In front of Lucy's: A sight that gave me the yikes

Given the possible state of our local dive bars today, you have to wonder about great places in high-rent districts such as Lucy's on Avenue A.

So when I saw the dumpster there in front of Lucy's yesterday afternoon...I couldn't help but think the worst. And I'm not alone in this thinking...and she has floated retirement rumors in the past.

Not to worry, though! I took a stroll by the place after its usual 6 p.m. opening time yesterday...Lucy's is still alive and well, the neon bar signs out front as inviting as ever...

Downtown Music Gallery is leaving the Bowery

This music-lover's mainstay at 342 Bowery is moving soon to Chinatown in a basement location at 13 Monroe St. (Click on the images for a better look...and directions...) According to the sign:

We are planning to be open for business there by the first week of January 2009, if not sooner.
We will be focusing even more on our mail-order/web sales at this new location, but we will have a new 'hours of operation' schedule so all our cherished NY and global customers can visit - and one can always call and ask about visiting at other times if those hours do not accommodate one's schedule for a visit when traveling to/through New York City.

And an FYI for tourists:



Downtown Express featured the shop in December 2006. According to the article:

Bruce Gallanter and Manny Maris defy all the snooty stereotypes surrounding record store clerks. Since opening their shop, Downtown Music Gallery (DMG) in May of 1991, the two have fostered an open, inviting atmosphere in their scruffy little record store on the Bowery. Both typical, Village shop and anachronism, co-proprietors Gallanter and Maris have created a modern-day salon, one that sustains imaginative artists who are largely ignored by the mainstream music industry.

Meanwhile, this means, of course, there's another nice Bowery storefront for something overpriced and stupid.

[UPDATE: Thanks to Alex at Flaming Pablum for setting the record straight...the store hasn't been on the Bowery since 1991...they were previously on Fifth Street just east of Cooper Square next to the Scratcher. Check out Alex's post on the shop from last February.]

Meanwhile on the Bowery....

Just a few doors south of the Downtown Music Gallery...another nice Bowery storefront for something overpriced and stupid.

That new coffee shop coming to Avenue B has a name

Between Fourth Street and Third Street.

Previously on EV Grieve:
New coffee place coming to Avenue B

Report: 43.1 percent of East Village sellers have cut their asking prices (for real estate, not drugs)

The Daily News reports today on StreetEasy's latest assessment of the Manhattan real-estate market...(Curbed had this yesterday.) The Daily News break it down:

Manhattan neighborhoods with the most price cuts
These neighborhoods have seen the highest percentage of sellers cutting prices from quarter three to quarter four 2008:

Beekman - 50.6% of listings cut prices
Manhattan Valley - 45.7%
East Village - 43.1%
Central Park South - 41.9%
SoHo - 41.7%

I dunno...still seems to me like the time I was dragged to a Barney's Warehouse Sale...$950 sweaters were on sale for $600!

You know that grand art-deco Metro Theater at 99th and Broadway that has been closed for a few years?

Yeah, its recent long tortured history (condo! restuarant!) is over. It will now be home to an Urban Outfitters. (New York Post, second item). Finally, local residents won't have to travel so far for their Toddland diver down hoodies!

City Room had an item on the Metro (originally called the Midtown, for some reason) in 2007:

From the outside, the landmark Metro Theater on Broadway, an Art Deco jewel box between 99th and 100th Streets, looks almost as exquisite as it must have in the 1930s, when movies were still known as “photoplays,” though no photo has played there for two years.

But the inside, visible to passers-by on a recent afternoon, has been gutted. Gone are seats and plaster and curtains and screen. Gone is a golden ceiling molding with a chain of floral bouquets. Gone are the sylph-filled niches. Gone is grillework that sprouted like corn stalks.

Here's a little more on the theater's past on Tom Fletcher's New York Architecture

The Midtown, designed by the architecture firm of Boak & Paris, opened in 1933. From 1948 through April 1972, it was part of the Brandt circuit, featuring sub-run foreign and independent fare starting in the 1950s. It exhibited films such as Belle de Jour, Shame (and just about every other Bergman movie), Breathless, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Repulsion, L’Avventura, Straw Dogs, and Gimme Shelter, though never in exclusive engagements. After Brandt's management, it operated as an adult film venue.

It was renamed the Metro in 1982.

FINALLY: Some good bar-related news

The Emerald Inn, the Upper West Side saloon that has been serving up drinks since FDR was in office, will live. And you can thank the recession for it.

In September, manager Charlie Campbell learned that rent would double to nearly $35,000 a month for its 800-square-foot space on Columbus Avenue near 69th Street. (Sidenote: How did he learn of this? He saw the location advertised for lease on the Web site of real estate brokerage CB Richard Ellis. Nice!)

Anyway, according to the Times today:

Like so many other stalwart-but-doomed Manhattan holdouts that have lost their leases under the pressure of gentrification, the Emerald — as its habitués call it — was scheduled to close at the end of April; its rent was to more than double.

But the watering hole . . . has won a two-year lease extension thanks to “the whole down economy, where they can’t find a tenant who will pay that much,” said Mike Campbell, 77, the Emerald’s owner.

Indeed, the reprieve “has to do with the economy — and the kind of people the Campbells are,” said Mike Clarke, an owner of the A. J. Clarke Real Estate Corporation, which manages the five-story apartment building in which the Emerald resides. Mr. Campbell’s son Charlie, 49, manages the bar.

As one patron said, "Columbus Avenue has been turning into a strip mall, with chain stores and restaurants. Maybe the recession will help the mom-and-pops stay in business.”

Finally, a little history on the place via the Times:

Mike Campbell’s father (also Mike) opened the Emerald with his brother William. “Exactly when, we’re not sure, but it was 1943 or 1944,” Charlie Campbell said.

The Emerald has been an enduring link to the West Side’s raffish past, when Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues were populated by gin mills and where brawls among patrons, enthusiastically mediated by bruiser bartenders, were not unusual.

“We were called Spanish Harlem until the ’60s, when they put in Lincoln Center,” said Charlie Campbell. In recent decades, the clientele has gone upscale, to professionals who can afford Upper West Side housing, along with a sprinkling of loyal locals, some of them survivors of the era when “West Side Story” was a contemporary narrative.

Previous Emerald coverage on EV Grieve here.

"Beat writers...spent considerable time with the bookies, dope dealers, working girls and alcoholics for whom the Holiday was a second home"

So, as you know, we're all in full-on mourning over what may or may not be the end of the Holiday.

Former East Village resident Mike Hudson had a nice piece on the place and its irascible owner Stefan last May in the Niagra Falls Reporter:

Stefan was old the first time I went in there back in the '70s, and he was older still when the Redhead and I lived a few blocks away on Avenue A during the early '90s. When I went there last week, it mostly to see whether the place still existed and, if it did, fully expecting to hear the particulars of Stefan's passing.

So I was surprised when I walked through the door and saw him there, weighing a lot less and not even bothering to put in his lower dentures anymore, but still standing behind his bar and still irritable.

"What do you want?" he asked.

Hudson gets into the bar's past patrons:

The place wasn't overtly literary in the sense of the White Horse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas suffered his killing seizure after a drinking bout, or the Lion's Head, where Mailer, Hamill, McCourt and Kennedy drank and fought and preened in front of barmaid Jessica Lange, but like many Manhattan dives the Holiday Lounge had its writers.

For years Allen Ginsberg had a large apartment in a building almost directly across the street, and he and other Beat writers like Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Herbert Huncke spent considerable time with the bookies, dope dealers, working girls and alcoholics for whom the Holiday was a second home.

When I mentioned them, Stefan cheered a bit.

"Ginsberg, Kerouac, yes. But Auden, Auden always sat right there, under the window. He lived in the house next door. And when the war was ended, after that, he came in one afternoon and said he was going to Vienna. He had a villa in Vienna."

And in the end, Hudson comments on the obvious...what has happened to the neighborhood:

The East Village isn't what it used to be, not 60 years ago or even 10. The writers and artists and musicians are gone, replaced by young Wall Street brokers, trust fund babies and Manhattan real estate speculators as rents have skyrocketed.

Likewise gone, and to who knows where, are the bums, and what was once the most wonderfully diverse neighborhood in the city has now become predictably and boringly white and middle class.

Cell phones glued to their ears, they walk their stupid dogs or ride bicycles on the sidewalk. Inside the living organism that is New York, art takes a back seat to commerce, no matter what they tell you.

Well, it's only Jan. 6...we're still being optimistic for the new year...and the continued existence of the Holiday as we've known it...

Nickel beer at Sam's

Jeremiah's awful news yesterday on the possible demise of the Holiday on St. Mark's inspired to me look into some other old haunts on the street from year's past...I came across this article in the Time magazine archives on Sam's Bar & Grill.

The Nickel In St. Mark's Place
Monday, Apr. 4, 1949

Pale and shaken, 51-year-old Sam Atkins backed away from himself with a feeling somewhere between disbelief and awe. By a single, splendid cerebration he had been lifted out of the ruck into the status of a television curiosity. In his humble Manhattan saloon, Sam had decided to cut the price of beer (the 7-oz. glass) from a dime to a nickel.

Up to that moment Sam was just a pensioned pumper driver from the Bayonne (N.J.) fire department, and Sam's bar & grill was like any neighborhood joint around St. Mark's Place on the Lower East Side. Its only distinctive touch was Sam's cousin, "Bottle Sam" Hock, who amused the trade by whacking tunes out of whisky bottles with a suds-scraper. But the customers got a joyful jolt when Sam opened up one morning last week.

All around the walls, even over the bar mirror, tasteful, powder-blue signs proclaimed in red letters: "Spring is here and so is the 5¢ beer." The early birds drank and took their change in mild disbelief. The nickel wasn't obsolescent after all. The word spread. Sam's bar & grill started to bulge like Madison Square Garden on fight night. People drank, shook hands with strangers and sang.

Then something went sour. The two breweries that supplied Sam cut him off, and an electrician came around and took the neon beer sign out of the flyspecked windows. Somehow, it seemed, Sam had betrayed free enterprise. An organization of restaurant owners muttered that Sam might not be cutting his beer, but he was cutting his throat. The Bartenders Union threw a picket line in front of the place because it was nonunion.

But Sam hung on. He signed up with the union, managed to get his beer through a couple of distributors and a Brooklyn brewery, announced that he was going to have the windows washed, and keep at it. Said he solemnly: "The people want it." By this week Sam's idea had spread to other saloons in Washington, D.C. and New Jersey, and Sam was getting more trade in a day than he had drawn before in a week. The nickel beer was here to stay, Sam announced.

Photos via the Time archive.

Downtown Beirut, around 1990, about 3 a.m.

I can't remember when it closed, 1994? On First Avenue.

Speaking of Downtown Beirut, I came across an article on menright.com about Carolyn, a downtown fixture and bartender at Downtown Beirut and member of Killer Instinct, X.K.I. and Bad Tuna Experiment.



According to the article:

Carolyn was new in town, working for an answering service and as an occassional punk extra in clueless Hollywood versions of the Lower East Side. She spent the nights she wasn't working on the benches in Tompkins Square, or on the stoops around Stromboli's Pizza on St. Mark's Place. She didn't have enough cash to get into the clubs very often. Drink of choice: a forty-ounce Bud.

The article talks about her bands and early years in the neighborhood. And whatever happened to her?

Carolyn resumed her long-interrupted college career and graduated summa cum laude from Hunter College. She got married. She studied for a PhD in English (specializing in Medieval Germanic Languages), wrote grammar exercises for college textbooks, and appeared on Jeopardy. (She won the trip — not the money.)

Carolyn is now the mother of a daughter by the name of Harriet, has a house in the woods, and is a Senior Editor for a major textbook publisher in New York City. Unlike many of her contemporaries on the Lower East Side, she survived. This is her hidden past.

And here's BTE with "Beer Picnic."

Window-washing day at the Empire State Building

This gives me the creeps. I hate heights.

A sign that I like

On 14th Street between Avenue A and Avenue B. Check out the old telephone exchange -- OR 3-4786.

Three other signs that I've always liked

Yes, all obvious ones...But I wanted to start the new year with an appreciation of some classic-looking signs.

The Parkside, Houston and Attorney.



Veniero's, First Avenue at 11th Street.



Smith's, 44th Street and Eighth Avenue.

Two signs that I like on Essex Street

Next door to each other. I'm curious if the Dembitzer Bros. are still shipping all over the world...

My Kinda Town

Bobby Steele and the Undead. Tompkins Square Park, July 2006. For everyone, like me, who's out of town at the moment.

Smokes and smiles

No secret how expensive cigarettes are...funny why the brass at the Mobil station on Avenue C and Houston thinks advertising the not-a-bargain price might lure in some motorists...



Meanwhile, remember to smile.

Save the M8

Scoopy has the following item in this week's issue of The Villager:

East Village native Quinn Raymond reports that COBATA (Coalition of Block and Tenant Associations) has started a new Web site to save the M8, the bus line linking the West Village and the East Village. The MTA wants to curtail the route as part of their plan to close a moronic $790 billion* budget gap.

* an EV Grieve estimation

Squats vs. the city

Also in The Villager this week: An interesting piece by Lincoln Anderson titled "Former squats are worth lots, but residents can’t cash in."

[Photo of 209 E. Seventh St. from the mid-1980s by Fly via The Villager]

Things to do if you're really bored

Measure this distance! On First Avenue between 10th Street and 11th Street.



Seems like more than 75 feet to me.

Here's to your New Year's resolutions!