Work appears to still be suspended at David Schwimmer's new home at 331 E. Sixth St. following Tuesday afternoon's debris mishap. The city issued a full Stop Work Order. We didn't spot any workers as usual this morning.
Friday, April 6, 2012
All is still quiet at Schwimmer Manor
Work appears to still be suspended at David Schwimmer's new home at 331 E. Sixth St. following Tuesday afternoon's debris mishap. The city issued a full Stop Work Order. We didn't spot any workers as usual this morning.
A Good Friday look at Mary Help of Christians
Mary Help of Christians on East 12th Street near Avenue A opened in 1917... and the ornate Roman Catholic church closed in 2007, as the Times reported. It was part of a realignment by the Archdiocese of New York.
Rumors of development here have been swirling since 2008, when The Real Deal reported that two-thirds of the playground space along Avenue A had been sold in an all-cash deal for $10.4 million.
Some four years later, the Church and adjacent school are still standing. But for how long? We heard from a longtime parishioner back in November, who said: "There are rumors that the church and school property are being sold by the Spring ... I'm afraid that NYU is buying it and going to build dorms." (Reps from NYU and the Archdiocese didn't respond to emails requesting comment.)
There is still a Spanish-language mass at the church every Sunday morning at 11:30. (The sign also mentions an English-language mass, but a church volunteer told me that they did away with that about 16 months ago.)
I went to mass there a few months back. There were perhaps 50 people there, an equal mix of older parishioners and young families with toddlers.
Last week, Off the Grid interviewed Janet Bonica, a parishioner who was born and raised in the East Village.
Here was her reaction to the church closing in 2007:
Our very foundation was pulled out from under us. We were always told that being a Catholic was more than just going to Sunday Mass; it was being a part of a parish community. We had a vibrant, active community, and it was taken away from us.
If Mary Help of Christians Church is demolished, I don’t think I will ever be able to go past that property again.
There are no words to describe the loss I feel. It is as deep as losing a beloved family member and, tied to the loss of the church, is the loss of our beloved Salesians of St. John Bosco. I cannot help but feel that we lost our church because it is sitting on a valuable parcel of real estate.
Indeed. Just look at the aerial view (via Off the Grid)... think what a developer could/would do with this prime real estate... the church, adjacent school and rectory, and playground where vendors set up for the weekend flea markets... (the three buildings on the southeast corner of 12th Street and Avenue A aren't owned by the Archdiocese...)
The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation and other community groups submitted a request to the Landmarks Preservation Commission asking them to landmark the church. The LPC denied the request. (Read about that here.) Janet Bonica said that she has written to Mayor Bloomberg and Cardinal Egan to no avail. She said they have even written the Vatican. As she told Off the Grid, "Obviously nothing helped."
The church in 1920 via the NYPL Digital Gallery ...
The makeshift shelter outside East Village Farms
If you've walked by the former East Village Farms on Avenue A between Seventh Street and Sixth Street early in the morning recently, then you've that seen the space is serving as a makeshift shelter of sorts...
The landlord is still waiting for the city to approve plans to renovate the space and add a rooftop residence.
Photos by Dave on 7th
The landlord is still waiting for the city to approve plans to renovate the space and add a rooftop residence.
Photos by Dave on 7th
Starbucks vs. the Bean
This is from our friends at Neighborhoodr... A quick headcount Wednesday evening:
1 customer inside Starbucks, First Avenue and Third Street
28 customers inside The Bean, Second Avenue and Third Street
Reminders: Tompkins Square Greenmarket is tomorrow
Not Sunday this weekend... so that people can be at home with their families, waiting for the premiere of Lifetime's "Client List" starring Jennifer Love Hewitt. Also, because of Easter.
This is what the southeast corner of East Third Street and Avenue C looked like on March 28, 2012
This year, we'll post photos like this of various buildings, streetscenes, etc., to capture them as they looked at this time and place... The photos may not be the most telling now, but they likely will be one day...
Hunts that involve Easter eggs and not pub crawls this weekend
Saturday at St. Mark's Church In-the-Bowery...
[Bobby Williams]
Sunday at La Plaza Cultural...
Please let us know about any other Easter-related hunts that involve eggs...
Sunday at La Plaza Cultural...
Please let us know about any other Easter-related hunts that involve eggs...
Thursday, April 5, 2012
Tanning season has started in Tompkins Square Park
And now, the East Village via Google's augmented-reality glasses
Our friends at Wheeeeeeee! shared the video below... Nick Bilton at the Times has been writing about Google's sorta-secret augmented-reality glasses — Project Glass. Yesterday, Google shared its first venture into wearable computing in this video that shows the potential uses of the glasses... and the East Village has a starring role...
Please discuss.
Meanwhile, will someone please check on Jeremiah Moss?
Please discuss.
Meanwhile, will someone please check on Jeremiah Moss?
From illegal hostel to residential at 27 E. Seventh St.
Back in April 2010, the city shuttered The Village Inn, the hostel that had been operating at 27 E. Seventh St. near Cooper Square.
[April 2010]The city said that there were illegal hotel rooms in the residential building. The Inn's owners said differently.
In any event, in August 2010, the building hit the market for $6.85 million. Per the listing, "There are many possibilities for this structurally sound and restored building ... [it] would be perfect to house a non-profit organization, but could also be converted to floor-through condos, a rental building or a spacious single-family home."
The other day, we noticed the arrival of a sidewalk shed out front (photo at top) ... and via the DOB, we learned that there are plans on file for an "interior gut rehab" with a change in use from a commercial facility to residential.
The city disapproved the first plans on Feb. 22. Yesterday, the city issued permits for workers to remove plumbing fixtures and "interior non-fire proof structure."
We're not sure of the condition of the building. However, here are two interior shots from the August 2010 sales listing... Before becoming The Village Inn, the building served as a rectory for the pastor and priests of the Order of Saint Basil the Great ...
...and the view from the roof...
The address apparently started life as a hostel back in February 2008, as Down By the Hipster noted. As of March 2011, the building was going for $5.9 million, and then Douglas Elliman removed the listing, according to Streeteasy.
Per DOB documents, developer Jay Wartski remains the building's owner. The Observer has described Wartski as an "accused slumlord and shady hotel mogul."
Previously on EV Grieve:
The Village Inn hostel on Seventh Street closed by city
East of Bowery tonight at Sidewalk
In 2008, writer Drew Hubner and photographer Ted Barron joined together to create East of Bowery, a collection of short stories capturing unvarnished moments from the neighborhood circa the 1980s.
In December, Sensitive Skin published a book version of the collaboration.
Tonight at Sidewalk, Barron and Hubner will present a multimedia version of East of Bowery featuring live music from Kurt (Pussy Galore, Boss Hog, Lapis Lazuli) Wolf. The show starts at 6:30. (No cover charge, but buy a drink or some food or something.) And if you can't make it tonight, they'll be doing it again on April 18 at the Cake Shop on Ludlow.
Here's an excerpt from Hubner's Next Stop Times Square post:
My last morning was like any other. I awakened with my mouth open, in the snow, with no shelter to speak of. Some of us called the empty lots behind the old matzo shop, at the corner of Norfolk and Rivington, the toxic waste dump. One never knew what or who might end up there, shiny needles, wine and other more intimate fluids were exchanged freely, we kept each other warm with song, spit and stories, of better, longer days and places where the sun filtered soft and lovely through fluttering leaves and left Indian paint patterns on our innocent faces.
Maybe there were fifty or so of us in the lot that night, none of our mothers when they walked us to kindergarten that first day and left us in the parking lot imagined their lovely child would ever end up in a place like this, even for one night. Everyone knows vacant lots are haunted by the men who once came home here where the walk was and hugged their pealing children tightly to their chests. It was almost an entire block, big enough for a baseball field. Some of us had fashioned temporary bivouac structures out of discards: cardboard boxes, found pieces of wood and orphaned plastic tarp.
------
Read an interview with Baron and Hubner at No Such Thing As Was.
Find East of Bowery here.
(Semi) Daily Pixel is Baron's photo site.
Find more information about the book at Sensitive Skin.
The BMW Guggenheim Lab finds a more upscale Berlin location to confront comfort
A few weeks ago, organizers for The BMW Guggenheim Lab, last seen on East First Street, canceled its stint in the Kreuzberg neighborhood of Berlin due to an "elevated risk" of threats toward the project.
However, organizers have found a new home in Berlin. According to a report at Spiegel Online:
"[I]t won't be in the famously counterculture district of Kreuzberg, where some residents had launched ferocious opposition to the project. Instead, the traveling lab sponsored by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and luxury carmaker BMW will now be located in the eastern Prenzlauer Berg district — an area known and sometimes even ridiculed for undergoing extensive gentrification, a hot button issue in Berlin. It's unlikely that the project will face quite as much hostility there."
The theme for the first two-year cycle of the BMW Guggenheim Lab is "Confronting Comfort." The Lab will be in Berlin from June 15 to July 29, then it's off to Mumbai.
Previously.
[Image via Spiegel]
[EVG repost] Then and now: The Provident Loan Society of New York
Yesterday, BoweryBoogie noted a potentially troubling sign at the old Provident Loan Society building at East Houston and Essex... Workers had delivered a Davey Drill to the site, as BB pointed out, generally employed before a huge construction/demolition project. One Boogie commenter heard the mega-CVS rumor coming here... (Read his whole post here.) We'll stay tuned for further developments...
Meanwhile, it's a good time to trot out this EVG post from November 2010...
-------------------
I've lost track of how many clubs this space has been in the last 15 or so years... The space was originally The Provident Loan Society of New York, which opened here in 1912... the space served as a studio for Jasper Johns in the 1970s...
Amazingly enough, the classic revival brick building has retained its look through the years... Here are some photos from the NYPL Digital Gallery..... the first photo isn't dated...
from 1936...
from 1935...
and today...
I wonder if, in 1912, locals were annoyed that another bank branch was opening...
Meanwhile, it's a good time to trot out this EVG post from November 2010...
-------------------
I've lost track of how many clubs this space has been in the last 15 or so years... The space was originally The Provident Loan Society of New York, which opened here in 1912... the space served as a studio for Jasper Johns in the 1970s...
Amazingly enough, the classic revival brick building has retained its look through the years... Here are some photos from the NYPL Digital Gallery..... the first photo isn't dated...
from 1936...
from 1935...
and today...
I wonder if, in 1912, locals were annoyed that another bank branch was opening...
Reminders: Say hi to Ben Stiller today!
Also, wonder if the studio found a kid to play Kristen Wiig's son yet...
[Image via]
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Nom Wah Tea Parlor owner among the new CB3 members
The office's news release notes the following new member at CB3:
• A new member of Community Board 3, Wilson Tang, a 33 year old native New Yorker is the current owner of Nom Wah Tea Parlor – a 90 year old Chinatown establishment that his family has owned for 37 years. His father began working at Nom Wah in the 1950s when he was 16, became a manager at 20, and bought the restaurant in 1974. Previously, Wilson worked in finance and owned and operated a bakery on the LES for five years.
The news release includes a link to the full list of Community Board members.
[Photo via Jeremiah's Vanishing New York.]
Full Stop Work Order at Schwimmer Manor
It is quiet outside David Schwimmer's incoming estate at 331 E. Sixth St. this morning. As DNAinfo reported yesterday afternoon, a piece of debris "caromed off a scaffold" and struck a passerby, who EMTs took to Bellevue with a minor arm injury.
Meanwhile, the DOB immediately issued a Stop Work Order on the property.
In the DOB's all-cap style: "FULL SWO ISSUED FOR MISSING GUARDRAILS, OPENINGS AT EGRESS, HOUSEKEEPING, AND INTERIOR SCAFFOLD NO PERMITS."
The city issued a Stop Work Order here back on Nov. 10: "CALLER STATES THE EXCAVATION WORK AT THE LOCATION IS UNDERMINING THE ADJACENT PROPERTY AT 329 6 ST CAUSING IT TO SHAKE."
BoweryBoogie has photos from yesterday right here.
Is Wafels & Dinges opening a café on Second Street and Avenue B?
[209 E. Second St. from April 2011]There is activity in the storefront at 209 E. Second St., the renovated building at the southeast corner of Avenue B. In recent weeks, workers have put up paper over the windows. The retail space had been for rent starting last spring.
A reliable tipster says that Thomas DeGeest, founder of Wafels & Dinges, will open his first café based on the same concept as his popular food trucks in circulation around the city.
DeGeest didn't respond to a message that we sent via Facebook asking for comment.
Anyway, years back, as Andrew Roth pointed out in "Infamous Manhattan," the intersection of East Second Street and Avenue B "probably saw more heroin retailing than any other spot on Earth." Until the NYPD launched Operation Pressure Point in early 1984.
A quick East Village 7-Eleven inventory
Yesterday we took a look inside the 7-Eleven coming soon to St. Mark's Place near Second Avenue... in the former J.A.S. Mart space...
A recap of what's in store.
As we reported on Feb. 24, there's a 7-Eleven in the works for 813 Broadway near 12th Street ... the cheap-o DVD shop recently packed up and moved across the street...
And as we first reported on Jan. 18, a 7-Eleven will open next to IHOP on East 14th Street ... at the site of the shuttered Exquisite DVD Video store ...
Anyway, to thediagram map ... into the 7-Eleven zone...
Soon, you won't have to walk down to the Bowery 7-Eleven for your Cheeseburger Bites...
[Photo by EV Grieve reader William Klayer]
A recap of what's in store.
As we reported on Feb. 24, there's a 7-Eleven in the works for 813 Broadway near 12th Street ... the cheap-o DVD shop recently packed up and moved across the street...
And as we first reported on Jan. 18, a 7-Eleven will open next to IHOP on East 14th Street ... at the site of the shuttered Exquisite DVD Video store ...
Anyway, to the
Soon, you won't have to walk down to the Bowery 7-Eleven for your Cheeseburger Bites...
This is what the northwest corner of the Bowery and Great Jones looked like on April 1, 2012
This year, we'll post photos like this of various buildings, streetscenes, etc., to capture them as they looked at this time and place... The photos may not be the most telling now, but they likely will be one day...
About the 'is a bitch' messages at Cooper Union
In case you were curious about the "is a bitch" messages on the windows of Cooper Union...
It's part of a student art exhibit that opened yesterday... this particular work is by Sarah Crowe and titled "A BITCH IS A BITCH IS A BITCH IS A BITCH."
Details here.
Photos by Bobby Williams.
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
[Updated] Meanwhile, on First Avenue...
Near Sixth Street. Via EV Grieve reader Duke... who notes, at 9 p.m., "situation normal." ConEd is on the scene.
And now with sound...
At El JardÃn del ParaÃso today
El JardÃn del ParaÃso ... between Fourth Street and Fifth Street, Avenue C and Avenue D... More info on the community garden's history here. Photos by Bobby Williams.
Report: Falling debris from the Schwimmer estate injures pedestrian
As DNAinfo reported earlier this afternoon, a piece of debris fell from the under-construction David Schwimmer mansion at 331 E. Sixth St. and struck a pedestrian.
Per DNA's report: "The debris caromed off a scaffold and struck the person, the FDNY said. They were taken to Bellevue Hospital with a minor arm injury."
A 37-year resident of this block between First Avenue and Second Avenue said, "Mr. Bigshot made a mistake tearing down this building. He paid a pretty penny and built some shiny silver thing. He's like a wart on the block. He doesn't belong here."
BoweryBoogie has photos from the scene right here.
City issues Stop Work Permit for sidewalk shed on Seventh Street and Avenue B
EV Grieve Etc: Mourning Edition
Union Square is 'now the very model of a modern major police state' (Gothamist)
E.V. Day and Kembra Pfahler bring a little Monet to the Bowery (DNAinfo)
Alan Moore on the collective spirit of artists in the 1970s-80s NYC (The Brooklyn Rail)
More development for Bond and Lafayete (Curbed)
185-191 Bowery next to fall (BoweryBoogie)
Politicos want the July 4 fireworks back on the East River (The Lo-Down)
Super PAC takes aim at 3 NYC incumbents, including Nydia Velazquez (The Wall Street Journal)
Gutting the classic Manganaro’s (Jeremiah's Vanishing New York)
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