John Penley plans campout at Ben Shaoul's Magnum Real Estate offices this weekend

Longtime East Village activist John Penley is set to campout this weekend outside the offices of Ben Shaoul's Magnum Real Estate on Broadway in Soho. (Set to start at 5 p.m. Friday.)

Per the Facebook invite:

SHAOUL AND HIS REAL ESTATE COMPANY HAVE BEEN AN EVIL CORPORATE REAL ESTATE WRECKING AND GENTRIFICATION CREW IN THE EAST VILLAGE. THE WORST OF THE WORST !!!!

While Shaoul has been a widely criticized developer in the East Village for years, the recent revelations about actor-poet-writer Taylor Mead's living conditions were the impetus for this event.

Articles in The Villager and the Post and at BoweryBoogie have outlined the 88 year old's current living conditions while the Shaoul-owned building on Ludlow undergoes a gut renovation. (Mead, a former Andy Warhol star, had lived in the rent-stabilized apartment for 34 years and didn't want to leave.) According to the account in the Post, "Plaster falls from his walls and roaches crawl up his legs. The kitchen sink doesn’t work."

"It’s going to kill him,” said Clayton Patterson, a neighborhood activist and longtime friend. “This is elderly abuse. It’s pretty Third World when you think about it."

As Curbed put this particular episode, Shaoul is "up to his old tricks. Or, more specifically, his old trick — forcing stubborn, rent-stabilized tenants out of the apartments he owns by having their buildings demolished around them."

Penley had this to say to us via a message on Facebook:

"I am demanding at the protest that he give Taylor a renovated ground-floor apartment in Taylor's building rent free for the rest of his life and provide Taylor with home-care assistance. He just made so much cash speculating and flipping buildings on the LES that doing something humane like I suggest he do would be a very small gesture."

Shaoul has recently sold large parcels of his East Village buildings to developer Jared Kushner. Shaoul is currently converting the former Cabrini Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation on Avenue B and East Fifth Street into residences.

Penley recently held a campout to call on NYU to help house the homeless.

L.E.S. Dwellers make the case against Soho House expanding to Ludlow Street

As you likely heard, Soho House is planning an expansion to 139 Ludlow St. They've already made their pitch to neighbors. (Read BoweryBoogie's post on it here; and The Lo-Down here.)

During this past weekend, L.E.S. Dwellers sent around their campaign again Soho House. (You can read it here.) It's slightly outside my usual coverage zone. But I wanted to share with you what they have to say. (And, of course, there's a major spillover effect from all this to this neighborhood...)

An excerpt from the L.E.S. Dwellers campaign:

Rival gangs of frat boys, sororisluts, suburbanite wannabes, tramps with stamps, and bridge & tunnel douchebags converge on our streets, and a bloody turf war ensues between residents and the drug and alcohol-fueled gangs. If Soho House comes, new gangs arrive with them - Jimmy Choo stiletto girls, newly minted tech-set, B-list models, I-bankers disguised in Thomas Pink and Gucci loafers, trust fund wannabe hipsters, expense account ad men, label whores, and Eurotrash. Our streets will become bloodier and messier than it already is, with the residents further outmatched by the increasingly uncontrollable mobs.

And!

The L.E.S. will officially become the "Eastpacking", unless we as a community do something about it. We can choose to remain silent and compliant, marking our doors with black crosses in anticipation of the Soho House virus incubating at 139 Ludlow Street. Or we can rise up and fight back.

Soho House reps are expected to appear before the CB3/SLA committee next month to apply for a liquor license. Reps have said they wouldn't expect to open on Ludlow Street until the summer of 2014.

Meanwhile, yesterday, Lower East Side documentarian Clayton Patterson explained why is he supporting the Soho House's expansion to Ludlow Street in a post published at The Lo-Down.

An excerpt:

If not them then who? Soho House is not going to build up. They are going to save the look and integrity of the façade architecture. The fact that they are private keeps the crowds down, will be more low key… and so on. Imagine this: it is a large double wide lot- has at the very least 6 stories worth of air right to build up. Imagine a brand new 12 story luxury hotel or apartment eating up the block.

'This is elderly abuse' — Warhol star Taylor Mead lives in squalor during building's gut renovation

Taylor Mead's home life in his fifth-floor walk-up continues to be a living hell, the Post notes today.

As you may have read in The Villager or at BoweryBoogie, Ben Shaoul bought the building Mead lives in and two others on Ludlow Street for $16.5 million last summer. Mead, 88, continues to live in his rent-stabilized apartment while the rest of the building is converted to market-rate homes. (Mead has lived here for 34 years and pays $380 a month in rent.)

Per the article:

Workers hammer outside his door from 7 a.m. till the evening. Plaster falls from his walls and roaches crawl up his legs. The kitchen sink doesn’t work.

Mead’s friends suspect Shaoul wants the poet to evict himself.

“It’s going to kill him,” said Clayton Patterson, a neighborhood activist and longtime friend. “This is elderly abuse. It’s pretty Third World when you think about it.”

You can read more about the legendary Mead, an actor, writer and poet, here. (Read this feature on Mead from The Paris Review last summer here.)

Of course, history doesn't mean much to developers.

“[Shaoul] is out for profit. He doesn’t give a shit about who I am,” he said. “It’s going to be hell.”

An update on Biker Bill's whereabouts

[Photo by Clayton Patterson]

Here's an update about Biker Bill, a regular through the years at Ray's and in Tompkins Square Park ... and a familiar figure at Bob Arihood's Neither More Nor Less...

People haven't seen him in some time ... Clayton Patterson passes along a message from Biker Bill yesterday:

I was involved in a hit and run. I have a broken arm and broken hip. I'm in the Richmond Center for Rehabilitation in Staten Island. I would like someone to come visit me at 91 Tompkins Ave., Staten Island NY.

And no word if Biker Bill ever started a Twitter account.

EV Grieve Etc.: Mourning Edition

[Avenue A and St. Mark's Place via Bobby Williams]

More on the Housing Authority's plan to use public housing space for new developments: "The reality is that the financing model for public housing in America is broken. The trend is toward permanent deficit." (The New York Times)

The Living Room receives an extension (BoweryBoogie)

The "inverted ship’s hull" inside St. Brigid's on Avenue B (Ephemeral New York)

Photos and video of Sunday's Hawk-Pigeon match in Tompkins Square Park (The Gog Log)

Celebrating Clayton Patterson's "Jews: A People's History of the Lower East Side" (The Lo-Down)

At Boulton & Watt: "The vibe is sort of steampunk minus the punk — call it steamprep?" (Gothamist)

Conversation from an Upper West Side diner (Jeremiah's Vanishing New York)

Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth on their 13 all-time favorite records (The Quietus)

RIP Mark Kamins, the DJ and producer who discovered Madonna (BlackBook)

... and he produced her 1982 song "Everybody."

EV Grieve Etc.: Mourning Edition

[Avenue C and East Second Street the other day]

A Jewish-Iraqi pop-up restaurant for East Ninth Street (DNAinfo)

A look at the work of Andrea Stella, founder of The Space at Tompkins (Take Part via HuffPost)

2 LES bars cited for alleged underage drinking (The Lo-Down)

Clayton Patterson op-ed: We need new LES leaders (The Villager)

Ruby's opens on the Coney Island Boardwalk in...



Muji opening a store on Cooper Square (BoweryBoogie)

Those romantic Ramones! (Montreal Gazette)

Why Quinn holds the cards on rezoning and landmarking (Off the Grid)

Losing this Brooklyn landmark? (Jeremiah's Vanishing New York)

Hulu showing the entire Criterion Collection for free this weekend (Gothamist)

...and how many of those Kate Moss/Rag & Bone ads look like this...

[Updated] Inside the renovated St. Brigid's

-----

...and to see how far the church has come... Clayton Patterson shared these photos from a neglected church circa December 2005...

Updated 1-28

The New York Times has a piece on St. Brigid's in today's paper. The article goes into detail on the church's "daunting structural problems" and the challenges of the restoration.

A quick excerpt:

The pews were replaced and the exterior restored to resemble the original brownstone. Stained glass windows were brought from St. Thomas the Apostle Church in Harlem, which closed in 2003.

[Architect Michael F.] Doyle also restored an elaborate inscription along the top of the east wall that had been painted over in the 1960s, although there was not enough money to put the original bell back in the tower.

The parish has been merged with St. Emeric’s nearby, and the parish and the church are now known as St. Brigid and St. Emeric.

Read the whole article here.

[Updated] A solidarity march for students in Montreal

Clayton Patterson shares these photos from last night... a group marched through part of the neighborhood in a show of support for the ongoing student protests in Montreal... (read the background here). ... the group (more than 100 strong by Clayton's estimation) arrived at Union Square at 10 p.m. ...

One reader said that the NYPD closed Tompkins Square Park early last night to prevent any groups from congregating there...

Updated 12:34 —
Colin Moynihan at the Times has a piece in the City Room this morning about the Park's early closure...

Updated 9:57 p.m. —

Here is an article from Animal titled "NYPD locks 100 people inside Tompkins Square Park to keep Occupy out." Here is the link.

The Blockbuster on East Houston is closing

Several readers emailed us this weekend with news that the Blockbuster on East Houston (part of the Red Square strip) is closing. Well, we've heard this before as far back as December 2009. BoweryBoogie heard the rumors too.

Plus, the store has been on the block for a year now, via JDF Realty... (And it appears Sleepy's is part any lease deal here...)

"All uses considered" according to the listing.

However, a Blockbuster employee confirmed the closure. The employee said that this Blockbuster has ended its rental service. (Yesterday people could only pick up one-day rentals.) The location will stay open through February for a liquidation sale, the employee said.

On Jan. 12, Dish Network Corp CEO Joe Clayton told Reuters that the company will be closing more U.S. Blockbuster stores across than it had originally planned, and will turn the remaining outlets partly into Dish customer-service points.

Dish bought Blockbuster last May in a bankruptcy auction for about $320 million, per Reuters.

And so, the DVD rental business is just about dead. Two Boots on Avenue A seems to be the only place left in the neighborhood to rent DVDs. Even the Blockbuster kiosk inside Duane Reade on 14th Street near First Avenue is gone.

Mondo Kim's is long gone... Cinema Classics is long gone... Intervideo Electronics on First Avenue will become a Subway (sandwich shop).

Of course, you can check out DVDs from the Ottendorfer and Tompkins Square Park branches of the New York Public Library.

Plan to sterilize the Bowery nearly complete: RIP Billy's tent

We wrote this back in May:

We can't help but be nervous when we see things like surveyors at work outside Billy's Antiques on Houston... What are they surveying? What godawful thing is coming/happening next to this region near the Bowery?

Now we know: After 25 years, the tent is coming down at Billy's Antiques to make way for a two-story brick building, The New York Times reported.

Proprietor Billy Leroy confirmed that his store will reopen in the new building. But, you know. Per the Times:

[W]ith the disappearance of the tent, Mr. Leroy and his employees said, another vestige of the neighborhood’s history will vanish. It is a prospect that some of them anticipate with gloom.

“It’ll be part of that final transition to a landscape of Pottery Barns and Starbucks,” said Jesse Sommer, a member of Mr. Leroy’s staff.

Should have known when the skull blew down in August.

[Photo circa 1991 by Clayton Patterson, courtesy of Billy Leroy]

EV Grieve Etc.: Mourning Edition

[14th Street and Avenue A this morning. By Shawn Chittle]

Helping Caffe Vivaldi (Jeremiah's Vanishing New York)

Occupy Wall Street's Day of Action yesterday (Daily Intel ... Runnin' Scared ... The Gog Log)

Clayton Patterson at the Zuccotti Park evacuation (BoweryBoogie)

How the NYPD doles out credentials to the press (The New York Observer)

Danny Hoch on Broadway, gentrification (Gothamist)

You guide to New York City's hidden mews (Curbed)

At the memorial for Bob Arihood last night

Community members gathered last night outside Ray's on Avenue A to honor their friend Bob Arihood, who recently passed away... Several people, including Ray, John Penley, Clayton Patterson and Chico, talked about their longtime friend...

Bobby Williams was there and took these photos...

...and Jewels even pulled down his pants in Bob's honor... an act that Bob caught on film many times through the years.

BoweryBoogie has more here ... including a video. Jill posts her thoughts from last night here. Patrick Hedlund filed his report for DNAinfo here.

One attendee remarked how strange it was not to see Bob there, standing in the background, chatting, observing ... and taking photos... a sentiment that we'll likely be thinking at every local event in the weeks and months to come...

There's talk of a memorial concert in Bob's honor Saturday afternoon in Tompkins Square Park. We'll pass along the details once organizers finalize the plans.

Updated:
Dave on 7th passes along this photo from 6:15 this morning... candles still burning brightly...

Whole Earth Bakery facing eviction on St. Mark's Place

From the EV Grieve inbox via Clayton Patterson...

The Whole Earth Bakery has been providing delicious, healthy, vegan and vegetarian food for 33 years, 20 of them at its current location at 130 St. Mark’s Place. This valued community resource is in danger of eviction, and needs your support.

Like all small businesses, Whole Earth Bakery has struggled to stay afloat during the recent recession. Occupying the space under a sublet agreement, the Whole Earth Bakery is up to date on rent payments, but the holder of the lease is delinquent, placing the business in imminent danger of eviction.

While there are other vegetarian and vegan bakeries in New York City, few can demonstrate the long-term commitment to quality cruelty-free, sustainable and delicious food that is the hallmark of the Whole Earth Bakery.

We need concerned community members to stop by the store and sign our petition, and volunteers to help organize events or coordinate email communications among our supporters. Please help us continue serving the East Village community, as we meet our commitment to provide healthy, nutritious food for all.

Check our Facebook Wall for updates.

Ugh. Whole Earth Bakery has faced eviction several times before. You can read the back story in this article from The Villager from 2007. Whole Earth has been a neighborhood institution since 1991... we need to hold on to what is left of this neighborhood.

Reminders tonight: Memorial in Tompkins Square Park for Monica Shay

Monica Shay died on Thursday after being shot last weekend at the Pennsylvania country home she shared with her husband Paul. She was 58. Tonight at 8, her friends and loved ones will gather in Tompkins Square Park for a memorial vigil.

As The Villager noted, she and her husband Paul, who is expected to recover, were prominent neighborhood activists. "They helped the East Village squatters who took over city-owned buildings in the 1980s. They also supported the encampment that homeless people set up in Tompkins Square Park."

The memorial will be held at Seventh Street and Avenue A at the entrance to the Park.

[Photo of Monica Shay from 1990 by Clayton Patterson via The Villager]

Another view from 1991

We've had a few items lately about 1991. (Such as this one.) Billy Leroy passed along the above photo from 1991 ... The future Billy's Antiques was called Manhattan Castle and Props .. as Billy noted in the photo, it was a time when cope were making frequent arrests in the middle of East Houston just west of the Bowery... and the MTA apparently didn't care if you sold MTA signs...

[Photo by Clayton Patterson, courtesy of Billy Leroy]

Lower East Side artists now larger than life — on canvas

It's likely that you spotted a few workers carrying a large portrait of Clayton Patterson up the Bowery the other day...

Indeed, the portrait is the latest from Curt Hoppe, the legendary hyper-realist artist who is among those showing new work starting this Saturday at the Woodward Gallery on Eldridge Street.

Hoppe is currently working on a series of paintings of fellow Lower East Side artists. Here's Patterson posing with his portrait.

Curt also sent along his portrait of Arturo Vega ...

...and in progress.

Curt hopes to show this series together — likely 15 portraits in total ... we're looking forward to seeing these.

[Photos courtesy of Curt Hoppe]

Previously on EV Grieve:
Q-and-A with Curt Hoppe: Living on the Bowery, finding inspiration and shooting Mr. Softee

EV Grieve Etc: Mourning Edition

Ailing man prevents mother-in-law from being robbed on First Avenue (The New York Post)

The art in the tree at the Cooper Square Hotel (Jeremiah's Vanishing NY)

A panel Sunday on modern day New York street photography featuring Clayton Patterson, Matt Weber and Jake Dobkin (Nathan Kensinger Photography)

The misery of living in NYC (Runnin' Scared)

An update on SPURA project planning (BoweryBoogie)

Squirrel love in Tompkins Square Park (Nadie Se Conoce)

A comeback for Jeffrey's Meats in the Essex Street Market? (The Lo-Down)

Fifth Generation vs. the Blank Generation (Flaming Pablum)

An East Village ambassador for Japanese cuisine (The New York Times)

Inside Kenka on St. Mark's Place (Eater)

Photos from NYC's "best coffee shops" (Refinery29)

Watch Billy Leroy throw someone into a coffin and nail it shut

Billy Leroy tells us about an independent film project that he's working on called "Don Peyote." Michael Canzoniero directs. While it started out as a small film, the production received funding... and it's turning into some much larger... it stars Dan Fogler and Anne Hathaway.

Anyway, here's a scene that features Billy (and the fellow in the German helmet is Clayton Patterson; the young woman is Billy's daughter Celina Leroy).

Here's the set-up for this scene shot outside Billy's Antiques on East Houston:

"We jump on Dan. I beat him up and throw him into a coffin and nail it shut... It's all part of a nightmare scene he has after ingesting hallucinogenic drugs. Wish I could do this to some of the yuppies that wander into Billy's."

The movie is still in production. Here's a snippet of it.

[Photos by Isak Tiner]