Thursday, May 8, 2014

Bibi Wine Bar is now open on East 4th Street



Yes, like the headline says. Bibi Wine Bar is now open at 211 E. Fourth St. between Avenue A and Avenue B… The Bar, in the former JujoMukti Tea Lounge (how did they get a liquor license?), is via the owners of the 8th Street Winecellar.

Per the chalkboard sign out front, they are featuring a "don't worry Bibi happy" happy hour.

We haven't heard anything about the place just yet … but there are some enthusiastic reviews on Yelp.

h/t EVG reader Chucho

Previously on EV Grieve:
Reader report: 8th Street Winecellar looking to open a 4th Street location

Perbacco is closed for remodeling

Speaking of wine bars on East Fourth Street between Avenue A and Avenue B… Perbacco has been closed of late. There's no sign up on the gate, which made a few fans of the well-regarded Italian restaurant nervous.

However, the Perbacco website has an announcement explaining that they are closed until later this month "for exciting remodeling."

One thing that we have heard loud and clear from our guests is a rapidly growing interest in wine. In order to cater to this growing interest, we will be putting more of a spotlight on our wine selection. We will even be using a Coravin wine system so that we can offer every single wine in the restaurant by-the-glass (as well as by bottle). This will enable us to introduce new food and wine pairings, flights, even classes!

Without jeopardizing the comfortable ambiance our guests have come to appreciate, we will be putting our wine cellar on display with a stunning glass wall-of-wines, and adding some lounge furniture. Imagine cozy comfort meets contemporary elegance.

The announcement states that Perbacco will reopen "in late May."

TD Bank branch opening next Friday on 2nd Avenue; party with free gift for the 1st 100 visitors!



Hey, that TD Bank branch anchoring the Jupiter 21 building on Second Avenue at East First Street is opening late next week.

The new neighborly neighbors placed welcome brochures on cars around the, uh, neighborhood with more details… the trees are coming! (And how many trees went into making these brochures???)





Any thoughts on what the gift might be? (Do banks still give out toasters? Or have they downsized to toaster mitts?)

Of course this Grand Opening Celebration will cause the new Mars Bar coming to a space somewhere in this building to ramp up their own First Day/Night Extravaganza.

Liquiteria coming soon to former Blimpie space on 4th Avenue



The quickly expanding Liquiteria mini-chain announced several new locations around the city in January … including one at Fourth Avenue and East 13th Street.

The plywood is down now at the former Blimpie space on the northeast corner of Fourth Avenue and East 13th Street … revealing the Liquiteria signage.

No word just yet on an opening date. Liquiteria's flagship store is on Second Avenue at East 11th Street.

Previously on EV Grieve:
East Village-based Liquiteria taking over beloved Gray's Papaya space

A new look for the northeast corner of Fourth Avenue and East 13th Street

Hampton Jitney drop-off service proposed for 2nd Avenue


[Via image the CB3 website]

Tonight's CB3 Transportation & Public Safety/Environment Committee meeting includes a proposal for a Hampton Jitney stop at 177 Second Ave. near East 11th Street.

According to the proposal (PDF!), there will be three drop offs during the summer: 7:34 a.m. on Monday, 3:19 p.m. on Friday and 9:04 p.m. on Sunday. (Depending on the traffic, add up to three hours to these times.)

While we haven't heard anything about this application (hey, when are we getting a heliport anyway?), there is opposition to other items on tonight's committee agenda — specifically with new permits for Chinatown bus companies, as The Lo-Down reports here.

The meeting starts at 6:30 in the University Settlement at Houston Street Center, 273 Bowery.

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

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.



By James Maher
Names: Kathy Kemp (left) and Kimberle Vogan
Occupations: Clothing designer/owner, employee at Anna
Location: Anna, 11th Street between 1st and 2nd Ave.
Time: Friday, May 2 at 4:30 pm

Kathy: I’m from outside of Reading, Pennsylvania. It was a pretty small town. I usually just tell people I’m from Philadelphia. I was 23 when I moved to Philadelphia. I went to college there and studied cultural anthropology and then I didn’t know what I was doing, so I moved here with a friend.

I never was drawn to New York City or the East Village but I was always interested. Somehow I landed here. I knew I wanted to do something in fashion but I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I had friends who were stylists and then someone said to me, ‘You should just do something that you love. Think about what you love and what you are good at.’ I thought, ‘Well, I’ve always made clothing and I know how to sew really well. I love shopping. I’ll open a store!’

What a great idea, because I didn’t have any money at all, but I looked around and found a place on East 3rd Street in 1995. Then it was definitely doable; there were people doing it all over. It was stupid and easy if you wanted to take the chance. If you just wanted to, you could blow the $3,000 that you had, go have fun, and meet a lot of new people and connections. Now you can’t even do that. I feel really sorry for people today who want to do this, because it’s almost impossible to do it these days.

I had less than $5,000 dollars and my rent was $600 to start but the catch was that my store used to be a drug-dealing place that sold cocaine and pot. The place had just been busted; it was broken apart. It used to be called Village Bikes — a bike shop that wasn’t really a bike shop. I walked in there and the police must have smashed everything, including the electrical box. We went back to the bathroom area and the toilet was completely smashed down to the sewer line. The only other thing that was in the space, besides smashed-up stuff and graffiti and old, smashed up florescent lights, was this huge mound of bikes in the middle, to make it a convincing bike store to be in. I had to clear those away and underneath all of the bikes was a giant hole in the floor that you could see the basement through. That was why it was $600 a month.

Then after I opened my store, for like 10 years afterwards, people used to come in and ask, ‘Is this the bike shop?’ I’d have to say, ‘No, this is a clothing shop.’ And then they’d ask, ‘Oh, well… do you sell bike parts?’ Ironically enough, the bike people had moved to the tire shop down the street. There was a tire shop where the Snack Dragon is now.

Kimberle: If your friend came into town and they got their car broken into you could just go to the tire shop and be like, ‘Yo, can we at least have the luggage back? Can you just keep what’s in it?’ And they’d be like, ‘Well, if you go down to Avenue D on the corner and look in the garbage can, it might be there.’ So you could go there to pick up your lost stolen belongings.

Kathy: People would get meth around the corner and some people would sell it on 3rd Street right out front. They’d go into the phone booths and leave the drugs in a paper bag. They all knew that nobody normal was going into a phone booth these days. Then the next person would come along and pick up the paper bag.

Kimberle: Every Monday and Friday were Meth Monday and Friday. I would go outside and just start sweeping really big and they’d plead me to stop.

Kathy: When I think about it, I was really stupid when I opened up the store, but I was also very, very lucky. I never would have done it knowing everything that I learned the hard way for 20 years. I was lucky because I landed in this spot. It was the 1990s in the East Village. Everyone was so supportive. It seemed like I landed in freelance central, where I was surrounded by writers, so people wrote about me, and stylists, who were walking home from pulling for their jobs and got stuff from my store. Even makeup and hair people would kidnap me and do makeovers on me. It was like a dream.

The first day that I opened my store so many great and amazing people came in that I left thinking it was too good to be true. I left thinking the store was going to burn down because this couldn’t be happening. It was the opposite vibe of now, where everyone walks around seeing what’s closed. It was, what’s new, what’s going on, what’s that going to be?

I opened up at 12 or 1 at the time. I was a workaholic when I first opened. I love the city so much I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t leave for three years at all until I met my husband. I’d wake up and work, do all my fabric sourcing and stuff and I’d go to work and a lot of people from the neighborhood would roll out of bed right as I was opening my gates. People would come in and have their coffee with me. It was really, really cool. A lot of the same people have shopped here since then.

Kimberle: It was like a therapist’s office. Lots of neighborhood people would come in to talk. I’ve worked with Kathy off and on for 17 years, but I shopped here every day for 3 years before I started working here. I was one of the crazies. Every day I shopped here because she got things in all of the time and for a lot of the pieces there are only one or two or three of them, so you want to know what she’s doing and you want that piece. I would come in everyday after work to look for what to wear to work the next day.

Kathy: I design all the clothes now but when I first opened up I was a vintage shop. I immediately realized that if you have a vintage shop, then everyone wants the same thing, so I just started changing everything to look like that one thing. For instance, one of the items that we did was dyed slips. We started dying slips in crazy colors. We dyed them day-glow colors. People were just crazy then. People would come in and would be going out to clubs at night and would want to wear something that was crazy. When I design something, I usually buy the fabric and make the sample on a mannequin or myself and then I give it to my sample maker who I’ve been working with for 17 years. I design everything except the jewelry.

Kimberle: I remember back in the day, it wasn’t always about going home to get ready to go out and planned out like that. You either worked or you didn’t work in the daytime, and if you did or didn’t, you just went over to a coffee shop like CafĂ© Limbo and hung out. Sometimes they’d have a sale, and then you might go down and have some Sushi at Avenue A Sushi. You’d go there and get sushi and then you’d go to Anna and somewhere else and you’d pick your outfit.

Kathy: Everyone was trying to outdo everyone, but not in a competitive way — just because it was fun.

We moved to 11th Street nearly two years ago. I loved 3rd Street and I missed my neighbors. It’s hard for me to change. I’m someone who resists change.

Kimberle: Moving to this street seems like a big upgrade to a lot of people. “Wow, you’re on shopping alley and you have all this space.” On 3rd Street we didn’t have a bathroom or a dressing room but it was home. It was the people who came there that made it home. We used to have people just walk around the store in their bras. There would be like 5 people just in their bras. They were comfortable. Those people come here now and it feels like being in a mansion. They want to take their clothes off in the middle of the store and we’re like, ‘there’s a dressing room now.’

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

NY Copy & Printing forced out of longtime E. 11th St. home, opening second location on E. 7th St.



Signs are up for a new tenant at 13 E. Seventh St. — NY Copy & Printing.

The family owned NY Copy & Printing has been around since 1992. Their home base is at 204 E. 11th St. with a second, smaller shop at 34 E. Seventh St.

However, the new owners of the East 11th Street building, sold late last year for $57 million to Benchmark Real Estate Group LLC, would not renew the shop's lease ahead of a condo conversion at 200 E. 11th St.


[EVG file photo]

The owners of NY Copy & Printing told us that they are very sad about leaving their East 11th Street location after 22 years, but "we have no choice." For now, they will operate both shops on East Seventh Street.

As for No. 13, half of this space was previously home to the D.L. Cerney boutique, which closed after 28 years in 2012. (This was NOT a closure due to a rent hike.) The other half of the former D.L. Cerney space is that cool lighting store, Bulb Concepts.

Previously on EV Grieve:
Someone actually paid $57 million for this East Village building

Reimagining this 12-story East Village building, now on the market

South Brooklyn Pizza space on the market for $18,975 (a month)


[Image via Elliman]

South Brooklyn Pizza closed for good at 122 First Ave. toward the end of April. For rent signs went up immediately.

And we just spotted the listing over at Douglas Elliman. There's not a whole lot of info, but you get the idea:

This East Village special was previously used as a restaurant and bar. Sports exposed red brick, sky lights, outdoor patio and a basement that will be sub divided. Approximately 2300sf.

The asking rent is $18,975 per month.

Signs on the storefront on April 22 indicated that South Brooklyn Pizza was moving to a new location in the East Village. However, we haven't heard anything more about that.

The Marshal seized the space on April 24. A rep for the landlord told an EVG reader that the pizzeria owners hadn't paid rent in several months. In August 2012, the company behind South Brooklyn Pizza filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Updated 10:04 a.m.
Check out the comments ... where VH McKenzie does some math to figure out how much pizza you'd need to sell a day to afford this space...

Previously on EV Grieve:
The Marshal seizes South Brooklyn Pizza; space is now for rent

Russ & Daughters Cafe opens this morning



The Russ & Daughters Cafe opens at 127 Orchard St. this morning at 10.

Niki Russ Federman and her cousin Josh Russ Tupper, part of the fourth generation of the family that founded the store on the LES in 1914, will run the 65-seat full-service restaurant.

You can read Grub Street's detailed preview of the Cafe here. And The Lo-Down has a roundup of the roundups about the Cafe here.

Meanwhile, The New Yorker takes a look at the cafe's new neon signage…



And don't worry — the mothership, currently celebrating its 100 birthday, isn't going anywhere on 179 E. Houston.

Previously on EV Grieve:
More details about the new Russ & Daughters Café coming to Orchard Street

Here is the new sign for Russ & Daughters Cafe on Orchard Street

A look at 3 new East Village sidewalk cafes

Just noting three restaurants that have recently unveiled their new sidewalk cafes… (there are others — these just seemed more prominent) …

There's Alder at 157 Second Ave. …



The Brazen Fox at 106 Third Ave. (at East 13th Street) …



… and Boulton & Watt at 5 Avenue A (at East First/East Houston) …

Hey, the Funkiberry sign is up on 3rd Avenue



Yep, here it is on Third Avenue and East 12th Street… in the former New Amici Pizza space





Here's more about Funkiberry from their website: "Funkiberry is the land of endless yogurt possibilities, where you rule the portions, the choices and the scene."

Anyway, it certainly is a colorful sign… likely the brightest and most-distracting sign/ad since GNC's Giant Pink Sports Bra ad graced our presence above the Pourhouse in 2012…

[EVG file photo from May 2012]

Previously on EV Grieve:
Stuff that you can't make up: More FroYo for the East Village

Ghost signage uncovered on Third Avenue and East 12th Street

DOUBLE ghost signage discovered at 88 3rd Ave.

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Report: Murder charge for driver who crashed into East Village Farm and Grocery


[Photo via Fox]

Queens resident Shaun Martin, who was allegedly drunk and high on PCP when he plowed his car into East Village Farm and Grocery on Second Avenue last June, has now reportedly been charged with murder.

The DA's office today upgraded the indictment to include second-degree murder, aggravated vehicular homicide, first-degree assault and other counts.

The Daily News reports that the 33-year-old Martin now faces 25 years to life in prison.

Mohammed Akkas Ali, a florist at the store at East Fourth Street, suffered serious brain trauma and died on Jan. 1 due to complications from his injuries. He was 63.

While free on bail in early December, police reportedly arrested Martin for threatening to shoot someone while possessing cocaine outside a club in East Elmhurst.

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Renee White ordered Martin held without bail.

Previously on EV Grieve:
[Updated] Car smashes into East Village Farm & Grocery on Second Avenue; 6 reported injured

Crowdsourcing campaign for injured East Village Farm and Grocery worker raises nearly $19,000

Report: Injured East Village Farm and Grocery florist has lost his memory, use of his voice

[Updated] RIP Akkas Ali

An Evening with Alan Cumming at Theatre 80



Helping celebrate Theatre 80’s 50th year, actor Alan Cumming added his name and handprints to the celebrity “walk of fame” outside 80 St. Mark’s Place last night. His cement imprimatur joins others such as Gloria Swanson, Joan Crawford and Myrna Loy.



Cumming, an East Village resident, was introduced by actress Arlene Dahl and theater owner Lorcan Otway.



In 2010, The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation recognized Theatre 80 with the Village Award for its place in the history of the community.

Text and photos by Stacie Joy

The East Village — 'this place is still the best home for a lot of people'


[Photo by Gregoire Alessandrini]

By Jennifer Blowdryer

Of course the very bloodiest single-minded crimes in Manhattan are real-estate battles.

There was that locksmith of a landlord who allegedly made an entire likable middle-age couple go missing. More locally we have Danny Rakowitz, the so-called Tompkins Square Park Cannibal, and his temporary flatmate Monica, who thought she’d get his apartment and ended up in the stew instead. I always felt that the apartment was the key factor in that murder — anybody who was acquainted with Danny should have known better than to cohabit with him for even a moment.

Marla Hanson got her face slashed by landlord-hired goons and got famous the wrong way, enabling her to hook up with a tabloid-hungry author Jay McInerny for a minute. Gary Indiana’s great book, "Depraved Indifference," is a lightning-rod masterpiece about the mother and son who did away with a needy woman who, to be fair to their aspirational level, did in fact own an entire townhouse.

Most real-estate crimes here in the East Village are of the pettiest Dickensian kind – somebody’s got themselves an apartment, all the way indoors, in a building with or without a lobby, or even just a room in an apartment. Their quarters are often piled high with animal hair, collectibles, and palpable loneliness. Once an anchor tenant gives up or loses a domicile, they got nowhere, really, to go. Ever. Because as much as every jackass likes to mention that the East Village has changed, like they just noticed it, the way straight men don’t notice they’re older til they hit the wrong side of 50, this place is still the best home for a lot of people.

I suppose that on the yuppie/crazy/Puerto Rican/Dominican range of remaining East Village tenants, I’d have to be realtor-perceived as one of the crazies. You’ve got to stick with your own kind, even if it takes a microcosm of rezoning, so I sometimes put other crazies up in my small flat. Barflies, charmers, the well-spoken and unmatriculable, they need to be here, even if it means they're on the floor by my bed, under a table, or, worst-case scenario, sucking up my expensive cable TV watching endless episodes of "Wicked Tuna."

-----

My favorite guests of necessity were originally here in the 1980s, the 1990s, or the aughts, bein’ beautiful, working on the buildings, spackling, plumbing, and being difficult, going to Mars Bar every damn day, gossiping thoroughly about each other in a Yenta way that is more informational than dunning. Because to have a habit, a craft that’s useless in a technocracy, to slide into permanent befuddlement due to the alcohol-poisoned blood that washes over ones brain every 2 minutes or so, to inhabit a permanent state of virulent misinformation due to that cross bred and sprayed substance which weed’s become. Worse yet, future tenants are likely to suffer from the after shocks of some Dick Cheney version of a military invasion. Bad things just happen to a guy who thinks too much and plans too little.

When brutal things happen to a woman she gets a lot less social slack – the world can collectively shun a crone shuddering on a ledge, no longer mom, booty call, or interested listener, unable and unwilling to hear how the world done a man wrong for even a millisecond.

Homelessness is so rampant but dunning that toting around a very large bag on city streets is a social death knell. The art of the bag stash is an artful slight of hand you'd better master if you're in the position of no position. If you’re trying to get a footing in somebody’s apartment then you’d better not be too obvious – put your stenchy belongs under the couch, just behind a chair, in a corner of a closet you hope the host doesn’t use much. One so understands.

I mean hell, I’m not much of a joiner, and groups of, say, 7 folk or more tend to turn on me in a subtle display of hive mind that I often suspect would translate into a public square beat down in another century or town. If it wasn’t NYC and the last great vestige of street life it retains, I’d be a stray cat, a low-down talent snob, an impossible to please slow to anger woman with snarly hair who picks friends like illogical magnets, an artist that needs to be broken.

-----


[Photo by Gregoire Alessandrini]

In the East Village I fit right in. I can walk to Ray's, talk to Kim and the ad-hoc salon he hosts behind the counter, get myself a peanut butter ice cream and some Belgian fries. If the sun is out even a little bit I could walk across the street to Tompkins Park, swing by Crusty Row and say hello to G-Sus or the late LES Jewels, or the Circle part of the Park to find Eak, after craning my neck to see if Jay is in the chess area to the right side, dominating at a chess table, sober but happy to be only a few feet from the boisterous day imbibers at the 7th Street entrance.

If there’s a conga beat that’s going on more toward Avenue B there are definitely congo players and maybe some of that hard to master off-beat Latin singing, so I walk down more toward the Avenue B side of the benches and stay close by the music, listening, smiling hard. Every few months my endless pursuit of artistic hobbies means a flyer generating visit to Santos at The Source on 9th Street. He’s a good man with a narrow multi-purpose print shop who crinkles his eyes kindly when I’m there on one of my bad days, stammering out my request for a DVD copy, hunched forward and vague but terribly busy with a million projects no Grant shall ever shine on. Santos makes people happy.

-----

I spent so many nights in a nearby building with the best cuddler ever that one operator came to call me “The Landlord’s Girlfriend,” a sort of fiendish tag muttered from clenched teeth. I sort of was, especially with my responsibility of pointing out the boiler room. Often there’d be a call that required me to get out of his bed way too early for an East Villager, cram on my shoes, and totter down to the basement to show an indifferent city worker where the boiler was. The employee always had a pleasant world weary shrug of an attitude. They'd look at the boiler, check the clipboard, and we'd all keep moving on with our day.

I had to point out the boiler because somebody with a beef called the Housing Department about rats or noise or God knows what, and the city worker with the clipboard was just a guy with a job, and he had to check something off on a form. This was the easiest out for he and I. It wasn’t like they thought there wouldn’t be a boiler room there if they caught us unawares. It was that the accumulated animosity resulted in a promiscuous use of snitching and cross snitching to 311, 911, and any other have-to-respond social services that exist. It was a stunning and extended use of city bureaucracy and we all had to play our parts, just about every other day, there was no way to stop any of it once it got rolling, Common Sense is such a myth.

Construction and history wise it’s an alright building, and it had itself a nice little courtyard that the couple on the first floor ably ran as their own, which tends to happen with ground-floor courtyards. The East Village version of the real-estate death battle writ small was sometimes more interactive than calls to the Housing Department. Like when the special-needs guy from the second floor clocked the courtyard tenant who’d invited him in for a celebratory glass of birthday scotch. Don’t get too friendly with your neighbors, was the lesson.

On another floor an ex-con moved in with the 90-year-old mother of his dead former cellie and knocked her around. He was fond of trying to engage GOLES (Good Old Lower East Side), an exhausted tenant’s rights non-profit, when his tyranny of one became threatened.

Another standing tenant was a not-too-bright nutter who grew up in the building, drew a knife on his trapped walker-bound father. You could hear the son’s security guard shoes tromping around or spot him booking down the steps, spewing the angry monologues of the self trapped, eyes flashing, face puffed up to a bright and scary red.

The low-down sociopathology of Elder Abuse is pretty common in rent-controlled apartments here and maybe everywhere. Pity the very old, the crippled, and frozen agoraphobic hoarder, because once a predator gets past their dented doors that’s all she wrote. Elder Abuse is both a true evil and banal, a crime perpetrated by the illiterate whose goal to just, you know, stay inside is a tenacious mini genocide of a living soul. Most crime, after all, is just poor people doing heinous shit to each other, no millions involved. Homicide cops don’t think much of us, the uncunning poor.

The other day, as I walked down my hallway steps, a woman, too thin, too hard, too much at work, said “Do you like silver?” and I stopped dead in my tracks. “Yes. Yes I do.” I replied, the only answer, because without leaving my own building I had just met the most classic of peddlers and she is after all alive, and deserves to be here as much as the plants, the bankers, the children, the loafers, and the artists.

The female riff raff of the LES are those plants that are just too green, the ones who sprout through the concrete on a so-called esplanade just off the Con Ed plant on the FDR. These unweeds and the peddling riff raff are suspicious activity, which is the safest way to be around here. It’s fun. In turn we, the effervescent place saving plants, refuse to be suspicious of you, you, and you. That’s how you miss the good stuff. Come on over, you Albanian Supers, you wheezing pugs, you silk screening waitresses with no ability to fulfill an order of any kind. We've all got our nerve!

Jennifer Blowdryer is an East Village resident who's been here since 1985 and was conceived in a dumpy tenement off the Bowery, right on Bleecker. She is the lead singer of Jennifer Blowdryer Punk Soul.

On First Avenue, Dok Suni is closing after 21 years



Dok Suni's, the 21-year-old Korean restaurant at 119 First Ave., will be closing in the coming weeks, staff there confirmed.

A new operator is talking over the space... and is on this month's CB3/SLA committee docket for a new liquor license. There aren't many details about the incoming owners based on a look at the paperwork (PDF) that they filed on the CB3 website ahead of the meeting.

It appears that they will be open for lunch, with a proposed opening time of 11:30 a.m. ... with more Korean-style food... here is the menu that is included with the applicant's information...



Perhaps now would be a good time to pick up co-owner Jenny Kwak's book from 1998, "Dok Suni: Recipes from My Mother's Korean Kitchen."

A few more details about Mars Bar 2.0, which doesn't sound very Mars Bar-ish at all



As you probably heard, Mars Bar owner Hank Penza (along with a new group of partners) will be returning to his former home at 11-17 Second Ave. ... now the luxury Jupiter 21 building.

Just what is going in here in the retail space adjacent to a TD Bank is still rather murky. Here's how CB3 is listing this application:

Paul Mil Cafe Inc, 11-17 2nd Ave (op/alt/gut renovation) (Mars Bar)

The kinda illegible handwritten responses to the questionnaire (PDF) provided ahead of this month's CB3/SLA committee meeting provide a few clues...

Aside from Penza, the other names of the principals appear to be Alain Palinsky, a co-founder of Juice Press, Chris Reda, an owner of The Griffin in the Meatpacking District, and Robert Montwaid, an owner of the club The Pink Elephant...



Also, according to the paperwork ... the proposed hours are 6 a.m.-4 a.m. Monday through Friday; 8 a.m.-4 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday. (That is a 6 a.m. down there right?)



The application also lists that there will be 15 tables good for 80 seats ... with one bar featuring eight seats. The new establishment will employ 15-20 people. And get this: "All Star Security Services will be providing security guards" — "3-4 nightly."



So there you go. What the hell? Maybe a club that will also serve breakfast? Sounds like the original idea for The General over on the Bowery.

Anyway, RIP Mars Bar.

Actual Indian restaurant opening in Little India


[EVG file photo from March 30]

Over on East Sixth Street between First Avenue and Second Avenue, we have a taker for Red Pepper, which closed in March after six months.

EVG reader Morten sends along the following photo of the former Sichuan restaurant …



Morten reports that the new restaurant is called Pearl of India, with an opening expected as soon as next week.

The most recent additions to (the dwindling) Little India include The Eddy, the Italian-influenced restaurant from Brendan McHale, a former chef at Jack's Luxury Oyster Bar, and Figaro Villaggio, the Italian wine bar-restaurant in the former Banjara space.

Demolition commences along East 14th Street


[EVG file photo from March 12]

Workers began erecting the sidewalk shed along the doomed section of East 14th Street between Avenue A and Avenue B on March 12.

And the single-level buildings have been sitting there ready for rubble ever since.

Until yesterday, when the demo crew finally arrived and started taking apart 532 E. 14th St. (the former ABC Animal Hospital, now located at 200 Avenue A)… as these photos by Michael Paul show …





Incoming: Two, 7-floor retail-residential buildings featuring 150 residential units in nearly 189,000 square feet of space.

By the way, in case you missed this post during the Great EVG Blackout of March 14 … Here's a reminder that the Blarney Cove sign is in good hands.

Previously on EV Grieve:
The disappearing storefronts of East 14th Street

[Updated with correction] 8-lot parcel of East 14th Street primed for new development

Sidewalk bridge arrives for start of demolition on East 14th Street; last chance for Blarney Cove sign

New 7-floor buildings for East 14th Street include 150 residential units

Why the East Village may have a few glum underage drinkers


[Couldn't think of a better way to illustrate this post]

The State Liquor Authority yesterday announced the results of a two-week investigation to curb underage booze sales in New York City.

Per the the official news release on the bust:

From April 17 through May 1, 2014, the unit conducted seven details, with decoys visiting 74 grocery and liquor stores [in the] five boroughs of New York City. In total, the undercover minors were able to purchase alcohol at 32 of premises visited, including one out of 15 stores in the Bronx, 15 out of 16 stores in Brooklyn, 5 out of 21 stores Manhattan, 8 out of 16 stores in Queens, and 3 out of 6 stores on Staten Island. During the investigation, SLA Investigators entered the grocery and liquor stores separately from the undercover minor to observe and verify when illegal transactions occurred.

And it turns out that all five places busted in Manhattan happened to be in the East Village…

• Uncle Johnny Grocery Corp., 55-57 Avenue D
• Loma Deli Market Inc., 133 Avenue D
• Avenue C Food Corp., 185 Avenue C, Store 2
• Yankee Two Deli Inc., 122 Avenue C
• Loisaida Ave Deli Corp., 301 East 4th Street

Probably better that the SLA did this as opposed to some newspaper intern.

H/T The Observer

Monday, May 5, 2014

EV Grieve Etc.: Mourning Edition


[Moving day for fake rocks on East 4th Street via Derek Berg]

A look at Mayor de Blasio's affordable housing plan (Curbed)

Man dies after a night of stage-diving at Webster Hall (DNAinfo)

About the new neon at Russ & Daughters Cafe (The New Yorker)

Cinco De Mayo at La Palapa on St. Mark's Place (CBS New York)

Details on the next Egg Rolls & Egg Creams Festival (BoweryBoogie)

Michael Alig released from prison this morning (Gothamist)

Why are New York taxis generally supposed to be yellow, anyway? (Ephemeral New York)

Getting to know... Jacob Riis (Off the Grid)

Another bad day to be a pigeon in Tompkins Square Park (Gog in NYC)

A $7 million infusion for the Blue Moon Hotel on the LES (The Lo-Down)

A look at the new-look Caffe Dante on MacDougal (Jeremiah's Vanishing New York)