Monday, June 8, 2009
Summer rental
On 10th Street across from Tompkins Square Park. I'm curious what the neighbors think.
Noted
Mayor Bloomberg's youngest daughter, Georgina, provides show-riding outfits to needy people through her program, The Rider's Closet. 'People say I should be changing the world instead of doing this,' Georgina said. 'But I get letters from people all the time saying I've changed their lives by providing them riding clothes they couldn't afford.'" (New York Post)
Former Waldorf Hysteria space getting the plywood
The long-vacated Waldorf Hysteria space at 165 Avenue B between 10th Street and 11th Street is being renovated...
No word just yet on what this will become... Given recent trends, I'll go with a dry cleaners. There isn't one within 10 feet of this place.
No word just yet on what this will become... Given recent trends, I'll go with a dry cleaners. There isn't one within 10 feet of this place.
Noted
"Famed for its concentration of heavily subsidized 20-something residents — also nicknamed trust-funders or trustafarians — Williamsburg is showing signs of trouble. Parents whose money helped fuel one of the city’s most radical gentrifications in recent years have stopped buying their children new luxury condos, subsidizing rents and providing cash to spend at Bedford Avenue’s boutiques and coffee houses." (The New York Times)
The motorcycle diaries
There was a rather mysterious beeping noise on Fifth Street near Avenue A. Neighbors first started hearing it Thursday night. The source was traced to a covered motorcycle parked by the Con Ed Avenue A substation. As of yesterday, the motorcycle's alarm continued to make the beeps at intervals of 10 seconds or so.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Fewer noise complaints to 311 -- except for that increase in complaints about loud music and parties
As the Post notes today: "Noise complaints phoned into the city's 311 hot line between January and March plummeted 16.5 percent compared to the first quarter last year -- from 9,292 to 7,755 -- and city officials cited fewer construction projects and slowing commerce for the newfound tranquility."
However!
"Economic misery might be prompting New Yorkers to seek company at raucous parties. Complaints of loud music and parties surged 18 percent in the first three months of this year."
The Times on why NYC corporate law firms are becoming an endangered species
"As the apocalypse on Wall Street ripples out into the larger economy, a thick red tide is lapping at the once-impregnable foundations of New York’s corporate law firms, threatening to turn the industry — and with it, some iconic city characters — into an endangered species." (The New York Times)
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Street fair!
Second Avenue at 14th Street...
And I forgot that Stella's corners the market on some of the food options...
And I forgot that Stella's corners the market on some of the food options...
Meeting for a plan to preserve the Bowery
Click on the image below to read the Bowery Alliance of Neighbor's plan to preserve the east side of the Bowery from Ninth Street to Canal. There's a meeting to discuss the plan on June 16.
Remembering the "Mayor of the LES"
Great story today in The Wall Street Journal about Rudy Mancuso. On Oct. 3, 1951, at the Polo Grounds, Mancuso -- who had one exposure left on his camera -- took what is arguably the most famous photograph in the history of baseball: Giant Bobby Thomson taking an 0-1 fastball from Dodger Ralph Branca over the leftfield wall in the bottom of the ninth. And the Giants win the pennant!
Sadly, though, Mancuso never received credit for the photo. He even lost the negative. As Joshua Prager notes in the Journal, "And so, tragically, the man who shot 'The Shot Heard 'Round the World' was entirely forgotten."
Many years passed. Mancuso's pencil moustache turned from black to white as newswires and then vendors and then Web sites hocked an inexhaustible supply of his photo. He made no money from his shot and held no proof that it was he, an embosser and die cutter living in a Lower East Side walk-up, who'd most famously preserved baseball's greatest moment.
Anyway, you can read the story for yourself to see what became of the negative and to find out what he did at the Hotel Rivington. Mancuso died on May 10 at age 89.
The Times did a piece on photo in September 2006.
Last year at this time on EV Grieve: The Lower East Side — There goes the neighborhood
That's the headline for the May 28, 1984, New York magazine cover story that I recently came across. The piece begins in the early 1980s with the rotting hulk of the Christodora and the young man eager to own it, Harry Skydell.
You can read the article here.
Friday, June 5, 2009
EV Grieve Etc: Mourning Edition
The freakologist of Times Square (Jeremiah's Vanishing NY)
Smith's cleans up when we weren't looking (Lost City)
The East Village circa 1934 (Hunter-Gatherer)
"Sorcerer's Apprentice" fun on 17th Street (BoweryBoogie)
Crap! We missed National FroYo Day! (Eater)
Depeche Mode lead singer sells WV townhouse, buys Battery Park penthouse (The Observer)
Depeche Mode? Musical interlude!
A family of four's 700-square-foot EV apartment (Dwell)
Lux Living has a stalker (Lux Living)
Looking at Music: Side 2 at MoMa (Stupefaction)
Dave's new shirt; Biker Bill's new hat (Slum Goddess)
"Diary of a Times Square Thief" is one of 120 films to play at the Brooklyn International Film Festival...which starts today.
The Scavengers
Last Saturday, a group of post-collegiate types took part in a scavenger hunt throughout the neighborhood. Sometime after 7, the group reportedly convened in front of Sophie's. There, the group members assembled many of the things they apparently had on their list to find. They all took pictures of each other with their junk. They were rather harmless in the grand scheme of annoying post-collegiate types who go on scavenger hunts and/or pub crawls in the neighborhood. Still, as several people confirmed, they were characterized as rambunctious and oblivious to their surroundings. They were, we understand, shooed away from the front of Sophie's by management. They were giving the impression that the ruckus on Fifth Street was caused by bar patrons. This was not the case. The group moved west toward Avenue A with their scavenger-hunt possessions in tow for more pictures. Then, the group parted ways, leaving behind everything that they had collected for someone else to clean up.
A quick follow-up to Tuesday night's Cooper Square Hotel meeting
As you know, on Tuesday night, the East Fifth Street Block Association had a community meeting with Matthew Moss, principal of the Peck Moss Hotel Group, the developer of the Cooper Square Hotel. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss and raise any concerns about the hotel's impact on the neighborhood. Several community leaders were in attendance, including CB3 District Manager Susan Stetzer and SLA & DCA Licensing Chair Alexandra Militano. I asked Stuart Zamsky, head of the East Fifth Street Block Association, two questions in a follow-up e-mail.
I wanted to get your thoughts on how you think the meeting went. Do you think some progress was made?
I think the meeting went well. I think the community was civil yet persuasive. And, I think that Stetzer and Militano were great assets who were clear and decisive in their thoughts. And, I think it sank in to the hotel/Matt.
The one thing that was missing (and has been missing from the whole process) is a strong showing by 207 [E. Fifth St.] residents. This was their strongest showing yet, but it was too little too late. I am dumbfounded at their lack of verve and participation, considering what they have at stake.
What were you thoughts when you saw the party afterwards at the Cooper for the $280,000 DBS Volante Convertible?
The cause of the party did not faze me. It's a ritzy hotel and will host high-end clients for special events. Rich/poor...that's NYC. That it went on too late, in a noisy fashion, and seemed unstoppable is worrisome.
"Some great art was produced in those self-indulgent times"
The Times checks in with a review of the new Cooper Union academic building on Seventh Street and Cooper Squuare... and they like it.
To the review!
We’ll have to wait to find out exactly what the end of the Age of Excess means for architecture in New York. Yes, the glut of high-concept luxury towers was wearisome. But some great civic works were also commissioned in that era. And given the hard economic times, they may be the last we see for quite some time.
The new academic building at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art is yet more proof that some great art was produced in those self-indulgent times.
And!
The building occupies a contentious site at Cooper Square, between Sixth and Seventh Streets, in the East Village. The area has experienced a particularly painful process of gentrification in the past decade. First, generic glass boxes began popping up along the Bowery. Then CBGB closed. For me the final straw was the opening in 2005 of Gwathmey Siegel’s undulating glass luxury apartment tower at Astor Place, a vulgar knockoff of Mies van der Rohe’s unbuilt Glass Skyscraper project and a symbol of the era’s me-first mentality.
And!
Yet the more you look at the building, the more it looks right at home in its surroundings. From certain angles the facade’s concave form seems to exert a magnetic pull, as if it were trying to embrace the neighborhood in front of it. The curve of the corner, which lifts up to invite people inside the lobby, has an unexpected softness. Even the bulky exterior mirrors the proportions of the Foundation building — a friendly nod to its older neighbor.
Mourning the loss of the Mayor of Seventh Street
The Villager brings the sad news that Pretty Boy passed away on May 19. Pretty Boy was believed to be 22 or 23. As Albert Amateau reports, "It’s impossible to say who owned Pretty Boy. The white cat walked into Mikey’s Pet Supply store at 130 E. Seventh St. in 1988 and made it his home base on the block, where the cat became known as The Mayor of Seventh St."
Pretty Boy was a favorite of several supers on the block between Avenue A and First Avenue, said Salon Seven proprietor Mark Dolengawski. “One of them said, ‘I wish I had a cool walk like that.’ It really was a cool walk, especially as he got older, it was a Zen-like stroll. It was so serene,” Dolengawski said.
[Photo via The Villager]
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