Noted

Mayor Bloomberg is the 8th wealthiest person in America with a net worth of $20 billion. (Forbes)

A letter from The Bowery Presents

The following e-mail showed up in in-boxes last night...By posting this, I'm neither endorsing or criticizing what they're trying to do at 19 Kenmare...just telling people what is happening with the space. (Eater's coverage of the proposed new restaurant is here.) Oh, I did always like Little Charlie's Clam House, which was at 19 Kenmare on the LES for 80 years.

This email was sent to you by The Bowery Presents, 156 Ludlow St., 5th Floor, New York, NY 10002. You are receiving this email advertisement because your email address was used for a ticket purchase or you signed up via our website.

Dear Friends:
I am asking that you please forward the following email to http://us.mc904.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=TRAV200008@hotmail.com to help support a new restaurant that plans to open near The Bowery Ballroom. The restaurant, named Travertine, will be located at 19 Kenmare Street (near Elizabeth Street) in part of the space that was occupied by Charlie's Clam House. We want to encourage new, well-managed restaurants to open in the community so that our guests will have a place to eat both before and after shows. The Community Board has requested that Travertine show its widespread community support through letters or by having supporters attend the Community Board meeting tomorrow evening 96 pm [ED note: Eh?] at SEIU HQ, 101 Sixth Avenue, 22nd floor, between Canal and Spring Streets). If you are able to attend, the Community Board leadership is merely going to ask supporters of Travertine's liquor license application to stand up or show their hands (this should take no more than an hour).
Thank you,
Michael Swier

Following is the Following is the email that you can either cut-and-paste or revise and send via email to the email address stated above:
Mr. Ray Lee
Chair, SLA Committee, Manhattan Community Board 2
3 Washington Square Village, NYC, NY 10012
Dear Mr. Lee,
I am writing to ask you and CB2 to support the application by Travertine (19 Kenmare Street) for a liquor license. I look forward to the opening of a well-managed, quality dining option in my neighborhood. The location has been a restaurant for many years and the owners of Travertine should be allowed to open at this site, create jobs, pay taxes, and improve the neighborhood.
I hope that you will encourage your fellow board members to approve the application on Thursday, September 18.
Sincerely,
Name
Address

OH, THANKS A BUNCH, TIME OUT NEW YORK

In this week's "Best 'Hoods" issue, the East Village gets the nod for "best bar scene." As the magazine notes: "Hate on college students all you want: Fancy pants, fuddy-duddies and everyone in between still love the E-Vill for a night of boozing." Just what we need! More TONY-toting bargoers! Here's the write-up on the "E-Vill." (And if that catches on...)

Meanwhile, on the too-many-bars front. Save the Lower East Side! has news on the most recent CB3 meeting...while Tim at Colonnade Row has the latest on the Box.

Welcome to the East Village!: We're rich, drunk, snotty and LOVE John Mayer!

Also in Time Out this week:

What do you think of when you hear…We asked New Yorkers to play a little word association with NYC neighborhoods. Let the stereotyping begin!

East Village:

“Snotty — they like to go out every day, like to drink.”
Sohaib Marie, 22; Sunset Park, Brooklyn


“Rich people who come from a rich family. They listen to John Mayer.”
Thomas Morales, 16; Bronx


“They’re fun people. Easygoing, easy to mix with.”
Carson Roberts, 26; Bronx

The Times discovers Chinatown

Oh, boy. From today's Times. Titled: General Tso’s Shopping Spree.

In the film version of “Sex and the City,” Miranda, played by Cynthia Nixon, hunts for an apartment in Chinatown, eager to sink roots into this roiling neighborhood. Once a bit remote and gritty for Miranda and her acquisitive ilk, this Lower East Side enclave — home to Chinese, Burmese and Vietnamese, among others — is on the cusp of gentrification. Wine bars, art galleries, restaurants and boutiques have proliferated, turning the area into a magnet for real-life style seekers who can be seen on weekends casing out the string of shops scattered in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge.
Intent on exploring this two-mile-square area loosely bounded by Kenmare and Delancey Streets on the north, and East and Worth Streets on the south, they thread their way past old tenements, knickknack shops and vendors selling windup toys. And they shop.
“It’s crazy how things are blossoming here,” said Zia Ziprin, the owner of Girls Love Shoes on Ludlow Street, just south of Canal. “It’s definitely becoming a little mecca.”
Merchants are lured by affordable rents; shoppers by the promise of forward-looking, and sometimes budget-friendly, wares at boutiques popping up along Orchard, Ludlow and Division Streets — and, more recently, on Canal, where closet-size outposts of chic rub shoulders with electronics and hardware stores.
For retailers, “Chinatown is a last frontier,” said Faith Hope Consolo, the chairman of retail leasing and sales for Prudential Douglas Elliman. Merchants leap at the chance to lease stores for $100 to $150 a square foot, roughly one third to one half the rent for comparable space farther uptown. “Here they can be big fish in a little pond.”

Lehman Brothers 1928 staff Christmas party

I hope they were serving a lot of booze...this is one dull bash.

A touch of Blarney

Not sure what to make of the stickers for EV Grieve favorite the Blarney Cove being plastered around the neighborhood. The "I love to party" message seems awfully fraternityish for the Blarney Cove. (ED note: Duh.) Unless they're trying to drum up some more business. Which I understand. That stretch on 14th Street between A and B is up for grabs in spots. Still.

Are you there God? It's me, Carrie

Candace Bushnell, whose mid-’90s New York Observer column was the basis for Sex and the City, has signed a deal with the children’s division at HarperCollins to write a young adult novel about Carrie Bradshaw’s high-school years. Hello! (New York Observer via Gawker)

Our billionaire mayor speaks out on the "I want it now" society

An "I want it now" society that refuses to live within its means is partly responsible for the subprime-mortgage crisis, Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday.

"I think you just can't blame the banks," he said, taking borrowers to task.

"They say, 'I want the great American dream. I want it now and I'm not going to wait until I put some money in the bank.' . . That's where we lost the moral compass of saying no to people who did not have the earning capacity to support a mortgage."

(New York Post)

Emily Brill weighs in on the Eldridge

On her Essentially Emily: Confessions of a 5th Avenue Misfit site, Emily Brill had this to say about the Eldridge, you know, the hidden lounge/restaurant on Eldridge Street with only 13 tables "manned by chaperones, butlers, table attendants, and a hospitality consultant"...:

The Eldridge is a nice space, but indeed, there’s nothing mind-blowing about it–unless, of course, you wanna talk location (and my friends are as obsessed with this neighborhood right now as I am). I know how stupid this sounds but for an uptown girl like me, stepping out of the cab last night on Eldridge Street was like stepping on to a soundstage. Maybe it’s because they had the sidewalk all glammed up for this party and the collision of flashbulbs and the unassuming nonchalance of East Village streets, graffiti and neon is what got me. I know the west village always used to give me this ‘you’re in a storybook’ feel and it still does from time to time–and the bowery can still feel like that during the day but it’s hard to feel like you’re in little ‘untouched’/unchartered new york by night. It’s an incredible feeling.

So whether or not we’re comin’ back to the eldridge, this is an area, I think, that’s going to see a lot of activity this year. But I hope it holds onto everything I described.

Here's the first comment in response to the post:



Related!: Jeremiah looks at the faux-bookshop facade of The Eldridge. What a kick in the balls.

Leaving Manhattan for Hooterville

For no reason, really. The intro to the long-running sitcom Green Acres from 1966.



Seems as if they could have reached a compromise -- just go to Hooterville on the weekends or something. You have to question how happy their marriage was. Sure is fun to over-analyze old sitcoms!

Condo calls

As the Post notes, in a tough real estate market, new buildings are doing whatever it takes to lure these buyers. "In an effort to be competitive, buildings are offering more and more extreme amenities," says Nathaniel Faust, vice president of Citi-Habitats.

Well, let's just have them report all this:

"Recently, rental buildings are going more full-service, and a lot of condos are making moves towards hotel amenities. Buildings going up now are gearing up to sell units over the next 24 months - they're counting on the weak dollar attracting foreigners - by providing the services that hotels do."

That's where Dr. Robert Glatter comes in.

Glatter is a board-certified emergency physician who has worked with high-profile clients - in certain circles he's known as the official doctor of the city's "fashion bitches" - such as Elie and Rory Tahari, Diane von Furstenberg, Devi Kroell and the cast of "Gossip Girl."

But when he's not taking the temperatures of the famous creative class or attending to patients at Lenox Hill Hospital, he's running his new business, Dr. 911. In addition to being sort of an old-fashioned house call medical care service, the business, which employs four other doctors, caters to luxury buildings such as 15 Central Park West, The Miraval and 40 Bond.

"And a lot of busy people - especially corporate types who have difficulty getting away from their desks - long for days of traditional house calls."

While the service might seem charmingly quaint and old-fashioned, it's not really for everyone - specifically, it's not for the poor. Prices vary on a case-by-case basis, but this personalized service does not come cheap.

"We have an upscale clientele," he says. "Sometimes we'll get a call from an outlying area, but the price deters them a little bit. I don't take insurance, and it's the patient's responsibility to submit the invoice to their company for partial reimbursement."

Love the cheesecake photo shoot the Post did for him, by the way.

Finally! Some positive financial news for NYC!

Federal homeland security officials are giving $29.5 million to the New York Police Department to develop a system to prevent a radiological or nuclear attack on the city.

Oh.

Tourists on hand to document our nation's economic collapse

Can't wait to show the kids! These photos were taken minutes after the Dow closed down more than 500 points yesterday. With the NYSE and Federal Hall right here, this is a heavily traveled area for tourists. Still, there were a lot more tourists milling about yesterday. Could have been the lure of the media trucks and lights...and blood.

Meanwhile, down the street. A few people in Tiffany's.



Not so many people shopping for BMWs. Except some dummies.

Dwell95 fiddled after Wall Street burned

About 90 minutes after the Dow closed yesterday, the big doings began at Wall and Water Streets. As Curbed reported yesterday, the Moinian Group, in some unfortunate timing, had scheduled the launch party for their Philippe Starck-designed luxury rental conversion at 95 Wall St. last night. Uh, oops? No matter! Despite a 500-point tumble (collapse?) on the NYSE, the mood was festive at the location known as Dwell95! A tux-clad musician with an electronic fiddle was on the red carpet delighting all who walked by, mostly confused tourists at the onset.

To hold space for the incoming town cars, Dwell95 planners implemented those festive "do not slip" signs indigenous to maintenance crews.

Meanwhile, here's a snippet of the energetic fiddle player's performance. (Oh, yes -- it's "La Bamba.")



I didn't stick around long enough to hear if he did "The Devil Went Down to Georgia."

Looking at the unintended victims of yesterday's stock market meltdown

How about the US Women’s Soccer team? They visited the NYSE yesterday to celebrate their Gold Medal victory in Beijing and ring The Closing Bell.

One argument for not mourning the destruction of Yankee Stadium

"The Yankees are pretending that, with a final, unimportant game this Sunday, they’re leaving the house that Ruth built: the majestic stadium that opened back when Harding was president. Wrong. That park died in 1973. In its place is a typical seventies improvisation, gritty, rickety, and ugly, something not built for the ages but just good enough to get us through the bad times." (New York)

Those who grease the wheels in Manhattan without (shudder) alcohol; and what's the booziest borough of them all?

Page Six Magazine covers an alarming trend: People who don't drink to wretched excess! No!

Meet the Wagonistas
There was a time when the fashion and media industries were known for their bacchanalian ways. Not anymore: The truly ambitious are giving up booze to boost their careers.

But while tastemakers often justify getting loaded as a way to grease the networking wheels, a growing number of ambitious New Yorkers in creative fields like fashion, media and entertainment say they are passing on the cocktails this year. It's not to lose weight and it's not a post-rehab regime. Instead, the impetus is much more mercenary: They're hoping that not nursing a hangover at work will give them a competitive edge in a tight job market.

And here's a stat from the piece:

According to the city's health department, about 16.8 percent of New Yorkers drink excessively, which is defined as imbibing more than two drinks a day for men and more than one drink a day for women, or consuming more than five drinks on any one occasion. Manhattan is the booziest borough of all, with about 23 percent of the population drinking excessively.

More than two drinks a day for a man is excessive? Good lord. What does three drinks an hour for, say, most of Thursday night and the weekend translate to?

Uh, any help here? Someone? Anyone? Jay McInerney?

"These people are probably giving themselves an unfair advantage by not drinking," says Bright Lights, Big City author Jay McInerney. "My friends still drink happily and copiously—except for the ones who went to rehab. These [ambitious teetotalers] are probably missing out on a certain amount of fun."

The last frontier on the LES?

Million dollar condos abound, of course, on the fringes of the Lower East Side, with River Ridge setting up shop on the wilds of Ridge Street and Karl Fischer soon to follow on Ridge and Stanton. Not to mention 32 Clinton at Clinton and Stanton. Still, for better or worse, there's still at least one stretch of the area where you can enjoy what the neighborhood used to look like -- the empty lot and few dilipidated buildings on Attorney Street between Rivington and Delancey. (Seems like the perfect place for a secret club!)






I have a few more shots from earlier this summer on my Flickr page.

Wishful thinking...?

For some reason I was looking at the CBGB Web site...Guess it hasn't been updated in a few years...And whatever became of the Vegas dream?

Going Nightclubbing

Speaking of CBGB...thanks to Stupefaction for telling us about the new Go Nightclubbing Web site.

NIGHTCLUBBING
THE ORIGINAL PUNK ROCK MUSIC VIDEO SERIES
by PAT IVERS and EMILY ARMSTRONG
Live videotaped performances from 1975-80
Described by the New York Times as, “The Lewis and Clark of rock video”, video artists Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong spent their nights from 1975-80 documenting the burgeoning punk scene in nightclubs around New York City. Ivers and Armstrong were acutely aware of the significance of that era and their material captures the sprit of the time. The edited results were shown on their weekly cable TV show NIGHTCLUBBING. These performances have been compiled and presented as the ultimate wish-I-was-there document of the groundbreaking punk, new wave, no wave and hardcore movement.

Lehman Brothers at night

Looks rather peaceful.


[Via Nickingle on YouTube]

"So on Monday we'll get to see what the failure of an investment bank with $600 billion in assets looks like." (Time.com)

A Nick Zedd retrospective

A little late on this...there's a Nick Zedd retrospective tonight and Sept. 28 at the Gene Frankel Theatre on Bond Street between Lafayette and the Bowery. (Here's more on Zedd's Cinema of Transgression.)

What follows is Thrust in Me, a short Zedd did in 1985 with Richard Kern in the East Village. (Zedd has both lead roles.) The song is "John Coltrane Stereo Blues" by The Dream Syndicate.

Oh, please be warned if you're new to this. It's graphic. Very, very NSFW. Oh, and nice panoramic shot of the neighborhood at the 7:26 mark.

The 57-story condo coming to 56 Leonard

From the Daily News on 56 Leonard Street:

The Swiss architects of the iconic Bird's Nest stadium at the Beijing Olympics are bringing their innovative style to New York City with a translucent glass skyscraper designed to look like houses stacked in the sky.

Architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron's $650 million, 57-story condominium featuring dramatic, cantilevered terraces is slated to begin going up in mid-October in the trendy Tribeca district in lower Manhattan.

Curbed has been following the story.

Anyway, this building won't look out of place at all! A fine addition to our city of glass.

"Giuliani will lock my ass up"

The Post reports: "Squeegee men -- the window-washing bane of city streets who became a symbol of Big Apple blight and a top target in former Mayor Rudy Giuliani's crusade to crack down on quality-of-life nuisances in the 1990s -- are making a comeback."

Noted from the article:

One press-shy squeegee guy, apparently still thinking it was Rudy's reign, asked The Post not to write about him.

"Giuliani will lock my ass up," he said. "There will be 30 cops up and down this street."

“Oh, God, we’re living in a hell that I can’t even begin to describe!”

That's Arthur Nersesian, the 49-year-old playwright, poet and novelist, talking about the changes in his home neighborhood of the East Village. He's the subject of an entertaining profile in the Times today.

Unlike many New Yorkers who inhabited the East Village of the 1980s, Mr. Nersesian seemed to remember every aspect of that gritty and often dangerous time with fondness. Even as he described the endless parade of prostitutes down East 12th Street or the bonfires set by the homeless in Tompkins Square Park, there was a palpable tenderness to his voice.
“There was a sense of community there,” Mr. Nersesian said. “I couldn’t walk down the street without saying hello to someone. You’d see Allen Ginsberg all over the place, and you’d see the other Beats.
“I wasn’t the biggest fan of the Beats, but there was an exemplary quality to the artist as citizen. You think about artists today in our society, and they’re kind of removed. You don’t really know them. When Ginsberg died, a definitive quality from the East Village — at least from my East Village — was gone.”
Perhaps inevitably, the East Village of today, with its fashionable bars and restaurants and its gleaming glass towers, fills him with despair. “Oh, God, we’re living in a hell that I can’t even begin to describe!” Mr.
Nersesian said mournfully that day at the diner. “It’s amazing how memory really does become a kind of curse. If I was just coming to the city today, I’d probably think, ‘Oh, this is a really interesting place,’ but it’s trying to tell people, ‘You know, there was a war fought here, a strange economic, cultural battle that went on, and I saw so many wonderful people lost among the casualties.’ ”

Also from the article:

In his 1992 play “Rent Control,” Mr. Nersesian incorporated an experience he had when he returned to the office tower that had replaced his childhood apartment.
“I tried to go to the exact same space,” he recalled, “and it turned out to be the romance division of Random House or something. I walked in and the secretary said, ‘Can I help you?’ And I think I tried to convey to her that this was where I lived for the first 10 years of my life; this space here was where I was bathed in the sink. And she looked at me like I was a nut.”

[Image: Andrew Henderson/The New York Times]

Welcome to our pretty bank branch

We've written before about the increase in bank robberies in NYC this year. Fancy bank branches abound on seemingly every corner of some East Village streets. It's so convenient! On the topic of the increase in bank robberies, the Times makes this observation today:

A look at the data shows that bank robbers seem to prefer some of the inviting environments of the newer banks on the city scene. Sovereign, Wachovia and Commerce — with plants arrayed on marble floors, jars of lollipops set on low-slung counters and no bullet-resistant barriers between tellers and customers — have some the highest ratios of robberies to branches.

I wonder when bank officials will realize these sparkly new branches are in the middle of an enormous metropolitan area, and not in Pleasantville USA...

EV Grieve's Fashion Week in Review (with apologies)

A tour of the LES

Big eater Crazy Legs Conti takes on the LES food scene here in this video clip...it's not that old...interesting to see what has changed since then...and what hasn't...

Under the Brooklyn Bridge

For Friday: "Nightmare In Pink Dead Cool"

The Chrome Cranks. The lone comment to this video on YouTube:

one of the best NYC bands when rock n roll in NY was really wild and pure... fuck williamsburg's pussie bands

Fashion Week photos found in the EV Grieve in-box

Was nice of someone to send them to me. 

Sweetness

Hunter-Gatherer takes a look at "21" via one of my all-time favorites, Sweet Smell of Success.

As he notes:

This movie is a must see for film buffs (especially NYC ones) but what struck me, while reviewing the film for the first time in a decade, is the ever-so-timely portrayal of media corruption.

Christmas on Mars at KGB

Not much of a Flaming Lips fan these days*, but this looks interesting and unwatchable at the same time. From a press release!:

This fall, legendary cult-rock band The Flaming Lips, Warner Brothers Records, and film company Cinema Purgatorio will bring the long-awaited Christmas on Mars: A Fantastical Film Freakout Featuring the Flaming Lips to offbeat venues across the country.

Christmas on Mars will open theatrically in New York City on September 12, 2008, presented in a custom-designed cinema at the KGB Complex at 85 East Fourth Street, screening in high definition video and the custom designed Zeta Bootis Mega Supersonic Super-Sound Surround System, which the Lips created for the film. Christmas on Mars will screen at unusual showtimes, the first of which have been have been announced (and some have already sold out) on cinemapurgatorio.com. Showtimes will include 7am and 9am showtimes, so audience members can go to Mars before they get to work, as well as some traditional evening showtimes.

Christmas on Mars is the directorial debut of Wayne Coyne, lead singer and frontman for the Flaming Lips. Coyne co-directed with George Salisbury, an audiovisual technician who works with the band. Coyne constructed much of the set - representing Mars - in his Oklahoma City backyard.

The film does indeed take place during Christmastime on Mars, as the colonization of the Red Planet is underway. But when an oxygen generator and a gravity control pod malfunction, Major Syrtis (the Lips' Steven Drozd) and his team (including the Lips' bassist Michael Ivins) fear for the worst. Syrtis hallucinates about the birth of a baby, and many other strange things. Meanwhile, a compassionate alien superbeing (Coyne) arrives, inspiring and helping the isolated astronauts.

More details here.

*It was at this point when I stopped liking the Flaming Lips:



** OK, that was actually pretty cool. And that dialogue!

Report: Cops interrogate Leftover Crack manager; defend using Taser during arrest

Lincoln Anderson reports in The Villager:

Following the arrest of Scott Sturgeon, 32, lead singer of the punk-rock band Leftover Crack, and four of his fans in the East Village last Friday evening, three men identifying themselves as Police Department Internal Affairs Bureau officers paid a surprise visit to Bill Cashman, the band’s manager, Monday afternoon. The three officers easily entered the building, on Avenue C near 10th St., since its front door had reportedly been left open due to ongoing construction inside.

Later in the article we hear from Deputy Inspector Dennis De Quatro, Ninth Precinct commanding officer, who defended the use of a Taser on one of the people arrested at Tompkins Square Park last Friday night.

The man was tased through his shirt on his upper torso for three seconds with the Taser being used in “touch-stun mode.” The deputy inspector noted that a Taser’s other mode is to shoot two electrically charged darts, which are attached to wires on the Taser, up to 20 or 30 feet. These darts puncture the person’s skin and leave wounds that could get infected, he said. The “touch-stun” technique — in which the Taser is manually pressed against the individual — is safer, especially at close range, he noted.

More EV Grieve Donut Social coverage here.