Sunday snowday

Snow continues to fall this afternoon on Seventh Street and Avenue B (see above!) — and elsewhere in the metropolitan area.

The National Weather Service reported three inches of new snow in Central Park earlier this afternoon. A Winter Storm Warning is in effect until 9 p.m. 

Also, as you likely noticed, the city suspended curbside (streeteries) dining today... however, restaurants with sidewalk seats are allowed to remain in service...

Week in Grieview

Posts from this past week included ... (with a photo from First Avenue and 10th Street by Derek Berg) ...

• Get your Sex, Love & Vintage this month at 3rd and B'zaar on 3rd Street (Monday) 

• The Marshal seizes the Lower East Side Coffee Shop on 14th Street (Friday) 

• It blizzard-ed (Monday ... and here and here and here, for starters) 

• RIP Ricky Powell (Tuesday) 

• The return of the anonymous, animal-loving snow shoveler of the East Village (Friday)

• Mystery pianist playing some snow tunes on 3rd Street (Tuesday) 

• About that rolled-up carpet in the crosswalk (Friday) 

• The latest single from Phony Express: "Pickup On 11th Street (Richie's Guitar Shop Bop)" (Friday) 

 • With Gino Sorbillo bowing out, there's another pizzeria slated for 334 Bowery (Monday)

 • Anniversaries! No. 22 for Lavagna (Monday) No. 6 C&B Cafe (Thursday) 

 • This week's NY See panel finds a solitary figure in a snowbound First Avenue (Thursday)

• Gallery Watch heads to Super Dutchess (Friday) 

• Happy birthday Ray! (Saturday) 

• Former Snowdays space will yield a sushi counter on 10th Street (Wednesday) 

• Space where Momofuku got its start is for rent on 1st Avenue (Thursday) 

• Thanks to Mighty Quinn's, Otto's Tacos is making a (virtual) return (Wednesday) 

• Deli in the works for the SE corner of Avenue C and 10th Street (Wednesday) 

• Snowplow collides with the Iggy's curbside space on Ludlow Street (Thursday) 

• Another pizzeria slinging 99-cent slices coming to 14th Street (Wednesday)

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Construction watch: Amelia and Christo's first nest for 2021

In recent days, Amelia and Christo, the resident red-tailed hawks of Tompkins Square Park, have started building their first nest of the season in preparation of starting and raising the 2021 fam ... and it appears to be in the same locust tree as last year's edition (in the area called Sandra Turner Garden near Temperance Fountain) ... 

Steven took these photos of the construction process... (work permits have yet to be posted with the city...)

and a nest break later...

As Goggla reported, Hurricane Isaisa wiped out their nest last summer... and also as Goggla has noted, the hawks will usually build a few nests before deciding on one (sort of their version of "Love It or List It"). It likely that Amelia and Christo may not make this one permanent, as hawk watchers noticed a broken limb here.

Anyway, be sure to follow Goggla for more on the hawk activity this breeding season.

And here are a few more constrcution shots via Mark H. ...

Sunday's opening shot

Been waiting a long time for a pink bear to see pink flamingos ... photo on Ninth Street before the snow today by Steven...

Saturday's parting shot

The carpet and barricades have been removed from the southwest corner of Third Avenue and Astor Place... no more walking on the man here. 

Photo today by Steven...

Ray's 88th birthday at Ray's Candy Store goes global with virtual greetings

Earlier this week, a few friends stopped by Ray's Candy Store at 113 Avenue A to wish Ray a happy 88th birthday... (given the pandemic, there wan't any type of in-person celebration as in previous years — a tradition dating to 2007).

Gifts included mini cheesecakes from Veniero's that spelled out R-A-Y ...

Ray also watched the birthday video tributes that people recorded for him...

Greetings came in from Australia, Mexico, Chile, Italy, England, France and Spain. (There's video at the shop's Instagram account.) 

Per the Ray's Instagram account (where these photos came from):

[T]o everyone who has checked in on Ray and Co. throughout this very trying and weird year, or ordered delivery or something from the to-go window, or sent a tweet or encouraging note on Facebook and Instagram, THANK YOU. Ray truly loves you. You are all his family and mean the world to him. He can't wait to see more of you soon enough.

David Duchovny's childhood room with a graveyard view on 2nd Avenue

On the occasion of his new novel, The New Yorker has a short interview in this week's issue (meant to note this in the links wrap on Thursday!) with David Duchovny. For the article, the star of "The X-Files" and "Californication" revisits the East Village of his youth. He grew up across the way from St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery on Second Avenue and 10th Street. (His mother still lives nearby.)

Excerpt!

"See the lights on the corner there? On the third floor? Two windows down. That was my bedroom, and this was my view." He gestured toward the churchyard. "It’s a weird view. It's a graveyard. We used to play baseball there. The headstones were flat, and we used them as bases." Just then, the bells began to chime. "Wow," he said. "I'm gonna dissolve."

Read the piece here.  

Photo via @davidduchovny

Saturday's opening shot

The early morning sky today from Avenue A and Seventh Street...

Junior achievement

 

Today, Seattle's KEXP is streaming its 9th annual International Clash Day (until 10 p.m. NYC time!) ... The radio station is celebrating the band and the messages of anti-fascism, anti-racism and pro-inclusion that they champion in their music. 

Aside from playing music by the Clash and other projects by its members, the station has been highlighting the many musicians who were so influential to the band (and many other artists). 

One example... Junior Murvin, the Jamaican musician best known for the single "Police and Thieves" — co-written with Lee "Scratch" Perry — in 1976. The Clash covered the song on their self-titled 1977 debut. 

 As Conseuqence of Sound previously noted, Murvin's Police and Thieves record "is a must-own album for any Clash fan with a taste for reggae." 

And:

Midway through a widely bootlegged 1979 show at the Palladium [now an NYU dorm on 14th Street!] in New York City, Strummer tries to make that very point. "You ought to hear Junior Murvin doing that tune," Joe said after "Police and Thieves." "He can sing in a voice as high as this roof."

Gallery Watch: Dissecting Cyborgian Swamp Thang at Super Dutchess

Text and photos by Clare Gemima 

Dissecting Cyborgian Swamp Thang

Super Dutchess, 53 Orchard St.

Super Dutchess gallery is the type of space that makes me miss my small city back home where artwork is hung respectfully, curated purposefully and in existence with the intent of discourse. This, of course, exists in New York City — it is just that much harder to come by. Small shows in artist-run spaces usually pack a big punch and this one was no different. 

The gallery’s current display delivers a succinct response to a moment in art history, a shift in dialect and questions on what it means to be operating in our often inoperable, ever-shifting and sometimes torturously vague conditions. 

Andrew Woolbright unpacks the very idea of thingness in Dissecting the Cyborgian Swamp Thang, curating artifactual relationships that speak to the notions of organs, organisms, organizing and organizational methods. 

The word organ, pre-Francis Bacon was essentially granted to anything, with no clear qualifying distinction. A flower that lived was an organ, much like a hammer was literary ephemera or a dead bird. They were all organs. Organ in today’s language most usually implicates the human body or more directly a heart, lung or liver that is operational or, in effect, alive. But if you applied this historic linguistic to 2021’s ubiquitous matter (think digital spaces, algorithmic patterns, AI, AR, laser technology, robotics and technological intervention) these all become organs themselves. 

So what are THOSE if this is the case, what are WE as bodies and how would artwork begin to extrapolate, accommodate or question thingness?

The work in this show is optically challenging and deceptive, colliding the more referential with the abstract, the melted and porous with the solid and polished. The hybrid nature of the work is perplexing, confusing but satisfying once the show’s ideology presents itself. 

Without knowing what the show is about, it is still extremely seductive, much to do with (in my opinion) Cherubim, a plaster and steelwork protruding from the spaces far wall created by Justin Cloud. 

There is also Randy Wray’s work, which situates the center of the space with his paper-mâché, sewn canvas, quartz crystals, wire, acrylic, oil, resin and mica sculpture. I responded to Chapter and Verse viscerally, perhaps because I walked around it and understood that the work was living in its own right. It had human-like fangs made from viciously planted crystals, fleshy tones and an organic shapeliness. It also looked extremely heavy, which I will never be certain of, offering a new dimension to the show’s hanging treatment and conceptual play.

It wasn’t long into my visit that I asked Andrew about his choice to not include any video inside of the space. I was made aware in his response that Dissecting the Cyborgian Swamp Thang had a digital element and life online through Emmett Mettier’s captivating and looping Bodily Collapse. The work is more grotesque than the physical works in the gallery and situates and informs the other artist’s works.

Through the use of case silicone and pigment and iridescent plastic film, Mettier has offered the show color as a formal experience, something in which the physical show is stripped of. The video work includes sound and light which syncopates with your heartbeat. 

When I was watching Bodily Collapse, it made me freak out about my own stomach and desperately wonder why it was in such abrupt and massive distress. It took me a second to realize, with huge amounts of relief, that it was Mettier’s audio element and not my own body. Scary, uncomfortable, extremely realistic while also sheeny, hue-y and delicious. The work is available to watch here.

Other artists in the show include Alexander Ross with Sketchbk98 Overlap Squish, a digital collage and ink-jet print, and Naomi Nakazato with her screen-printed, polyurethane and plexiglass works A Soft Spot for Rupture and Spoil. 

Dissecting the Cyborgian Swamp Thang will be showing at Super Dutchess gallery, 53 Orchard St. between Grand and Hester, until Feb. 18. 

A kind thank you to Andrew Woolbright for curating an inspiring show and for allowing me an extremely informative visit. 

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ 

Clare Gemima is a visual artist from New Zealand. New-ish to the East Village, she spends her time as an artist assistant and gallery go-er, hungry to explore what's happening in her local art world. You can find her work here: claregemima.com 

[Updated] About that rolled-up carpet in the crosswalk

An EVG reader shared the following clips from last evening on the southwest corner of Third Avenue and Astor Place. 

The first clip shows what at first glance could be a discarded roll of carpet ... placed right at the curb, giving pedestrians no choice but to walk over it. However, per the clip, the piece of carpet is moving...

 

 And here, people are seen walking on the carpet...

   

Apparently, the man inside the carpet wants people to walk on him to satisfy a fetish. The reader had seen this happen in the past. 

For years, from the late 1990s into 2013, a man, dubbed "the human carpet," visited clubs and other places to have people walk on him while rolled up inside a carpet. In this case, he instructed people — women in high heels a bonus — to do so with a sign. This MO is different. There isn't any consent.

To the reader:

"I think he waits for the snow so he can barricade the walk way and force you to walk on him.... without your consent. He moves around. The last snow storm he was at different crosswalks every night."

And some more background...

"When I was in high school there was another guy that would ask us to walk on him while in a rug. This was in the 1990s. This guy is someone else. For me, I have no problem with someone's fetish, but at least the guy from when I was in high school asked you to do it. I don't think it's cool to kinda violate those forced to walk on him when crossing the street. Anyway, I just thought people should now."

Updated 5:15 p.m. 

DP in EV shared footage from late this afternoon...

 

And a little later... perhaps on a dinner break? Photo by Steven...

The Marshal seizes the Lower East Side Coffee Shop on 14th Street

Ugh. A bad sign at the Lower East Side Coffee Shop on 14th Street just west of Avenue A ... there's a posted notice stating that the restaurant is now in the legal possession of the landlord. (Thank you to @goodnitesteve for the tip and photo.)

And as you can see, plywood now covers the windows and door. 

While the coffee shop is on the new side (2008), it had (if this is permanent) an old-school look and feel — especially with the neon. This photo is from Jan. 23...

However, business had been off during the pandemic... and the delivery and takeout orders (and extremely limited outdoor seating) ... wasn't apparently enough to stay in business.

Pandemic aside, it has been a tough slog for all the businesses on this corner. For nearly three years this side of 14th Street was an active construction zone for L-train repairs with a variety of trucks, drill rigs, pile drivers, compressors and generators. 

Several businesses were forced to shut down due to severely limited access to their storefronts. Outside the now-shuttered Dion and the Coffee Shop, customer access included only 28 inches of sidewalk space — not big enough for a wheelchair in spots.

The return of the anonymous, animal-loving snow shoveler of the East Village

Residents still digging out from Monday's blizzard are receiving an assist... and it's a familiar name for some of you — the anonymous, animal-loving snow shoveler.

You may recall this story from the snowy days of 2016... an anonymous individual who voluntarily shoveled out snowbound cars (see the links below) ... leaving behind a note explaining the act of kindness ... anyone who wanted to express his or her gratitude could donate to the shoveler's favorite cause — Mighty Mutts/Ollie's Place Animal Rescue. 

Here's more from the snow shoveler last evening via email:

I wanted to let people know that I've been shoveling out random cars again and it's too wet out to leave notes on cars.   

If someone wants to make it clear that they don't want their car shoveled out they can. If I've already shoveled someone's car and they are furious I can put the snow back. I am extremely careful and never touch the cars.

As in the past no one should feel any obligation for the service. It is something I enjoy doing and I'm getting some exercise but if they want to make a donation to Mighty Mutts/Ollie's Place Animal Rescue, go for it.  

Photo of a random shoveled-out parking space.

Previously on EV Grieve:
• There is an anonymous, animal-loving snow shoveler in the East Village

• More about the anonymous, animal-loving snow shoveler of the East Village

The latest single from Phony Express: 'Pickup On 11th Street (Richie's Guitar Shop Bop)'

Phony Express, the prolific and anonymous pandemic-era East Village band, has released a new single — "Pickup On 11th Street (Richie's Guitar Shop Bop)." 

Per the band in a statement to EVG: "Richie is a close friend of the band. He’s been quietly inspiring music in our neighborhood for more than 35 years."

Have a listen: 

   

Previously on EV Grieve: 

The debut of Phony Express, a local pandemic-era band who collaborates by phone

EVG Etc.: Weathering the storm with Amelia and Christo; Prepping for International Clash Day

 

• Man slashed on the L-train platform on 14th Street and First Avenue (The Post ... ABC 7)

• Cuomo nows says restaurant workers and cab drivers are eligible to receive COVID-19 vaccines (Gothamist ... the City) 

• Noreetuh on 1st Avenue launches a free weekly meal for unemployed restaurant workers (Instagram ... h/t Eater) 

• Testing out Big Stick Willy's, the delivery-only cheese stick business in the East Village (Grub Street) 

• Exploring the life and music of free jazz great William Parker (The Brooklyn Rail) 

• How did Amelia and Christo weather the storm on Monday? (Laura Goggin Photography) 

• City lags in clearing bike lanes of snow (Streetsblog) 

• International Clash Day 2021 is TOMORROW (KEXP) 

• What the Ramones played at their last-ever U.K. gig on Feb. 3, 1996 (Glide Magazine) 

Tree pic along Tompkins Square Park on 10th Street

Grant Shaffer's NY See

Here's the latest NY See panel, East Village-based illustrator Grant Shaffer's observational sketch diary of things that he sees and hears around the neighborhood and NYC ... 

C&B Cafe turns 6

A quick — and slightly belated! — happy 6th anniversary to C&B Cafe over at 178 E. Seventh St. between Avenue A and Avenue B. 

Chef-owner Ali Sahin's A+ breakfast-lunch-coffee to-go shop opened in late January 2015. 

While it was certainly a challenging year for any local business (C&B's woes included a break-in), Sahin did have plenty to celebrate, including a successful crowdfunding campaign to purchase a new oven, a lease to extend the space into the vacant storefront next door and a headline-grabbing champagne assist as Biden won the presidency. 

Here's to the next six years... 

Photo from April by Stacie Joy

Space where Momofuku got its start is for rent on 1st Avenue

163 First Ave. just north of 10th Street is now on the rental market.

The space is notable to some local food aficionados for being where David Chang's Momofuku empire got is start .... first as the home of Noodle Bar (2004) before it moved a few storefronts away... later becoming Momofuku Ko for six years (2008-2014), which is now open in a larger space on Extra Place ... and then the first outpost of his Fuku fried chicken sandwich chain (2015-2018).

There was speculation that Chang would hold on to the space, as Eater noted after Fuku closed: 

The space, near and dear to Momofuku as the location that kicked off Chang’s empire, will continue to serve as an incubator — though what else the company has up its sleeves is TBD.

Not much info on the retail listing, except that the space is vented for cooking, though all uses are considered. 

Photo by Steven with assistance from EV Arrow

P.S.

Bring back Wraparama!

Snowplow collides with the Iggy's curbside space on Ludlow Street

We noted a few of the curbside dining spaces that were damaged during Monday's blizzard (a small number all things considered). 

While Mother Nature may have wreaked some havoc... at least one city employee was responsible for plowing into the curbside space outside Iggy's Keltic Lounge on Ludlow between Stanton and Rivington.

According to an Iggy's employee, "our barrier is a foot closer to the sidewalk than everyone else around us. We have reflectors and a giant construction barrel on the side where the cars come down the street."

Still. 

"This guy got close, backed up, and got closer. What the hell?" 

The curbside space, which the tavern was still using (though not Monday evening) is still standing, though slightly askew. 

The carpenter who built the structure this past summer will assess the damage tomorrow...

Wednesday's parting shot

Thanks to EVG reader Danny for this photo from Ninth Street between First Avenue and Second Avenue ...