Photos by Derek Berg
Who's a good robot dog? Tompkins Square Park today...
Sunday, March 9, 2025
Week in Grieview
• Q&A with Steven Matrick, co-founder of the New Colossus Festival, taking place this week at East Village and Lower East Side music venues (Tuesday)
• The return of Lucy's (Monday)
• Tompkins Square Park field house refurbished, reopening nears after final inspections (Tuesday)
• RIP Hal Hirshorn (Wednesday)
• A group of runners is hoping the city will add lighting to the new East River Park track (Thursday)
• At Night Club 101 with Hello Mary (Monday)
• Meet the new owner of Boris & Horton (Monday)
• Ashes to ashes: A to-go twist on Ash Wednesday (Wednesday)
• One-time studio home of Joey Ramone is for sale at the St. Mark (Monday)
• Coming this spring to 9th Street: Irving Green (Thursday)
• Openings: Bateman's on 6th Street (Thursday)
• On 7th Street, the Instant Noodle Factory is closing; noodle liquidation sale commences (Monday)
• Interesting new business opens on the Bowery and Houston (Wednesday)
• From pizza to politics: Eleven B serves up a new campaign HQ on Avenue B (Wednesday)
• Signage alert: Butter Smashburgers on St. Mark's Place (Wednesday)
... and EVG reader Bryan K. shared this Christmas tree discard with us from Second Street between Avenue B and Avenue C... Per Bryan, "Trying to camouflage the shame by dropping it among some old tree branches!"
About Robert Sietsema's New York
He'll also "focus on value and good food around New York City."
This piece he did a few weeks ago caught our eye: "All the Soups at B&H Dairy, Ranked."
You can read more about the newsletter and sign up for a subscription here.
Previously on EV Grieve:
Sunday's opening shot
Saturday, March 8, 2025
'Art Handlers' at Bullet Space
"Art Handlers" is the new group show at Bullet Space ... with an opening tomorrow (Sunday!) evening from 6-9. (Otherwise, hours are Saturdays-Sundays from 1-6 p.m. or by appointment.)
The urban artist collab is at 292 E. Third St. between Avenue C and Avenue D.
Noted
This Enron has been pushing The Egg, a (fake) at-home nuclear reactor.
Per CNET:
The Egg appears to be part parody and part art project, but there may be something else stirring under the surface. Connor Gaydos is listed as Enron's CEO in the company's articles of incorporation in Delaware... Gaydos is the co-author of a book about Birds Aren't Real, a movement designed as a parody of conspiracy theories. Birds Aren't Real pushes the idea that birds are government spy drones.
The scandal-plagued Enron, mired in accounting fraud, filed for bankruptcy in December 2001. According to Britannica, the collapse of Enron, which held more than $60 billion in assets, involved one of the biggest bankruptcy filings in U.S. history.
Friday, March 7, 2025
Damn Damn Damn
RIP Brian James, the guitarist and co-founding member of the Damned. He died this week at age 70.
In October 1976, the Damned released their debut single, "New Rose," written by James. The Damned was the first UK punk band to release an official song. It appreared on the Damned Damned Damned record.
He also played with the Lords of the New Church and Iggy Pop, among others.
Previously on EV Grieve:
An info session for community and faith leaders on protecting immigrant New Yorkers
Join New York Immigration Coalition and the Lower East Side Community Care Coalition to learn how your organization can be an ally in the fight to protect our neighbors. Attendees will be taught how to identify valid vs invalid warrants and the rights your organization has in an encounter with federal authorities.March 8 2-4 p.m.St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery131 E. 10th St. at Second Avenue
Sign up at this link.
Thursday, March 6, 2025
Women-fronted bands take over the Parkside Lounge stage for International Women’s Day
"This year's show features 10 women-fronted bands, with a mix of talented female and male musicians," said Val Kinzler, founder of We The She, a NYC nonprofit whose mission is to reinforce gender equity and healing through the arts by creating interactive workshops and community-supportive events.
The lineup includes East Village singer/songwriter Patti Rothberg, who will perform her 1996 debut album, Between the 1 and the 9, in its entirety with her new band, The Patti Rothberg Coincidence.
Most performers are the NYC downtown rock scene veterans; others are up-and-coming talents.
Here's a rundown (note that Rome 56 had to drop out)
• 6 p.m.: The Ruminators (Jill GE & Patti Rothberg)
• 6:35 p.m.: Violizzy & Friends
• 7:20 p.m.: QueenPins (featuring Rigel Mary Sarjoo)
• 7:45 p.m.: Sue Lashley
• 8:15 p.m.: Rew Starr
• 9 p.m.: Exit 99
• 9:50 p.m.: Val Kinzler Band
• 10:45 p.m.: • The Miss J Experience
• 11:30 p.m.: The Patti Rothberg Coincidence
• 12:20 a.m.: The Record Players NYC
Parkside Lounge is 317 E. Houston St. at Attorney.
Tickets are $5.
A group of runners is hoping the city will add lighting to the new East River Park track
Per the petition:
The East River Park Track will soon close through at least 2026 and undergo a complete reconstruction ... The designs for the new track do not include sports lighting. Now is the time for our community to organize and petition our city to incorporate lighting into this fully funded reconstruction project, ensuring the rebuilt track meets the needs of the community now and in the future.
The volunteers state:
• The track in its current and future planned form has inadequate lighting, which creates risks of personal harm and athletic injuries after dark
• Many of New Yorker City's 8+ million residents rely on evening hours to exercise due to work or school schedules. Lighting ensures the track remains open and usable year-round.
• Maximize Public Investment: Adding lighting during the ESCR project reconstruction is far more cost-effective than retrofitting later. This ensures the track reaches its full potential as a safe, accessible, and well-used public space.
And The East River Park Track is one of only two regulation tracks open to the public in Manhattan and the only one located south of 135th Street (the other regulation track is located at Riverbank State Park on the Upper West Side). It is a vital community resource that deserves to be ready to meet the community’s needs for safe all-year-round use after its reconstruction.
The group's effort received a boost last week when Community Board 3 passed a resolution in favor of the lighting, writing:
... Community Board 3 supports the efforts of community advocates in ensuring that the track remains a safe, accessible, and well-lit public resource year-round while also addressing environmental concerns related to lighting.
Find the petition here.
Coming this spring to 9th Street: Irving Green
Photos by Steven
Renovations are underway inside 321 E. Ninth St., between First Avenue and Second Avenue, where Irving Green will open this spring.
Per its Instagram account, this is an "East Village destination for curated homeware and gifts with a touch of Irish charm."
The shop takes over for the March Hare, which closed at the end of January. Read about that here.
Openings: Bateman's on 6th Street
Photo via Bateman's
Two East Village residents are behind Bateman's, a new cocktail bar on Sixth Street. The bar's name and concept are based on Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, a black comedy horror novel from 1991 (and a 2000 film starring Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman).
The lounge, via husband-wife duo Carlo Olcese and Natasha Van Duser, with baroque-style paintings and Tiffany chandeliers, features a 10-seat bar and a 20-seat dining area for the small-plates-style menu.
Bateman's, 308 E. Sixth St., between First Avenue and Second Avenue, is open daily from 5 p.m. to midnight and closes at 2 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays.
If you're on Instagram, you can check out pics of the drinks here.
No word if there's any Huey Lewis & the News on the bar's soundtrack.
Wednesday, March 5, 2025
Wednesday's parting shot
Photo by Stacie Joy
This year's New Colossus Festival is underway at East Village and Lower East Side music venues. It will feature more than 200 bands and various industry panels.
At Baker Falls, 192 Allen St., between Houston and Stanton, there was an afternoon slate of conversations ranging from independent release and distribution strategies to creating music videos.
The live music continues through Sunday. Check out the slate here.
Previously on EV Grieve:
Ashes to ashes: A to-go twist on Ash Wednesday
Photos and reporting by Stacie Joy
This morning, on this Ash Wednesday, Pastor Will Kroeze and retired Pastor Barbara Beale offered "ashes to go" from the corner of Ninth Street and Avenue B outside Trinity Lower East Side Lutheran Parish.
Those who received the ashes arrived on foot, by bicycle and car.
At least one dog took part as well...
Pastor Will also prepared to-go bags of ashes — made from burned palms from Palm Sunday and holy oil — for a colleague to administer to a hospital-bound parishioner and during at-home visits.
And yes, someone couldn’t resist making a dime-bag joke...
RIP Hal Hirshorn
Photo for EVG from 2016 by James Maher
Little had been made public about his death until a feature at The New York Times yesterday. His sister, Harriet Hirshorn, told the paper that the cause of death was coronary artery disease. He was 60.
Per the Times:
While other artists of his generation rode the art-market boom of the last three decades, he remained aloof, rarely putting his work up for sale at galleries. His spare website features a few of his paintings and photographs, but no contact information or personal details.His work was absolutely analog. Mr. Hirshorn made his own paints using traditional ingredients, and he scoured the Chelsea flea market for antique camera parts, the older and more obscure the better.His landscapes drew on a color palette of dirty greens and autumnal browns. They were Turner-esque in their near abstraction, with swirls of misty clouds obscuring craggy cliffs and stormy seas.His photographs likewise seemed to exist out of time. He made them by applying a solution of salt and silver to drawing paper, layering it with a negative and exposing it to light to capture an image — a technique developed in England in the mid-19th century that eventually fell out of favor because it required very long exposures that made it hard to keep an image in focus.
He arrived here in the late 1980s. During an interview with EVG's James Maher in August 2016, Hirshorn lamented the changing neighborhood.
Basically within a five-minute walk [today] most of the East Village that I’ve known over the course of 25, almost 30 years is gone, just gone, not like in bits and pieces, shifting here and there — just one fell swoop. Just to see everything radically redeveloped is what’s so stunning, because it used to happen in bits and pieces as the real estate went up. Now they’re doing blocks instead of buildings.
An EVG reader emailed us to say, "He was a wonderfully sweet, quirky man and a brilliant painter and photographer. I'm glad to have called him a friend."
From pizza to politics: Eleven B serves up a new campaign HQ on Avenue B
Photos and reporting by Stacie Joy
In recent months, we've received several inquiries about the status of Eleven B, the pizzeria owned by Vincent Sgarlato and his family on the southwest corner of 11th Street and Avenue B.
A large for-lease banner arrived on the 11th Street side in the fall, though it remained in business.
Now, though, Sarah Batchu, a Democratic candidate for the open City Council District 2 seat, has debuted a campaign office inside the restaurant. This is a temporary, four-month lease agreement with Eleven B for the corner space. The restaurant and bar will (physically) remain the same, pending possible reopening once the campaign office lease is up.
"We are holding the space for him, happy to help," says Batchu of Sgarlato.
Batchu says she will host community events here, including constituent services.
• Andrea Gordillo (Democrat)
• Jason Murillo (Republican)
• Allie Ryan (Democrat)
• Gail Schargel (Democrat)
• Anthony Weiner (Democrat)
The primaries take place on June 24.
Signage alert: Butter Smashburgers on St. Mark's Place
This will be the second outpost for the burger joint that opened last summer on Macdougal Street.
Butter offers five menu items (not counting tea, soda, and water): the house cheeseburger (single or double), a fried chicken sandwich, a veggie burger, fries, and an ice cream sundae. It also offers a monthly burger or chicken sandwich special.
Find the menu here.
St. Mark's Burgers & Dogs recently opened down the block at 34 St. Mark's Place ... and because someone will bring this up: An outpost of Smashed is coming soon to 94 Third Ave. between 12th Street and 13th Street.
Interesting new business opens on the Bowery and Houston
This is the first tenant here in almost seven years ... the last at 284 Bowery was Cherche Midi, Keith McNally's French brasserie, which closed in June 2018. (Before this, McNally had unleased Pulino's Bar and Pizzeria.)
This corner had also been a hot spot for street art these past six years, including a mural paying tribute to George Floyd by @fumeroism that arrived in early June 2020.
So much for bank branches being a thing of the past: A Wells Fargo opened one storefront to the south on the Bowery several years back. Now, if we can just get a psychic or nail salon to open in the space between, it will feel like 2008 or so...
Tuesday, March 4, 2025
Q&A with Steven Matrick, co-founder of the New Colossus Festival, taking place this week at East Village and Lower East Side music venues
Photos and interview by Stacie Joy
Longtime Lower East Side resident Steven Matrick arrives at Pianos (158 Ludlow St.) excited to talk about music and bands — and I am excited to let him, as he details some acts he's especially keen on seeing (and hearing) at this year's New Colossus Festival.
Since he's the co-founder of the nearly weeklong event, which is rapidly approaching (today through Sunday), we take some photos at one of the fest's 11 venues and chat about the NYC music scene, what it takes to run a festival, and his favorite moments from previous ones.
What inspired you to start The New Colossus Festival, and how has it evolved since its inception?
I was on a series of panels with the other bookers on the Lower East Side, and we kept talking about how much we all missed CMJ. This was in 2018. Festival Co-Founder Mike Bell approached me about the New Colossus Festival as the booker of Pianos, and then his partner quit, so we teamed up. He rightly pointed out the scattershot nature of bands coming to NYC on their way to SXSW and how we should centralize it in the neighborhood we love. We chose Lio Kanine from Kanine Records to help us with booking, as he always threw amazing parties at CMJ.
We did a test run in 2018 on both floors at Pianos the week before SXSW, and it went extremely well, so we went full throttle in 2019.
The festival lineup has gotten bigger (more bands) and better (more amazing bands) with each year. We’ve been able to rely on locals less and less with each edition, and our mission is to welcome international bands to NYC, so we’re very happy about this. We also have done 22 weeks of shows (with 5 bands at each one) at 18th Ward Brewery the last three years, so we’ve at this point worked with about 300 local bands and are able to figure out which ones we want to showcase every year.
The festival name is derived from Emma Lazarus's poem about the Statue of Liberty. How does that symbolism influence the Festival’s identity?
NYC has been one of the epicenters of music for a very long time, and we want to welcome artists from all over the world to play their first shows in March. This was Mike's idea, and I'm a very sentimental person, so I was and always have been really into it.
It is really beautiful, and there is a way in which musical artists wash up to NYC looking to play:
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries sheWith silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
How do you see The New Colossus Festival contributing to NYC's cultural and artistic landscape?
Well, we're an indie rock festival. The indie rock music scene started in the East Village with CBGB and Max's Kansas City, moved to the Lower East Side in the early 2000s (Mercury Lounge, Luna Lounge, Pianos, Cake Shop, Don Hills, etc.), moved to Williamsburg in the early 2010s, and then eastward to Bushwick. Now, there are a ton of venues in Ridgewood and BedStuy.
The move eastward has to do with artists finding affordable places to live. It is extremely important to us that we have this Festival in the Lower East Side/East Village to bring these kids back to playing in these historic venues.
We're also functioning as an entry point for what will be 800 bands by the end of the Festival, and most of them gain a footing so that their next show in NYC has the capacity to have a good-sized audience at it. It's a wonderful thing.
Many artists are performing in New York City — or even the U.S. — for the first time. How does the Festival support them in making that leap?
Well, when you go to SXSW, you're technically only supposed to play one show and certainly not more than one at night during official festival hours. This year, we’ve given all international bands two to three shows and many locals two shows. It is so excellent to provide multiple showcases for them during their trip.
In the past, at Pianos, a band from Norway would showcase at 7 p.m., and sometimes the rooms were empty because nobody knew who they were yet. This is a much better way to play your first NYC shows.
Are there any artists or performances you’re particularly excited about this year?
Yes! I'm a punk rock guy and am throwing two label parties. All of the bands on those parties are amazing: Test Plan, Prostitute, Public Circuit, Peer Pleasure and Bucket (two bands I saw at Ireland Music Week), Joe & the Shitboys from the Faroe Islands, who are opening three shows for Iggy Pop soon, and some really excellent weird bands from Ohio: Big Fat Head, People in the Daytime and Touchdown Jesus, that Pons, who are on our label, sent over to me.
On the nonpunk front, I can't wait to see Prism Shores, You Said Strange, Delivery, Hachiku, Cusp, World News, Dictator, Dutch Mustard, Snoozer (Alex G's band), Wax Jaw, Bleary Eyed … and I can go on and on and on!
Looking back, what are the festival moments that stand out for you?
1. Lowly (Denmark) at Pianos in 2019 completely blew our minds. Think Stereolab.
2. Paul Jacobs (Montreal) blew us away at Pianos in 2022.
3. GIFT (Brooklyn) played Berlin in 2022 and were so great I wound up managing them.
4. Ducks Ltd. (Toronto) blessed us with three shows last year. Their album Harm's Way was the theme album for the Festival, so I enjoyed every moment of all three shows—as did everyone else who was there!
5. Roost.World (Vermont) closed out the Festival last year at Baker Falls on Saturday Night, and it was a full-on amazing dance party.
What are your long-term goals for The New Colossus Festival, and are there any new elements or expansions you’re considering for future editions?
We'd like to continue holding it in small venues to keep it manageable for everyone and evolve the number of people who come out for the week. This year, we did six shows with Super Bock, three shows with Groover, and, again, 22 weeks of shows at 18th Ward Brewery, so the Festival has become more of a year-round thing.
We'd like to continue expanding who we partner with for shows and throw great shows throughout the year.
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