RIP Anthony Amato

Anthony Amato, the founder and artistic director of the Amato Opera, died on Tuesday. He was 91. According to The New York Times, he had been battling cancer.

Founded in 1948 by Tony and Sally Amato (she died in 2000), the Opera has called 319 Bowery home since 1964. The Amato Opera closed in May 2009.

The building remains on the market at 319 Bowery. Plans for a "bar/restaurant/theater experience" never materialized. The asking price is $6.5 million. Per the listing: "The neighborhood is now lined with luxury hotels, fashionable restaurants and stylish fashion stores. Bring your architect and your imagination."

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

Life after the Amato Opera

Costume drama on the Bowery as the Amato Opera empties out

Ruin of the Bowery nearly complete: Last season for the Amato Opera

Go inside the Amato Opera here.

Speaking of new locations of The Bean...

Fresh from Monday's opening of the Bean at Second Avenue and Third Street ... we were curious about progress of the Bean's location coming soon to Ninth Street at First Avenue... Here's how the place is shaping up Tuesday via photos by Bobby Williams.

We asked Ike Escava, a Bean partner, for a quick progress report.

"We are waiting for the landlord to turn over possession of the space to us," he said. "We are not sure when that will be, but expect it to happen in January or February and will be open about 8 weeks after that."

Previously.

$1 pizza getting less expensive on Avenue C

99 cents!

Here's what is coming soon to Avenue C between Ninth Street and 10th Street... The Mosaic Cafe closed here in September.

Wait till you see their array of latkes this Passover!

Over at Whole Food Bwoery... via a post by Marjorie Ingall, who wrote: "We appreciate the sentiment and accept your slightly confused but well-intentioned holiday wishes."

St. Brigid's at night

How the under-renovation church on Avenue B and Eighth Street has looked at night this week...

Yes, we've been posting a lot about St. Brigid's of late, but it is one of the few really positive constrction-related stories around here ...

Photos by Bobby William.

Coming soon to the former Heartbreak space: Boukies

In his Nov. 10 column at The Villager, Scoopy had news about Heartbreak, the Swiss-German eatery that closed here in October on Second Avenue and Second Street. Scoopy got the word that Heartbreak owner Christos Valtzoglou would open a small-plates Greek place.

Yesterday, Diner's Journal had more details on the new venture: Boukies is scheduled to open in March. "It will specialize in small plates of Greek food, mainly meze, and offer only two main courses: whole grilled branzino and lamb chops."

As you probably know, Valtzoglou also owns Pylos on Seventh Street.

Breaking: Holiday lights are off again in Tompkins Square Park

Oh no!

@angel_chao just passed along this photo...

And just hours after our post that the lights had returned... Too many holiday lights highs and lows for one night...

Joy to something! The holiday lights are back on in Tompkins Square Park

After three nights without the lights illuminated on the holiday tree... Earlier today, a park official told us they were having electrical problems... Can't wait to start complaining when the lights are still on in February!

Photo by Bobby Williams.

Previously.

[Updated] City temporarily closes Affaire on Avenue B

A tipster notes that the city temporarily closed Affaire, 50 Avenue B at Fourth Street, for operating without a "permit." Not sure what kind of permit. (According to the State Liquor Authority, the bistro/lounge has an active license through September 2012.) We'll see if we can find out some more information here shortly...

Update: An Affaire rep called it a "bureaucratic hiccup."

UPDATED: They are back open

The EV Evil Triumvirate (IHOP, 7-Eleven and Subway) sends David Cross packing to Brooklyn

In an interview with Gothamist today, our friend David Cross says that he's leaving the neighborhood behind for Brooklyn... He specifically mentions 7-Eleven, IHOP and the various Subway sandwich shops as helping hasten his exit ... "It's mildly heartbreaking. It's just becoming more and more like a mall. I might as well be in St. Louis. It's very, very quickly, rapidly losing a lot of its character."

We hope that he still stops by here to visit, especially when people start badmouthing UCBeast and cargo shorts again.

Anyway, the East Village stuff is one small part an interview where he talks about the upcoming season of "The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret." (Begins Jan. 6 on IFC! Woo!)

Why the lights are out on the Tompkins Square Park holiday tree

Now... (Well, the other night... not now now)

Yesterday, we wondered why the lights weren't illuminated on the Tompkins Square Park holiday tree.

So we asked Robert McLean, parks and recreation manager, Manhattan District Three, what was wrong. He said that Park officials were aware of the problem.

"The tree lights worked one night and were off the next morning. We tried to fix the electrical hook up yesterday, but we could not get the lights to stay on," he said via email. "We have contacted the electricians and they should come out right away."

And soon!

[Bobby Williams]

[Updated Again!] Astor Place cube pranked

Our friends at Welcome to the Funhouse spotted this early today ...

Credit then to the the Caltech Prank Club ...?

Yes, it has been turned into a Weighted Companion Cube ...

@mylestanzer noted that the Astor Place cube police have removed the gag...

Runnin' Scared has more on all this here.

The Mildred is for sale

619 E. Fifth St. is now on the market. Price: $12,225 million. Here is part of the listing:

Massey Knakal Realty Services has been retained to sell 619 East 5th Street, also known as “The Mildred.” The property is a 40 unit, 6-story walk-up apartment building located on the north side of the East 5th Street cul-de-sac between Avenue B and Avenue C. The freestanding building consists of +/- 25,200 gross square feet and is fully occupied. Apartment layouts consist of 16 studio/one bedroom units, 4 one bedroom units, 9 two bedroom units, 9 three bedroom units, and 2 three bedroom duplex units. The 2 duplex units are located on the ground floor and go down to the lower level of the building with separate entrance/exit ways on the east side of the building. Of the 40 residential units, 27 units are Free Market and 13 units are Rent Stabilized.

On the plus site, the listing DOES NOT mention anything instantly alarming such as "includes 87,000-square-feet of air rights" or "building will be delivered vacant."

I'm curious, does anyone know why it's called The Mildred?

BMW Guggenheim Lab did great things here, BMW Guggenheim Lab says

From the EV Grieve inbox yesterday ... a news release titled "BMW Guggenheim Lab Site Officially Returned to the City of New York, Transformed into Community Park" ... Here are the three best passages...

Richard Armstrong [Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation] stated, “We are deeply grateful to the City of New York for joining with us in this adventure by allowing a Parks & Recreation property to be the inaugural site of the BMW Guggenheim Lab. We were convinced that the vitality and creativity of this dense, urban East Village location would be the ideal place to launch this experiment. Thanks to the understanding and cooperation of the City, this prediction was realized beyond our best hopes.”

And!

The Lab’s wide range of programs encouraged community engagement and offered insight about today’s dense and changing urban environments, including the need for: the increased activity and involvement of community and neighborhood groups to institute urban change; stronger personal relationships and social interaction within cities to help achieve community cohesiveness; an increased focus on the reuse and revitalization of existing physical and organizational structures; and a growing interest in understanding urban interactions through the use of open-sourced data and models.

Love it when you talk about open-sourced data and models!

The BMW Guggenheim Lab New York received a highly positive response from the public, many of whom have praised its ability to bring individuals together, evoke a sense of community, generate positive energy, provoke questions and then listen to what people have to say, and ignite dialogue that can continue on long after the departure of the physical Lab structure.

Generate positive energy? They must have missed the comments here ... and here...

In any event, the Park is back in the community's hands... a subject we'll have more on later...

FRIDAY: BoweryBoogie has a rundown on Saturday's festivities here.

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

Residents pitching in to help refurbish First Street garden

Designs for urban life apparently don't include trees

Continuing to question the BMW Guggenheim Lab's benefits to the local community

6th Street Kitchen space for rent

This past Jan. 4, a fire destroyed the 6th Street Kitchen between Avenue A and Avenue B. (You may read our coverage here.)

[EV Grieve reader Jamie]

At the time, owner Chris Genoversa had hoped to reopen. In early spring, chef Andrew Kraft moved on to a new gig on the Upper West Side. With that announcement, the 6th Street folks said "the space is still boarded up but we’re optimistically hoping for something fantastic there in the future."

This is how the space looked in September...

[Dave on 7th]

And this week, "for rent" signs appeared over the rolldown gate...

We reached out to Genoversa for comment last night.

Demolition returns to 11-17 Second Avenue

Last Wednesday, a worker at the site of the demolition of 9-17 Second Avenue suffered a leg injury after being struck by falling debris.

The city promptly issued a full stop work order...

Yesterday, the city rescinded the stop work order ... (hope that you can speak DOBese...)

Bobby Williams noted the crews back on the scene yesterday...

Seems to be just a shell left here ...

Noted

Spotted recently on the gated driveway outside 52E4 — the 15 stories of condo on the Bowery and East Fourth Street.

Back in 15 minutes? What happens if we have an important delivery for John Legend that can't wait?

Report: Jury deliberations begin tomorrow in slaying of Edgard Mercado

In September 2009, police arrested 22-year-old Davawn Robinson and charged him for the murder of Edgard Mercado, a CUNY professor who lived on Avenue C near East Eighth Street. According to the Post this evening, deliberations are set to start tomorrow morning. Robinson is accused of strangling Mercado. Robinson, who faces one second-degree murder count, has claimed that Mercado wanted to be strangled while having sex and that the death was accidental. Gay City News has more on the trial here.

Lunch date

Today in Tompkins Square Park. By Bobby Williams.

Going deep at the Schwimmer's for that 6-story new home

Work continues at 331 E. Sixth St. ... where we continue to speculate that the land under the formerly historic, now-demolished townhouse is the property of David Schwimmer. (A refresher on why this may belong to the "Friends" star here.)

Goggla passed along this photo. And we took a look at the site ourselves yesterday. The workers are digging deep... any deeper and they'll be in Hollywood soon...

There are permits galore now on file with the DOB... we're looking at "the erection of a 6 story one family building."

According to permits, Cooper Union grad (and current Trustee!) Leslie Gill is the architect of record. (No sign of the renderings yet, but we look forward to seeing them!) Among the many projects during her distinguished career, she did the master planning for Warner Bros. Records, Los Angeles. (Did you know that "Friends" was filmed on the Warner Bros. lot from 1994 to 2004?)

Meanwhile.

A caller told the DOB on Nov. 30 that workers are "doing unsafe demolition and it is causing his building to shake and it may cause structural damage."

And now, a comment someone left on Nov. 25 on one of the other Schwimmer posts:

You know what the difference between LA and NYC is (having lived in both places I can speak with some some degree of knowledge)?

In LA they don't give a rat's ass about the character of the neighborhood. There's very little consideration given to architectural context, and they have very few buildings that have been around since the 1850s.

Here we take some pride in the fact that our neighborhoods have some character, and saying that someone can do 'anything they want' with an old building may be technically true, but is completely out of the spirit of what makes this city different and why neighborhoods like the LES/EV what they are.

If someone comes in and buys a perfectly nice old building (and one that might actually be landmark-worthy) and then razes it to put up some monolith that has no relationship to the what's around it, well, then that person is, um, well, an idiot.

Having some knowledge of the world that Mr. Schwimmer comes from, it's not strange that he did what he's doing, because in his world oversize garish houses on small lots is what you DO. You could really care less about what your neighbors do or think or even what their house looks like.

Here, however, that's really annoying and I'd even go so far as to say dramatically uncool. Welcome to NY, David. It's clear you're just an interloper with more cash than sense.

Previously on EV Grieve:
Is David Schwimmer the 'Friends' star who now owns the demolished 331 E. Sixth St. townhouse?

Outrage over total demolition of historic East Sixth Street townhouse