Photo by Derek Berg
A crosswalk moment on First Avenue and St. Mark's Place...
In the 1950s, she married the poet LeRoi Jones, who later changed his name to become the Black power nationalist Amiri Baraka. Hettie Jones spoke and wrote about the bigotry and antisemitism she faced at that time, both as a Jewish woman and a white woman married to a Black man.In 1957, the couple founded a literary magazine, Yugen, and the Totem Press, which published works by legendary Beat writers, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Williams S. Burroughs.Later divorced, they had two daughters: Kellie Jones, a professor of art, archaeology and African American studies at Columbia University, and Lisa Jones Brown, a writer on staff at The Village Voice for 15 years.The family had lived at 27 Cooper Square since the early 1960s and the heyday of the Beats.
Village Preservation has more about her fight to save her longtime home between Fifth Street and Sixth Street, where she lived for nearly six decades:
You can read more about her extraordinary life at The Associated Press and The New York Times.In 2007, when a hotel developer announced plans to build the 22-story Cooper Square Hotel, it looked like the 1844 Greek Revival house at 27 Cooper Square would be demolished. The four-story building that currently stands on this lot is of unknown origins. However, clues from a tax assessment records and historic maps indicate it might have been constructed between 1843 and 1845, as two narrow houses with ground-floor shops.Given Hettie's petite size, it would be easy to call her successful effort to save the structure a David-and-Goliath triumph, but that would diminish her accomplishment. Remarkably, her gentle but persuasive stress on the building's age and artistic heritage convinced the hotel's owners. They opted to spare the building and simply utilize the structure's lower two floors for corporate headquarters. Hettie also convinced the hotel to reinstall the vintage stained glass window above the entrance door, which had been removed long before.
NYU is considered one of the city's largest and wealthiest landlords, and, like other private colleges, it benefits from tax exemptions on its real estate. Last year NYU acquired a Kips Bay apartment building for $210 million — one of 2023's priciest transactions. And the total assessed value of NYU's holdings is about $1.8 billion, just below Columbia University's total, but NYU is taxed on just $120 million of that, thus enjoying nearly $1.7 billion in savings, according to a Crain's analysis in a piece from last fall headlined "City loses $788 million in property taxes as private colleges eat up 25M square feet of land."
Artwork created by Brad Heckman based on this EVG photo from First Avenue and Ninth Street...
Renowned across Europe for the potent mix of low prices and high-quality goods that defines its thousands of colorful stores, Lidl arrived stateside with deep pockets, a highly developed private label strategy and a disciplined focus on efficiently running a complex business in a highly competitive environment.But instead of steadily growing its U.S. footprint as it had originally intended, Lidl US has moved ahead in fits and starts, prompting questions about why its value-focused business model has trouble gaining traction on American soil.
Bánh Anh Em is Chef Nhu Ton’s love letter to our culture, our country, our families and all the brothers and sisters we've met along the way. It's a reflection of the journeys Chef Nhu has taken, traveling countless times across Vietnam by motorbike, rediscovering and re-inventing herself, and deeply immersing in the craftsmanship of Vietnamese cuisine.
We are profoundly grateful to the generations, the restaurants and the chefs who paved the way for us to be here today, and we hope to honor their spirit through every dish we craft...