Vogue Magazine held a pre-Met Gala party on 6th Street Saturday night

Tonight is the annual Met Gala, aka the Costume Institute Gala aka the Met Ball, the fundraising gala for the benefit of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute. (This evening's honoree is Rei Kawakubo.)

On Saturday night, Vogue Magazine held its annual pre-Met gala at 6BC Botanical Garden and Grape and Grain on Sixth Street between Avenue B and Avenue C.

As we understand it, Vogue "made a very generous gift" to the garden and "promised to be respectful of the space."

Here's the recap via Vogue:

[There was] a “Midsummer Night’s Anime” dress code. All around, guests decked out in their finest mingled amid glowing flowers. For dinner, attendees meandered over to Grape and Grain, an adjacent wine bar, for custom bento boxes from David Bouley’s Brushstroke. Afterward, revelers returned to the garden for a dessert of Taiyaki fish cones topped with matcha green tea ice cream. Trays of Minamoto Kitchoan mochi and cookies were passed, along with glasses of Moët & Chandon Champagne and cups of Heavensake sake.

EVG regular Shawn Chittle shared the photos on this post...

[Updated] A message in Tompkins Square Park

EVG correspondent Steven spotted this earlier today in Tompkins Square Park... someone left an anti-war recording on a tree using three plastic cups as a holder as well an amplifier for the sound...



The device remains in place as of this afternoon, though the recording has stopped...

Updated 6:30

Steven spotted a second homemade speaker... this one is no longer working either...

May is Lower East Side History Month

Via the EVG inbox...

Lower East Side History Month is an annual celebration of the rich and diverse history of the Lower East Side. Each year in May, Lower East Side cultural and community groups, small businesses and residents create a variety of public events, exhibits, tours, and learning opportunities. All events take place in the historical boundaries of the Lower East Side, which includes the East Village, Chinatown, Two Bridges and Loisaida.

The activities officially commence on Wednesday evening with the opening reception for an exhibit titled "A Photographic Journey Through the East Village." The photos will be on display all month at ILevel, an installation gallery, at 37 E. Seventh St. between Second Avenue and Cooper Square. Details here. Find the full calendar of events here.

A proposal to co-name part of 2nd Avenue and 7th Street after the victims of the 2015 gas explosion

Members of CB3's Transportation & Public Safety/Environment Committee will hear a proposal this month to co-name Second Avenue between Seventh Street and St. Mark's Place after the two men who died in the gas explosion here on March 26, 2015.

Authorities have said that siphoned gas at 121 Second Ave. was to blame for the explosion, which killed Moises Ismael Locón Yac and Nicholas Figueroa, and injured two dozen other people.

Figueroa, 23, a recent graduate of SUNY Buffalo State, was at Sushi Park with a co-worker. Locón, an employee at Sushi Park, was 27. Locón sent most of his paycheck back to his family in Guatemala, where he worked as a school teacher before moving to the United States in 2008.

Here's more information about the street co-naming proposal via a petition:

In memory of these young men, we ask that our community honor their lives and demonstrate to their families who their loss was also our loss and that we share in their sorrow by co-naming these blocks.

The petition must be signed by a minimum 75 percent of the total number of residential units and 75 percent of the total number of businesses on these blocks. (We appreciate the support, but do not need signatures from elsewhere in the neighborhood. The petitions will be available at neighboring businesses.)

If approved, then City Council will vote on this in May or June. If passed in the City Council, we will set a date with the Department of Transportation for a street blade installation and have a street co-naming event.

Here's a document (PDF) with more information on CB3's guidelines for co-naming a street. (If you have any questions or want to get more involved, then please email nicholasandmoises [at] gmail [dot] com.)

The committee meeting is May 9 at 6:45 p.m. at Downtown Art, 1st Floor Theater, 70 E. Fourth St. between the Bowery and Second Avenue.

The committee is also expected to hear a request to co-name Second Street between Avenue A and Avenue B for Mary Spink.

Spink, a local business owner and member of CB3, was a community activist and later served as executive director of Lower East Side People’s Mutual Housing Association. She died in January 2012 at age 64.

Previously on EV Grieve:
Updated: 2nd Ave. explosion — landlord, 3 others charged with 2nd degree manslaughter; showed 'a blatant and callous disregard for human life'

Memorial for Mary Spink tomorrow

RIP Nicholas Figueroa

RIP Moises Ismael Locón Yac

The housing limbo of Raphael Toledano's (former) East Village tenants

The New York Times delved into Raphael Toledano's crumbling East Village real-estate empire yesterday... focusing specifically on the resnt-stabilized residents who accepted buyouts to leave their homes — but have yet to receive their payment.

When we last checked in with Toledano, Madison Realty Capital had replaced the 27-year-old landlord as the property manager of 15 East Village buildings while a deal to transfer the ownership was worked out.

Toledano planned to use $124 million worth of financing from Madison Realty Capital for buyouts and renovations.

Per the Times:

What followed was a familiar playbook: Coerce tenants to give up their valuable rent-regulated apartments with threats of eviction or offers of cash payouts, or both. Once the tenants leave, renovate the empty spaces and lease them for considerably more money. “At the end of the day, it’s a part of the business plan,” Mr. Toledano said in a telephone interview.

Then...

“He made it really clear that he was going to make it a miserable place to live,” said Jen Bekman, 47, an entrepreneur who lives in another Toledano-owned building, on East Fifth Street. She also fielded daily calls and texts from the landlord. “Sometimes he’d lose his temper. You could just tell that he was kind of volatile.”

The clock was ticking for Mr. Toledano. His deal with Madison Realty Capital gave him a year to clear out apartments, then renovate and rent them.

In the end, 140 of the 300 tenants who lived in the 15 buildings signed buyout agreements, totaling $7 million in payouts, Toledano confirmed. (Bekman received the largest payout offer — $600,000 for the $1,900-a-month, one-bedroom apartment she lived in for 25 years.)

However, by the time all the buyout offers were finalized, Toledano no longer had the money to pay his debts.

To shield himself from personal liability, Mr. Toledano had purchased each of his properties using limited liability companies. Last summer, the L.L.C.s that owned the buildings in the Madison Realty portfolio went into default and Madison stopped funding the buyouts.

So the residents who took the buyouts are in various stages of housing limbo. You can read the piece for more.

Meanwhile, Toledano has sold off other pieces of his East Village portfolio, as we've noted.

You may want to warn anyone you know who lives in the West Village.

Back to the Times:

[Toledano] said he was in contract with an investor to buy a $200 million portfolio of properties in the West Village, a neighborhood where he said tenants were less organized.

“I kind of want to get out of the East Village walk-up business, to be honest,” he said, without a hint of remorse. “There is so much scrutiny of the buyouts.”

Previously on EV Grieve:
Foreclosure notice arrives on Raphael Toledano-owned building on 12th Street

Claim: Landlord of 444 E. 13th St. threatened 'to drop dynamite on the building'

Cleaning up 444 E. 13th St.

Report: State investigating East Village landlord Raphael Toledano

Health Department to inspect Raphael Toledano's East Village properties for toxic levels of lead dust

Foreclosure notice arrives on Raphael Toledano-owned building on 12th Street

Report: Raphael Toledano files for Chapter 11; $145 million deal for EV portfolio is off the table

Raphael Toledano tenants take to Midtown streets to speak out against their landlord and his lenders

L'Apicio serving its last meal on May 20

L'Apicio has announced a closing date. The upscale Italian restaurant on First Street in the Avalon Bowery Place complex will shut down after service on May 20.

Here is their announcement via Facebook:


Back in March, we reported that Chef Sujan Sarkar was applying for a new liquor license for the space for an unnamed restaurant that will serve "upscale modern Indian cuisine."

Sarkar is the chef partner at Ek Bar, "India's first Artisanal cocktail bar." He is also the chef of Rooh, a similar-sounding restaurant that recently opened in San Francisco.

L'Apicio debuted in 2012. Here's what Pete Wells at The New York Times had to say about it in a generally positive review from December 2012: "L'Apicio can deliver a very enjoyable night out if you don't ask too much of it."

This large space with outdoor seating (capacity inside/outside is 266) here between Second Avenue and the Bowery was also home for four years to the Bowery Wine Company.

Previously on EV Grieve:
Chef Sujan Sarkar bringing 'upscale modern Indian cuisine' to the Bowery

Parantha Alley opens in the Bowery Market today

Parantha Alley, a regular on the Brooklyn food-fair circuit, debuts today at the Bowery Market, the year-round open-air food court at 348 Bowery and Great Jones.

Parantha Alley serves Indian flat bread with a variety of fillings. (Their menu is here.)

Colleen Kong-Savage created the mural...

Just about done w @ParanthaAlley mural! Add counter, menu, sign, then fresh paranthas come to Bowery Markt May 1! #indianfood #illustration pic.twitter.com/0doW0mFyj6

— Colleen Kong-Savage (@KongSavage) April 23, 2017

Parantha Alley joins Alidoro and Sushi on Jones here. The Market launched last July with five vendors... and since then, the mini outposts of Champion Coffee, The Butcher's Daughter and Pulqueria have moved on, as previously noted.

Previously on EV Grieve:
A winterized Bowery Market, now down to 3 vendors

The Bowery Market opens today with 5 year-round food vendors

A new vendor for the Bowery Market

Bowery Road and the Library of Distilled Spirits check into the Hyatt Union Square

The new bar-restaurant is now open at the Hyatt Union Square — please welcome Bowery Road to Fourth Avenue and 13th Street.

Here's more about it:

Gather at Bowery Road, a neighborhood American restaurant. Chef Ron Rosselli's flavorful and thoughtfully prepared dishes are inspired by long relationships with local farmers and purveyors and loaded with seasonal produce from the Union Square Greenmarket. The restaurant takes its name from its location on 4th Avenue, which was formerly called Bowery Road when it served as the pathway to Peter Stuyvesant's farm.

Located directly off the lobby, Bowery Road is open from 7am-11pm for breakfast, lunch, dinner and weekend brunch.

Rosselli has also worked at Locanda Verde and The Standard Grill.

The hotel now also sports The Library of Distilled Spirits, which: "pays tribute to liquor makers and their craft with over 700 bottles made around the world. Explore the collection neat, or shaken and stirred into more than 150 classic cocktails. Barkeepers and encyclopedic volumes of single spirits will help you choose."

As previously noted, The Fourth and Singl, the hotel's two dining-drinking options, had closed. Marco Moreira and Jo-Ann Makovitzky, the restaurateurs behind these two as well as a third Hyatt space, Botequim, reportedly parted ways with the hotel last spring.

The two new establishments are operated by APICII, "a multi-concept restaurant company."

The hotel opened in April 2013.

Previously on EV Grieve:
Slim dining options at the Hyatt Union Square for the time being

Juice Press annex for rent on 1st Street

[Photo from October 2015]

Going back to September 2015, the flagship Juice Press on First Street seemingly had dibs on the small retail space next door here between First Avenue and Second Avenue… The official JP signage/brandage eventually appeared.

The space sat empty for more than a year. Last fall, the space became a gym ... where we would see founder-CEO Marcus Antebi working out.

Anyway, to bring this storefront story to a close... that space is now for rent...



Previously on EV Grieve:
Juice Press is up to something on East 1st Street

Sunday's parting shot

Photo in Tompkins Square Park today by Steven...

About the Moon passing through Orion, and other upcoming 2nd Avenue Star Watcher events

Here's a dispatch about last evening via East Village astronomy buff Felton Davis...

As Virgo rises in the East, Orion sets in the West, and the seasons change. (At last, after weeks and weeks of nothing but clouds and rain!) When the light from Aldebaran left the star 65 years ago,"Guys and Dolls" was playing at the Shubert Theater on Broadway. When the light from the Pleiades left the star cluster 400 years ago, Shakespeare was writing his plays. When the light from the Orion Nebula set forth 1,600 years ago, Rome was sacked by the Visigoths (later defeated by Attila the Hun). The crescent Moon tonight was passing through Orion between Taurus and Gemini, but was repeatedly blocked by passing clouds.

However, there will be more opportunities for sky gazing from Second Avenue and Third Street...

Upcoming events:

May 7 — near conjunction of waxing Moon and Jupiter in Virgo

June 3 — another near conjunction of waxing Moon and Jupiter

June 9 — near conjunction of full Moon and Saturn in Sagittarius

July 6 — near conjunction of waxing Moon and Saturn

August 21 — total eclipse of the Sun in the afternoon. (A partial in NYC.)



Find more 2nd Avenue Star Watcher pics here.

Illustrations/photos here courtesy of Felton Davis

Week in Grieview

[Photo of 2nd Avenue Friday evening by Regina Shvartsman]

Stories posted on EVG this past week included...

Permits filed for 6-story building in long-empty lot at 89 First Ave. (Monday)

Ravi DeRossi moving Ladybird to the East Village; taking residence at former Bourgeois Pig space (Thursday)

Alphabet Scoop open for the season on 11th Street (Saturday)

Preliminary vote on increases for rent-stabilized apartments (Tuesday)

Out and About in the East Village, 2017 recap (Wednesday)

Reader report: A car drives in the First Avenue bike lane (Thursday, 40 comments)

Katrina del Mar's "Feral Women/Filmed Portraits" exhibit is up through May 18 (Thursday)

Another sign of spring: the annual Dance Parade is May 20 (Friday)

The Black Rose has closed on Avenue A; welcome Tompkins Square Park Art Bar (temporarily) (Thursday ... Friday)

Silverstone Property Group gets to work on buildings (previously) owned by Raphael Toledano (Monday)

Townhouse rich in art history for sale on 11th Street; air rights included (Wednesday)

More about Artichoke's move across 14th Street (Wednesday)

Pop-up bubble tea exhibit brings crowds to the Bowery (Monday)

Own Olympic snowboarding champ Shaun White's A Building condo (Friday)

Sandwicherie opens on Fourth Avenue (Tuesday)

A retail vacancy at 51 Astor Place (Monday)

Yuan Noodle in the works for the former Biang! space on Second Avenue (Tuesday)

Whole Foods Market® Bowery replacing beer with coffee in prime corner spot (Tuesday)

Something for future generations to discover on Second Avenue (Tuesday)

Ben Shaoul's East Houston Street condoplex makes first street-level appearance (Monday)

...and practicing for the upcoming Shirts vs. Skins ping-pong tourney...


[Photo by Derek Berg]

... and like 10 days later, no one picked up the table as they promised to do tomorrow...



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14th Street gate all dolled up

Spotted on 14th Street between Avenue B and Avenue C...





These were remnants from a stoop sale yesterday.

And in case you were wondering, Art in Odd Places takes place this year along 14th Street from Avenue C to the Hudson River on Oct. 12-15.

Report: Target takes aim at Essex Crossing with a small-format store

[Rendering of 500 E. 14th St. via RKF]

As you may recall, Target is leasing 27,306 square feet in Extell's new development at 14th Street and Avenue A for a small-format store expected to open in the summer of 2018.

That store will have some competition with itself. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Target will also lease space in the second floor of the tower under construction at 145 Clinton St. in the Essex Crossing complex. This space will also house a Trader Joe’s.

Some details via the Journal:

Essex Crossing, which extends roughly between Stanton and Grand streets to the north and south and Essex and Clinton streets to the west and east, will have 1,061 rental and condominium apartments and include a movie theater, a bowling alley, a three-block-long marketplace and a medical facility.

A majority of the retailers that have signed for space at Essex Crossing are expected to open in 2018, offering services in an area that has been underserved, said Andrew Katz, a principal of Prusik.

Target “sees tremendous potential” in New York City, where there is a dense population and plenty of tourists, making the area one of the company’s priority markets, the spokeswoman said.

Target is using the stores to support its online shoppers, offering them the ability to order online and pick up purchases in the store within an hour. The company plans in June to test same-day delivery service from its Tribeca location, offering store shoppers the option of having their purchases delivered within a certain time frame to locations in Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn and Queens, for a fee.

Previously on EV Grieve:
New 7-floor buildings for East 14th Street include 150 residential units

Target offers details about its flexible-format store opening summer 2018 on 14th and A

The disappearing storefronts of East 14th Street

1st free concert of the season in Tompkins Square Park is tomorrow (Sunday!)

Starts at 2 p.m. Here's the lineup:

• The Brass

• Future Punx

• Porvenir Oscuro

• Lion's Cage

• Rebuschaos

H/T Steven!

When you take time to read the wet paint sign on the bench in Tompkins Square Park

Photo yesterday in Tompkins Square Park by Derek Berg... Volunteers from Partnerships for Parks were out with the paint getting things ready for spring/summer travelers...



...and a few more paint pics via Steven...

Noted

An EVG reader shared this photo on Avenue A between 12th Street and 13th Street ... a discarded Santa suit on the sidewalk is up for grabs...

And just about seven-plus months until SantaCon...

Alphabet Scoop open for the season on 11th Street

In case you are out shopping for ice cream on this 80-degree day... Alphabet Scoop, run by The Father's Heart Ministries next door, is now open for the season at 543 E. 11th St. between Avenue A and Avenue B...

And here's more about them:

Alphabet Scoop is a job and life skills program for teens. The program is designed to prepare teens with the skills needed to advance in their school and work endeavors. Teenagers receive classroom instruction and work under a shift supervisor in the retail store.

We recruit and screen mentors to work with the teens, offering friendship, guidance, support and encouragement aimed at developing the competence and character of the mentee. We belong to the Mentoring Partnership of New York. Every time you buy our ice cream, you are helping a teen remain in a teaching and nurturing environment and off the streets.

They are open from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. today.

And upcoming on May 12...

Bad hair days: Kings Hairstyling closed for renovations

Brown paper covers the windows at Kings Hairstyling on 14th Street between Second Avenue and Third Avenue... thought it might be another small-business casualty ...

But! They are merely closed starting today for a renovation... with a reopening on May 8...



I always liked the look of this place ... with veteran barbers in sporty shirts...


[Image via Yelp]

Friday's parting shots

[Photo by Goggla]

Thanks to Goggla and Bobby Williams for the lovely sunset-time photos...


[Photo by Bobby Williams]