Photo by Shawn Chittle.
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Save Kate's Joint on Avenue B
A campaign is underway to help save Kate's Joint, the vegetarian restaurant on Avenue B and East Fourth Street. Here's the background on indiegogo:
Kate’s Joint, vegetarian restaurant and bar, has been a staple in New York City’s East Village since 1996. Solely owned and operated by neighborhood native Kate Halpern, who dreamt to create an affordable restaurant to serve the community she grew up in. Kate’s Joint has grown to become much more than just a business, it is a home for locals and travelers a like, a place to bring family and friends, and to meet new ones.
Unfortunately, with the changing neighborhood and economic recession Kate’s Joint has seen a fall in business and rise in costs. Kate is currently in arrears with the landlord. Eviction notices have been sent, court appearances have been made, and if a substantial amount of money is not raised by April 11th, the next court date, the doors will shut permanently at Kate’s Joint. The East Village will lose another neighborhood landmark.
Anyone who has ever met Kate knows how hard she has worked over the past 15 years, and how dedicated she is to this business. She has many plans to increase business, including transforming a section of the restaurant in to a bakery featuring vegan and gluten free baked goods, reaching a new market of morning commuters who would be able to grab a cup of coffee and a vegan muffin on their way to work. That being said, first thing is first, fighting off this eviction!
The Impact
This is not just about saving Kate’s Joint; it is about preserving the East Village. It is about preserving small, female owned businesses. Don’t let Avenue B turn in to a row of Starbucks and banks; help keep small businesses alive!
What We Need & What You Get
We need at least $30,000 to go to back rent. While we are hopping to raise the majority of this through donations and fundraisers, we realize that may not be possible. We are also in talks with other funding sources, including loans and investors.
Read the rest of the post here. Owner Kate Halpern explains the perks of a contribution there too...
Blockbuster closes tomorrow; last chance to buy the store's fire extinguisher
As we first reported, the Blockbuster in the Red Square shops on East Houston closes tomorrow...
...and when they say everything must go, they mean it.
Hope there's not a small fire inside the store today.
Previously.
...and when they say everything must go, they mean it.
Hope there's not a small fire inside the store today.
Previously.
This was the line for McSorley's at 8:56 a.m., March 17, 2012
Hey, it's St. Patrick's Day. In case you didn't know already because your neighbors have recently discovered the Pogues.
Anyway! Forgot to check when McSorley's opens today... 9? 11?
... and around the corner... Leprechaun bus!
If you don't feel like waiting, then you may go to the Village Pourhouse on 11th Street and Third Avenue. They were open earlier. You may need a backpack to get in. Many people we saw entering the bar had backpacks. (Unfortunately, not depicted so well in this photo...) Change of clothes? Provisions? Textbooks? Stomach pumps?
If you are brave enough to venture out today (we recommend that you stay locked in your bathroom), then say hi. We'll be wearing a disguise from Gem Spa...
Anyway! Forgot to check when McSorley's opens today... 9? 11?
... and around the corner... Leprechaun bus!
If you don't feel like waiting, then you may go to the Village Pourhouse on 11th Street and Third Avenue. They were open earlier. You may need a backpack to get in. Many people we saw entering the bar had backpacks. (Unfortunately, not depicted so well in this photo...) Change of clothes? Provisions? Textbooks? Stomach pumps?
If you are brave enough to venture out today (we recommend that you stay locked in your bathroom), then say hi. We'll be wearing a disguise from Gem Spa...
From the Department in Great Timing Department
Nike chose today, St. Patrick's Day, to film a commercial around McSorley's.
Unless there's a St. Patrick's Day theme to the commercial.
Unless there's a St. Patrick's Day theme to the commercial.
Friday, March 16, 2012
Rare Woodcock spotted in Tompkins Square Park
First, please no snickering over the bird's name... Bobby Williams spotted this Woodcock today in the Park...
And, background cut-n-paste from Wikipedia...
And, background cut-n-paste from Wikipedia...
The American Woodcock (Scolopax minor), sometimes colloquially referred to as the Timberdoodle, is a small chunky shorebird species found primarily in the eastern half of North America. Woodcock spend most of their time on the ground in brushy, young-forest habitats, where the birds' brown, black, and gray plumage provides excellent camouflage.
Because of the male Woodcock's unique, beautiful courtship flights, the bird is welcomed as a harbinger of spring in northern areas. It is also a popular game bird, with about 540,000 killed annually by some 133,000 hunters in the U.S.
Tomorrow: Squat tour of the East Village
From the EV Grieve inbox...
The tour is free of charge...
This Saturday at 12 noon we will hold another trial-run squat tour. Longtime squatter activist Frank Morales will lead the tour and we will have a few guest speakers along the way. Please join us and bring all your friends! The tour will start at the museum's new storefront at 155 Avenue C and will visit several squats in the area. We will probably cover one mile over the course of about two hours.
The tour is free of charge...
John Lurie on East Village Radio Sunday
From the EV Grieve inbox...
And a little prepwork from 1981...
Listen live to EastVillageRadio.com's Morricone Youth this Sunday, March 18, at 2 pm as Devon E. Levins welcomes musician, artist and actor John Lurie on a very special Lounge Lizards' edition of the soundtrack show.
Last time Mr. Lurie graced the EVR studios with his magnanimous presence was this past autumn for a two-part special in which the musician-turned-painter talked about his soundtrack work (check that out here and here). This time, the show will focus on the genre-blurring work of Lurie’s band, The Lounge Lizards. Expect to hear classic cuts and Lurie’s insights into the formation and legacy of one of the most interesting musical acts to emerge at a time when New York City was bursting at the seams with them.
Be sure to revisit the archives and listen to Lurie and Levins wax over hamburgers on how John got his first sax, played harmonica with Canned Heat in his late teens and was admonished by an 11-year old Scarlet Johannson for his soundtrack to "Manny & Lo" sounding too much like "Badlands."
And a little prepwork from 1981...
EV Grieve Etc.: Mourning edition
The Cabrini closure: "It’s a deplorable situation" (The Villager)
Short history of Avenue C and Loisaida Ave. (Ephemeral New York)
From 2006, MTV interviews The Horrors in the community garden on Sixth Street and Avenue B (Flaming Pablum)
Thoughts and memories of Avenue C (Movin' On Up NYC)
Longtime High Line-area business now a parking lot (Jeremiah's Vanishing New York)
More on the re-branded Coleman Oval Park from CB3 (BoweryBoogie)
More on the re-branded 95 Delancey (The Lo-Down)
And your local Duane Reade stores have slashed prices on the Jeremy Lin merchandise and moved it to a back aisle...
From Tin Pan Alley to Max Fish
Yesterday, in Part 1 of our feature on Ulli Rimkus and Max Fish, we learned that the bar is safe for now on Ludlow Street... we also looked at the art scene that eventually helped lead to the bar's creation in 1989... You can find Part 1 of the post right here.
By Joann Jovinelly
Meanwhile, Uptown
At the same time, other members of Colab, including Rimkus, Kiki Smith, and photographer Nan Goldin were trying to make their way in midtown, peddling libations uptown at a bar called Tin Pan Alley, owned by Maggie Smith since the 1970s.
Photographer Keri Pickett, a longtime patron, called Tin Pan a place where “artists mixed with locals, where scores of young musicians performed ranging from jazz and samba to punk rock.”
Rimkus was a bartender at Tin Pan, as was Goldin, and Smith worked in the kitchen. Charlie Ahearn, who lived in the neighborhood at the time, used to hang out there and remembered the place as a kind of “tough girls environment with many strippers and street walkers drinking along with artists, musicians, drug dealers, and city detectives.
Like The Times Square Show, there were events nightly, such as film screenings and punk shows [that featured bands] like the Butthole Surfers. [Rimkus] was at the center of it all, graciously showing interest in her friends’ work and in the artists and musicians [who frequented the establishment].”
As it turns out, all of the work at Tin Pan and Colab was the perfect foundation for Rimkus, who took all that experience and used it to open Max Fish in 1989. The name came from the property’s former tenant, Max Fisch, a Jewish man who sold Judaica. Prior to obtaining a liquor license, Rimkus did what she had always done: She mounted an art exhibit, The Atomic Art Show.
“I wanted to have a place where people [could] come and hang out — not to get drunk, that was never the point,” Rimkus told Time Out New York. “The artists played a very important role in this place. We were hosting art shows before we even started the bar.”
Some Assembly Required
By their very nature most artists are anti-social, but put them all in a small room together and it’s like igniting a rabid fire. Fran Lebowitz said it best when she said “the history of art is people sitting around in bars, talking and drinking” and Max Fish certainly became a testament to that idea. It quickly made its name both for its colorful ad-hoc art shows and for launching more than a few careers.
The shows continued. Over the years the bar remained a busy, popular LES hangout. Throughout the 1990s, everyone from filmmaker Jim Jarmusch to actors and personalities Johnny Depp and Courtney Love were regulars.
Artists remained at the forefront and by the turn of the new millennium, newcomers like Dash Snow, who in 2009 was found dead of a drug overdose, called Max Fish home. Snow, along with scores of others including photographer Ryan McGinley and artist Dan Colon, had inadvertently become part of the inner circle. The baton passes to a new generation, but Rimkus is still at the helm.
“Max Fish is supposed to be a place where this sort of gathering [happens],” Rimkus told The Daily Beast. “It was always meant to be a place where you meet people you normally don’t meet. There’s your home, there’s your work, and then you have Max Fish. It hasn’t changed over the course of 20 years.”
What has changed is that the very bar that helped remake the LES is a potential target in the ever-tightening grip known as gentrification; Rimkus faced similar problems in 2010.
“Gentrification was always a thing on this block,” Rimkus told New York magazine. “I moved here years before I opened the bar. It was all Hispanic families and whoever used to be here and then moved because more and more white people moved in. And now we’re [in danger of] being kicked out [again] … there’s three different high-rise buildings next to me.”
Despite a steep rent increase, Rimkus is hanging on.
As the LES gives way to fancy condos and glass skyscrapers, due in part to zoning changes by Mayor Bloomberg, fans of the bar hope it will stay another 20 years.
To lend their support, they have signed a petition. At last count, the number of signatories had reached into the thousands, many of hom added words of encouragement, such as those from patron Shalie Sweetnam, “Max Fish is one of the many elements that personify the color and camaraderie of the LES ... it should be respected for that in a climate that increasingly and sadly values gentrification and homogenization over history and character.”
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Joann Jovinelly is a freelance writer and photographer who still calls the East Village home. When she's lucky, she sells her work and pays the rent. She knows about the Times Square Show because she lived and worked with Charlie Ahearn and Jane Dickson in the late 1980s and they told her all about it, among other things.
Find more photos by Keri Pickett at Tin Pan Alley Live.
9th Street Espresso taking over part of the former Life Cafe space
As we first reported a few weeks back, the dueling landlords who own Life Cafe planned to split the space in two ... part of the space is for rent... Thanks to The Villager, we now know what is filling half of the former Life Cafe — 9th Street Espresso, which will be moving next door ... Scoopy has the details, which include:
Moving one storefront to the east will almost double the cafe’s space, from 500 to 900 square feet. The new location, at 343 E. 10th St., is not only much wider, but will include Life’s former backyard garden, which [landlord Bob] Perl plans to enclose — though it will still have skylights — allowing year-round use.
Read all of Scoopy here.
Avenue C's other sinkhole
The sinkhole on Avenue C at 13th Street has been getting its share of attention, including a segment on NY1's For You feature ... ConEd has been on it of late.
But! A reader reminds us of another longtime sinkhole getting sinkier along Avenue C... on the east side of the sidewalk between Sixth Street and Fifth Street ...
Where's the love?
But! A reader reminds us of another longtime sinkhole getting sinkier along Avenue C... on the east side of the sidewalk between Sixth Street and Fifth Street ...
Where's the love?
Shades of gray
On Monday, we pointed out the new buildings that arose from the grave of 326-328 E. Fourth St. ... At the time, the building were gray. But! EV Grieve reader Steven notes that perhaps the gray was just a primer... or some kind of undercoating ... Workers yesterday were putting on a coat of white...
This is what 17 Avenue A looked like on March 4, 2012
This year, we'll post photos like this of various buildings, streetscenes, etc., to capture them as they looked at this time and place... The photos may not be the most telling now, but they likely will be one day...
Thursday, March 15, 2012
The Pies of March
Members of Time's Up today at Astor Place... Per the description:
Feeling a little betrayed by your bank lately? Feel like banks got bailed out and you go sold out Don't want to associate your money with dirty coal and oil? Get on your bike and join us as we ride and take the banks to task. It's time to Occu-Pie the Banks! Ride will end at 4th Annual Unforgettable Pie Fight!
The art evolution of Ulli Rimkus and Max Fish
By Joann Jovinelly
To some, this year is symbolic of a potential global crisis that threatens civilization, but for a few New Yorkers that death knell rings much closer to home — on the Lower East Side. This year marks the threat of a different kind of death — the potential closure of a beloved bar known as Max Fish that has for more than 20 years been the life blood of New York’s downtown arts community.
Fortunately, when we finally caught up with owner Ulli Rimkus, we found her firmly rooted.
“We have no immediate plans to leave, and in fact, we’re good for now,” she explained joyfully last week.
If you recall, in December 2010, reports surfaced that the demand of rising rent costs might lead to the removal of yet another New York mainstay. However, by January 2011, Rimkus had received a one-year lease extension. Now she's here indefinitely.
While business has been up and down of late, Max Fish remains populated by regulars as well as newcomers hoping to mix it up at this storied art spot. For now at least, the hysteria of a forced move remains distant.
Hang the Art; the Beer Will Follow
Rimkus opened Max Fish on Ludlow Street in 1989, first as an art gallery, but her artistic past goes much deeper. More than a decade earlier she had arrived to the United States from Düsseldorf, then a part of West Germany.
In her twenties and eager to lay claim to New York’s thriving arts scene, Rimkus and her then boyfriend, artist Christof Kohlhofer, moved to the Lower East Side in 1977. They soon became members of the collective Collaborative Projects, Inc., or Colab, a loose confederation of artists that courted the likes of filmmakers Charlie Ahearn and Jim Jarmusch, painter Jane Dickson, sculptor Tom Otterness, and printmakers Kiki Smith and Jenny Holzer, and as many as 50 more.
By working together and establishing a nonprofit status the following year, Colab quickly evolved into a positive force in New York’s contemporary art scene. Besides being in control of its own exhibition spaces (which typically meant temporarily taking over abandoned spaces) Colab produced arts shows for Manhattan’s public access cable TV network, helped champion the nonprofit arts space ABC No Rio, opened a screening room for Super 8 films on St. Mark’s Place, and encouraged the intermingling and strengthening of the arts community at large.
Rimkus was at the center of that thriving push for unity and she even co-authored one of Colab’s first National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) grant applications, which later became a mission statement for the fledgling group.
No Gallery? No Problem
Within two years of its formation Colab began hosting radical group shows, first with The Manifesto Show in 1979, which broke new ground and caught critics’ eyes. The Real Estate Show followed in 1980, but none were as memorable as The Times Square Show. Held during the summer of 1980 in an abandoned four-story massage parlor on 41st Street and Seventh Avenue, critics hailed the exhibit as the arrival of New York’s “punk rock” artists. Nude models milled about and mock peep shows were staged. In one room, an orange punching bag hung from the ceiling.
According to its press release, the month-long exhibit took on “the complexities of the human condition, theatres of love and death, invention and phenomena…daring performance, comic relief, arcades of fiction and halls of art from the future — all beyond the horizon of your imagination.”
The Times Square Show had legs. Uptown gallery owners jockeyed for the opportunity to buy the work, and Jeffrey Deitch, Director of the Los Angeles Art Museum but then a young art critic, wrote that the art was “raw, raucous, [and] trashy, but exciting.”
The surging popularity of the artists, many who lived on the Lower East Side, paved the way for the first wave of gentrification in the East Village. Before long, galleries popped up on every other corner that would eventually create art stars out of Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, David Wojnarowicz, and many others. Within five years, the East Village surpassed SoHo as New York’s art mecca with more than 78 galleries lining its streets by 1985.
In the late 1970s, however, the city’s contemporary art scene thrived for established artists, but not for newcomers. Colab was significant because it pushed the boundaries of what struggling artists could control, especially when they banded together.
Samuel M. Anderson, Ph.D., who has written extensively about the groundbreaking show, noted the power that was yielded by Colab and the significance of the artist alliance.
“Just as distinctions between the specific art works on display and the genres they represent begin to evaporate, distinctions between basic ontological concepts dissolve in the chaotic play of objects housed in a four-story massage parlor,” he wrote. “This was the particular, disorienting contamination of power wielded within the bounds of The Times Square Show: Not only materials, but genres, categories, sensibilities, even whole realities met, merged, and infected each other with the tumultuous interplay of their qualities, their meanings, and their histories.”
Street Artist to Art Star
Charlie Ahearn, director of the widely respected 1980s film "Wild Style," which told the story of New York’s earliest graffiti writers, remembers The Times Square Show well.
“Jane Dickson painted a portrait of Ulli on a black plastic bag and hung it in the second-floor stairwell,” Ahearn recalled. “Ulli was there often, hanging up work, helping out in the ‘gift shop’ on the ground floor, or up on the second floor ‘fashion room’ where Sophie VDT [another Colab artist] had hung work and Jean-Michel Basquiat painted a red abstraction directly on the wall. Basquiat also painted the words ‘Free Sex’ over the main entrance doorway, but someone else painted it out.” [The Times Square Show was Basquiat’s first entry into showing work professionally.]
“Ulli was an amazing supporter of artists,” Ahearn continued, “especially of Kristof Kohlhofer, who not only painted his stencil art on canvas, but was a forerunner to [today’s] street art scene, painting his stencils up and down Ludlow Street.”
Basquiat was also better known as a graffiti writer. His street tag, SAMO (an acronym meaning SAMe Old shit) was once found all over downtown Manhattan. He had become loosely affiliated with Colab through Diego Cortez, a filmmaker he’d meet at the Mudd Club, but he quickly left the graffiti world when his popularity exploded, just a few years after his associations with Colab.
But the collective was not without its problems. Just two months prior to The Times Square Show, the group was in danger of losing its NEA funding due to the work of one of its members, Tom Otterness, whose controversial project Shot Dog Film turned the stomachs of anyone who watched it. (Otterness, who fatally shot a dog in the video has since apologized, but continues to face opposition from some New Yorkers based on that 30-year-old work.)
Tomorrow: From Tin Pan Alley to Max Fish.
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Joann Jovinelly is a freelance writer and photographer who still calls the East Village home. When she's lucky, she sells her work and pays the rent. She knows about the Times Square Show because she lived and worked with Charlie Ahearn and Jane Dickson in the late 1980s and they told her all about it, among other things.
[Photo of Ulli Rimkus via New York Art Department]
More details emerge about the CBGB music festival this summer
Gothamist first pointed out that the CBGB brand was eyeing opening a club somewhere in the city ... Then, BoweryBoogie heard about a CBGB music festival happening this summer... Now our friends at This Ain't the Summer of Love found some more details on the event (sort of buried) at CBGB.com.
In part:
The CBGB Festival is a five day celebratory showcase of music, film, distilled spirits and learning. From The Bowery and the Lower East Side to the streets of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, join them as they turn it up as loud as it will go this year during the 4th of July holiday week. July 4-8, 2012: Named for the greatest rock-n-roll venue in the world; they proudly introduce the first Annual CBGB Festival. Experience four energy-fueled days & nights of music, rock-n-roll films, insider-industry workshops, and intimate storytelling; all LIVE, all in New York City. CBGB has defined music and culture for generations of people around the world. Universally recognized as the birthplace of punk, CBGB continues to define new music and popular culture by fostering live performances & personal expression from artists around the city and across the globe.
You can read the rest of it at This Ain't the Summer of Love.
Interesting... even if it does sound like a treatment for an energy drink commercial...
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