" he says, scowling. Mramor drops the laminated photograph back into his duffel bag. He doesn't apologize for seeming rude. "Being nice doesn't work," says the irritated college student. "I signed up two people today by being an asshole, and I'll continue to do that. Have a nice day."
