Just an "apartment for rent" sign. Uh. Carry on. Nothing to see here...
The L.E.S. Slacktivists’ sound-permit flap spilled over to the recent HOWL! Festival, causing some howls of frustration from festival organizers. After John Penley, Jerry “The Peddler” Wade and Bill Cashman, Leftover Crack’s manager, argued in federal court that the local crust-core band’s planned concert outside the Ninth Police Precinct on Sept. 5 was being held to unfairly low decibel levels, police apparently felt they had to make a better show of monitoring HOWL! sound levels. Artist James Romberger, whose wife, Marguerite Van Cook, ran this year’s festival, as she did last year, said that “The Death to the Police Rally,” as he called it, caused a headache for HOWL! “We were enforced,” Romberger said. “They stood there all day with whatever those were…sound guns, or whatever.” Actually, Romberger said he’s more concerned about the whole “death” trend of late by local singer/activists, from Leftover Crack’s Sturgeon singing “Kill cops” to David Peel leading choruses of “Die yuppie scum!” “Anyone who’s against the death penalty cannot be behind calling for death,” Romberger stated. “Throwing donuts and pies is O.K., funny, ha ha. But calling for death is anti-reasonable and uncivilized.” Speaking of throwing donuts, we hear that the harassment charge against Sturgeon for trying to pelt police with the pastries on Sept. 5 was dropped but that he was asked to perform 200 hours of community service, which he refused.
Mike Bakaty draws tattoos with a signed picture of Gandhi hanging in a frame over his shoulder: “To Mike. Your man, Mahatma.” He traveled a lot as a young sailor, and the navy is where he got a taste for tattooing. Then, during what Bakaty refers to as the bootleg years – the period in which tattooing was illegal in New York – he started practicing the art behind closed doors on the Lower East Side.
For 36 years, there were no tattoo shop storefronts in New York City - not even on the Bowery, where modern tattooing was invented in the 1890s. There were no televisions in street-level store windows showing people getting tattoos, no advertising - save for the tattoos themselves - fliers or vague messages in the back of the Village Voice. Every Tom had to know Dick who knew Harry who knew where to get a tattoo.
Tattooing in New York City went underground after the City Health Department found what it said were a series of blood-borne hepatitis cases coming from tattoo parlors in 1961. Tattoos were done on the second story of buildings on Canal Street, in basements, apartments and backrooms.
Seems perfect for the East Village resident who's sick and tired of the overdevelopment and condofication of this neighborhood...to move to a neighborhood with even more ridciulous overdevelopment and condofication.
Conceived by self-proclaimed radical sociologist-turned-real-estate-developer [Michael] Rosen in 1989, Red Square occupies land that served as an automobile service station for more than 25 years. Rosen's wife's family bought the property in the 1960s, and, he points out, no homes were destroyed and no businesses were displaced.Red Square was designed by graphic artist legend Tibor Kalman, a Hungarian immigrant. Its quirky feel has come to symbolize the avant-garde, rebellious East Village spirit.
Marie Santiago, who used to be the superintendent of a Staten Island building where Reeve lived for several years, called him a "freak."
"When they left, we found out they were total freaks. We found videos of him and people playing with people dressed up as dinosaurs," she said.
"When they had a party, the people who came were weirdos. They wore all leather. They would wear spikes around their necks, too."
In the film version of “Sex and the City,” Miranda, played by Cynthia Nixon, hunts for an apartment in Chinatown, eager to sink roots into this roiling neighborhood. Once a bit remote and gritty for Miranda and her acquisitive ilk, this Lower East Side enclave — home to Chinese, Burmese and Vietnamese, among others — is on the cusp of gentrification. Wine bars, art galleries, restaurants and boutiques have proliferated, turning the area into a magnet for real-life style seekers who can be seen on weekends casing out the string of shops scattered in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge.
Intent on exploring this two-mile-square area loosely bounded by Kenmare and Delancey Streets on the north, and East and Worth Streets on the south, they thread their way past old tenements, knickknack shops and vendors selling windup toys. And they shop.
“It’s crazy how things are blossoming here,” said Zia Ziprin, the owner of Girls Love Shoes on Ludlow Street, just south of Canal. “It’s definitely becoming a little mecca.”
Merchants are lured by affordable rents; shoppers by the promise of forward-looking, and sometimes budget-friendly, wares at boutiques popping up along Orchard, Ludlow and Division Streets — and, more recently, on Canal, where closet-size outposts of chic rub shoulders with electronics and hardware stores.
For retailers, “Chinatown is a last frontier,” said Faith Hope Consolo, the chairman of retail leasing and sales for Prudential Douglas Elliman. Merchants leap at the chance to lease stores for $100 to $150 a square foot, roughly one third to one half the rent for comparable space farther uptown. “Here they can be big fish in a little pond.”
An "I want it now" society that refuses to live within its means is partly responsible for the subprime-mortgage crisis, Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday.(New York Post)
"I think you just can't blame the banks," he said, taking borrowers to task.
"They say, 'I want the great American dream. I want it now and I'm not going to wait until I put some money in the bank.' . . That's where we lost the moral compass of saying no to people who did not have the earning capacity to support a mortgage."
The Eldridge is a nice space, but indeed, there’s nothing mind-blowing about it–unless, of course, you wanna talk location (and my friends are as obsessed with this neighborhood right now as I am). I know how stupid this sounds but for an uptown girl like me, stepping out of the cab last night on Eldridge Street was like stepping on to a soundstage. Maybe it’s because they had the sidewalk all glammed up for this party and the collision of flashbulbs and the unassuming nonchalance of East Village streets, graffiti and neon is what got me. I know the west village always used to give me this ‘you’re in a storybook’ feel and it still does from time to time–and the bowery can still feel like that during the day but it’s hard to feel like you’re in little ‘untouched’/unchartered new york by night. It’s an incredible feeling.
So whether or not we’re comin’ back to the eldridge, this is an area, I think, that’s going to see a lot of activity this year. But I hope it holds onto everything I described.
