The Grim Reaper at Manitoba's

On Avenue B.

Open Your Eyes

The Lords of the New Church.

Young former Wall Street workers ponder their next move

The Times has a lengthy piece today on the recent college graduates who suddenly find themselves without jobs on Wall Street:

Mr. Menzul, 22, is among the untold numbers of young finance types caught in limbo by the economic crisis, yearning to stay in the nation’s financial heart yet fearful that no market rebound is in sight. It is impossible to gauge how many such strivers are leaving New York or considering it. But interviews over the past two weeks with affected workers and recruiters revealed an emerging portrait of newly minted college graduates suddenly jobless in a frightfully expensive city, and forced to contemplate a change in career — or address.

And:

Adjina Dekidjiev, an operations manager at Manhattan Apartments Inc., said she had been seeing more people trying to break leases, some leaving, some just looking for cheaper places to live.
“A lot of people are doing their math, asking, ‘How can I stay in the city, for as long as possible, and try to find a job?’ ” said Win Hornig, who started the blog bankergonebroke.com after being laid off from JPMorgan in September. “People are definitely going to leave the city if the market doesn’t come back. It’s just too expensive.”

And before you make a smartassy, ha-ha comment, the Times wants you to understand this:

Many in New York have delighted, at least a little, in a sense of schadenfreude over investment-banker woes, having viewed them as a greedy breed that helped homogenize and gentrify the city. But the market crisis has already had widening ripple effects, and many young people working in jobs related to the finance sector were never making a mother lode.

Met Food lives

Good news from Scoopy's Notebook this week: "Met Food supermarket on Second Ave. and New York University have finally settled on a lease that will allow the market to keep serving the East Village customers who depend upon it and championed its cause so fiercely." (The Villager)



Now, perhaps, can they take down the sale sign for clam shell salads? I took this photo Aug. 30. And the sign was still up the last time I walked by...

Another season comes to a close at Belmont Park

The Fall Championship Meet at Belmont Park ends Sunday. The Park will be dormant until the spring.

To commemorate the end of the season, here's a look back at Belmont Park fashions in 1957...If we shot this today, how many of the spectators would be wearing sweats or cargo pants?

Fatcats to pay top dollar for chance to heckle Jets upclose

By now, no doubt, you have already registered for the ultra-supreme tickets at the New Jets Stadium. Check out the Coaches Club...where you can stand on the field -- just five yards off the Jets bench! Oh, and access to a private 20,000 square-foot bar and lounge!



As the Post reports, at least one fatcat has already overpaid, which prompted giggles. And quips!

Looks like the mystery mortgage mogul who shelled out $400,000 for the rights to buy the two best seats in the house for Jet games fumbled the timing of the market.
That's because the "personal seat licenses" for nearby seats in the much-hyped Coaches Club section at the new stadium are selling for less than a third of the price the fat-cat fanatic paid.
"Maybe he's used to overpaying for assets," quipped Kyle Burks, president of Season Tickets Rights, referring to the current mortgage meltdown.

He must now also fork over another $14,000 per year for his actual season tickets.

And check out the incredibly life-like artist rendering...And just what is going on with head coach Eric Mangini on the far left?

Is the game in his pocket?

Extra Place gets its first tenant...And it's dessert (shocker!)

Terrifying news from Time Out New York's The Feed yesterday afternoon (via Curbed):

This just in from budding chocolatier Rachel Zoe Insler, previously of the pastry kitchen at Union Square Cafe and now the owner and mastermind of the soon-to-open Bespoke Chocolates...Two pieces of good news (we cherry-picked the best for you):

(1) BESPOKE CHOCOLATES HAS AN OFFICIAL ADDRESS!

The lease on the shop has been signed and it looks like our fabulous landlord will be turning over the keys on Halloween. Scary, yes, but also exciting! By the end of November, you will be able to visit us in the East Village at 6 Extra Place, New York, NY, 10003.

Two pieces of good news? I didn't make it to that second piece of good news in The Feed post. Now can someone tell me what the first piece of good news is?

Extra Place coverage on EV Grieve is here.

Tonight: Episode 3 of "Life on Marzzzzzzzzzzzzz"

Tonight at 10, we will bravely soldier on and watch "Life on Mars."

Meanwhile, Hunter-Gatherer, an aficionado of classic TV from here and abroad, weighs in today on the U.S. version of "Mars":

Hollywood, ladies and gentlemen, is now officially out of ideas. The first two episodes borrow so heavily from the UK version that one wonders at first if ABC bothered hiring writers at all for the domestic offering. But after watching a bit of the show I quickly realized that dialogue this flacid could only be made in the good old USA. Is there such a thing as TV karaoke?
I love Harvey Keitel, and I really like Michael Imperioli and Gretchen Mol. But good actors as they are, they are all hogtied by a dreadful script that attempts to Americanize a UK concept for pablumesque primetime consumption. In this portrayal of life in 1973, howlers reign supreme and Michael Imperioli’s character, Det. Ray Carling, leads the cavalcade of cringe with lines like “he’s as crazy as a fruit bat at a cranberry convention” ……….wow.

Well put.

And HG ends with a sensible question: "[W]hy not just show the original series?"

See you at 10!

Still on the record

Alex posted some dandy NYC-related album covers yesterday. I love that Kiss "Dressed to Kill" cover.

Meanwhile, here are two that don't need much explanation:

Oh, and as for this Sinatra cover...I have no idea if it's New York...I just like it.

Here comes the bailout...?

When 2-3 apartments in the same building just aren't enough

Tom Cruise has reportedly gobbled up five units in the American Felt Building on 13th Street, where he and Mrs. C have been staying of late. "One they use for a gym, and two apartments are for staff." You may now make a "he must have a big staff" joke. Or not. (Page Six)

Previously on EV Grieve:
Noted (ZOMG edition)

At old Yankee Stadium before Game 1 of the World Series

The Phillies beat the Rays 3-2 in Game 1 of the World Series last night in St. Petersburg, Fla. Meanwhile, for this occasion, I ventured up to the Bronx to visit old Yankee Stadium before the game. In no particular order, it was rather cold, lonely and depressing outside Yankee Stadium. Pretty much what I expected. (Except for the cold. Check the weather forecast next time.) Few people were around. Except for the Yankee office entrance and the gift shop, the old stadium was shut tight. I couldn't help but imagine the mob scene right about now had the Yankees not been so underwhelming* this past season...and actually were hosting Game 1 of the Series.

[* open to other suggestions to describe the 2008 season.]

On River Avenue, which runs across from the Stadium, the gift shops and bars were closed for the season. Ball Park Lanes was open -- several teens milled about on the inside. Here's a bit of what Yankee Stadium and vicinity looked like...

Portions of the walls outside the stadium are filled with messages from fans.

Across 161st Street, the new Yankee Stadium looms (lurks?).

The only action was at the venerable Yankee Tavern, which was full with a boisterous happy hour crowd.

I have more photos on my Flickr page.

Many people are trying to hook up right now...and we're watching, so to speak

What happens when you mash Google maps with Craigslist Casual Encounters? Hookupmaps show where the, uh, hookups are happening right now. (Via BuzzFeed)

So who's trying to hook up right now in the East Village...?

For the record

Oh, hello! So don't mind me or Alex here. We're just having a little fun picking out some album covers that feature NYC.

So I'm starting with an easy one...Blondie's "Autoamerican" from 1980.



And I can't say that I'm much of a Gloria Gaynor fan, though I dig the cover to her "Park Avenue Sound" record from 1978.

Historic church on Second Street plans its ruin

Rob at Save the Lower East Side! brings us some troubling news on the development front for the neighborhood. Among the approved projects: The Russian Orthodox Cathedral of the Holy Virgin Protection and Chapel of St. Innocent of Irkutsk on Second Street is planning to add eight residential stories to its current 60-foot height. WTF?

Forget James Cramer and his ilk, how would Joey Ramone invest in this troubled market?

Given our recessive economy, Theresa K. at Punk Turns 30 asks a sensible question, Where is stock market wiz Joey Ramone when you need him? Indeed! As she notes, "While Joey Ramone made his mark in public singing songs like 'Teenage Lobotomy' and 'Cretin Hop' and seeming to endorse a loser way of life . . . in reality, he was very well aware of his stock portfolio. Yes, the man had investments. He was no dummy although he played one on (m)TV."

This article in the Guardian UK from July 2006 examines the friendship Ramone struck with the Money Honey, CNBC's Maria Bartiromo. At first, though, she igonored his e-mails when they first appeared in 1998. Probably just another weirdo!

After a while though, curiosity got the better of her and Bartiromo, arguably the most recognisable business journalist in the United States, replied. "I started getting e-mails from him and he would say Maria, what do you think about Intel or what do you think about AOL and I thought who is this person emailing me? It's crazy, he's calling himself Joey Ramone," she recalls. "Sure enough it was him and we developed this friendship. And he was attuned to the markets. He really understood his own investment portfolio. Joey Ramone was a fantastic investor."

Ramone, of course, also wrote the song "Maria Bartiromo," which appeared on 2002's "Don't Worry About Me," the first posthumous release to come from his estate.

As the song goes:

What's happening on Wall Street
What's happening at the stock exchange
I want to know
What's happening on Squawk Box
What's happening with my stocks
I want to know
I watch you on the TV every single day
Those eyes make everything OK
I watch her every day
I watch her every night
She's really out of sight
Maria Bartiromo
Maria Bartiromo
Maria Bartiromo

Bartiromo had this to say about the track:

"He said to me Maria, I wrote a song about you and he said just come down to CBGBs in Manhattan, be there at midnight. I said, Joey, I'm sorry to tell you but I have to be on the air at 6am and I can't be anywhere at midnight except in my bed, so I didn't go." Instead, at Ramone's urging, she sent a camera crew. "Sure enough, the cameraman came back with the tape and there's him and his band with this song Maria Bartiromo and I just love it. It's a tremendous tribute. I just love that. It's great, just great."

Here are two versions of the song....the first with some Money Honey cheesecake...

An erection year cover up?

The McCain/Erection '08 poster I saw this past weekend on Seventh Street and Avenue C...



...has been replaced...



Conspiracy theories anyone?

OK, I think we get it...

Avenue A near 12th Street.

Hanging out on St. Mark's Place

Another view of the coming recession

Last Tuesday, Jeremiah had a post with a photo of "the recession" graffiti at the "coming soon" Capital One branch on 8th Street and University. Meanwhile, I just saw the front page of last Friday's Washington Square News:



I really like this shot by WSN photog Ben Norman. Perhaps this will be one of the iconic images of this time in NYC...

Happy 100th birthday John's of 12th Street

Just got a press release announcing that East Village mainstay John's of 12th Street "is celebrating their 100th year anniversary on Thursday, Oct. 23 by rolling back the prices on their menu to approximations of those available in 1908."

The release included a few historical tidbits. Like!

During prohibition Momma John kept a "hootch" still in the backyard behind the kitchen and made wine in the basement. John opened a speakeasy upstairs and patrons would enter through the restaurant, where he served Momma John's brews in espresso cups in case of a raid. To celebrate the end of prohibition, John put candles on each of the tables in the restaurant and started the wax candelabra which is still in use and being added to nightly in the back room.

And celebrities!

Patrons though the years include an eclectic range of bold face names including Jackie Kennedy (who brought her young family in for spaghetti dinners), Ben Stiller (who dines with his parents), Pete Townsend (lore has it he sketched the idea for Tommy on a napkin), Christian Slater (who had his 9th birthday party in the restaurant's back room), Tom Cruise (who initially went unrecognized and waited patiently for a table for an hour), and Kelly Ripa (her first date with now husband Mark Conseulo was at John's).

Noted

NYU was recently ranked 15th by Global Language Monitor as one of the most mentioned universities in print and electronic media, beating out the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern University and Georgetown University, among others. The study measures university appearance through every accessible database, including print, electronic media and the blogosphere.
Columbia University, however, snagged the number two spot in the study.

(Washington Square News)

NYC on the record(s)

Yesterday, I had a post on revisiting the "Physical Graffiti" cover art 33 years later.

Somehow I've managed to missed the ongoing NYC album art posts at Gothamist. Here, Gothamist proves a little background on how NYC played a prominent role on an album cover...They've covered everyone from Dylan...the New York Dolls...to the Strokes and the Beastie Boys. Good stuff.

[Updated: Alex has video from an MSNBC report on "the death of album cover art.]

Noise, then darkness

Stevengyang posted this video on YouTube titled "235 East 13th Street." Here's the description:

This is a video of the construction that has gone on around us over the past year. The construction has turned our bedroom window into a concrete wall. The wall is so close we can touch it. At then end you see how dark the room is even at 3 pm during the day. At least its not as loud anymore.

Ugh. What a nightmare. Mrs. Grieve and I moved out of an apartment on the LES around the time when rumors were circulating that the empty lot next door was becoming a six-story building with retail on the ground level. Sure enough, there's now a spiffy new apartment building on that space. We had five windows in that apartment, including three that faced the lot. The apartment was dingy as it was -- can't imagine what it would be like now.

Perhaps developers should be sentenced to live in apartments next to their construction zones to experience all this firsthand.

Previously on EV Grieve:
The dog days of summer

A New View of the Lower East Side (I'll say!)

Meanwhile, the above post made me curious about the 19-story Ludlow Hotel rising on, uh, Ludlow, right behind The Ludlow. (Clever, these names!) What do you do if you forked over money for a space in The Ludlow with nice southern exposures...which will soon be exposed to a 170-room hotel? (And what about The Ludlow's slogan: "A New View of the Lower East Side...")



Curbed had this shot last month:



Haven't seen mention of the new hotel at The Ludlow site.

They should really update their Web site, too. None of the images reflect the new construction going on next door. Seems a little misleading to me...

Nancy Spungen 30 years later

New York magazine has this feature this week:

The Day Punk Died
Thirty years ago this month, the death of Nancy (of Sid &) effectively ended New York’s early punk scene. It’s been easy to hate her since — maybe too easy

In the article, Karen Schoemer speaks with Legs McNeil, among others. She interviews him at the Yaffa Cafe. I love how the article ends:

Legs McNeil doesn’t live in New York City anymore. He bought a house in rural Pennsylvania and doesn’t relish his return visits. He’s now a recovered alcoholic wearing a black Hawaiian shirt decorated with pictures of exotic cocktails and pegged black jeans 30 years out of fashion. He wants his old New York. He glances at a girl in slutty Sex and the City clothes that aren’t slutty anymore, talking on her cell phone while her dining companion gazes patiently into space. The sight brings out a little of his old fire. “I don’t know who the fuck they’re talking to,” he sneers. “Are they talking to other people in restaurants eating breakfast?” Where’s Nancy when you need her? She would have hated it here. She wouldn’t have lasted a minute.

Here's the Sid and Nancy heroin interview from the punk documentary D.O.A.

Noted (ZOMG edition)

Yes, yes...several people have told me that Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are living in the East Village while she is appearing on Broadway...at the American Felt Building on 13th Street near Fourth Avenue. (Or maybe not!) No shortage of photos of Tom and daughter Suri on the street...here they are on Fourth Avenue via the Vulture.


[Photo by Flynet Pictures]

14 year old against Bloomy's third term (no matter where she may actually go to school)

LimeWire has the following post on Rachel Trachtenburg:

At 14 years old, the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players drummer (and daughter of its singer/guitar player Jason and costumer/slideshow operator Tina) is already playing a more active role in local politics than most of us ever will.

New Yorkers are, by now, familiar with the proposal to extend term limits and allow our mayor, Michael Bloomberg, to run for the city's highest office a third time. As part of the process, the city council is now holding public hearings, allowing citizens to argue for or against the plan. On Thursday, Rachel spoke to the council, making the case against allowing Bloomberg to seek a third term.

In her testimony, Rachel told the council that, because Bloomberg raised taxes to give money to the Yankees and move the fountain in Washington Square Park slightly (and continuously sided with landlords on rent stabilization and affordable housing issues, I might add), her family was priced out of their East Village home. Now, they live in Bushwick, where their friends are often mugged at gunpoint. "Any monkey can raise taxes," says Rachel. "No offense to monkeys."

Meanwhile, BushwickBK.com has an important addition to the story:

A minute of research shows that Rachel is enrolled in school in SEATTLE — which means her family’s apartment in New York is at best a business necessity and at worst a luxury or status item, even if it is now in Bushwick. Boo. Hoo.

Physical Graffiti 33 years later

From the WOW Report (via BoingBoing):

Artist Lou Cannizzaro went back to 96 St Marks Place in Manhattan 33 years after that location starred on the cover of Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti album. Robert Plant should have aged so well.

Wikipedia has this about the cover art:

The album's sleeve design features a photograph of a New York City tenement block, with interchanging window illustrations. The album designer, Peter Corriston, was looking for a building that was symmetrical with interesting details, that was not obstructed by other objects and would fit the square album cover. He said:

We walked around the city for a few weeks looking for the right building. I had come up a concept for the band based on the tenement, people living there and moving in and out. The original album featured the building with the windows cut out on the cover and various sleeves that could be placed under the cover, filling the windows with the album title, track information or liner notes.

The two buildings photographed for the album cover are located at 96 and 98 St. Mark's Place in New York City. But to enable it to fit, the building (which is actually a five-story building) had to be cropped out. So for the album cover it became a four-story building instead. The buildings used on the cover were the same that Keith Richards and Mick Jagger were filmed in front of in the Rolling Stones music video "Waiting on a Friend."