No lines

[Bobby Williams]

At Joseph C. Sauer Park on East 12th Street between Avenue A and Avenue B...

Tompkins Square Park still without a gate at Avenue A and St. Mark's Place

Last Thursday, a man driving a station wagon crashed through the front gate of Tompkins Square Park on Avenue A and St. Mark's Place ... sections of the damaged gate were sitting there for several days... now they're gone... with some orange tape in place for the time being...

White lines

East Seventh Street near Avenue C above and below...





Unrelated from the other week. East Third Street and First Avenue.



Unrelated but always good to hear.



And related.

Zoltar's cozy new arrangement

Well, what do we have here outside Gem Spa...? A New York Lottery "Play Center" is now stationed directly next to Zoltar... picking lottery numbers adjacent to the Great One who tells fortunes and accurately predicts the future? We're guessing Zoltar's daily income is about to go through the box.

An East Village snow day

Grégoire Alessandrini let us know that he just added more images to his blog — New York in the 1990's Photo Archives. We featured some of his work back in May.

Some background: As a student here in the early-to-mid 1990s, he always carried a camera around with him ... and he has been uploading the photos from that time to his blog. He lives in Paris these days.

Anyway, given the temps outside today ... East Village blizzard pics from 1995 seemed fitting...

Second Avenue looking north...



First Avenue looking north ...



Avenue A looking south ...



Indian Larry...



You may now spend your holiday weekend rooting through his photo archives here.

El Jardín del Paraíso loses its prized tree

[Photo by Annalee Sinclair via Facebook]

Ugh. The largest tree at El Jardín del Paraíso had to come down earlier this week... The tree in the community garden that spans the block of East Fourth Street to East Fifth Street between C and D was leaning, and some people worried that it could come down during a storm... Here's the scene yesterday via Goggla...

Chico finishes his Ramones mural at Croxley Ales

As we first noted last Saturday, Chico was creating a mural of the Ramones on the gate at Croxley Ales...he wrapped his work earlier this week on Avenue B...

A French 'Heartbreaker' tonight in Tompkins Square Park

Tonight in Tompkins Square Park... Films on the Green presents another free French, uh, film... French DJ’s from WNYU will spin music before the screening, which starts around sunset (approx. 8:30) ...

Tonight — "Heartbreaker"

A description!

Pascal Chaumeil's new film "Heartbreaker" starring Romain Duris and Vanessa Paradis. It's a French romantic comedy, kind of the opposite of Hitch, about a guy who breaks up relationships for a living and falls into one in the process ... Chaumeil is also a protégé of Luc Besson, having work as second unit director on a few of his films.

July 4th on Union Square — 1876

[Click on image to enlarge]

A Centennial celebration, followed by epic lines for the restrooms at the nearby Starbucks.

From the NYPL Digital Gallery.

A scene on Second Avenue this morning

Two readers described this scene this morning on Second Avenue by the steps of the Ottendorfer Library. Two older men are passed out on the sidewalk. Two other men come by and try to rouse them. Or so it seems.

A passerby on the other side of the street starts screaming at the men standing. Residents in an apartment across the way also yell at the men. There's shouting back and forth.

From the witnesses, it appears that one of the men took money from the two on the ground. The man in the red shirt declares his innocence. He walks into Second Avenue yelling. He comes back to the men on the sidewalk and explains he was actually helping by hiding the money on their bodies. He says that it was too easy to take.

There's more standing and the two finally walk away, still declaring their innocence. They placed the money into the crack of the man's ass.

Someone else walking by promises to call an ambulance. Others pass by walking on the Avenue.

Golden eye

Bobby Williams took this photo late yesterday afternoon, between the monsooning bouts of heavy rain...

Your rainbow HQ

Hey now. Rainbow action. Double rainbow action late this afternoon/early evening.

First, via EVG contributor Stacie Joy...





-----

...and via EVG readers Rob and Mike ...



-----

... and via @caitlindomke over Tompkins Square Park ...



-----

And via Liz Lee... you have to click on the image for the full(er) effect...



-----

And the Death Star killed off the other half of Bonnie DeWitt's rainbow...

Everyone was apparently trying to leave town

An M14 logjam! East 10th Street and Avenue C late this afternoon... Photo by Bobby Williams.

In the city

Sort of a tradition. The Specials and "Ghost Town" circa 1981.

Or, if you prefer to look at it this way ...

Comments

A lively discussion continues on these two posts:

A case against using the term 'crusty' (Friday, 94 comments)

A private party in a public Tompkins Square Park (Saturday, 42 comments)

Out and About in the East Village

In this weekly feature, East Village-based photographer James Maher provides us with a quick snapshot of someone who lives and/or works in the East Village.

Today is part 2 of our interview with Phillip Giambri, picking up in the mid 1970s. Read part 1 here.



By James Maher

Name: Phillip Giambri
Occupation: Storyteller, Submariner, Actor, Theatre Sound Tech, OTB Announcer, Computer Systems / Network Administrator.
Location: St. Marks between 1st and 2nd Avenues.
Time: 1:00pm on Monday June 17th

Around then I needed a steadier job. How long was I going to go without a responsible pair of shoes? The actor’s union used to give you a free pair of shoes every year if you were unemployed and in the union — and I never missed a year.

So I got a job working for the city at the OTB [Off Track Betting] as an announcer for 15 years. I had benefits. It was in the Paramount Theatre in the middle of Times Square. It was still kind of in the theater so that was a good compromise.

The plus side of that was there was a bar right across the street on 43rd Street called Gough’s Chop House and The New York Times was right in the back of our building, so all of the writers and the photographers and the press room from the Times hung out in this old Irish bar in Times Square. I started hanging out there because I wanted to meet the writers from the Times. I thought they were really interesting. I hung out there off and on for 17 years.

I got my first computer job because of New York Times writers. My wife’s boss bought one of the first portable computers that weighed 55 pounds. It was a Panasonic and it came in a suitcase and I borrowed it and instantly got addicted. A couple months later he said, ‘Hey where’s my computer?,’ So I got this guy that I worked with at OTB and he built a PC for me for $2,000 dollars. I wasn’t sleeping at night, I was taking stuff apart and putting it back together.

At the time at OTB, the computer department switched from mainframes to PCs, and nobody there knew anything about PCs, so they said, ‘Go talk to Phil.’ So my friend who became the head of that side of the business asked me to come work for him as a network administrator. I was willing to take a pay cut to apply for the job and, of course, HR said, ‘You have no experience with computers, how can we hire you as a department head?’ And I said, ‘I’ve been written up in The New York Times numerous times as a computer guru’, and they said, ‘Yeah, sure.’

I pulled out these newspaper articles and they said, ‘Well, how do we know that you’re the Phil that he’s talking about.’ So I said, ‘Okay, wait a minute’, and I go downstairs and over to the Times to my friend Larry Shannon who wrote those articles. He was the first computer writer for the Times and he would always write, ‘My friend Phil the computer guru said we should do this.’ He kept quoting me. So he wrote a letterhead paper from the Times saying that I was indeed the Phil from the computer articles and they gave me the job. Thanks to Gough’s Chop House I got my first computer job. After two years of that, Giuliani came in and things got real bad over there, so I moved to the Hospital for Special Surgery as a network manager and worked there for 17 years.

From there, I decided to retire, get tattoos, and start telling stories. The other thing that I loved about this neighborhood was hanging out at the bars most of my life and swapping stories. I’ve closed so many great bars in this neighborhood that nobody even remembers or knows about. My favorite bar of all time was called Broadway Charlie’s on Broadway near 12th Street.

One of the other reasons that I moved to New York was because I wanted to be a beatnik, but I was about 10 years too late when I got here. I was going around in the West Village to all the places where the beatniks had written. I followed Kerouac and Ginsberg, and I was going around to all the places that they hung out. They were long gone, but I found this bar called Broadway Charlie’s where all the guys who didn’t become famous and weren’t dead hung out. They were all there.

It was an incredible place and every Friday and Saturday night they would have live music and all of the musicians who played in the Village would go and jam after they got off work. From midnight to 4 you would have great music and weirdo local bohos, old folks, and leftover hippies. It was a really strange, fun crowd. This was around ‘77 to maybe ‘81.

In the ‘50s, poetry was really big in the West Village. The beatniks brought it in and then it moved over as far as St. Marks Church in-the-Bowery, which still has the same poetry service that they’ve had for 25 years.

They had Corso and Ginsburg and all those guys leftover from the ‘50s still reading then. When the hippies came in the poetry kind of disappeared. It was all rock and roll, Fillmore East, Electric Circus. Coffee houses didn’t do poetry anymore.

And then all of a sudden in the last 10 years it started, slow at first, but in the last five years it’s felt like the ‘50s all over again. Every bar with a back room is fostering some kind of poetry. It’s amazing. These kids, they act like professional performers and they’ve never been on stage before. They’re reading things that they’ve written on their phone. They’re damn good. It’s a very exciting time right now. The East Village is alive with this stuff.

The thing I’m proudest of is the work we did with the block association. That was the thing we were most successful with that meant the most to everybody around here. Our lives improved dramatically. But then as soon as we did that the Gap came in and all of a sudden everybody else wanted to come in here. That’s the way it works.

James Maher is a fine art and studio photographer based in the East Village. Find his website here.

-----

Read Part 1 from Phillip Giambri here.

Citi Bike docking station 'just around the corner' is now apparently an amenity in the East Village

There's a new listing for an apartment over on East Fifth Street and Avenue B... Here's the copy:

Wing Two Bedroom apartment located at 543 East 5th Street in the haert [sic] of the East Village.

Apartment features two bedrooms, separate kitchen and tile bath. Locatde [sic] steps to all the great bars, restaurants and shopping of this great neighborhood. Citi Bike station just around the corner.

True, the docking station is around the corner on East Sixth Street and Avenue B — on the other side of the street from Sunny & Annie's. However, given that the East Village has 23 docking stations, it seems as if many apartments have one right around the corner. Is this a feature worth mentioning?

Claim this space on East Third Street

These signs recently arrived on the fence of the empty lot on East Third Street just east of Avenue C... providing information on how you can use this space... Members of 596 Acres recently posted these ... (the Brooklyn-based group of gardeners have identified vacant lots throughout NYC ... they want to help empower local residents to take them over and make the land something useful and green ...)



The city owns this property... according to DOB records, the city approved plans here in 2008 for a four-floor residence. The Department of Housing Preservation and Development is listed as the owner. No word on the status of those now five-year-old plans.

Meanwhile, someone made it easy to access the lot...



Read more about 596 Acres in this Times feature from April 2012.

Previously on EV Grieve:
A look at the dwindling number of East Village lots

East Village resident up for $10,000 prize to fund soccer program for under-privileged kids

East Village Michael Nies shared this with us... Nies helps run a charity to raise money via the Luis Rojas Foundation for after-school soccer programs in the city... and the New York Red Bulls selected Nies to represent the New York area in a national voting competition for a grand prize of $10,000 to the charity.

"That's a little less then our budget for an entire year, so it's a big deal for us," Nies told us. "We currently run programs in three schools — in Harlem, Brooklyn and Staten Island. This could help us get a fourth school."

Here's more about it via a news release.

Michael Nies, Vice President of the Luis Rojas Foundation, was selected as the New York Red Bulls Community MVP for 2013 for his work with the local charity. Through Mr. Nies' stewardship, the Foundation raises money to run after-school soccer & fitness programs for children in the poorest of NYC schools.

Mr. Nies will now be entered into a national competition with the winners from the other eighteen MLS clubs for a grand prize of a $10,000 charitable donation from MLSWORKS, the philanthropic arm of MLS. From July 1st through July 12th, online voting here will determine the winner.

"We're a small charity, and to be recognized shows our work is paying off. Our foundation is desperately trying to help kids living in extremely difficult situations, and the chance to win $10,000 from MLWORKS is an incredible opportunity and could enable us to expand to other local schools," Nies said.

If you're interested in helping Nies and the kids that he works with, then you can vote here. [This is NOT about soliciting donations. This is simply to vote on the City to receive the prize money.]

EV Grieve Eatery Etc.: Twister reminds us of its froyo arrival; the Stage is on vacation

As noted back in January, more FroYo is on the way... on Second Avenue near East Seventh Street at the former Spa Belles location ... a new Twister banner recently arrived as a reminder... and now they're hiring...



-----

A few storefronts to the north... you may have noticed that EVG favorite the Stage is on a vacation... will reopen on Tuesday...



-----

Last Friday, we spotted a temporary sign for the incoming Blue Ribbon Fried Chicken... the real thing arrived several days ago on Second Avenue and East First Street... fittingly mall-like for the space...



-----

Taqueria Diana is taking over the space that Cheep's Pita Creations had on Second Avenue near St. Mark's Place... Fork in the Road recently had more details on the place, which is run by a California native who was most recently a manager at The Meatball Shop...



-----

And several people have asked us about the Boca Chica space on First Avenue and East First Street... workers removed the BC signage a few weeks ago... Boca Chica closed in late February... Francis Derby, who was part of the opening team of wd~50 under Chef Wylie Dufresne and a one-time sous chef at Momofuku Ssam Bar, is the executive chef at the restaurant opening here called Golden Cadillac.