Thursday, November 5, 2020
You rebel scum
Grant Shaffer's NY See
The next Avenue B Flea is Saturday, and here's how they came to be
Ahead of this week's sale, we asked organizer Lisa Marie a few questions about how the flea markets came to be along this corridor of the East Village...
What originally inspired you to organize Avenue B Flea?
Do you foresee it becoming an ongoing event? Are you thinking of carrying these over to the spring?
I organized and promoted events in the scene for years as a musician and also curated a few art shows. When I moved on from that, I still wanted to organize events and noticed how fast fashion was having a negative impact on the environment, so I started organizing large-scale clothing swaps. It was a way to keep clothing out of landfills and donate the leftovers to charity. My favorite place to have them was Lucky on B because of the great backyard patio.
When we couldn’t safely do my swaps there because of COVID-19, the owner, Abby, suggested a flea to increase some foot traffic to the struggling businesses. I took it from there. I called on the vast network of musicians and artists I know who wanted to share their creativity and needed money, so this became the perfect outlet.
Yes. I’d love that but now warm days are limited. I prefer to keep this an outdoor thing, so it looks like the last flea is Saturday, Nov. 14 — if it doesn’t rain. There might be a one off if we get a random warm day on a weekend in December too.
I plan on doing this again in the spring and I’ve heard nothing but positive feedback about it so stay tuned.
Several people have asked if they can sell stuff — residents with extra records and clothes. Can anyone show up or do they need to reserve a spot?
I love to accommodate locals, and I ask that they email me to reserve a spot.
I plan at least a week in advance since there is a lot of planning and organizing in order for this to run smoothly and not be a free-for-all.
I’ve carefully vetted these spots to bring new life to the dead zones created by the closed businesses on Avenue B. It’s unfortunate that there is no city, state, or government support for these local mom-and- pop shops and they have no choice but to close.
I assign locations according to what I think will work best in the area and what type of space a seller needs. Not every table or rack can fit into any space, so it’s crucial that I know who’s selling what and where. I position everyone strategically to make sure entrances and sidewalks aren’t blocked and it’s not an inconvenience to the neighbors.
Ultimately, I hope the extra foot traffic is beneficial to the local businesses and increases revenue for the neighborhood!
What has been the most rewarding part of Avenue B Flea for you?
It’s great to see how resilient New Yorkers can be. We always bounce back and it‘s because we’re community strong. We’re tough no matter what the world throws at us, but for the last few decades, the East Village has lost it’s magic. It’s become sanitized and a lot of the creative types have left.
What I’m seeing now is musicians, artists, and creative types reclaiming the street as a platform. It feels very guerrilla and that was the essence of downtown back in the heyday. I’m trying to preserve some of that, and I designed the flyer to try and capture that old-school aesthetic.
This flea is an avenue to showcase new energy by offering items from artists and sellers you don’t see in the homogenized chain stores. People are also coming out to hear local music, reunite with old friends, and a lot of young people are discovering independent designers, collecting vinyl, and getting a taste of what the neighborhood used to be about.
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Caracas Arepa Bar is closing its East Village outpost after 17 years
Co-owner Aristides Barrios made the announcement on Instagram yesterday (and Eater was first to report on it):
Thank you to all who helped build this place, we did it with our own bare hands. Thank you to those who helped us navigate these 17 years... Those part of the team, now became family and those supporting us over the years, also became family...
Caracas Arepa Bar will continue on with their Williamsburg location.
Barrios and co-owner Maribel Arauj started the business of selling the stuffed Venezuelan arepas here on Seventh Street in 2003. The original location at 93 1/2 E. Seventh St. suffered extensive fire damage in September 2016, and the owners were never able to reopen in the space.
And that storefront remains vacant, along with the former Luke's Lobster next door. This will make three consecutive empty spaces then after service on Sunday.
Previously on EV Grieve:
Veniero's has a temporary new space on 11th Street
Perhaps the NYC institution (since 1894!) is expanding?
Well, yes! But not permanently. Frankie Zerilli, a fifth-generation Veniero family member,
told us that they are renting the space temporarily for holiday storage... and for packing orders (hello cannoli kit!).
Wednesday, November 4, 2020
Noted
🙄
Spotted on the plywood at Target on 14th Street and Avenue A this evening ... photo by Lola Sáenz...
Gallery Watch: Crichoues Indignation at the Hole NYC; Vantage Points at GRIMM Gallery
Text by Clare Gemima
Crichoues Indignation by Caitlin Cherry
The Hole NYC, 312 Bowery: Showing through Nov. 15
The HOLE NYC honestly takes it up a notch with every artist they showcase.
Upon visiting this gallery, I was shocked to see that The HOLE had transformed entirely, with crisply painted walls, a huge amount of incredible new works and a fresh take on their whole space.
Transforming the gallery for Cherry after Cubed, their previous group show (14 international artists) that utilized the space in an entirely different means, allows viewers to understand just how important looking at art is right now, how passionate The HOLE is and how on board their team is with highlighting the current climate of technology and social media running rampantly hand-in-hand with civil unrest, the election and dismantling (or establishing) social hierarchy in 2020.
Cherry's oil on canvas works are engulfing in their larger than life scale, confronting the viewer in a familiar digital landscape with Black Femme figures at the foreground, her gazes highlighting the way social media appropriates this community's body image, sexuality and style without highlighting their skill set or expertise.
An image-run, surface level and vapid Instagram-esque landscape is expressed through Cherry’s undulating use of fluorescent colors, shapes and installation techniques. The artist’s hyper-sexualised characters are based on dancers, bartenders and Instagram models working at cabarets and as online influencers.
I would recommend seeing this show for an impressive take on its online origin (a misspelt tweet that Kanye West made) that expands into a gooey, delicious and psychedelic series of abstract paintings.
Cherry also includes a very large paintings vault, housing several canvases that gallery goers can engage with. The vault speaks to the value of archiving digital works (or lack their of) playing with online’s ubiquitous sugar-coating methods and the over-arching authenticity in the art world today.
PS. The HOLE also has a show on by Anders Oinonen
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Vantage Points by Letha Wilson, Sonia Almeida, Heidi Norton and Claudia Peña Salinas
GRIMM Gallery, 202 Bowery: Showing through Nov. 14
Although the gallery is dominated by a vast amount of captivating and rich work by a male painter, Tjebbe Beekman (Symbiosis), if you get to the middle of the gallery and turn to your left, you will see a small door leading to a descending staircase that you can go down for a refreshing take on (finally) an all women's show!
The work deals with the natural world, conceptually and physically, as the artists criss-cross and mingle with the use of plants, grass, fibre, wax, metal and paper presented in a range of autonomous sculptures, paintings and installations in their final form.
The work in this show is presented on the ground, wall, floor and even corners of the building, challenging conventional installation techniques that demonstrate how space can be manipulated by both delicate and less delicate forms. Nature versus structure, hard versus soft, digital versus organic, etc.
Wilson, Almeida, Norton and Salinas' work compliments each other as much as it highlights the differences in each piece. The most compelling work for me was Reverse timeline (2019) by Sonia Almeida, made out of printed fabric, screen print, fabric pen, cotton, polyester and wool hung from the ceiling, and The Museum Archive by Heidi Norton made out of five panels of glass, resin, plants, beam splitter glass, photo gels, photographic prints, film and an aluminum stand.
This is GRIMM Gallery’s final show before they move to Tribeca.
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Clare Gemima is a visual artist from New Zealand. New-ish to the East Village, she spends her time as an artist assistant and gallery go-er, hungry to explore what's happening in her local art world. You can find her work here: claregemima.com
East River Park updates: Construction pushed to 2021; protected bike lanes proposed for Avenue C and East Houston
Here are the latest updates about the $1.45 billion storm protection project for East River Park:
- The start of construction, which had been slated to commence this fall, will be delayed until the spring of 2021, according to a presentation the city made at a CB3 committee meeting last month. For further reading: BoweryBoogie and Bedford & Bowery.
- The DOT will propose permanent protected bike lanes on Avenue C and East Houston Street to offset the closure of the East River Park greenway once construction starts.
As Streetsblog first reported: "The lanes will run on Houston from Second Avenue to the waterfront and on Avenue C from Houston north to 20th Street, enabling cyclists traveling from below Houston on the existing bike lanes on Pike and Allen streets to connect with the bike network further north."
CB3's Transportation, Public Safety, & Environment Committee will hear the proposal on Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. The Zoom info is here.
- The full CB3 last week voted to preserve the East River Park's Art Deco Track House and Tennis Center Comfort Station.
Via the EVG inbox:
Endorsing a proposal put forth by the Lower East Side Preservation Initiative, CB3 voted to recommend that the buildings, adorned with unique maritime terra cotta decorations, be raised to the Park's new grade level and renovated rather than demolished, thereby protecting them from future rising tides.
The CB3 resolution calls for amending the plans of the City's controversial East Side Coastal Resiliency Project. Those plans call for the demolition of the two structures and their replacement with standardized modern structures of the kind planned for parks all over New York City.
Now the city just needs to buy into the plan.
Meanwhile, tomorrow afternoon at 4, you may may watch the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project Community Advisory Group's next public meeting about the project. Submit questions or comments in advance. Watch on the Pratt Center for Community Development’s Facebook page.
The hotly contested flood-protection plan will bury/elevate East River Park by eight feet as part of the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project.
After Con Ed work, Cafe Himalaya and Prim Thai are reopening
After missing seven days of business thanks to Con Ed work, Cafe Himalaya returns to service today.
As noted last week, Con Ed had to make emergency repairs at 78 E. First St. between Avenue A and First Avenue, forcing the 18-year-old family owned Tibetan/Nepalese restaurant and new neighbor Prim Thai to close.
Cafe Himalaya is open Tuesday-Sunday from 1-10 p.m. Find their website here. Or call: 212.358.0160
Previously on EV Grieve:
Tuesday, November 3, 2020
Report of a death outside the Orpheum Theatre
There was a large police presence here this morning around 8 (photo below by Derek Berg) ...
Sources later confirmed that one of the men who had been sleeping on the sidewalk had died. A friend said that the man had been sick, though he had refused to seek medical treatment.
People have been sleeping here in recent weeks... the group had previously been camped out on the northwest corner of Second Avenue at Seventh Street.
Thank you to Steven ... and 2ndAvenueSilverPanther for the top photo
Businesses along Broadway and the Bowery board up their windows ahead of Election Day
Businesses along Broadway near Astor Place and on the Bowery were among those putting up the plywood in the days before the election. Both corriders were vandalalized and looted in late May and early June at the beginning of the protests. (Here and here.)
Here's a plywood report from early last evening ... in many cases, the businesses were open...
... and on the Bowery...
... and along East Houston between Avenue A and Avenue B... where the vacant storefronts at 250 E. Houston St. got the plywood treatment...
... Steven shared these photos from Second Avenue at Ninth Street ... as landlords have boarded up two empty spaces... the former Starbucks and Otto's Tacos... this corridor was also hard hit in late May...
Updated 10 a.m.
Dave on 7th shared this from 14th Street and Avenue A...
H/T Lola Sáenz and Eden!
There's another community cleanup day in Tompkins Square Park this Saturday
As previously reported, given budget cuts, Johnathan Young, the head gardener in Tompkins Square Park, has been assigned to other locations ... "leaving Tompkins vulnerable to trash and weeds."
Unlike the cleanup day on Oct. 10, which attracted up to 50 volunteers, there is a 25-person maximum for this Saturday. RSVP to this email: dayshavegoneby23@gmail.com.
H/T Steven
Concern for Muzzarella Pizza
The pizzeria has not been open since the early days of the summer ... this after a brief reopening coming out of the PAUSE. There's nothing on the gate or the Muzzarella social media properties mentioning a closure — temporary or permanent. (The last Instagram post is from June 27.) The phone number sends callers to a voice mailbox that has not been set up...
Mozzarella, which serves a tasty meatball hero among other non-pizza items, opened in 1991.
4 years on, the Shepard Fairey mural is being chipped away on 1st Avenue and 11th Street
In an Instagram post, the L.I.S.A. Project, the public art charity responsible for this wall, said that "an aged building with a NW exposure and a bad pipe burst has taken its toll" on the mural these past four years.
The mural's goal was "to supply some brightness and positivity for the locals wandering below — especially the children coming and going from neighboring P.S. 19."
The L.I.S.A. Project is promising a new mural on this space.
Meanwhile, at least one reader figured the Michael Jackson mural on the other side of the Avenue might be removed first...
Monday, November 2, 2020
The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black in Tompkins Square Park
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