Are you as angry as we are that the City is allowing five "landmark-eligible" 19th century buildings at 112-120 East 11th Street, which formerly contained long-term tenants and affordable housing, to be demolished to make way for a 300-room hotel geared towards globe-trotting millennials?
Are you as appalled as we are at the hypocrisy of the administration for refusing to save these buildings, which are being developed by a donor to and political appointee of the Mayor?
Are you disgusted by what this will mean for this block and this neighborhood?
Then join us on Monday, August 22 at 12:30 in front of 112-120 East 11th Street (3rd/4th Avenues) to protest the development and the City’s negligence and hypocrisy...
Central to the downtown transformation is the new, smaller Mount Sinai Downtown Beth Israel Hospital, which will include approximately 70 beds and a brand new state-of-the-art Emergency Department (ED), located at 14th Street near Second Avenue — just two blocks south of the current Beth Israel campus. This ED will accept ambulances and will be able to handle all emergencies, such as heart attack, and stroke, on site. It will also include a pediatric ED. Patients with the most complex conditions will be stabilized and transported to other hospitals in the Mount Sinai Health System.
I had tattoos from when I was a kid and when I was in the Navy, so I looked around the city and there was nothing here. Tattooing was banned in the city from 1962 to 1997, when we moved into this shop. At the time, the nearest place was up in Yonkers called Big Joe’s. I spent two years going up there, hanging out, watching and gleaning information. I was in the process of getting my old work covered up and I’d be asking questions and everybody would shut up. They didn’t give up the information. And the more they shut up, the more interested I became. Fortunately, there was a guy visiting up there that became a key figure in modern tattooing, named Zeke Owen, who was the first to give me any real information. And by 1976 I started tattooing.
My building on East 11th Street between Avenue A and B had some packages stolen yesterday. After reviewing the security footage we saw the guy in the purple shirt hanging out on the sidewalk pretending to be on the phone and then he followed the USPS guy in after he was buzzed in.
He then proceeded to fill his large bag with the packages that were just delivered and left.
The business owner said his partner recently asked a cop on patrol why nothing was being done to stem the scourge and was told: “Well, if we don’t catch them doing it red-handed, we can’t search them for drugs.”
The business owner, who asked not to be identified by name, got fed up and called 311, and received a call back the next day from a stunned Internal Affairs Bureau cop.
“He was flabbergasted,” recalled the source, who said the investigator called the situation “inexcusable” and vowed to “get to the bottom of it.”
“It’s well known they have issues in the park at times, and they deal with it on an ongoing basis,” the spokesman said, adding that cops have made 63 drug-related busts there so far this year.
Our #NYPD Conditions Team spending the day in Tompkins Square Pk talking to visitors & listening to concerns pic.twitter.com/DAcNOFaVhI
— NYPD 9th Precinct (@NYPD9Pct) August 16, 2016
Name: John Von Hartz
Occupation: Writer
Location: 2nd Street between 1st Avenue and 2nd Avenue
Time: 11:15 on Tuesday, Aug 16
We moved to the East Village in 1965, and everybody thought we were crazy. We were, because it was really tough down here – a very heavy welfare, drug area, but it was all we could afford.
I was a writer, and once you’re a writer you’re always a writer. I worked for Time Life Books for years, the hard cover books about art, science, boating, anything. It was very interesting, and I got paid and paid fairly well for the time. It was like getting paid for a graduate program. Then I freelanced. Kathy, my wife, is an ace teacher. She teaches English as a second language. So we strung along somehow.
We discovered very quickly that you could buy brownstones for a reasonable amount of money, and the idea that you could own a brownstone in Manhattan seemed inconceivable for our socio-economic level, but we found one for what boiled down to $19,000 for three floors.
We lived in two of the floors and rented out the top one. We struggled with that for six or eight years, especially because we didn’t know that much, but we would hire people, we would watch what they did, and we would try to do it ourselves. We got pretty good at tiling and plumbing. We learned that if you can take care of a three-story brownstone, you can probably take care of the Empire State Building, because it’s all pretty much the same. There’s a plumbing core and an electrical core. It’s just segmented out. Just with the Empire State Building, there’s more of it, but the basics are the same.
So we grew confident that way, and then finally the area just got to be too noisy and too crazy for us, so we found a house. It was five stories, with ten apartments, a front and back apartment on each floor, and it was $64,000, which we couldn’t afford. But we figured we’d try it and see if it worked out. Turned out it did, but we went through very difficult times with it.
The main thing was that it was a working-class neighborhood, and so it had its ups and downs depending on what was happening on the street. Then in the 1980s, or late 1970s, the druggies started moving in. We would have to go out after dinner many nights. Somebody would come around, the word would go around, there would be a line formed behind him, the drugs would mysteriously appear from a runner on a bicycle, get handed out, and the users would disappear as quickly as they had formed, so it was very hard for the cops to catch them.
I would primarily go out, because we couldn’t get Kathy killed, and I’d just say, ‘Look we don’t want this. This is a family block here. We don’t want any trouble. Just stay away and we’ll all live happily ever after.’ They’d say, ‘We don’t want any trouble either.’ By god it worked. It took a long time and we worked with the police. We did a lot of things, but at that time the police, I won’t say they were in on it totally, but they were a lot more in on it then they were not in on it. The city was awash with drug money, and the whole area east of Avenue A was [filled with] abandoned buildings and drug-selling centers. Limousines were pulling up with UN plates on them with kids running out from the limousines to get the drugs for the diplomats. It was just a scene from a bad movie.
In time, [our street] settled down, and then we started seeing a terrific gentrification in the late 1990s maybe, which some of that was okay, but it just got… typical New York, there’s no middle ground. It’s all or nothing.
A lot of the characters on the streets have been forced out by the high rents. Our building was able to get higher rents, but that wasn’t really the point. We were surviving. We wanted artists and writers and other people to be able to live down here. Our interest wasn’t in real estate. We just happened to be people who had to live in New York and lucked into a building.
But I have to say this, and I say this every time I till this story – we didn’t know what would happen when we bought our building in 1973. The city was going broke, the middle class was abandoning it, the federal government and Ford had said drop dead to New York. We put everything we had into that building and we could have so easily been wiped out. I’m not talking about trying to make a fortune, I’m talking about just being destroyed, wiped out. We were very lucky. We rolled the dice and won that way. Nobody knew what would happen, or if they knew they weren’t willing to take the chance.
Now this is like a regular upper-middle-class neighborhood with fancy cars on the street. I couldn’t have imagined it. Cars were just fair game when we were first here. Tires were stolen or slashed, windows broken, radios stolen. It was a different ballgame.
