The Marshal took legal possession of the storefront at Sixth Street in a legal notice dated Dec. 26 (Merry Christmas!).
On Dec. 17, we noted that the retail space — 6,500 square feet over two levels — was for lease. Offside Tavern had occupied the corner spot since spring 2023.
This was a new iteration of Offside, which operated at 137 W. 14th St. for three years until the pandemic-related PAUSE of March 2020. During the NHL season, OT was a hockey bar specifically for fans of the New York Islanders.
August Laura had a brief run at the address, opening in October 2019 ... then a haphazard schedule during the pandemic before finally shutting down in December 2021.
They took over the space from what some people considered an East Village institution — Sidewalk, the restaurant, bar and live music venue (home of the Antifolk Festival) that closed in February 2019 after 34 years.
Starting today, B Cup Café is soft-opening in its new location at 204 Avenue B, between 12th Street and 13th Street.
B Cup is the first tenant in the renovated retail space, which was rebuilt after a June 2023 fire at B-Side, the former bar on the ground floor.
The new B Cup includes an expanded menu and later hours with the addition of a beer-wine license. (There are four wines offered by the bottle or glass as well as five beer choices.)
The café spent 18 years on the SW corner of 13th Street and Avenue B, recently closing in this spot after the landlord did not offer the business a new lease.
If you're on Instagram, you can follow the B Cup account for updates.
After an incredible 5 years in the East Village, we're investing in the next 10 with a full kitchen upgrade, HVAC fixes, and soundproofing! Because of this, Nowon East Village will be closed Dec. 23-Jan. 9 for renovations.
The restaurant, which serves nontraditional Korean fare (specialties include the double cheeseburger with kimchi mayo and dill pickles), will reopen on Jan. 10.
On Nov. 30, Chef Jae Lee announced that he had signed a 10-year lease for the space.
Nowon opened in November 2019 and had four months to make an impact before the pandemic PAUSE of March 2020. (During the hiatus, they teamed up with Frontline Foods to provide meals for health-care workers.)
The shop had been at 343 E. 10th St., just west of Avenue B, since the summer of 2019, when it moved to this high-profile space from a storefront on Avenue B between 11th Street and 12th Street.
Remnants of the space were spotted on the curb yesterday... (h/t cs on b).
Three Kings, established in 2008, continues operating outposts in Williamsburg, Long Island and London.
Before Three Kings arrived, No. 343 had been vacant for years. This space was part of the former Life Cafe, which closed in September 2011.
Here's a build-out people will likely be watching in the New Year.
As reported in late August, Lidl, the German supermarket chain with 12,000 stores worldwide, is opening a branch on Grand and Clinton on the Lower East Side next summer.
The coming soon sign is up, as the top photo shows. (Thanks to Roger Bultot for the first two photos in this post.)
Lidl US signed the lease for the 23,000-square-foot space at 408 Grand St. (previously a Rite Aid) on property owned by the affordable housing nonprofit Grand Street Guild.
Here's a look inside the gutted storefront going back to October (pic by Stacie Joy)...
There are several Lidl outposts around NYC, including Queens and Staten Island. When the Grand Street grocery opens, it will be the third in Manhattan. There's one in Harlem now, with a location slated for Chelsea.
This article tells you what you can expect from a Lidl.
Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, died this afternoon at the age of 100.
His post-presidency work included lending his building skills to Habitat for Humanity.
Carter and his wife Rosalynn were among the volunteers who helped rebuild the six-story residential building at 742 E. Sixth St., between Avenue C and Avenue D. In the early 1980s, the property, called Mascot Flats, was a burned-out shell missing a roof.
In 1983, Bruce Schoonmaker, a minister running the Graffiti Ministry Center on East 7th Street, helped convince Habitat for Humanity to start a project at this building; for the previous six years, the organization had focused on smaller home-building efforts in several states and a few foreign countries. That July 1983, they purchased the building from the City as its first large inner-city renovation, with apartments that would be sold at a very low price to the community's poorer residents who also committed 1,000 work-hours to the rebuilding efforts.
In April 1984, Robert DeRocker, then Habitat for Humanity's New York executive director, persuaded the former president who was in town for a speech to tour the site. Carter had already worked with the nonprofit to build a house in Americus, Georgia, a few miles from his home in Plains. What the ex-president found was a building in total disrepair, with no roof or permanent staircase, and interiors fire-blackened and knee-deep in garbage.
"There was this old lady — she was 65, maybe 70," Carter told the Times. "She was living in the next building and there was no water, no heat, no electricity. And she was cooking her meal on a trash fire that she built between two bricks. I realized then how much Habitat could mean to a neighborhood like this."
Three years after renovations began, in November 1986, 19 families moved into the rehabilitated building.
For more on this project, check out "The Rebuilding of Mascot Flats," a 60-minute film documenting the efforts of homesteaders to transform the building.
In a statement following Carter's passing, Habitat NYC and Westchester is inviting the public to visit Mascot Flats to share messages and items of tribute for Jimmy and Rosalynn. ("We ask the public to be mindful that this is a residential building and to conduct your visit with consideration and respect.")
If you want to start getting into the Valentine's spirit, you'll be in luck at the Target on 14th Street and Avenue A (thanks to Edmund John Dunn for the photo).
"Energies" is "an international group exhibition that unfolds throughout the entire building at 38 St. Marks Place and expands into numerous partner locations in the surrounding East Village community. The exhibition includes influential historic artworks alongside contemporary positions and new commissions that address ecological affordances and effects, social formations, and political arrangements attached to energy past and present."
One of the pieces includes Gordon Matta-Clark's "Rosebush," which has been restored at its home since 1972 outside the St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery on 10th Street and Second Avenue.
In a brief yet prolific career that ended with his death at age 35 in 1978, Gordon Matta-Clark responded to the neglect of New York City's urban environment with radical interventions, most famously colossal cuts in abandoned buildings. Much of his work was meant to be ephemeral, and little of it survives, especially in the places it was created. An exception is a small, rusted steel cage outside St Mark's Church in-the-Bowery. For years, it has stood unmarked and empty of the flowers it was intended to hold.
"It is, we believe, the only existent work in an outdoor public space of Gordon's," says Jessamyn Fiore, co-director of the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark.
The reactivation event this past fall was a collaboration between the Swiss Institute, the Poetry Project, Danspace Project and St. Mark's Church.
Read more here.
The Swiss Institute, on the SE corner of Second Avenue and St. Mark's Place, is open Wednesday through Friday from 2 to 8 p.m., Saturday from noon to 8 p.m., and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m.
The Cure's A Song From the Lost World" (the band's first album since 2008) made plenty of year-end top-10 lists. (It would make the EVG top 10 as well.)
On Dec. 18, the band released a live version of the single "A Fragile Thing," recorded at the Troxy London show last month.
After some 24 years in service, Rai Rai Ken has closed on 10th Street between First Avenue and Second Avenue.
Sunday was the last day in service for the Tokyo-style ramen shop.
Here's part of the signage for patrons on the door...
We were incredibly lucky to have served you for over 2.5 decades. Back in 2000, before ramen was a household word, we opened a hole-in-the-wall counter shop reminiscent of downtown, old-school Tokyo. 20 years later, during the pandemic, we linked up with takoyaki pioneer Otafuku and with soul-food powerhouse Curry-ya in our current home in order to survive.
Our staff over the years has pivoted a lot. However, due to an unfortunate series of events, we have decided to close. We appreciate all the support and wonderful memories over the 24 beautiful years.
This also likely means the end of Curry-Ya, which shared the address. Ban Rai sake bar is listed as temporarily closed.
Leading up to the holidays, I visited the new Cafewal (Fulani for cafeteria) located in ELIM House of Worship, 602 E. 12th St. at Avenue B. EVLovesNYC rents space and a kitchen there to provide daily hot meals, showers, assistance, and information, as well as a community for asylum seekers, with a focus on offering free services for immigrants from West Africa.
Cafewal serves a daily weekday lunch at 12:30 p.m. to anyone who shows up (and all are welcome). I am greeted by Executive Director Tyler Hefferon, who shows me around the space and explains its origins.
"The new kitchen is an expansion of our restaurant training program that began last spring as an effort to provide asylum seekers with certified letters stating that they were volunteering with our organization, an important piece of paper that contributed to a barbaric point system engineered by New York City of qualifying extenuating circumstances and aided in the prevention of single adults being kicked out of the NYC shelter system every 30 days and left with no place to sleep," he said.
We discuss how the program works and its training component to assist the newest New Yorkers with job skills.
"The meals are prepared to meet EVLovesNYC's standards — nutrient-dense, culturally sensitive, and absolutely delicious. The kitchen provides much-needed hot meals to our neighbors and assists our chefs by providing their first NYC kitchen experience to add to their resumes, plus the technical and organizational skills required by the fast-paced NYC hospitality industry," Hefferon said. "We are thrilled that many program participants have progressed through the asylum process to the point of receiving their federal work authorization and are searching for their first jobs in the United States, with some individuals apartment hunting and exiting the shelter system."
To date, since the spring of 2020, EVLovesNYC has provided over 585,000 hot meals and 8.4 million pounds of groceries to food-insecure New Yorkers, Hefferon says, and the costs have been difficult to keep up with, as the 3,600 hot meals per week cost between $3 and $4 each. The organization is funded solely by small-dollar donations and corporate sponsors.
We're now on the clock for MulchFest, which culminates with Chipping Weekend on Jan. 11-12 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. in parks designated parks around the city... including Tompkins Square Park, where you can drop off your tree over the next few weeks.
If you have three hours and 35 minutes (with intermission) to spare to see "The Brutalist" this holiday season, then I recommend seeing it in 70mm at the Village East by Angelika on Second Avenue and 12th Street. (Theater link here.)
The film, which opened on Dec. 20, is showing in the classic Jaffe Art Theatre in VistaVision, which Paramount Pictures developed 70 years ago. ("The Brutalist" is also shown here at other times, though not in 70mm.)
The acclaimed film tells the story of Holocaust survivor and Hungarian-born Jewish architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) as he begins a new life in America.
The lobby includes a display of buildings that Tóth's character designed...
Thanks to EVG reader Steph for sharing this photo and message from this morning at Veniero's on 11th Street:
Us crazies who got there at 7:35 this morning were rewarded with cookies and coffee.
And!
They did have to have a word with the lady who decided to take the huge strawberry cheesecake out of the case clearly marked NO self-service teetering through the masses... Merry Christmas.
Chipping Weekend takes place Jan. 11-12 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. According to NYC Parks: "Bring your tree to a chipping site on Chipping Weekend to take home a tree-mento! We'll chip your tree and give you your very own bag of mulch to use in your backyard or to make a winter bed for a street tree."
Parks officials say that 46,626 trees were recycled last year.
* While MulchFest begins the day after Christmas, there's no rush to part with your tree. In fact, you could wait to drop it curbside until July or August, hoping it'll make headlines on a local news site.
The signage arrived yesterday at 153 First Ave. for Fluffy Fluffy, a dessert cafe for the long vacant space between Ninth Street and 10th Street.
Here's more about the brand via a press release from earlier in the year:
Founded in 2018, Fluffy Fluffy began franchising in 2020 with a mission to spread joy worldwide through souffle pancakes. Originating in Canada, the brand offers handcrafted Japanese-style souffle pancakes known for their soft, bouncy, and incredibly light texture.
Made with locally sourced milk and free of artificial additives, each souffle pancake is cooked slowly at a low temperature for up to 20 minutes. Topped with a variety of fruits, toppings, and house-made sauces, they aim to bring the celebratory symbol of joy and togetherness traditionally associated with Japanese souffle pancakes into daily life.
The brand's diverse menu includes more than just souffle pancakes, featuring innovative delights like croffles, burnt top cheesecake, roll cake, macarons, lattes, and specialty sodas. Fluffy Fluffy demonstrates its commitment to inclusivity by offering meat-free menu options, catering to diverse dietary preferences.
The last tenant at No. 153 was Coyote Ugly, which held forth here with bartop dancing and body shots for 27 years. CU left this address in September 2020 ... for new digs on 14th Street.
