Today in front-page news

Giving the edge to the Post today.

An espresso to go?

On the Bowery.

Punk rock girl

The Stranglers (again, yeah) from 1982.

When surveyors make us nervous

We can't help but be nervous when we see things like surveyors at work outside Billy's Antiques on Houston... What are they surveying? What godawful thing is coming/happening next to this region near the Bowery?

And why do we hear rumors about something Starbucksy coming to the vacant storefront behind Pulino's?

This weekend: The Ukrainian Festival

It's an EV Grieve favorite... and workers are setting up now...

What happens to fallen road signs

Crazy Eddie sent me this fallen "Bump" sign on the East River greenway by the ConEd plant awhile ago...

Now looked what happened to it! Red Hook isn't enough for them?

Life after the Amato Opera

In January 2009, Anthony Amato announced that he was closing the Amato Opera after more than 60 years. Amato also said that he was selling the building at 319 Bowery that he had called home since 1962.

As he told the Times, "I'm 88 years old, and I'm a little tired," he said. "I have a few years left."

However shocking the news may have been to the public, the announcement wasn't a complete surprise to some company members.

"There were some rumors swirling among the cast in the late fall of 2009," Melissa Gerstein, an East Village resident and an Amato member since 2004, told me on the phone. "We noted his health. He was just tired. He still had a lot of live. He wanted to do some other things to do with his time."

And then the cast began to talk about the future.

"There were a lot of people who had been involved with the company for 30-40 years. There were really sad about not being able to go to the Amato every week to perform," Gerstein said.

So a small group of cast members continued talking about launching Amore Opera to fill that void in producing homespun, inexpensive productions and keeping the Amato spirit alive.

Once the members had everything in order — a board and budget, for starters — they approached Amato with their idea.

He gave them an enthusiastic endorsement.

Tonight, the Amore Opera finishes up their second season with a production of "Carmen," which runs through May 29 at the Connelly Theatre at 220 E. Fourth St. between Avenue A and Avenue B.

For Amato, Gerstein said that he was extremely pleased that people who he loved and cared about were going to be continuing his legacy.

And what does Anthony Amato mean to her?

"He is a very warm and giving person. He’s just in it for the music, and no other purpose. For a young person like myself coming in — I was a year out of graduate school, which was tough and rigorous — jumping into a company like Amato, with a fun, unstructured way of doing things… He molded each performer into the person that he knew they could become up on stage."



For further reading:
Amato Opera (Jeremiah's Vanishing NY)

Find more information on the Amore Opera here.

'Soon the entire length of Avenue B will be lined with shit holes like this'

And in case you didn't see this yet at the Voice... Robert Sietsema checks in with an epic rant on the state of Avenue B dining and nightlife these days ... starring Billy Hurriance's.

To the post!

You look up at the street sign and realize you're in the hippest nabe in the world, the old E.V. And it dawns on you that soon the entire length of Avenue B will be lined with shit holes like this, crass dining and drinking establishments that might have been invented by Guy Fieri. Yes, now we're in the Fieri-verse, a realm of ostentatiousness overconsumption so abject, that nori rolls may come wrapped in bacon so as not to frighten the regulars with seaweed. Any self-respecting blogger would turn and run from such an apparition, yet this appears to be the future of the streets where Allen Ginsberg and Charlie Parker once strolled.

It had to be said.

Photo via

The Guggenheim makes good on promise of chopping down tree

Yesterday, we noted that to make way for the BMW Guggenheim Lab in the former rat-infested lot off First Street, workers would need to chop down this tree below...

...and yesterday, workers did take it away...

A reader noted yesterday the City will replace this tree once the Guggenheimers move on in October... In addition, word is the Guggenheim is donating 25 trees to the City as well.

Your now probably outdated 35 Cooper Square update

These shots were supposed to go up yesterday afternoon, but with the Great Blogger Blackout of 2011...

EV Grieve correspondent Bobby Williams took these yesterday... the historic 35 Cooper Square is slowly being chipped away in agonizing fashion...

...and we'll soon see the 35 Cooper Square outline on the side of the Cooper Square Hotel...

Only 8 shopping days left until ...

Photo by Crazy Eddie.

A sort of deja vu: Same address, different crowd last night at 200 Avenue A

A reader sends along a few photos from last night's opening at the former Superdive space... AD Projects is setting up a temporary home with the exhibition Reliquary/SUPERDARK. Read more about that here.

Yesterday at 35 Cooper Square

Yesterday afternoon, part of 35 Cooper Square started coming down. (Here's a photo via Curbed.) Still, not quite the full-on wrecking ball shitshow some people expected.

EV Grieve contributor Bobby Williams was on the scene too.

He noted a few suits looking down at the condemned property from the Cooper Square Hotel next door...

...including (MAYBE!) developer Arun Bhatia there on the right (have only ever seen him with a helmet on...)

...after a little while the suits left...

Designs for urban life apparently don't include trees

We first heard rumblings of some kind of Guggenheim pop-up community center or something at the rat-infested lot on East First Street near Second Avenue.

Well! As you may have heard by now, it's happening! This summer... through October.

And this is what it will look like.

Oh. And here's part of the official news release that we received:

Richard Armstrong, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, and Jim O'Donnell, President and CEO, BMW North America, LLC, announced today that the BMW Guggenheim Lab will launch in New York City from August 3 to October 16. Following New York, the BMW Guggenheim Lab will travel to Berlin in spring/summer 2012, and to a city in Asia to be announced later this year. Conceived as an urban think tank and mobile laboratory, the BMW Guggenheim Lab will explore issues confronting contemporary cities and provide a public place and online forum for sharing ideas and practical solutions. The BMW Guggenheim Lab and all of its programming will be free to the public. The new website and online communities will create and extend the opportunity to participate in this multidisciplinary urban experiment worldwide.

Anyway, there has been some work taking place in the last six weeks or so.

And workers have had some success in thinning the rat population, as you can see from this one found in the street of front of the lot.

Unfortunately, a resident who lives adjacent to the lot wrote me to say:

Just to let you know the Guggenheim project next door to my place plans to chop down a 60-foot tree [this] morning. Such destruction for a temporary art installation! That tree has been there for what must be 30 or 40 years!

A small price to pay for some forward-thinking ideas and designs for urban life?

UPDATED: A reader asks —

If I want to conduct work around a City tree, do I need a special permit? Excerpts from the City's Parks & Recreation Department website:

"Any person wishing to plant a tree on city property or do work on or around street or park trees must first obtain a permit from Parks.

"Removing a tree without a permit and damaging trees are very serious offenses, punishable by a fine of up to $15,000 and/or imprisonment for up to one year."

What I don't know is if the tree is a city tree or not.

Previously on EV Grieve:
The Guggenheim wants our rat-infested First Street lot

Residents pitching in to help refurbish First Street garden

Next on the extinction list?: Cup and Saucer Luncheonette

Bad news from Grub Street. Daniel Maurer reports that the building housing Cup and Saucer Luncheonette, the old timer on Canal and Eldridge, is now for sale.

One of the owners of the diner, which has been in existence for 71 years, tells Maurer that he's optimistic that they'll work out a deal to stay. We hope so. We need more places like Cup and Saucer in these manly-man, artisanal days of NYC dining.

Doesn't seem as if much else is going on in the building aside from the Cup and Saucer...

In any event, this isn't the first time that we thought that the Cup and Saucer might be in trouble.

For more on the Cup and Saucer (and other LES signage), check out Jeremiah's post from 2007 here.

Be part of Art Around the Park

These flyers went up, appropriaty, around Tompkins Square Park earlier this week...

You can register here.

Another new deli for Avenue C

EV Grieve reader Dave on 7th notes another new deli on Avenue C. The Neighborhood Deli takes over the space from Pollo Cafecito, the takeout shop for Cafecito between 11th Street and 12th Street.

Neighborhood Deli now joins the new Yankee Deli a few storefronts away ... as well as two newly renovated delis three blocks to the south on Avenue C.

Expect a rebranded Cooper Square Hotel one of these days

At the Post today, Lois Weiss reports that "the trendy upscale Cooper Square Hotel" is for sale. As she notes, the sale is expected to attract interest from "equally trendy hoteliers like Ian Schrager and Rocco Forte."

Woo!

The marketing materials boast "an exclusive bar on the second floor featuring floor-to-ceiling windows and an expansive 1,700-square-foot outdoor patio."

The CoHo, you know (sorry!), had to hand itself over, or something, in a $71 million restructuring deal, The Real Deal reported back in March.

But! As Weiss writes:

Things are looking up, however. At least one night this weekend is sold out and the following weekend has availability with rates ranging from $392 to $441 for a king-size room. With city occupancy continuing to bounce upward along with tourism and room rates, Westport Capital probably figured it was an opportune time to hit the market.

A call to Christopher McClure, CEO of Westport Capital, also went unreturned by press time. Harmon is currently wrapping up the sale of the Chelsea Hotel to an as-yet-unnamed buyer for around $80 million.

When the dust settles, sources said, the Cooper Square Hotel should top that price, especially since it is sparkling new and has no hotel management contracts in place.

"It can be totally rebranded," said one source.

That "sparkling new" exterior will need to be hosed down when the demolition and subsequent construction starts directly next door at the former 35 Cooper Square.

Another era, another lost city

Our friend Esquared posted an excerpt from the Dec. 21-28, 1987 issue of New York magazine. It's a cover story by Pete Hamill titled "The New York We’ve Lost."

Here are a few passages:

“It was a city, as John Cheever once wrote, that “was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.” In that city, the taxicabs were all Checkers, with ample room for your legs, and the drivers knew where Grand Central was and always helped with the luggage. ... In that city, you did not smoke on the subway. You wore galoshes in the rain. Waitresses called you honey. You slept with windows open to the summer night.

That New York is gone now, hammered into dust by time, progress, accident, and greed. Yes, most of us distrust the memory of how we lived here, not so very long ago. Nostalgia is a treacherous emotion, at once a curse against the present and an admission of permanent resentment, never to be wholly trusted. For many of us, looking back is simply too painful; we must confront the unanswerable question of how we let it all happen, how the Lost City was lost. And so most of us have trained ourselves to forget. …”

And!

I suppose that 30 years from now (as close to us as we are to 1958), when I've been safely tucked into the turf at the Green-Wood, someone will write in these pages about a Lost New York that includes Area and the Mudd Club and Nell's, David's Cookies and Aca Joe and Steve's ice cream. Someone might mourn Lever House or Trump Tower or the current version of Madison Square Garden. Anything is possible. But if so, I hope that at least one old and wizened New Yorker will reach for a pen and try to explain about our lost glories: and mention spaldeens and trolleys and — if he can make it clear, if he has the skill and the memory — even Willie Mays.

You can access the entire article through Nonetheless here.

Today in that sinking feeling about the Mars Bar

Yesterday, as this photo by Goggla shows, that machine thing was back outside the Mars Bar testing soil samples to monitor the toilet water level. (They were last spotted in February.)

And as for actual closing dates, well, there's plenty of rumors and speculation ... the latest word on First Street is that Prof. John upstairs has to vacate his place by mid-July.

EV Grieve correspondent Bobby Williams happened by as well. He took these shots...