#EricGarner protests continue in force. Follow @joejackson, @bkesling, @ZushaElinson on streets coast to coast. http://t.co/Xxg8YtMuS2
— Pervaiz Shallwani (@Pervaizistan) December 5, 2014
The building was in terrible condition ... It’s been such an exercise in zen and archaeology. As much as we’ve been trying to maintain it, you couldn’t keep everything. We were lucky on their closing night that we didn’t all fall through. Every time we look behind a wall it’s been a major repair. It’s been an endless process.
For over four decades, #9 Bleecker Street has been the headquarters of American and even international counterculture. It is the official home of the Yippies, (Youth International Party) a group of late 60's activist pranksters initiated by the legendary Abbie Hoffman working to create positive social change by mocking and subverting the establishment.
In 2006, the space was converted into The Yippie! Museum and Cafe. a space devoted to preserving the history of American activism and providing a location where young activists can mobilize – such as the Occupy Wall Street movement who used it to stage meetings and hold fundraisers.
In late 2013, the Yippie! Museum was snatched away by unscrupulous real estate developers who specialize in gentrification. They used deceptive and outright illegal tactics to take possession of the space and shut it down, robbing the national activist community and the world of a vital one-of-a-kind resource and historic location.
We are asking for ALL who read this message to join our crusade to Re-Occupy The Yippie! Museum by making a donation!
Dear Customers!!! d.b.a is temporarily closed for renovations. Stay tuned for reopening date - and Yes! new loos!!!
Name: Arthur Nersesian
Occupation: Writer
Location: Angelina Café, Avenue A between 2nd and 3rd Street
Time: 1 pm on Wednesday, Nov. 19
I was born and raised in the city. My grandfather was born on 9th Street and Avenue B, behind St. Brigid’s in 1899, so I didn’t make it very far. My mother’s side is Irish and my father’s side is Armenian. I grew up in Midtown for my first 10 years of life, on 50th and 3rd, when it was still a low- to middle-income German-Irish neighborhood. Our entire block got evicted. We had lived in a 5-story tenement and we paid something like $50 a month for an entire month, rent controlled. Of course the whole block was evicted and now it’s a 75-story office building.
Throughout my life we’d come down to the Village. I had memories of coming to the East Village when my mother was getting her MSW at NYU. I have this indelible memory of seeing the Alamo, the black cube in Astor Place.
But through the early 1970s, Broadway was kind of the Rubicon that you didn’t pass. East of Broadway you were kind of asking for it. I remember in the early 1970s venturing down to the East River Park for the first time and just being amazed by how far east the city went down here.
A story that I always tell is when I lost my virginity. It was a girl who was living between A and B on 7th Street, in 1973 or 1974. I was about 16 years old. I remember, we had the sacred moment and then as I was walking home it was totally desolate and somebody was sort of throwing bottles and cursing at me. I just thought this is not worth losing your virginity for. I was convinced I was not going to make it. I was trying to make it to 3rd Avenue because cabs did not go East of 3rd. I thought, I am going to die here tonight and it wasn’t worth it. The moment that every young man craves, but all I remember is the terror. I don’t remember anything erotic about it. Am I going to make it out of the East Village? I’m never coming back here again.
As someone who was born and raised in the city, I remember seeing it steadily getting worse. I mean, everyone I knew back then kind of saw it as going the way of Detroit. I thought New York was going to go under. Everyone had an escape plan. Everyone had gotten mugged and burglarized. People don’t understand. You paid your rent with your guts and everybody had stories, if not a story. You just saw the city shrinking. I really thought I was going to have to find somewhere else to move to, after three generations.
If you had asked a 1979 Arthur Nersesian how New York would look in 2014, I would have said by this point Midtown would be part of the slum that stretched from Crown Heights and Brownsville and Bed-Stuy. The Lower East Side would have completely encompassed Midtown. You saw the city shrinking, spreading into this metastasized cancer of the city going under.
But I ended up moving into the East Village when I was 22. I had been hanging out here throughout the 1970s as it slowly got better and then in 1981 I moved to where I am now on First Avenue.
The 1980s was the hippie entrepreneur period and there was a lot of collective work. It was affordability, the notion of grabbing a storefront and turning it into an art gallery. You did feel this sense of possibility. I was part of the Lower East Side Literary Journal.
It’s amazing how this area had these wonderful artistic communities within this tight area, these music communities, the punks on up, to the artistic communities, the abstract expressionists on 10th Street, a theatre community, little theatre row, even a film community all packed into this one area with a certain level of overlap. And then you had these overlapping demographics, such as the local Latin community and some of the old time Italian and Jewish community people. They made for a really interesting stew. It was just a perfect balance of economy and artistry and sensibility and a kind of anarchy where you felt like you could do stuff. You felt like you could be left alone. It was just a really great place to grow up as an artist and to find your footing.
I did every kind of odd job you can imagine. Just in this neighborhood, I worked in the St. Marks Cinema on the corner of 2nd Avenue and St. Mark's Place at $3.35 an hour. It was rough. It was the hardest money you ever earned in your life. It’s always that way, the lowest pay and the hardest work. You had to deal with a lot of the locals, the tougher kids, and you had to deal with the alcoholics and addicts and so on. For $3.35 an hour to take a punch, that was a pretty hard way to make a living. After that I managed the Cinema Village over on 12th Street.
That was the invisible, x-factor here. It was kind of unwieldy, tough, and at the same time it kept things very real. Second Avenue from St. Mark's to 5th Street would be lined with people who basically just went through the garbage cans and found what they could and they would put it on a blanket. I’d get everything from clothes, to books, to you name it — old phones, antiques. I don’t know if any of them were actually stolen but they seemed to be recovered. There was this active grassroots economy of people who came here and unfolded their wares.
I always wrote. It took time to learn how to do it. Writing is a wonderful calling but it’s a bad profession. I always equate it to being a heroin addict without getting high. You spend your whole life struggling to do this thing, to set time aside so you can write. You beg, borrow and steal to be able to create the time to do all this work. And I’m regarded as this relative success. My 11th book came out and I’m still doing odd jobs. It’s a hell of a profession.
Gather on the far end of the room and take on formidable opponents at Wii Sports, or just kick back and wait for the man of your choice to approach you with his best pickup line. Wild Wednesdays score you 75-cent drafts and well drinks at Matty's on the Drive. And don't forget to try the signature grape martinis.
The Dee Dee Ramone Exhibition will be held in Dee Dee’s home turf of NYC for the first time ever at the Hotel Chelsea Storefront Gallery (222 West 23rd Street), from December 10th, 2014 – January 1st, 2015. The launch of this exhibit will offer a preview of the soon-to-be-released Fender Dee Dee Ramone Limited Edition Signature Precision Bass guitar, a tool used by the enigmatic Ramone to leave his indelible fingerprint on rock history for generations to come.
This historic exhibition sanctioned by the rock legends’ own estate, will celebrate all of the facets of Dee Dee’s long-lasting artistic legacy: a founding member of the Ramones, one of the most influential punk-rock bassists and primary, prolific songwriter of world famous group, as well as his work in the visual arts – proving that Dee Dee, who began painting more seriously in 1996, was an artist in every sense of the word. The breadth of Dee Dee’s art and achievements is so wide that one of his paintings, to be featured in the exhibit, was recently showcased in a question on America’s favorite quiz show Jeopardy.
In addition to featuring Dee Dee’s art, writings and fashions, the Dee Dee Ramone exhibition will also include iconic photographs by the likes of Bob Gruen, Mick Rock, Chris Stein (Blondie), Ed Perlstein, Stephanie Chernikowski, Keith Green and more.
Previous exhibits of Dee Dee’s work have been held at La Luz De Jesus and famed street artist Shepard Fairey’s Subliminal Projects galleries in Los Angeles, and is now being presented in New York for the first time.
Is RCN whitewashing Loisaida culture and history? Celebrated street artist Antonio "Chico" Garcia and the community group Loisaida Inc. are crying foul after the company nixed their plan to create a mural celebrating L.E.S. “heroes” on the RCN cable building on Avenue C.
[1994, via Richard Colligan]
Our 4th annual tribute to "The Band" and their epic farewell show. Benefitting the great work done by Food for Life at Tompkins Square Park, and their 3x weekly program of serving hot, healthy meals to anyone in need.
@evgrieve Best thrown out bed ever. pic.twitter.com/F2h0y8TgRq
— EdenBrower (@edenbrower) December 1, 2014
