So long, roll-down gates

The Times follows up on its story about the city's newly endangered roll-down gates.

[O]n orders of the City Council, roll-down gates have joined the ranks of fatty foods and cigarette smoke: they have been legislated against, some right into extinction.

And!

The head-scratching dismay expressed by Pyung Lim Lee upon learning that City Hall had taken a regulatory interest in the rickety old solid gate outside C.H. Plaza Dry Cleaners, 400 Court Street, Brooklyn, N.Y., 11231, was typical.

"If the government pays, then O.K.," said Mr. Lee, the owner of the shop, who was not surprised to learn that the government would not, after all, be covering the cost of a new gate. "They make law, law, law, and people's life is more difficult."

Previously on EV Grieve:
City leaders take another step toward making NYC completely sanitized


[Photo by Richard Perry/The New York Times]

Mini Bar opens on Dec. 11

The new small plates-type place, on Seventh Street near Avenue A, will be the fourth business to give this spot a whirl in fairly quick succession. Of the previous tenants, this space has the best look and feel to it...

Previously hereabouts.

At least one person upset that the weird sushi/Blimpie/pizza place closed

A recent DOH shutter on Park Row near CIty Hall.




Guess it's off to the Pizza Hut/Taco Bell/Arthur Treacher's now...

"I walked down the Bowery and turned right on Bond Street... and for a minute I thought, 'Oh my God, I don’t know where I am!'"

This week Time Out interviews Lois Weaver (on left in photo) who, with partner Peggy Shaw, opened the now-iconic WOW Café Theater on East Fourth Street and founded the Split Britches performance troupe. They're unveiling their latest piece of edgy queer theater, "The Lost Lounge," at the new Dixon Place this Friday.

Their new work is, in part, about the changes in the neighborhood. "We call it a tribute to the last holdouts, to the people who kind of hold on or resist or fight or just hold on in the face of the kind of real-estate development that’s been going on in the Bowery. It's shocking, what’s been going on there," said Weaver, who still lives in the East Village.

Weaver had more to say on the area in a Q-and-A, including:

Do you feel like strangers in the East Village now?
"I walked down the Bowery and turned right on Bond Street the other day, and for a minute I thought, 'Oh my God, I don’t know where I am!' I just didn’t recognize it. And so one of the themes that we’re working on is how memory is tied up with landscape, and what happens when you lose your landscape — how identity is tied into place and how it feels like we’re losing part of our identity by losing those places."

Image via.

238 E. Fourth St. continues its steady progress

Back in August, I noted the rather impressive progress at 238 E. Fourth St. between Avenue A and Avenue B where the former one-level construction company was razed to become a $4 million penthouse by the world-famous Bob and Cortney Novogratz.

The construction netting is off...and the new tenants will be ready to move in by, say, Dec. 15. Well, maybe not. Anyway, onward and upward and stuff...



As a Curbed commenter said about site:

[A]t least they didn't kill the beautiful old tree that in the back of the property between the yards of 3rd and 4th streets. Our new rich neighbors will get to enjoy the loud bar's garden in the backyard of 3rd St bar, the loud bars on Ave. B between 2 & 4. I hope they enjoy paying millions of dollars for all the "color and charm" of the East Village. Welcome to the fuckin neighborhood.

Previously on EV Grieve:
Former construction company becoming a two-family home with $4 million penthouse

Shake Shack and "Hale and Heardy" among the top-10 2009 Google searches in New York City

Drumroll!

1. cuny portal
2. duane reade locations
3. mta trip planner
4. seamless web
5. conedison.com
6. hopstop
7. hale and heardy
8. shake shack
9. nyu home
10. queens library

Why would anyone have to Google "Duane Reade locations"? Just walk two blocks in any direction and you should find one.

Also!

As EV Grieve reader T.E.V.B, who passed this along, noted, "C'mon people, learn to spell 'hearty!'"

What did other cities look up...?

Ada Louise Huxtable on the new Cooper Union: "It perfectly expresses the creative energy of New York"

Legendary critic Ada Louise Huxtable weighs in on the new Cooper Union building in The Wall Street Journal. And she likes what Thom Mayne has done... Take it away, Ada!

[I]ts futuristic façade is strikingly different in style and unlike anything else around it. The East Village is an area in transition, best known for its disappearing Bowery flophouses and restaurant supply stores. The wave of development moving along the Bowery in the wake of Sanaa's New Museum with its offhand infusion of sophisticated Japanese design already contains the marks of Meatpacking-District gentrification. With its uneven mix of scales and textures and juxtapositions that have more to do with unpredictable change than reliable constants, this is a place that upends any conventional or stable idea of "contextual" harmony.

And!

It is not surprising that the school would commission an equally advanced design for its new construction, not only for the latest in technology and sustainability, but also as an appropriate learning environment for those engaged in creative disciplines. Applying a tough sensibility to a tough assignment revitalized an amorphous status quo. To this native New Yorker who has watched the city evolve over decades and treasures its unrelenting diversity, Mr. Mayne has got it just right.

And she likes the staircase!

The stair is meant to be the interactive heart of the building and it appears to be working, although reality doesn't always follow architects' plans. Students move between classes, sit on the steps with their computers or lunches, and peel off to adjacent study lounges. Daylight pours down from a skylight at the top. This is high architectural drama, a luminous and exhilarating invitation into the structure's life and use. It is not building as bling. It is how architecture turns program and purpose into art. And it perfectly expresses the creative energy of New York.

Some faded ad glory reappears above the Mercury Lounge

Typically, the wall atop the Mercury Lounge building on Houston near Essex features an ad for something like this...



In the last week or so, the building's former occupant was revealed...




The Mercury Lounge opened in 1993. Prior to that, Shastone Monuments -- part of Houston's once-thriving gravestone industry -- called this space home for nearly 60 years. You can read more about Shastone here at Mr. Beller's Neighborhood.

GammaBlog has a great angle on the ad here.

Lil' Monsters opening soon on East 10th Street (cute kitties alert!)

Sounds like a fitting name for a bar around here... But as the sign says here on the storefront at 279 E. 10th St. between Avenue A and First Avenue, Lil' Monsters will specialize in pet care and animal rescue...



And cute kitties alert in the front window...




And please note...



They have a Web site.

Pet hotel opening on Avenue B

Paws & Relax will be near 13th Street. Right across the way from the Copper Building.

It was a balmy 44 last evening

...when we spotted two intrepid diners eating outside at Yuca Bar, Seventh Street and Avenue A...the diner with her back to the camera was wearing a hooded parka thingee.

Reminders tonight: The Lower East Side Remembered and Revisited

The Lower East Side Remembered and Revisited
CUNY-Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave., Manhattan, Elebash Recital Hall

Join panelists:
Joyce Mendelsohn, author
Annie Polland, the Tenement Museum
Clayton Patterson, photojournalist and author
Eric Ferrara, the Lower East Side History Project

Joyce Mendelsohn’s "The Lower East Side Remembered and Revisited," first published in 2001 and is being re-released by Columbia University Press in a revised and expanded edition, including a new section on the Bowery. Panelists will discuss the neighborhood's venerable churches, synagogues and settlement houses as well as the breakneck changes that have taken place. Transformed from historic to hip – aged tenements sit next to luxury apartment towers, and boutiques, music clubs, trendy bars and upscale restaurants take over spaces once occupied by bargain shops, bodegas, and ethnic eateries.

*RSVP FOR TICKET AVAILABILITY

Date: December 2, 2009
Time: 6:30 PM-8:30 PM
Phone: 212-817-8471
E-mail: gotham@gc.cuny.edu

Check out the Web site for more details.

Renovation watch at the former Tribe space

Every time we walk by the former Tribe space on First Avenue and St. Mark's Place, something is just a little bit different...over the course of a few days, we saw...





...and now, EV Grieve reader dmbream noted yesterday:

Hanging copperplate this morning at Tribe. Plywood taken down. Also jack-hammering out what were covered up window openings on the St. Mark's side of the place.

Here's a shot yesterday via les pensées insouciantes:



Anyway, as far as we know, the Crooked Tree folks are opening a tapas bar in this space.

Previously hereabouts.

Fare warning

From the EV Grieve inbox:

Dear God. There are Lady GaGa ads on the screens in the cabs.

[Image via Eric Alba.]

Welcome back

Now that most everyone is back from the Thanksgiving holiday... Per the Glum Friend of EV Grieve, who had to travel, this is the first best part about returning to NYC. The ride back in from JFK or LaGuardia... and the first glimpse of the skyline from the road....




The second best part is likely when the cab drops him right off at his favorite bar...

Friday night on St. Mark's Place

According to witnesses on Friday night, the fellow here was seen on St. Mark's Place between Third Avenue and Second Avenue.



He was having a difficult time standing...and not nodding off...



Soon, paramedics arrived, and took him to St. Vincent's.





Photo Credit: Vautrin

9th Precinct sees slight increase in overall crime for year; 74 of 76 NYC police precincts see lower numbers

As the Times noted yesterday:

Police Department statistics show that the number of major crimes is continuing to fall this year in nearly every category, upending the common wisdom that hard times bring more crime.

According to the article, there has been a decrease in overall crime in all but two of the city’s 76 police precincts.

So how about our 9th Precinct? I took a look at the city's weekly crime statistics for the period ending Sunday.

As you can see, there is actually an increase in crime in several categories. The numbers of rapes (12 in 2009; 8 in 2008) and burglaries (267 vs. 192) have increased in 2009 compared to 2008. The total number of crime complaints has increased from 1,363 last year to 1,402 this year. (And at least six of those reported crimes can be chalked up to the "Spiderman-like thief" who burglarized the same East 10th Street building earlier this year...)



However, as we've said before, it's important to keep these numbers in some perspective. For instance, robberies in the 9th Precinct have decreased by 80 percent since 1990.

Previously on EV Grieve:
The Post notes a "90 PERCENT SURGE IN BURGLARIES" in the East Village

East Fifth Street suddenly has new views

A new listing popped up Trulia (via HotPads) the other day for a $1 million condo on East Fifth Street in the 10009 zip .... complete with a Google street view of Fifth Street and Avenue A.

And the photos that accompanied the listing looked like this...



... with hotties in the pool and steam room!



Obviously a mistake giving the description is for something swank in Long Island City. Or maybe that last bender at Sophie's lasted a little longer than I remembered.

City leaders take another step toward making NYC completely sanitized

From the City Room:

Citing high rates of graffiti, the City Council voted unanimously on Monday to gradually ban the use of rolldown metal security gates, a move that would eliminate what has been an enduring if forbidding feature of the urban streetscape.

Image via City Rag.

Headline writer in deep shit

Up at the Post, there's the sad story of an 81-year-old Lower East Side woman who was critically injured during a fire in her Grand Street apartment. And here's the paper's treatment of the story online...



Hmm, I always appreciate direct headlines that tell me what the story is going to be about, but...