The many lives of the Roseland (For Part 2: Man, it's so loud in here)

I love the Roseland Ballroom on West 52nd Street. Not so much as a concert venue. But for its history. Since 1919, the Roseland has been an ice rink, a roller rink and a dance hall. Blogger Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company provides this summary:

The Roseland Ballroom was built in 1919 at 1658 Broadway, near 51st Street. It was the second in a string of three Roselands built by Louis Brecker (the original was in Philadelphia). Brecker envisioned a cheap but respectable dance hall: "home of refined dancing." It became one of America's most famous dance halls, in part due to its booking of upcoming jazz greats such as Fletcher Henderson and Louis Armstrong, in part due to stunts like female prizefighting bouts and law-breaking dance marathons.

After a couple of decades, it jacked up it's refinement factor in order to become "family entertainment": more decor, less taxi dancers, no jitterbugging, bouncers in tuxedos. In 1956, it moved two blocks into a former ice rink at 239 West 52d Street. The older Roseland was demolished.

(Cosmodemonic goes on to discuss how the Roseland played a key role in Henry Miller's "Tropic of Capricorn.")

As the New York Times noted in October 1996: The 1939 ''W.P.A. Guide to New York City'' described Roseland as ''the downtown headquarters for hot music and such urban dance steps as the cake and collegiate, the Lindy and the Shag.'' Tommy Dorsey, Count Basie and other big-band names played Roseland in the 1920's and 1930's.

Roseland was almost lost in the 1990s:

Roseland's dance floor is magnificent, but the rest of the interior is now well beyond shabby, with faded carpets and worn paint. The curved Iceland ceiling is painted black but marked with many holes; otherwise there is no trace of the rink. The gallery level is a warren of empty rooms, littered with debris. Graffiti and a black, spray-painted ''body piercing booth'' are leftovers from rock concerts that take over the house a few times a month -- ''Soul Coughing'' is due on Nov. 29.

Despite its age and condition, Roseland Dance City is a fascinating leftover in New York entertainment culture -- there is no hype, no flash, no marketing, no product tie-ins, just the swirl of dancers from expert to beginner. It's one of those unprocessed experiences that we say we want, but which may vanish very soon.

The Roseland survived, of course. Again and again. Different locations. Different genres. New tastes. A Time magazine feature from 1957 reports:

When a public dance hall named Roseland opened on Broadway in 1919, smart young people had recently deserted the waltz for the foxtrot, were just beginning to master the delicate nuances of the shimmy. Sam Lanin and his Ipana Troubadours were on the bandstand, thumping out such Ziegfeld Follies hits as Mandy and You Cannot Make Your Shimmy Shake on Tea. Since that distant New Year's Eve, generations of stag-line Romeos and their girls have bunny-hugged Lindy-hopped, Charlestoned, big-appled black-bottomed and jitterbugged under Roseland's star-studded ceiling. At 1 o'clock one morning last week the stars winked out for the last time; the following night Roseland reopened in glittering new quarters, billed as "a magnificent metropolis of melody and merriment."

Family Entertainment. Although professional nostalgics lamented the demolition of the old Roseland building as the end of an era, the dance hall had actually been changing its function for a long time. It started as a refuge for the "poor young clerks" Scott Fitzgerald wrote about; it evolved into a place of family entertainment.

Part 2:

Whew. Anyway! Why bring all this up? I was there last night for the My Bloody Valentine show. I won't get into all that here. But I will in the comments if anyone wants to chime in....Take it away Alex.

From last night:

P.S.

Oh, speaking of Roseland, here's a snippet of 1977's Roseland, the Merchant-Ivory film starring Christopher Walken:

About that "giant-robot laboratory" on East Sixth Street

As you may know, New York has a great piece this week on 190 Bowery, a space that I've long been curious about. Wendy Goodman gets right to it in her lead:

The building at 190 Bowery is a mystery: a graffiti-covered Gilded Age relic, with a beat-up wooden door that looks like it hasn’t been opened since La Guardia was mayor. A few years ago, that described a lot of the neighborhood, but with the Bowery Hotel and the New Museum, the Rogan and John Varvatos boutiques, 190 is now an anomaly, not the norm. Why isn’t some developer turning it into luxury condos?

Because Jay Maisel, the photographer who bought it 42 years ago for $102,000, still lives there, with his wife, Linda Adam Maisel, and daughter, Amanda. It isn’t a decrepit ruin; 190 Bowery is a six-story, 72-room, 35,000-square-foot (depending on how you measure) single-family home.

There's another building that I've been curious about: 421 E. Sixth Street between First Avenue and Avenue A.



I was told years back that an artist lives there. Indeed.

According to Forgotten New York: "421 was a Con Edison substation built in 1920-21 that converted direct current to alternating. It is at present (2008) the studio of modern artist/sculptor Walter De Maria. His most famous installation is The Lightning Field (1977) is permanently installed in the desert at Quemado, New Mexico, and was commissioned by the Dia Art Foundation, who run the site and provide accommodation for visitors. The work consists of hundreds of stainless steel rods projecting from the ground to a uniform height of around six metres (20 feet). Rows of 20 rods extend for one mile, while rows of 16 extend for a kilometre, making a square grid of standard and metric proportions. The work is designed to attract spectacular lightning strikes."

NY Songlines has a few more details: "This building, which looks like a giant-robot laboratory, was actually built in 1919-21 as a New York Edison transformer substation — turning DC current into AC. Since 1980 it's been owned by artist Walter De Maria."



Wonder if we'll ever get to see the inside of this space...

Related:
Miss Representation on 421 E. Sixth St.

The money shots of Wall Street (so to speak)

Someone did a nice little edit job on Wall Street, as in the 1987 Oliver Stone film.

An appreciation: A sign that I like

On Cherry Street. Haven't seen much lately about this site becoming a condo...

Looking at a review of Candace Bushnell's new book

Read Doree Shafrir's review of One Fifth Avenue, the latest from Candace Bushnell, in the Observer.

Bonus excerpt:

[T]he new breed of youngsters intent on highlighting the hypocrisy of their elders is meaner and, well, snarkier than their forebears, Ms. Bushnell implies. Their number is led by a smarmy 20-something named Thayer Core, who lives in a tiny East Village walk-up and yet feels qualified to lob his verbal grenades at the rest of Manhattan (including several residents of One Fifth). Thayer is a despicable character, and it’s not a stretch to imagine that she was personally offended by things written about her on Gawker (where, full disclosure, I used to work). And yet, Ms. Bushnell’s caricature of the Web site and its writers falls victim to the very same snarky, self-satisfied kind of writing she accuses the new generation of perpetuating.

Can't wait for the series!

[Via Gawker]

On returning to the 1970s in 2008 and beyond

Nick Paumgarten on the possible implications of the Wall Street meltdown (under the heading in The New Yorker this week of Dept. of Magical Thinking):

For example: let’s postulate that the collapse of the financial-services industry spells catastrophe for New York City, a return to the nineteen-seventies. Lost tax revenues, budgetary shortfalls, unemployment (not only of those in finance but of the hordes who rely on them), plunging property values, vanished retirement accounts. Let’s cut this up, like a pile of bad debt, into various strips, and, as the rating agencies did to various slices of subprime-mortgage debt, take the top layer and, abracadabra, rate it triple A. Throw out the other strips, the grim probabilities—the crime, the decaying infrastructure, the hardship all around, the heroin and the syphilis. What do we have left? The bright side: maybe Manhattan will become affordable again, and cool, and dangerous. Dangerous in theory, but not to you or your family and friends. Dirty, but in a good way. Night clubs where anything goes. Art, music, Billy Martin.

Four sightings in the neighborhood — officially a trend?

Yes, yes...I know that one is a Mini Cooper...it's still small.  Anyway, I included it so that you can see how much LARGER it is than the Smart Cars...

Speculating about the future of 159 E. Second Ave.

We've been keeping our eye on 159 E. Second Ave., the hallowed ground that was home for 27 years to the beloved A. Fontana Shoe Repair. There has been lots of activity there.  A tipster reported last night that the plywood was down, though the windows are still covered with paper. This is what we spotted earlier with our special spy-cam:



Sure, we could just do a little reporting and find out what's going in here...but let's just wildly speculate!...Because no matter how ridiculous our guesses, we probably won't be too far off! Based on the kitcheny-type wares, I'm going with a high-end dessert shop. Because this area desperately needs more dessert places!

At least there's good news at the tailor shop next door, as Jeremiah reported.

What happened when no one was looking

Airoots has an interesting essay on creativity and the creative process:

New York was creative when no one was looking. SoHo, The East Village, the Lower East side in Manhattan and more recently Williamsburg in Brooklyn were cultural hotbeds for as long as the city was bankrupt and they they were ignored. That’s when people like ABC No Rio and CBGB could squat buildings and Futura was spray painting subway tunnels, when artists that are now established, recognized and often no so inspired anymore where still crackheads, gays, punks, bums and squatters. There was nothing there to see. No hype and no romance. These much venerated places were at the periphery of a city on the verge of a breakdown.

Now that New York is universally recognized as a creative city all we see instead of artists are art directors, graphic designers, ad producers and so on. Established and wannabe communication professionals, commercial artists and other marketers come enmasse to such cities, where they know there is an industry that can use their know-how. Rather than breaking new grounds this so-called “creative class” recycles tired clichés and remixed proven formulas. New York is good at attracting people from elsewhere, but doesn’t breed much local talent anymore. Of course just like everywhere pockets of innovation remain. New York is big enough and its periphery is full of creative tension and driven people. But as a rule, creative work seems to happen where no one is looking.

The dog brothel and other fine works by Joey Skaggs

Meine Kleine Fabrik brings us this video and story of media hoaxster Joey Skaggs. Among his alleged early work:

In 1968, Skaggs noticed that middle-class suburbanites were going on tours of the East Village to observe hippies. Skaggs subsequently organized a sightseeing tour for hippies to observe the suburbs of Queens. On Christmas Day, he created the Vietnamese Christmas Nativity Burning to protest against the Vietnam War.

In 1969, Skaggs tied a 50-foot bra to the front of the U.S. Treasury building on Wall Street, organized a Hells Angels' wedding procession through the Lower East Side, and made grotesque Statues of Liberty on the 4th of July, again to protest against the Vietnam War.

Also!

Cathouse for Dogs (1976): Skaggs published an ad for a dog brothel in The Village Voice and hired actors to present their dogs for the benefit of an ABC news crew. The prank annoyed the ASPCA and the Bureau of Animal Affairs until Skaggs revealed the truth after a subpoena. ABC did not retract the story (the WABC TV producer insisted that Skaggs had said it was a hoax to avoid prosecution), possibly because the piece had been nominated for an Emmy Award. It was subsequently disqualified.

This short film, directed by Frederick Marx, shows many more of Skaggs's media pranks through the years...



Funny stuff. Though I'm easy. Heywood Jablome cracks me up every time!

The Bowery is nightlife

Down by the Hipster on the new powerhouse destination that is the Bowery:

There are at least 15 bars in a 3 block radius that are packed every weekend, and we are sure that we missed a few. Add in the new hotels, high rise condos, New Museum, pending Keith McNally restaurant, Daniel Boloud's new spot, Matt and Paul's pending space in the Puck Building etc., it will hit you too. The Bowery is nightlife. It's where operators want to open, and where New Yorkers can sip expensive drinks and still step over the homeless who are sleeping outside the Mission. It's feaux authenticity that the youth crave. The Bowery. Shudder.

[Image via Art Knowledge News]

Why strippers are all "moaning and groaning" at the Penthouse Executive Club

Wall Street's financial crisis has trickled down to Manhattan's mammary meccas. A source tells us jiggle joints all over the city are seeing a drop in business, with fewer customers, less bar traffic and a drop in lap dances. "The strippers at Penthouse Executive Club are all moaning and groaning," one insider tells us. "They say they aren't making anything at all since the market crashed." (Page Six)

Noted

HACKENSACK, N.J. (AP) -- The biggest danger for magician David Blaine when he hangs upside down above New York's Central Park for 60 hours next week? Going blind.

That's the analysis of Dr. Massimo Napolitano of the Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey. He is the chief of vascular surgery and is advising Blaine on the stunt.

Napolitano told the Bergen Record for a story Saturday that hanging upside down for a long time increases blood pressure in the head, especially in the eyes. That could lead to blindness.

The doctor doesn't say how long the blindness could last, but he says there's also a risk of swelling and cramps in internal organs.

"As much a part of the fabric of New York City as the landmarks she helped popularize: Magnolia Bakery, Pastis and her beloved Greenwich Village

Page Six Magazine puts Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell on the cover of its new issue.

And we begin:

Honey blond highlights? Check. Sample-size physique? Check. Closet full of designer duds to wrap around said physique? Check. But Candace Bushnell, the creative genius behind Sex and the City and the NBC TV hit Lipstick Jungle, doesn't just look like a character from one of her best-selling novels. (Take your pick: Sex and the City, Lipstick Jungle, Trading Up or Four Blondes.) By the way she lives (a feminist, she eventually married a much younger man) and who she writes about (most famously, of course, Carrie Bradshaw), Candace, 49, embodies a modern breed of New York woman that is as ambitious about love as her career. She is also as much a part of the fabric of New York City as the landmarks she helped popularize: Magnolia Bakery, Pastis and her beloved Greenwich Village.

Candace, who grew up in "upper middle class Glastonbury, Conn.," also recalls moving to New York:

After three semesters at Rice University in Houston, she dropped out to "run away to New York City." Her goal was to become a writer, but when she first moved to Manhattan in 1978 at age 19 she lived in a two-bedroom apartment on 11th and Broadway with three other girls. She had to scrape to pay her $150-a-month rent, often eating $1 hot dogs or a can of soup for meals. Dating was a way to score free meals and meet the city's glitterati.

The article doesn't get into what Candace thinks of a post Sex-and-the-City New York ... or the impact the show may have had on New York.

Still, the article notes that: she is relieved to be out of the dating pool. "There's nothing harder than being single. And things are even harder for young women these days," says Candace.When I was growing up in the 1970s, you didn't have to shave your legs, let alone have a Brazilian wax."

Questions and statements on the LES

At Clinton and Stanton on the LES.


In front of 32 Clinton, the four units ranging from $1.8 million to $2.5 million.

No, really? Seriously? SERIOUSLY?!

At 110 E. Third St. You can't make this stuff up.




So that glassy condo at 110 Third Ave. has a frozen yogurt shop and Bank of America branch in its adjacent retail space. Seems about right.

On Saturday, it looked as if today's forecast would be named after a stipper -- or maybe a poodle

Sprinkles?

Articles that I decided not to read

From NYU's student newspaper, Washington Square News.

Summer's officially over...

and someone apparently didn't get the bike out much during the season...Spotted on 8th Street near Avenue C.

So long to the summer....

"The voice of God" speaks

Wading through all the blather in the media today about the final home game at Yankee Stadium. One thing stands out, though: Bob Sheppard. The Post's Steve Serby did his Sunday Q-and-A with Sheppard, one of the city's most iconic and classy figures. He is the legendary voice of Yankee Stadium who started as public-address announcer in 1951. Unfortunately, an illness has kept the 97 year old (!) from the Stadium this season.

This passage really jumps out. Serby asks him his thoughts on various Yankees through the years.

Q: George Steinbrenner?

A: Do you know, after being there (more than) 50 years, I don't think we ever exchanged more than three or four lines over the time, and they were all cordial.

Wow. Well, given how shabbily Steinbrenner has treated his people, maybe this is a good thing...

Anyway, Sheppard ends on a hopeful note:

Q: The new Yankee Stadium?

A: Tell the people who read The Post I'm looking forward to next year.

He's too weak to attend tonight's last game. Still, as the Times noted in a profile of Sheppard yesterday:

Sheppard’s voice will be heard Sunday night, as it has been all season — as the recorded introduction for No. 2, the Yankee captain Derek Jeter, after Jeter requested this rare favor. The shortstop’s name — JEE-tah — has become a stylized flourish for Sheppard, who is otherwise a purist. Or maybe we all have exaggerated it, as we imitated it. At any rate, when they finally tear down the old place, that echo will bounce off the apartment buildings and bridges and hills of the Bronx and Manhattan — JEE-tah, JEE-tah, JEE-tah — forever.

Sheppard’s legacy is secure — half a century of Giants football games, including the classic 1958 championship loss to Baltimore, his voice and microphone ensconced in the Baseball Hall of Fame (even if the rules have not been bent to induct him along with hallowed broadcasters) and inclusion in a few movies and commercials over the years. (He does have a business side to him.)

Essentially, Sheppard is a simple man, as some poets and clerics and teachers can be termed simple. He never sought the company of the athletes. He had his own niche in life, and he still does, giving thanks that he can attend church each morning, go shopping, and in good weather walk the garden behind his home, always with Mary.

They are the most handsome couple in the world. I used to see them walking the shoreline at Jones Beach State Park in the summer of 1961, but what I did not know was that they were newlyweds. When I sat in their living room a few months ago, they told me how they met, at church, of course, after Sheppard’s first wife died of a brain tumor, leaving him with four children. He invited Mary Hoffman to the beach, where they swam and played pitch-and-putt golf, and, when he was ready, he proposed.

Bob has not resumed serving as a lector at Mass, but Mary reads from the scripture many mornings — “the best female lector I have ever heard,” he said Friday, as if he were saying “No. 2, Derek JEE-tah.”

The Sheppards resisted the Yankees’ kind offer of a limousine for Sunday night, but they do go out.

“You know how old I am?” Sheppard asked. “My daughter, Mary, is celebrating her 50th year in the convent. Can you imagine? And she is still young and beautiful.”

Sheppard in action from last season:

Some photos I took during the summer that don't really a thing to do with anything except that I took them this past summer, which ends today

Third Avenue and 11th Street, 7:50 a.m., Sept. 21

And now a word from our sponsor

In honor of the last game at Yankee Stadium. Or an excuse to run a silly commercial featuring Mickey Mantle.

And now, another word from our sponsor

Ditto.



Hmm, Dextrose food energy...

Breaking records; wasting gas

Hot off the wire! (And I'm assuming this is today...since it's hot off the wire and all...)

NY attempt at record for largest tow truck parade

NEW YORK (AP) -- Get ready for the rumble of 400 or more tow trucks parading through the streets of Queens and Brooklyn.

New York's towing industry plans to break the world record for the largest tow truck parade with a procession of 50-ton rotators, medium-duty trucks, flatbeds and wreckers.

The procession is slated to leave Shea Stadium and cruise along the Van Wyck Expressway before finishing at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. The trucks will then park on the 5,000-foot runway to spell out the words "New York."

Guinness Book of World Records representatives will be on hand to certify the results of the parade. The previous world record was set on Aug. 20, 2004, at Wenatchee, Wash., by a parade of 83 tow trucks.

Hmm, given the price of gas these days....seems like money well spent. Good luck fellas! Anyway, this is all well and good, but does anyone remember what happened last time?

Down and out in NYC

Headline from today's Wall Street Journal:

As Times Turn Tough, New York's Wealthy Economize:
Plastic Surgeons, Jewelers, Yacht Builders Brace for Leaner Times; Saying No to Caviar

And the first few parargraphs:

A nose job in a hospital with a private nurse in attendance had been something of a rite of passage for Joan Asher's children. But when her fourth and last child was ready for her own rhinoplasty recently, Ms. Asher asked her to postpone it.
The financial markets were simply more out of whack than her 16-year-old's proboscis.
"The other noses were more prominent," the stay-at-home mother from a tony New York City suburb in Westchester County told her 16-year-old daughter. She could get hers done when things settled down.
The financial crisis on Wall Street has New York's well-to-do reeling.

No one attended the schmancy Sex and the City DVD release party

Horrors! Writes Sheila at Gawker: There's no satisfying way to explain the party, other than a PR clusterfuck/fuckup. However, maybe people are getting a little tired of the franchise after a six-year TV run, one of the most-hyped movies of the year, and a cultural reach that, on some days, seems to have infected the entire city with luxury brand names and bus tours. What does this say about the sequel? We're guessing nothing good. Sometimes you just have to get the shotgun and take the old mare out behind the barn.

Saturday morning bonus!

Here's a feature on the Sex and the City Tour from April 2004 by Norwegian journalist Henrik Pryser Libell:

Dee Dee Ramone and Spikey Tops on the Uncle Floyd Show

From April 1991.



Who's Uncle Floyd?

Lucky Cheng's leaving the East Village for the wilds of Times Square

News from GNML via Eater.

As Down by the Hipster notes: "We are also happy that it will be bringing its legions of tourists and bachelorette parties with them. Walking past the restaurant on a weekend night is like walking through a gauntlet of cheese. You know what we mean. You know."

Thanks for the memories!

EV Grieve Etc.

A few things...

Avalon to buy Extra Place from City? (Save the Lower East Side!)

The growing number of tent cities (CNN)

Ken remembers HoJo's (Greenwich Village Daily Photo via Jeremiah)

An evening to save the Bowery (Bowery Boogie)

SJP on the possible Sex and the City sequel (Us -- no giggling, please)

Oh, to be rich and white...to have the ways and means to help out other rich white people (esquared)

[Photo via Forgotten New York]

In which EV Grieve panics for a brief moment

Was startled the other day when I saw the ominous-from-a-distance sign hanging above Life at 1oth Street and Avenue.

Just an "apartment for rent" sign. Uh. Carry on. Nothing to see here...

Anyway, forgive me for being a little jumpy. Last time I made note of a building for sale, the business on the ground floor moved...in this case, Vasmay Lounge at 269 E. Houston St.

Previously on EV Grieve:

Rent lives; Life lives on

Did the Donut Social cause a headache for HOWL?

Scoopy's Notebook in The Villager this week has more on the fallout from the Donut Social on Sept. 5:

The L.E.S. Slacktivists’ sound-permit flap spilled over to the recent HOWL! Festival, causing some howls of frustration from festival organizers. After John Penley, Jerry “The Peddler” Wade and Bill Cashman, Leftover Crack’s manager, argued in federal court that the local crust-core band’s planned concert outside the Ninth Police Precinct on Sept. 5 was being held to unfairly low decibel levels, police apparently felt they had to make a better show of monitoring HOWL! sound levels. Artist James Romberger, whose wife, Marguerite Van Cook, ran this year’s festival, as she did last year, said that “The Death to the Police Rally,” as he called it, caused a headache for HOWL! “We were enforced,” Romberger said. “They stood there all day with whatever those were…sound guns, or whatever.” Actually, Romberger said he’s more concerned about the whole “death” trend of late by local singer/activists, from Leftover Crack’s Sturgeon singing “Kill cops” to David Peel leading choruses of “Die yuppie scum!” “Anyone who’s against the death penalty cannot be behind calling for death,” Romberger stated. “Throwing donuts and pies is O.K., funny, ha ha. But calling for death is anti-reasonable and uncivilized.” Speaking of throwing donuts, we hear that the harassment charge against Sturgeon for trying to pelt police with the pastries on Sept. 5 was dropped but that he was asked to perform 200 hours of community service, which he refused.

Previously Donut Social coverage on EV Grieve.

The oldest tattoo shop in Manhattan

City Snapshots had a nice post this week on Mike Bakaty, proprietor of the only tattoo parlor left from the days when tattooing was illegal in New York. His shop, Fineline Tattoo, is on First Avenue between First and Second Street in the East Village.

As CS notes:

Mike Bakaty draws tattoos with a signed picture of Gandhi hanging in a frame over his shoulder: “To Mike. Your man, Mahatma.” He traveled a lot as a young sailor, and the navy is where he got a taste for tattooing. Then, during what Bakaty refers to as the bootleg years – the period in which tattooing was illegal in New York – he started practicing the art behind closed doors on the Lower East Side.

Among the people who have received a tattoo from Bakaty: Wilford Brimley.

Via a link at City Snapshots, here's a brief look at the history of tattooing in NYC:

For 36 years, there were no tattoo shop storefronts in New York City - not even on the Bowery, where modern tattooing was invented in the 1890s. There were no televisions in street-level store windows showing people getting tattoos, no advertising - save for the tattoos themselves - fliers or vague messages in the back of the Village Voice. Every Tom had to know Dick who knew Harry who knew where to get a tattoo.

Tattooing in New York City went underground after the City Health Department found what it said were a series of blood-borne hepatitis cases coming from tattoo parlors in 1961. Tattoos were done on the second story of buildings on Canal Street, in basements, apartments and backrooms.

Noted

The city’s unemployment rate rose to 5.8 percent from 5 percent in July — the largest monthly increase in more than 30 years — as about 5,200 private-sector jobs were eliminated . . . Many of the layoffs came in the tumbling financial sector, which is one of the city’s biggest employers and the provider of nearly one-fourth of its annual wages and salaries. (New York Times)

What a Steel!

Ads have gone up around the East Village, like the one below seen at 8th Street and Avenue C, for The SteelWorks Lofts coming soon to Williamsburg. The sales gallery is opening in October for the lofts that are priced from $495,000 to $1.5 million.


Seems perfect for the East Village resident who's sick and tired of the overdevelopment and condofication of this neighborhood...to move to a neighborhood with even more ridciulous overdevelopment and condofication.

P.S.
What exactly is "handcrafted living"? And what's up with the blowtorch? Why is Jennifer Beals coming to mind?

"Its quirky feel has come to symbolize the avant-garde, rebellious East Village spirit"

The Daily News takes a look at Red Square on East Houston:

Conceived by self-proclaimed radical sociologist-turned-real-estate-developer [Michael] Rosen in 1989, Red Square occupies land that served as an automobile service station for more than 25 years. Rosen's wife's family bought the property in the 1960s, and, he points out, no homes were destroyed and no businesses were displaced.Red Square was designed by graphic artist legend Tibor Kalman, a Hungarian immigrant. Its quirky feel has come to symbolize the avant-garde, rebellious East Village spirit.

Hmmm.

Previously on EV Grieve:
Looking back: Red Square and gentrification

Otis Williams Jr. on Wall Street

Otis Williams Jr. -- street performer, sculptor, poet and self-proclaimed health fanatic and ex-con -- took to the steps at Federal Hall on Wall Street after work Tuesday to talk about being clean and sober and, uh, some other things that I couldn't quite make out. The tourists seemed entertained. And the Federal Hall officer was jovial enough in ushering Otis off the stairs (in the second video).

Story of a City: New York (1946)

Here's a revved-up version via Rocketboom:


[Via AnimalNewYork]

"Freaks" and cheeks

Sorry, a little off topic here, but I wanted to make mention of this....On Monday, cops raided an S&M parlor in Tribeca and arrested two people, including the club's alleged proprietor, Collin Reeve, 35, of Staten Island. They two were charged with promoting prostitution. Whatever! Let's find out more about Reeve. As the Post helpfully notes in its case to assassinate the man's character:

Marie Santiago, who used to be the superintendent of a Staten Island building where Reeve lived for several years, called him a "freak."

"When they left, we found out they were total freaks. We found videos of him and people playing with people dressed up as dinosaurs," she said.

"When they had a party, the people who came were weirdos. They wore all leather. They would wear spikes around their necks, too."